Caste, racialization, and the making of environmental unfreedoms in urban India

ABSTRACT

Caste is as an under-recognized marker of environmental inequalities in urban India, what this article names as “environmental unfreedoms” for their fundamentally humanity- and dignity-robbing traits. It argues that a theoretical framework that is attentive to the racialization of labour and property under colonial and capitalist urban relations can reveal the making of environmental unfreedoms. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Bangalore/Bengaluru in southern India, the article shows, in particular, how the criminalizing language of “encroachment”, rooted in colonial urban planning lexicon and used to justify the spatial disciplining, containment, and eviction of labouring Dalits today, has dire consequences for the making of environmental unfreedoms. In turn, ecological narratives have also provided legal grounds for caste-based slum evictions. The article concludes that a framework that weaves together analyses of caste, racialization, and environmental unfreedoms in the urban context can identify opportunities towards transnational solidarities across anticaste and antiracist struggles.

KEYWORDS:

• Caste
• property
• environmental justice
• Dalit
• urban political ecology
• racial capitalism

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks go to two anonymous reviewers for generative feedback on my draft manuscript. I am also enormously grateful to the Antipode Foundation for funding our 2019 conference upon which this special issue is based, and for the opportunity to collaborate with Issac Arul Selva, Jesús Cháirez-Garza, Mabel Gergan, and Pavithra Vasudevan. Finally, my thanks go to Amanda Eastell-Bleakley at Ethnic and Racial Studies for her support and efficiency at every stage of the review process. All errors remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The Marathi word for untouchable, “Dalit”, so assigned by the caste abolitionist Jyotirao Phule in the late 1800s, roughly translates to “broken” or “ground down”. Officially, Dalits fall within a census category of “Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe”, a more expansive category that accounts for about a quarter of India’s total population, as also a bureaucratic category for managing affirmative action programs. The term Dalit, more political than administrative, was popularized among politically conscious groups during the first half of the 20th century and was used explicitly in opposition to the demeaning and infantilizing terms “Untouchable” and “Harijan”.

2 I use the post-2010 official Indian name “Bengaluru” to discuss the contemporary city and the anglicized name “Bangalore” for events pre-2010.

3 Most prominently, the Government of India deliberately prevented Dalit and anticaste activists from including caste as a form of discrimination in the World Conference on Racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, framing caste as exceptional to Hindu culture and tradition (Natrajan and Greenough 2009). In today’s Hindu nationalist ethos, rightwing commentators continue to insist that concepts such as race and racialization are imports from the West and should not be applied to India, even while they simultaneously deny the existence of caste atrocities and racism.

4 Against the “race science” and nativism propounded by European Orientalists and Hindu nationalists alike, historians have debunked the theory that Aryans (who generally positioned themselves as dominant castes) constituted either an invading or autochthonous “race”. Ambedkar ([1948] 1989) disputed the then dominant view (held by both Europeans and elite Hindus) of biological race as the origin of untouchability. Instead, recent studies have shown that nomadic pastoralists originating from Iran and the Eurasian Steppe likely migrated to the subcontinent in waves, and had in common not race, but a set of Indo-Aryan languages and a variety of Vedic and caste cultural practices (Joseph 2019; Thapar 2018). Today’s Indian population, much of which cannot be phenotypically distinguished, is an admixture of diverse aboriginal peoples and migrants. The colonial project reinterpreted this admixture in narrow scientific racism terms; for instance, erroneously distinguishing light-skinned upper-caste “Aryans” as a race distinct from darker-skinned groups (this colour difference does not, in any case, hold empirical truth). Equally fallacious, the Hindu nationalist project insists that Aryans are a distinct racial group autochthonous to India. My use of “racialization” as a social construct works explicitly against these biological understandings of race in India and is instead in line with concepts afforded by critical race theory, i.e. caste is not race, but caste is racialized.

5 It is a common misconception that untouchability affects only Hindu communities; to the contrary, untouchability is practiced among Christians and Muslims even after conversion to these religions. Nathaniel Roberts’ (2016) ethnography, for instance, focuses on a Dalit Christian slum in Chennai, and its ostracization by upper caste groups. While exact figures are difficult to come by, it is believed that well over half of Indian Christians and Muslims in India are from Dalit, tribal, and OBC backgrounds and continue to face ostracization even after conversion (Bhatty 1996; Tharamangalam 1996). In South India, seventy-five per cent of Christians and Muslims are officially categorized as SC/ST (George and Adiga 2017). As civil rights activists have been at pains to argue, Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims are multiply discriminated against; not only do religious institutions such as churches and burial grounds not grant access to them because of perceived untouchability, but Dalits Muslims and Dalit Christians also fall through the cracks of constitutionally mandated affirmative action laws. At the other end of the spectrum, while Syrian Christians are a numerically small minority in India, for all intents and purposes, their wealth and cultural status is closer to that of Brahmins (Thomas 2018).