“We have achieved great feats…but our struggle is far from over”: Centering caste difference in feminist discourse of the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Bihar, India

Caste-ing Space: Mapping the Dynamics of Untouchability in Rural Bihar, India

“…As a feminist anthropologist interested in social and agrarian change, I concentrated research at the village level, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in villages in Bihar where Bhuiyan Dalits had secured rights to own land following the decade-long radical feminist Bodhgaya Land Movement (BGLM) (Prasad, 2021;Prabhat, 1999;Kelkar and Gala, 1990). In the late 1970s, land movement activists mounted a successful opposition to a Hindu monastic institution popularly known as Bodhgaya Math (BGM), which despite its religious outlook was the most powerful feudal landowner (zamindar) in Gaya.…”

“…The BGM had controlled vast estates and people throughout the region for centuries and Bhuiyan Dalit kamias (bonded laborers) were forced to serve BGM officials and other landed elites well into the late 1980s. Their experiences of activism gained through joining first the armed Naxalite movement and later the BGLM enabled Bhuiyan Dalits to obtain titles to and actual control over land formerly held by the BGM (Prasad, 2021). There has been little documentation of how the redistribution of land to Dalits, particularly Dalit women, affected gender and caste social orders in rural Bihar following the conclusion of the BGLM.…”

“…(HRW 2007, p. 45) Despite being illegal, 'untouchability' thus retains conceptual valence as a critical tool for understanding how Dalit mobilizations and gaining control over productive assets, such as land, have disrupted and reconfigured discriminatory practices in rural Bihar. Even modest gains by Dalits are of great importance given the historical, socioeconomic, and political contexts of inequality and discrimination in which they are registered (Prasad, 2021). Dalit access to land and other economic resources can be read as overt signs that caste-based discrimination is being undermined, at least in terms of spatial segregation by untouchability.…”

Towards Dalit Ecologies

“…Th e Pathapally movement demonstrated a shift in Dalit strategies as they prepared to confront the dominant castes as well as the state (Teltumbde 2015). Similarly, Prasad (2021aPrasad ( , 2021b traced the long-term eff ects on Dalits of having participated in the peaceful Bodhgaya land movement in the late 1970s in Bihar. Prasad (2021b) showed how obtaining control over redistributed land that had previously been owned by a local Hindu religious institution fundamentally reoriented rural public spaces.…”

“…Ongoing contestations over Dalit access to those spaces resulted in a qualitative shift in practices of untouchability, as what had once been overt was rendered hidden and diffi cult to discern, though no less prevalent. Overcoming landlessness remains critical for Dalits seeking to improve their social and economic status and challenge the covert manifestations of untouchability that are still represented in ecological and sociological forms of discrimination in India (Prasad 2021a).…”