Dalit Chembur - Spatializing the Caste Question in Bombay, c. 1920s-1970s (original) (raw)

A Struggle Over Class and Space in an Indian City

Economic and Political Weekly, 2014

Through the struggle over the right of workers to stand at Jakhan Chowk, Dehradun, in which the authors and others were involved, one can understand many key issues around capital, urban space and exploitation of workers in urban India.

Caste and capital in the remaking of Ahmedabad

Contemporary South Asia, 2017

The city has been eulogized as a liberating space of anonymity where identities of caste and creed dissolve before the might of economic capital. This paper examines how the role of caste is both masked and intensified in the formation of new neighbourhoods in the backdrop of city-remaking projects. Our ethnographic study of Dalit-dominated neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad shows that the emergence of a middle-class neighbourhood in Ahmedabad’s periphery must be seen as a ‘post-liberalization Dalit ghetto’ that is distinct from the pre-liberalization Dalit neighbourhoods in the industrial centre of the city. The new Dalit middle-class neighbourhood of Chandkheda is a result of greater economic mobility among Dalits which continues to be marked by the three exclusionary mechanisms: ‘moving up’ and into segregation; caste vigilantism; and protean forms of intra-Dalit exclusion. The collusion of caste and capital produces unexpected forms of space politics that tend to enhance rather than dissolve distinctions based on micro-caste identities in middle-class residential spaces, all the while hiding new forms of exclusion behind the rhetoric of secularized urban development.

Towards a Political Ecology of Caste and the City

Journal of Urban Technology, 2022

In this contribution, I reflect on the under-recognized role of caste and its allied notions of pollution and purity in the making of deeply inequitable, environmentally unjust, and splintered Indian cities. Published in 2001, Graham and Marvin's Splintering Urbanism addressed the fragmented and unequal nature of infrastructure networks in the wake of globalization in cities of the Global South. Of particular interest to scholars since then has been to trouble the historicity of the book's central thesis, demonstrating that postcolonial cities have always been splintered along the lines of race, class, and ethnicity via unequal infrastructural networks and segregated housing; as such, globalization is not the primary cause of inequality. Yet, the category of caste, intersecting with class, religion, and gender, still has not featured centrally in critical urban studies and urban political ecology. Drawing on long-term research on Bangalore (southern India), I sketch mutually reinforcing axes of a research agenda in urban political ecology, namely the interrogation of caste power in urban property, infrastructure, and labor regimes.

Making space: towards a spatial history of modernity in caste-societies

Social History , 2022

A vibrant public sphere has come to be recognised as a necessary condition of modern democracies. Jürgen Habermas’s work has been a convenient point of departure for studies concerned with the concept of the public sphere and modernity, despite evidence mounting from feminist, postcolonial and subaltern studies that its despatialised nature and universalistic assumptions render invisible large groups that remained – temporally and spatially – outside the ‘mainstream’. Using examples from colonial and early modern India, this article demonstrates how these limitations play out in complex societies and why ‘space’ is pivotal in studying the public sphere, especially in caste societies. Following the spatial (re)turn within academia in the last decades, I argue that Henri Lefebvre’s work on social spaces provides a theoretical alternative that treats space with analytical rigour, allowing us to problematise the concept of the public sphere and to move away from Western Europe as an ‘ideal type’. The article demonstrates how an approach that is informed by Lefebvre’s framework is particularly useful in societies where caste influences spatiality and, consequently, lived experience – as well as having broader resonance and application.

‘AAMCHI MUMBAI’1 : THE CITY IN THE DALIT IMAGINATION

The phenomenon of Migration be it emigration from one country to another or movement of people within a country, from the rural to the urban, has always had an interesting impact on the literature and culture of a particular region. Within India, this movement has happened from the villages to the urban areas, mostly to the cities like Delhi, Mumbai etc. In the case of Mumbai, it has faced a huge influx of immigration from the hinterlands of Maharashtra as well as from other states of India like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This influx of migrants is not only a burning political issue in the state but has also featured strongly in the literature and culture of the city. This cosmopolitan nature of the city as well as its financial prosperity has also attracted a huge population of Dalits who have flocked to the cities, since pre-colonial times. The dynamic all-encompassing nature of the city offered them a chance of living a normal life independent of caste professions and its associated humiliations. But while their anonymity helps them escape their inherent caste-identity, it offers them more obstacles in the form of unemployment, poor quality of living in the cities, environmental degradation, corruption etc.

Dalit desires, middle-classness and the city of Surat_draft

"Beyond Consumption India’s New Middle Class in the Neo-Liberal Times" Edited By Manish K Jha, Pushpendra Kumar Singh Copyright Year 2022, 2022

This paper begins as remarks and provocations which I made while chairing a panel in the conference held at TISS. It is in that spirit, the paper begins with certain polemical statements. At this level, the key anxieties are directed toward how to approach the question of middle class and not merely the social realities which are identified as pertaining to one specific segment of the society. This question, I believe ought to be addressed before we move to the level of the methodological. This belief stems out from a simple ontological investment instead of an epistemic promise. Here, one may refer to what Heidegger has termed as 'a circle of reasoning' when he is formulating 'the question of the meaning of being'. For him, this circular reasoning is not a matter of grounding by deduction, but rather of laying bare and exhibiting the ground' (Heidegger, 1953/2010:7). Such a framing then allows the paper to move away from the causal analysis of social reality to phenomenological interpretations of such a reality, creating a ground for laying bare the question of aspiration outside the domains of economics and economic anthropology. The underlying assumption behind this study is that the question of aspiration cannot be investigated in isolation from the materiality of the social life. yet, the study also tries to emphasize that there is aspiration is fundamentally ambiguous and cannot be measured leaving it primarily as socially incommensurate. This phenomenological exercise was also required as the paper moves into narrating the ways in which members belonging to one specific Scheduled caste community, Mahyavanshi perceives the issue of mobility within the city (in this case, Surat). This mobility has twin dimensions: at one level this is spatial (about moving from one neighbourhood or location to another); at another level, this is deeply social reflecting upon their desire for upward social status. The question of aspiration, the paper argues, has to be located at both these axis: spatial and the social. At another level, this aspiration has to be contextualized by positioning it in the larger relationship between a scheduled caste community and the city. These framings are crucial to puncture the universal language of method as well as approaches towards the study of middle class and in return we get a subjective treatment of what it means to be a member of a particular social group in a specific regional setting. Heidegger, Martin. 1953/2010. Being and Time (translated by Joan Stambaugh). Albany: State University of New York Press. In published form this was substantively revised. Therefore, consult the published chapter or the author before making any citation.