Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environment Justice
Thursday 3 December 2026, 12 midday - 1.30pm
Seminar Room 00.063, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All welcome
What does the environment look like from the vantage point of those historically confined to its harshest labour - the tanneries and brick kilns, the mines and sanitation work, the landfills and drains?
This talk introduces Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environment Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which argues that caste is not incidental to India’s ecological history but constitutive of it—shaping who labours in its industries, whose bodies absorb its toxicity, and whose knowledge of soil, water, and weather counts as expertise.
Drawing on Dalit autobiography, folklore, art, and testimony, the talk moves across some of the terrain the book covers - from the caste politics of industrial labour and technology to climate change and ecological imagination - recovering figures rarely found in environmental writing: the folk deities Dina-Bhadri, the self-taught sculptor Nek Chand, and the Tamil writer Bama, among others who have made ecological meaning out of their own distinct conditions.
Caste, on this account, is an underexamined but indispensable lens for environmental humanities - one that reframes core categories like nature, authority, and belonging, and unsettles who gets to narrate the Anthropocene in the first place. It also opens onto wider, comparative conversations - with Black ecologies, environmental racism, and global environmental justice movements - that ask similar questions of other places and histories.
Mukul Sharma is Professor of Environmental Studies in Ashoka University. Dalit Ecologies is his most recent of his eighteen published works in English and Hindi, including Green and Saffron: The RSS, Modi, and Indian Environmental Politics (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2024), Caste & Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), and Human Rights in a Globalised World: An Indian Diary (Delhi: Sage, 2010).
