Dalit and low-castes literature vividly portrays their ecological experiences, perspectives, and aspirations through a wide range of forms and themes. Within their literary works, there is a rich tapestry of both human and non-human elements, encompassing figurative and imaginative landscapes, as well as representations of natural and social environments. They reveal notions of belonging and marginalization in relation to nature, examining issues such as access and alienation from natural resources. The discourse on caste and environmental justice has made efforts to acknowledge and appreciate the Dalit eco-literary tradition. This involves critiquing the prevailing nature writing traditions and analysing Dalit literature through ecological lenses. Unlike the pursuit of an idyllic era of environmental harmony, this literary tradition aims to carve out Dalits’ distinct language, memory, and vibrancy.

In her autobiography, Bama, the first published Indian Tamil Dalit woman writer, describes herself as Karukku, meaning palmyra leaves with their serrated edges on both sides, like a double-edged sword challenging its oppressors. Her life of cruel caste oppression within the Catholic Church was like that of ‘a bird whose wings had been clipped’ and her recovery from social and institutional betrayal felt ‘like a falcon that treads the air, high in the skies’. Manohar Mouli Biswas, a Bengali Dalit writer from West Bengal, writing for over three decades, thought of himself as a water hyacinth. Initially he had named his autobiography Prisnika (water hyacinth). Later he renamed it as Life and Death of Prisnika, while expressing this self-identity as deeply hurtful for him. The world of Dr Siddalingaiah, one of India's foremost Dalit writers in Karnataka, breathes and dies in ooru keri – a separate space in a village or a city, where a Dalit resides – so much so that his autobiography is titled after this place.

Growing up as a ‘Namashudhra’ in a peasant family in West Bengal, a Dalit woman in Tamil Nadu, a Dalit man in southern Karnataka – a diverse range of contemporary Dalit writers, working in different regions and languages, identify themselves in nuanced ways with nature in their literary works. Their rich and varied stories – of discrimination and creation, humiliation and heartbreak, hope and freedom – are also nature stories, where they forge a relationship with the environment in diverse ways.

Commons, including rivers, water bodies, forests, land, air, and the earth, have served as a crucial reference point for various forms of environmentalism. However, when viewed from a Dalit perspective, commons acquire a multi-layered and intricate significance that encompasses social, economic, and environmental dimensions. They encapsulate the inherent tensions and conflicts between social integration and cultural diversity, playing a pivotal role in the expression and resolution of socio-spatial transformations within society. Moreover, commons serve as sites of Dalit creativity, enabling the exploration of self, space, spirituality, and freedom. Through the narratives, metaphors, and collective memories associated with commons, Dalit writers construct a historical account deeply rooted in the earth itself.

Dalit writer Adwaita Mallabarman was a poor Malo, born in 1914 in Gokanghat village, beside the river Titash, near Brahmanbaria town in Comilla district of present-day Bangladesh (it was East Bengal in undivided India until 1947, then East Pakistan until 1970). He lost his parents at an early age and lived with his uncle in the village until his teenage years. The Malo community raised subscriptions to support him, and he was the first child in the village and the nearby area to finish school. Mallabarman could not continue with college education because of financial problems and migrated to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in search of work. In 1950, he completed Titash Ekti Nadir Naam in the Bengali language, and after a few months, he died from tuberculosis in 1951 at the young age of thirty-seven. Titash was published in Kolkata five years after his death and became a highly acclaimed novel of Bengali literature.

Technology plays a crucial role in mediating the interaction between society, labour, and nature. In a broader sense, the history of technology reflects the evolving attitudes of humans towards labour and nature. The dominant socio-cultural factors in a society significantly influence the development of technology, technological sciences, and education, and the strategies employed in transforming the natural world. One important principle that shapes technological application and innovation across various industrial sectors in India is the casteist materialist conception of the relationship between labour, work, and nature. This conception perceives this relationship as a natural, static, and fixed phenomenon, rather than a dynamic and evolving process. According to this view, the interaction between labour and nature is shaped by caste-based cultural and historical processes, with its specific content and course determined by the hereditary occupation and skill of Dalits. In practice, the combination of caste domination and capital constantly seeks to control and regulate the exchange of technology and knowledge between labour and the physical environment, which ultimately proves detrimental to both Dalits and the environment. This approach hampers progress and perpetuates inequalities, hindering the positive impact of technology on society, labour, and nature as a whole. The leather industry in Kanpur, along with the associated technology and the age-old involvement of Dalit labour, serves as a prominent example that illustrates the aforementioned scenario.

Jajmau, an industrial suburb of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, is well known for leather tanneries. Located on the banks of the river Ganga and administered under the Kanpur metropolitan area, its tanneries have been doing good business since long – generating INR 15,000 crore of revenue every year and accounting for the country's 30 per cent of leather export. Tanning is the process of treating skins and hides of animals to produce leather, and tanneries are the places where the skins are processed. Tannery workers are Dalits – mainly Chamars – and low-caste or low-skill Muslims. Kanpur, founded in the early eighteenth century, became an important commercial and military hub in British India and after independence, it came to be known as the industrial and financial capital of Uttar Pradesh, and a producer of fine quality leather and textile products.

Dalits’ histories, myths, and memories offer invaluable insights into their ecological past and present. These narratives, which have been widely disseminated through oral tradition, print media, and various forms of communication hold immense popularity within marginalized communities. Embedded within these stories, songs, myths, and performances are depictions of nature, landscapes, struggles for natural resources, acts of sacrifice, labour, and pain. Often characterized by their collective and anonymous nature, they have assumed significant relevance in the Dalit community's ongoing struggles for land, water, and other resource rights. A counterpoint to hegemony, such cultural forms represent dissident voices, reflecting Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogics and heteroglossia, and Stuart Hall's concept of ‘oppositional’ decoding, challenging ‘negotiated’ reading positions. It may be equated with Raymond Williams's paradigm of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’, and ‘emergent’ cultural practices in constant interaction.

In the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India and Nepal, folk tales, stories, and songs woven around the two Musahar brothers, Dina and Bhadri, thrive among the Dalits, particularly those belonging to that community. Dalits living in the bordering sub-regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and Nepali Terai have used myriad voices and a diverse set of folk traditions and cultures – oral tales, stories, songs, music, ballads, performances, proverbs, riddles, theatre, dance, festivals, crafts, and idols – to celebrate their folk heroes. The Dina–Bhadri folklore is a frequently sung ballad in north Bihar, with performances of as many as fifty-two wars of the heroes, waged to protect the poor labourers from exploitation by the rich landlords. The folk tale has helped in transforming the rich cultural capital of Musahars into ‘political and developmental capital for the betterment of the community as a whole’. The legend of Dina–Bhadri is also effective for the mobilization of the marginalized Musahar community ‘because of its strong anti-feudal, anti-bondage, and pro-peasant characteristics’.

A study of the influential figures of Dina–Bhadri can signify a confluence of streams and issues – a popular folk tale and its dynamic reproduction in a variety of forms; changing histories of past and present; entanglements of texts, traditions, and performances; everyday lived social experiences of Musahars while producing and reproducing these stories; and a Dalit politics of folklore. While the folk tale has been a subject of some scholarly works, in contemporary times, it has also acquired dynamic ecological meanings, which have been relatively understudied.

On 15 August 1973, the twenty-sixth anniversary of Indian Independence, Dalit Panthers, an organization founded by young Dalits in 1972 to evoke ideas of blackness and black power for representing Dalit politics, took out a march on Mumbai's streets. The march was called the Black Independence Day (Kala Swatantrya Din), where a Dalit Panthers Manifesto was released. Questioning the dominant narratives of independence, democracy, government, and political parties in India, the manifesto identified three ‘burning questions of Dalits today’: ‘1) food, clothing, shelter; 2) employment, land, untouchability; 3) social and physical injustice’. Key programmes, carried on under this manifesto, have extensively focused on Dalit access to natural resources: ‘The question of landlessness of the dalit peasants must be resolved’; ‘Dalits must be allowed to draw water from public wells’; ‘Dalits must live, not outside the village in a separate settlement, but in the village itself ‘; and ‘all means of production must belong to the Dalits’.

