An Anthropological Analysis of the Invisibility of Dalits of India in the Environmental Discourse: A Tale of Subjugation, Alienation and Resistance

Abstract

Ever since the onset of discourses around environment protection in India, different perspectives have come up to evaluate our natural environment. Nevertheless, even in their totality, they fail to provide a complete picture of the environmental struggles in India. This is partly because the ‘the Dalit perspective’ remains missing from the tales of ‘environmentalism’ that India has seen in the recent past. In India, there has been a complete subjugation of the Dalit perspective from the mainstream environmental discourses. So far as this subjugation goes, it is far from innocent and has a strong socio-political undercurrent, which creates a hegemonic structure within which the Indian Dalit loses his voice altogether. The authors, through the medium of this article, have made attempts to discover the forces which are at work in obliterating the Dalit perspectives from mainstream environmental discourse. The authors have tried to answer the questions that have characterized the subjugation in many different ways: Whether the missing of Dalits narratives is due to the monopolization of the discourses by the ‘upper caste’ and upper-class writings in India? The article will inquire how much truth is there in such allegations. More so, some light will be thrown on the structural framework of environment protection, and find answers as to how the structure of ‘environmental movements’ in India alienate the Dalits from actively participating in it. Further, the authors seek to unravel the politics of identity in India and how it affects the environment protection and subjugate the Dalit narrative. This will be done by taking into account some prominent Dalit symbols which have become tools for suppression by the state to cause the death of any resistance that comes from within the marginalized Dalit population of India. This article is solely an academic enquiry into the dialectical relationship that exists between the Dalits, the caste politics and the environments. The aim is to determine the reasons and consequences of subjugation and alienation of the Dalits from the environmental discourse.