The Ritual and the Biopolitical: Planning for Anti-Caste Outcomes in Urbanizing India

Keywords: Caste, India, Planning, Urban, Identity
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

How should modern planning approach a caste society? The promise of modernity for anti-caste ideologues in the twentieth century was one that privileged the role of centralized intervention. A “scientific” planning practice was seen as the way to undo any non-economic, identitarian forms of subjectivity. Within this discourse, cities were envisioned as engines of producing a new secular citizenship and subverting traditional caste antagonisms; to overcome the village's effect as a "sink of localism".

India’s pathways of urbanization have proved caste to be a far more dynamic axis of stratification than one simply tied to rural spatialities. Nonetheless, much anti-caste scholarship continues to reify the exalted position of the ‘urban’ itself, presuming the resilience of caste as a failure of urban possibility rather than an outcome of planning interventions designed to consolidate caste power. This approach has led anti-caste parties to focus their energies solely on electoral victory rather than asking the more profound question: what is an anti-caste technology of government? Is centralized state intervention still the panacea? Or a more diffused decentralization, incorporating new activism around commons with the broader ideals of universal citizenship? At what scale must intervention be (re)conceived to produce “anti-caste” outcomes, and what might be an anti-caste epistemology of built and natural environments? By reviewing newer interventions that complicate the urban-rural binary and by delineating two different types of caste logics – the ritual and the biopolitical – this paper seeks to nuance the role planning and welfarism might play vis-a-vis anti-caste politics.