Political links between the Dalit Panthers and the Black Panthers, common legacies of B. R. Ambedkar and W. E. B. Du Bois, and numerous initiatives and academic writings by organizations, activists, and academicians have aligned anti-caste struggles of untouchables and low-caste people in India with anti-racist articulations of African Americans in the United States. Amid this long tradition of intersections between anti-casteist and anti-racist positions, Dalit–black solidarities have encompassed questions of social and economic inequalities, civil and political rights, possibilities of democracy, development, gender, empowerment, and formation of organizations of the oppressed. In history and economics, too, caste and race, Dalits and black people, and the parallel connections and common grounds between the two have been widely analysed. Caste and race have often been considered interchangeable, in terms of their overwhelming potential for damaging human society.

However, the age of civil and political rights for India's Dalits and America's black people is also a time of environmental inequalities and social and ecological movements in both communities and continents. Yet, the search for shared histories and struggles of Dalits and black people have not entered the unquiet world of environmental struggles.

The term ‘Dalitbahujan Anthropocenes’ refers to the untouchable and low-caste population in the country whose bodies, labour, lives, and work have been shaped through their close proximity to industrial development and modernity for several centuries. This proximity is a consequence of historical colonialism and capitalism, systems of hierarchy and discrimination, polluted local environments, and persistent environmental casteism. It is rooted in the belief that Dalit and low-caste bodies possess a ‘natural’ capacity to endure and engage with the dirty and hazardous processes and substances of industrialization, with their labour being seen as essential to the nation's progress. In contrast to the dominant temporality of the Anthropocene, which focuses on a unified human society, the concept of Dalitbahujan Anthropocene disrupts teleological time and challenges singular narratives. It does so by recounting the experiences of Dalit and low-caste individuals within the caste–colonial–capitalist systems, expanding across various contexts such as agricultural fields, coal mining, bonded labour, displacement, migration, famines, and droughts – all in the name of civilization and modernization. Beyond the scope of caste and capitalism, Dalitbahujan Anthropocenes offer a creative alternative perspective on addressing issues related to extraction, waste, urbanism, and development. Nek Chand and his Rock Garden serve as counter-narratives, challenging the caste and Dalit blind spots within the Anthropocene discourse.

Nek Chand Saini (December 1924–June 2015) is widely known for his creation of the Rock Garden in Chandigarh city. Born in Berian Kalan village, 90 kilometres to the north of Lahore, and now in Pakistan, Nek Chand migrated with his family to the Indian side of the Punjab region after Partition in 1947. Until the age of 23, he, his parents, four brothers, and two sisters lived in an agricultural village of Pakistan. As a Partition refugee, Nek Chand moved in several Indian cities – Jammu, Gurdaspur, Karnal, Panipat, and Faridabad, and finally settled down in Chandigarh.

Nek Chand Saini belonged to the Mali caste, which has been characterized in various accounts, and in various regions of India as an occupational ‘Shudra’ caste, traditionally and intimately connected with the occupation of gardening and cultivation-selling of flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change at Copenhagen in 2009 (COP 15), Narsamma Masanagari, Manjula Tammali, and Sammamma Begari – Dalit women from Medak district of Andhra Pradesh – burnt their accreditation badges in protest against the lack of recognition of caste and Dalits in climate discussions. Coming from Medak district, where extreme heat and erratic rainfall impacts the everyday village life, Sammamma, a small farmer of Bidakanne village, explained: ‘Climate change does make it more difficult. If there is drought or unseasonal rainfall, the first thing that suffers is crop cultivation. If there are no crops, it is difficult for us.’ Narsamma, farmer and activist of Pastapur village, claimed that ‘upper-caste farmers use machines to plough their land, heightening the climate crisis with fertilizer and other things. Our impact on the climate is much smaller. Larger farmers grow money, we grow food’. Standing outside the Conference Centre, Dalit women demanded ‘to bring in the voices of the small and the excluded. If you really want to understand climate change, then come and talk to people like us’. During COP, they also spoke about untouchability and occupational hierarchy still being practised in the villages, and how a group, Deccan Development Society, was trying to organize Dalit women farmers’ collectives by pooling financial and human resources, sowing local rice varieties and diversifying crops in small farms, to mitigate the impact of volatile weather and increasing water scarcity. On another occasion, ‘Dalits Dignity March’ in Delhi, organized every year on 5 December by the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR), a network of grassroot Dalit groups, displayed prominently the banner of ‘Dalit Climate Justice’. Ashok Bharti, the chairman of the organization, submitted a memorandum to the prime minister, asking the Indian government not to compromise the interests of Dalits in the country's commitment to cut carbon emissions, and suggested fair share and special care for the community in climate change mitigation policies and budget allocation. Of late, a few Dalit and anti-caste writers have begun articulating their views on climate change. They have critiqued the trend to overlook the ‘correlation between climate change and social exclusion’, the ‘hidden casteism of climate change reporting’, and have explored ‘a broader framework to situate caste in the climate change/climate justice discourse’.

