Landscapes of Caste Exclusion: Rethinking Forests and Fields in South Asian Environmental History

The field of environmental history in India emerged as a response to movements against forest policies and large dams in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, anti-caste scholars and activists soon critiqued early environmental histories that portrayed colonialism as a watershed in the ecological history of South Asia without accounting for the violence of environmental exclusions along lines of caste. This review article surveys works in environmental history and engages interventions from Dalit studies to evaluate the role of caste in the colonial transformation of entangled subcontinental landscapes of forests and fields. Brahmanical and colonial demarcations of forests and fields simultaneously hinged upon oppressed caste labour while eliding Dalit and Adivasi claims to land. Taking landscape to encompass contingent webs of socio-ecological relations and contested spatial imaginaries, this article argues that the reproduction of landscapes of caste exclusion entailed material struggles over nature and the naturalisation of exclusionary landscapes. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .