In urban India the loss of land rights, unsafe sanitation and waste processing, and flood and climate change risk—what I refer to as "environmental unfreedoms"—continue to be structured by caste, religion, and gender hierarchies in ways that critical scholarship has yet to take stock of. Based on a book project in progress, this talk puts forth an anti-caste epistemology for India's urban environment. It draws on ethnographic and historical accounts of urban village commons, wetlands, and “unauthorized” housing in Bengaluru from the colonial to contemporary period, as well as the production of environmental unfreedoms that disproportionately beset lower-caste, Dalit-Bahujan, and other minorities. It argues that just as ecological dispossession is wrought by casteist and colonial property regimes, so too do resistance frameworks arise from coarticulations between spatial struggle, embodiment, and caste identity. Identifying productive tensions between postcolonial, anti-casteist, and Black feminist thought, the talk seeks to build towards an emancipatory politics of urban and environmental justice, one rooted both in anti-caste standpoint epistemology, and a transnational ethics of freedom and abolition.

Malini Ranganathan is Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC, where she is also faculty team lead at the Anti-racist Research and Policy Center.