Agriculture, rivers and gender: Thinking with ‘caste capitalism’, migrant labour and food production in the Capitalocene

abstract

This briefing offers an analytic frame for understanding how the politics of irrigation for food crops are imbricated with the politics of gender and the re/production of caste-based hierarchies in contemporary India. The briefing focuses on how we might understand industrial pollution, particularly of rivers used for irrigating crops, as well as the increased propensity of drought due to climate change, in relation to the ways in which the boundaries of gender and caste-based identity are buttressed and mobilised by Hindu nationalism and concomitant crony capitalism. While ‘gender’ usually appears in the literature on food politics as a sign for women and the domestic, this briefing offers a counterpoint by framing women both as householders and preparers of food domestically, and as informal sector agricultural labourers who deal directly with the impacts of casteism, industrial pollution and climate change. The briefing offers a new frame, termed ‘caste capitalism’, as a way of disrupting the elisions amongst three related but ostensibly distinct processes: 1) climate-related water crises and industrial pollution, 2) the social and legal enforcement of caste – and gender-based categories and, therefore, hierarchies, and 3) religious nationalism. In the frame of ‘caste capitalism’, understanding the politics of gender is necessary for understanding how religious nationalism and Hindu supremacy in India rely on deregulated industrial production, including a lack of oversight on industrial waste. This is imbricated with the endogamous reproduction of caste and enforcing caste – and gender-based categories through violent means. Pollution here is the physical effluent of inequality, directly impacting women who are working as agricultural labourers and maintaining household access to water and food, while reaping the ill health effects of an environment that is increasingly unliveable. The briefing offers a framing of the Anthropocene in India in the terms of ‘caste capitalism’ as a counter point to ‘crony capitalism’ for understanding the imbrications of caste, class, gender and environmental change, particularly in respect to agricultural irrigation and the growing crisis of India’s water sources.

keywords:

• India
• water
• pollution
• caste
• gender

Notes

1 The author would like to thank Prisha Dayal for research assistance for this piece, Rohit Prajapati in Vadodara, India for providing information on activism relating to the Mahisagar and Vishwamitri rivers in Gujarat, and Eric Beverley for feedback on the piece itself. Any shortcomings remain the author’s alone.

2 This is not to say that there is a gap in the literature per se on these imbrications, but it is to emphasise the discursive critique that, on the whole, ‘gender’ continues to signal female subjectivity and the domestic, often produced in relation to violence. This is notable given that ‘gender’ is a categorical term and is not equivalent to the marked categories of ‘woman’ or non-cisgender identities subsumed within it.

3 Related issues, beyond the scope of this piece, include earlier resistance to appropriating land for dams on the Narmada River (Maitra 2009) and the more recent politics of water and dispossession in Kashmir (Bhan & Trisal 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Svati Shah

SVATI SHAH is a cultural anthropologist. They are an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the United States. They also serve as a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria in the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Development Studies. Email: [email protected]