Dalit Place-Making in Coastal Wetlands

Keywords: anti caste political ecology, infrastructure, climate adaptation, coastal wetlands, aquaculture
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 23

Abstract

In March 2017, Dalit famers from over 45 villages in coastal Nagapattinam in South India, took to a day-long hunger strike opposing the implementation of a 300 million US Dollar Climate Adaptation Project on the coastal wetlands of the Cauvery Delta. Already mired in dire precarity amidst successive years of cyclones and droughts, the progressively irregular monsoon rainfall, and the varied onslaught from expanding shrimp aquaculture in the region, the paddy farmers asserted that the proposed adaptation plan would benefit only the ruling elite's aquaculture economy and lead to their dispossession.

Given the historic spatial segregation along caste lines, the most oppressed caste groups, the Dalits were relegated to coastal wetlands. Tempered with swamps and salt marshes, coastal wetlands were considered challenging and exclusionary landscapes that would place Dalits at a distinct disadvantage in terms of their access and control over resources. This innate vulnerability has multiplied several times over in recent times, with the increased risk from climate disaster events as well as such risk-induced development. Combining archival research with ethnography, I explore how big infrastructure projects have historically reproduced casteist spatialities magnifying Dalit vulnerabilities. At the same time, Dalits in this region have engaged in radical place-making practices that relies on a creative manipulation of the geomorphological characteristics of 'uninhabitable landscapes. Inspired by abolition political ecology, this project seeks to understand Dalit place-making in coastal wetlands and asks what forms of anti-caste political ecology futures can be imagined amidst such vulnerabilities.