ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Caste Politics and EcologySubscribe to Caste Politics and Ecology

Environment Justice and Caste after Liberalisation

This article discusses the interrelationship between environmental justice, caste, and liberalisation. The deep natural, social, and cultural processes involved in the making and unmaking of environment and labour in a caste-capitalist economy impact people’s sense of freedom, belonging, and values. It uses the brick kiln industry in the Jhajjar district of Haryana as a case study to explore the impact of liberalisation on the use of labour and the environment, which reproduce or repudiate structures of hierarchy. The article also investigates how migration of people and capital, promoted by liberalisation, affects the rights and dignity of labour and the sustainable use of natural resources. Economic restructuring post liberalisation is not only perpetuating discrimination and disparity in the economy but also aggravating climate injustices, where Dalits are increasingly facing the impact of rise in emissions and heat in their working and living areas.

Cultural Ecologies of Urban Lakes

The Bathukamma festival, historically observed by Telangana-based Other Backward Classes and Dalit communities with traditional connections to waterbodies, has since 2014 become a state festival and a platform for political claim-making. This state-making project has had ripple effects revealing the everyday entanglements of caste associations, urban state–citizen relations, and the political ecology of urban waterbodies, in the capital city of Hyderabad. The paper sheds light on how competition between different caste groups, with distinct cultural ecological claims, shapes urban political ecologies. Urban communities mobilise narrowly defined caste associations to strategically make claims to place, and lobby for resources and recognition. Such claim-making exists even in slum settlements consisting of new migrant communities. We argue that attempts to gain recognition of caste-based claims for water-linked resources are an indirect articulation of belonging and connection to the state and the city.

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