Brahmanism, Racialization, and Geographies of Difference

Keywords: Brahmanism, production of place, racialization, caste
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

My research seeks to analyze how historically marginalized Dalit caste groups located on vulnerable coastal landscapes navigate the threats posed by climate change and related economic and infrastructural development. Nagapattinam, in the coastal plains of the Cauvery delta in South India, is extremely vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. This coastal wetland region, however, is also home to a high proportion of Dalit caste groups, a result of the historical pattern of spatial segregation of Dalits to “uninhabitable” places called cheri.

In this paper, I trace how caste mediates the differential production of space and its implications for climate change. I offer two preliminary claims. First, I argue that we need to reorient our analytical focus from the potentially essentializing category of “Dalit” difference to instead a critical focus on Brahmanism as an ideology. Moving away from a lens of viewing caste in its particularistic identities, I argue that a reframing through Brahmanical ideology allows one to trace caste formation as an ongoing process, articulating with situated histories of colonialism and present-day impulses of climate capitalism. To this, I add, in my second claim, that Brahmanism provides the rationale for not just the hierarchical valuation of people, but also the hierarchical valuation of places. I provisionally offer cheri as a spatial analytic to refer not only to preexisting uninhabitable landscapes emerging from the Brahmanical order but to also think through how such devalued places are also produced relationally and made uninhabitable through ongoing projects of infrastructure development.