Resisting Environmental Violence from the Margins: Dalit Women Activism in India’s Urban Peripheries

Waste-Picking in India is a highly caste-based and feminized field of labor, with Dalit women constituting the majority (up to 90%). With the onset of the pandemic, sanitation workers were hailed as ‘frontline warriors’, but as business returns to usual, so does the exploitation and precarity for them. It also goes along with racial and ‘gore’ capitalism, state omission and gendered violence, that continues the century-old dehumanization of caste in a modern, neoliberal setting. However, these women are not passive objects who will simply accept the status quo, but challenge and creatively subvert environmental violence mingled with the grim fact of capitalism and casteism on a daily basis.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and 50+ interviews with female waste pickers and Dalit activists in informal settlements and landfills in urban India and an analysis of scholarly work, this paper examines Dalit articulations of ecologies and decolonial praxis against eco-casteism. By doing so, it utilizes a multidisciplinary approach, including a decolonial ecofeminist lens, supplemented by concepts of environmental violence/suffering/justice and recent research in the field of Dalit Studies.

By focusing on the everyday practices of these workers, this paper is a commitement toward the creative agency, highlighting their role as bearer of knowledge from which larger analyses can be drawn. To reflect on decolonial praxis, this paper works with Mignolo’s 'Border Thinking' and Freire’s 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' to underline the forms of quotidian subaltern resistance by waste pickers and activists in abandoning the dehumanization and in seeking environmental justice.