Caste

Disasters are often constructed as unique and extraordinary events. Such accounts ignore the social histories and inequalities that render specific communities/regions prone to disaster. In this paper, we focus on how coloniality and caste function together to produce dispossession among Dalits, Bahujans, and Adivasis (DBAs) through continuous violence and illegal appropriation of land and resources […]

Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, and many other Dwij-Savarna (‘upper caste’) academics from historically privileged ‘Dwij-Savarna’ Indian castes like Brahmins pioneered subaltern studies in the context of South Asian studies. Their thrust towards decolonising led to an epistemic de-centring of Western hegemony in knowledge production on behalf of marginalised ‘subalterns’. However, Umesh Bagade points out that […]

Knowledge systems characterised by classification, categorisation, and data collection underlie efforts to govern. This paper critically examines knowledge collected by central governing entities in India about waste in an urban local body – specifically through the National Cleanliness Survey or Swachh Survekshan. Relying extensively on field work in Rajpur (2018–2019), one of the highest ranked […]

This is a short piece on advocate and activist Kiruba Munusamy, who practices in the Supreme Court of India and is a dalit rights activist. Some of the cases that Kiruba has fought against gross human rights violations and Kiruba's own experiences are discussed in the piece. The author focuses on Munusamy's resilience and resistence in the […]

This paper speaks of the women sanitation workers who are working at the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic in Pune city, an epicentre of rising COVID-19 cases in India. Prevailing caste and gendered norms of labour roles render the women doubly vulnerable. Within that context, we investigate how the women sanitation workers self-identify their health […]

The principle of ‘leaving no one behind’ is strongly emerging as a defining aspect of the new development framework under negotiation in 2015. This stems from an acknowledgement of the failure of the Millennium Development Goals in securing benefits for the most marginalised groups, those suffering from economic deprivation and discrimination as a result of […]