Dalit Chembur: Spatializing the Caste Question in Bombay, c. 1920s-1970s

Abstract

Studying the spatial exclusion of Dalits is distinct from looking at caste as an axis of spatial organization in the city. The “urban” is not just a location for mapping the social geography, but a mode that engenders spatial inequality. This article probes the spatial strategies of urban planning, between the 1920s and 1970s, which produced exclusionary spaces and masked the dynamics of caste within its techno-managerial rationality. It refocuses the lens of scholarship on Bombay from the urban periphery moving beyond the three popular sites of Bombay’s historiography: the factory, the neighborhoods of mill district, and the Island City. Exploring the politics of urban expansion, it illustrates how the planning regime reproduced hegemonic caste-class relations, which relegated Dalit migrants to the city’s fringes, on low-quality lands, and in segregated neighborhoods. Based on life histories, this article shows how Dalits created spaces for living, linked inextricably to their labor, and contests the abstract notions of space like “slum” that identify and mark people and their spaces. It also explores the affective relations nurtured and solidarities forged in the Dalit neighborhood on the terrain of urban politics, which recognizes Dalit actors and their struggles for redistribution and dignity.

Ambivalent Governance and Slow Violence in Mumbai's Mithi River

“…Institutional power asymmetries between parastatals and the municipal corporation reinforce older spatial inequalities in the city between west and east. Several eastern suburbs were zoned for industrial use by the colonial state (Thatra, 2022), a practice continued postcolonially, and as a consequence lands here are less valuable, more polluted, and inhabited by a larger proportion of poor and marginalized communities than those in the western suburbs 5…”

“…Institutional power asymmetries between parastatals and the municipal corporation reinforce older spatial inequalities in the city between west and east. Several eastern suburbs were zoned for industrial use by the colonial state (Thatra, 2022), a practice continued postcolonially, and as a consequence lands here are less valuable, more polluted, and inhabited by a larger proportion of poor and marginalized communities than those in the western suburbs. 5 The map of the Mithi's institutional architecture (see Figure 3) makes explicit the fragmentation that defines its governance landscape and generates ambiguity; this uncertainty is productive, because it allows state agencies flexibility to act but also produces a system that is designed to punish some violations while condoning others.…”

Between paternalism and illegality: a longitudinal analysis of the role and condition of manual scavengers in India

“…26 28 Beholden to housing supplied by municipal corporations, communities were also often forced to live in the most crowded and unsanitary regions of a city and were frequently subjected to eviction and displacement during urban renewal projects. 30 …”

“…Scavengers’ work was classified as an essential public service, thereby prohibiting them from taking up other employment or unionising to demand better pay 26 28. Beholden to housing supplied by municipal corporations, communities were also often forced to live in the most crowded and unsanitary regions of a city and were frequently subjected to eviction and displacement during urban renewal projects 30…”

Itinerant urbanization: On circles, fractals and the critique of segmented space

“…More recent work that moves beyond the ability of so-called “dominant” (non-Brahman but powerful land-owning) castes to consolidate power through agrarian transitions (see also Chari, 2004) points to the insights that can be gained from an explicitly anti-caste perspective, particularly regarding the simultaneously liberatory and constraining dynamics of urbanization. This kind of approach, for instance, can be seen in Mhaskar’s (2021) recent analysis of the rippling urban–rural effects of mill closures in Mumbai, as well as in Thatra’s (2022) historical account of the development of a Dalit neighborhood in Mumbai. Thatra draws on Lefebvre’s spatial triad to explore the tension between official “representations of space,” which occlude both the urban labor and rural agrarian distress of Dalit communities, and the lived experience of the neighborhood, which generated a lively Ambedkarite public sphere.…”