Tracing Development Experience and Dalit Marginalization: Emergence and Continuance of Dalit Housing Colonies in Kerala

The paper aims to analyse the state planned creation of socially exclusive, “Scheduled Caste Habitats” or commonly known as Dalit housing colonies in Kerala, India. The state of Kerala in India has always been the centre of academic debates and policy discussions around the world for its famous “Kerala Development Model” and having the first ever democratically elected communist government in the world. Kerala Land reforms was initiated by the communist government as part of social reforms to facilitate the land ownership to the historically marginalized sections like Dalits. Even though the land reforms upheld the motto of “land to the tiller”, scholars Like John Kurian, J Devika, K T Rammohan and others note that it had failed in actual practice to provide the Dalits with ownership of productive land. Rather, the government could only ensure the ownership of homestead land, resulting in the creation of numerous socially excluded spaces called Dalit housing colonies around the state. Even though the state started various social justice measures in the name of “Scheduled Caste Habitat Development”, these Dalit housing colonies stands, both spatially and sociologically, as a critique of Kerala development experience. Using state archival materials and ethnographic data from a Dalit housing colony, the paper primarily tries to problematise the conceptualisation of SC “Habitat” by the state which eventually resulted in the spatial, aesthetic and cultural reproduction of caste and stereotyping of Dalit housing colonies in Kerala. Setting this as a context, the paper makes an argument that the contemporary forms of residential segregation on the basis of caste, especially spatial exclusion of Dalits in Kerala is very much influenced by a “caste-state nexus” (Viswanath, 2014) were the state conceals its policies of ghettoisation or “habitat development” as in the terms of government records under the techno-managerialism.