Caste and Infrastructural Violence:Experiences of Dispossession, Denial and Dehumanisation of Dalit Waste Workers in Patna

Abstract

Caste violence, despite being (re)produced discursively and materially in Indian cities through different legal, environmental and planning modalities, scarcely features in urban scholarship as caste and caste violence are often confined to rural India. This research argues for a reframing of caste violence in terms of ‘infrastructural violence’ as dalits’ historical experience of discrimination and untouchability is being replaced by their structural invisibilisation from urban infrastructural imaginations. My PhD research draws on a multi-sited ethnography of dalit waste work(ers) in Patna to examine caste violence through their experiences of dispossession, denial, and dehumanisation. I present my preliminary findings, which reveal how dalit waste workers are subject to violent and exclusionary urban imaginaries, infrastructures, and practices, and how they continue to be dispossessed of their livelihoods, denied their claims to waste and workspaces, and dehumanised by upper caste workers and residents. The fetishisation and exploitation of dalit’s cheap and dirty labour in reproducing the normative imaginations of the urban are also documented as violence, which has political and material implications on the questions of (in)equities, (in)justices and (im)mobilities for urban Dalits. This research, drawing on dalits’ identities, social relations, and everyday intersectional subjectivities, aims to contest cities as casteless sites which reproduce caste violence at scales. It also aims to contribute to the conceptualisation of infrastructural violence as a situated, spatial, affective, temporal and relational experience.