Ambedkar and Marx expressed the aforementioned sentiments during the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. However, even centuries later, these words resonate in the contemporary context of the Indian industrial world. The advent of machines during the Industrial Revolution held the promise of a positive transformation of labour and life on earth. It was seen as a potential solution to the pressing issues faced by Dalit labourers in caste-based occupations and economy. These issues included working in polluted occupations, unsafe working conditions, unhealthy environments, limited opportunities for progress, and degrading work conditions. Nevertheless, the combination of caste-based discrimination and capitalist exploitation of labour and nature has led to a series of conflicting and contradictory situations. The relationship between industries and Dalit labourers, as well as their impact on the environment, has faced intense scrutiny over the past two decades. A comprehensive study conducted on a burgeoning industrial area within the National Capital Region highlights both the challenges and successes experienced by Dalit labourers in their interactions with the realms of industry, caste, and nature.

The Wazirpur industrial area (WIA) in Delhi, capital of India, is choked with small and medium enterprises, spread over a thousand plots.

This book comes out of my continuing research on the interrelationship between caste, Dalits, and the environment. The terminology of Dalit Ecologies is an open, collaborative space to collate insights from Dalit, backward, and anti-caste histories, socio-political thought, and movements and organizations, and to bring to light some aspects of contemporary Dalit environmental narratives. My deep interest in the subject inspired me to introduce an elective course on ‘Environment and Social Exclusion’ at Ashoka University in 2020, which proved to be very popular, and initiate an international webinar series on ‘Anti-Caste Politics and Environmental Justice’ and ‘Dalit Ecologies’ in 2020–21, organized by the Ambedkar Study Centre, Seshadripuram Evening Degree College, Bengaluru, in association with the Antiracist Research and Policy Centre, American University, Washington, DC.

My conception of Dalit Ecologies is also influenced by, and derives from, rich academic and political work in other parts of the world around ‘Black ecologies’, ‘Racial ecologies’, and ‘Feminist ecologies’, which analyse the interrelation between race, gender, and environmentalism through an interdisciplinary lens of race and gender studies, and socio-political ecology. Simultaneously, they sculpt distinct histories, stories, and approaches of racialized communities in expressing ecological relations. I draw insights from collective thinking and initiatives on ‘Global Black Ecologies’, which focus on ‘the critical insights, world-making, and world-sustaining practices of global Black communities’. While primarily Afro-diasporic in nature, they also express ‘connections to communities without recent African ancestry who have articulated political and social connections to Blackness with respect to their position within racialized national and global hierarchies, such as caste, exemplifying Achille Mbembe's conceptualization of “Becoming Black of the World”’.

The chapters are grounded in my fieldwork and visits, interviews, and conversations with Dalit, backward caste, and anti-caste people and activists, grassroots organizations and NGOs involved in Dalit issues, leaders of political parties, industrialists, and government officials – in the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab. Dalit autobiographies, coming out from the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and West Bengal, have also been insinuated to comprehend the wide canvass of the subject. The chapters here include rural and urban environments; industrial, technological, and agricultural systems; developmental and anthropogenic activities; economic, political, and cultural spheres; and Dalit social and political organizations.