Between Capitalocene, Heteropatriarchy and Environmental Casteism: Dalit Female Ecologies and Resistance in India’s Urban Peripheries

Since the landslide victory of the BJP in 2014, physical violence against caste-oppressed communities as well as resource extractivism for the sake of development are on the rise. While the pandemic has engendered short-lived debates on the vicious confluence of environmental violence, state omission and the tormented legacy of caste and dispossession in urban India, the nexus between environmental violence and caste apartheid in urban settings from a gendered perspective is hitherto underexplored. Dalit (formerly known as ‘untouchables’) women remain the most vulnerable in these violent environments, that are shaped by ‘environmental casteism’ (Sharma, 2017) and ‘organized abandonment’ (Gilmore, 2022), leading to slow deaths as a form of subtle mass violence.

Given this context, this paper examines first the intersection of environmental injustices, caste and gender in shaping social inequalities, everyday vulnerabilities and resilience through the practice of waste-picking as a feminized and caste-based labor, that has been traditionally assigned to Dalits (officially 4 Mio. workers). It subsequently explores Dalit female articulations of environmentalism and quotidian forms of resistance as decolonial praxis and pluriversal contributions, offering a wider glimpse into Dalit ecologies and liberation struggles under double colonization, right-wing authoritarianism and its greenwashing. It draws on 50+ semi-structured interviews with Dalit female waste pickers, social activists, and NGOs in landfills and slums in Delhi and Mumbai, and photo-documentation. Grounded in a multidisciplinary approach, it draws on decolonial feminism (Lugones, 2012), body-territory (Segato, 2008; Velez 2019), critical pedagogy (Freire, 2005), and border thinking (Mignolo, 2012), expanded by environmental concepts such as environmental racism (Bullard, 1993) and waste colonialism (Liboiron, 2018). As this work focuses on the creative agency of subalterns, their journeys of healing and survivorship, and the abandonment of dehumanization, this paper also seeks to contribute to the emerging research on critical Dalit pedagogies in non-formal educational contexts.