Dalit Ecologies: Literature,Capitalism and Cinematic Landscapes in Contemporary India

Introduction

Ajay Navaria’s Unclaimed Terrain explores the intersections of caste, ecology and modernity in contemporary urban India, showing how migration unsettles dalit subjectivities by loosening their ties to rural hierarchies and agrarian ecologies (Giffard-Foret, 2016, p. 4; Navaria, 2013). Ambedkar repeatedly insisted that the village is a spatialised moral order: hedges, wells and threshing floors draw lines of touchability, placing the ‘touchable’ inside and consigning others to the margins (Ambedkar, 1936/2014). Crossing those lines forces the map to be redrawn; spaces once reserved for one kind of body begin to admit others, opening the possibility of claiming a different social name (ibid.).

Ambedkar’s formulation of the ‘Broken Men’ in The Untouchables also offers an important conceptual genealogy for dalit ecologies. Rejecting purely ritual explanations of untouchability, Ambedkar instead situates caste degradation within histories of settlement, labour, dispossession and spatial exclusion (Ambedkar, 1948/2024, pp. 37–40). His argument that the ‘Broken Men’ occupied segregated spaces outside the village foregrounds the relationship between habitat, territorial organisation and material vulnerability (ibid., pp. 37–40). As Ambedkar observes, ‘The Hindus live in the village and the Untouchables in the ghetto’ (ibid., p. 35). In this context, dalit ecologies extends Ambedkar’s attention to the relationship between caste, settlement and environmental access while resisting any reduction of caste to a fixed ritual category alone.

Mukul Sharma extends Ambedkar’s critique by arguing that caste shapes environmental justice through the regulation of access to resources and control of ecological spaces (Sharma, 2024, p. 5). Crucially, Sharma shows that caste oppression is produced and sustained through boundaries between the human and the animal (ibid., p. 47). For dalits, animality is not a metaphor but a lived condition: caste society enforces proximity to forms of labour such as carcass removal, leatherwork and cattle grazing while simultaneously stigmatising dalits as nearer to the bestial than the human (ibid., p. 47). Sharma notes that ‘hardly any Dalit autobiography goes without a statement proclaiming that they are forced to live like animals’ (ibid., p. 47). The policing of purity and pollution operates not only at the level of food, water and work, but through the body itself, via violence that ‘whips people like animals until they can neither see nor breathe’, as Bama writes (Bama, 1992/2012, as cited in Sharma, 2024, p. 47).

While emerging from the historically specific relationship between caste and environment in South Asia, dalit ecologies also gesture towards broader questions concerning how social hierarchies become sedimented within infrastructures, landscapes, labour regimes and environmental access. In this sense, the framework contributes to wider conversations in environmental justice, spatial inequality and subaltern ecological thought beyond the Indian context. Karukku situates the reader inside a Tamil village where even the colour of the soil appears to change the moment a dalit foot crosses an invisible boundary (Bama, 1992/2012, p. 19). Bama does not need to preach; she follows the women as they skirt the upper-caste street, watch the irrigation tank run dry for their fields while the landlord’s pump chugs all night, and gather thorn-brush for fuel because every decent grove is fenced and padlocked (ibid., p. 19). The book’s opening pages make clear that land and body share a single bruise (ibid., p. 19). Sharma (2024, p. 48) notes that in dalit literature and autobiography, dead animals carry divergent meanings: for dominant castes, they symbolise pollution, whereas for dalits they mark birth-bound duty, food, income and the daily negotiation with stigma and exclusion. ‘Animals circulate across their life narratives and enter into socio-spatial and purity–pollution relations’, Sharma (2024, p. 49) writes, shaping dalit identity through everyday labour, diet and bodily experience.

Viewed through a dalit ecologies framework attentive to environmental justice and the politics of animality, Navaria’s urban narratives provide a crucial literary intervention. They reframe dalit migration as an ecological transformation: a movement from caste-bound rural landscapes to contested but potentially liberatory urban terrains (Brueck, 2014, p. 128). At the same time, the persistent entanglement of animality and caste across literature and film compels a rethinking of what it means to claim ecological belonging, and to assert the right to be human in the face of enduring structures of dehumanisation (Sharma, 2024, p. 49).

Methodologically, the article approaches dalit ecologies not as a fixed environmental category but as a fluid spatial relationship shaped through migration, labour, memory, infrastructure and caste negotiation across rural and urban contexts. Rather than treating caste as a static ritual identity, the analysis understands it as historically adaptive, materially mediated and continuously reconfigured through ecological and social relations.

Caste, Land and Village Ecologies: Co-constituted Histories

The historical formation of castes in India cannot be separated from the organisation of land and ecology. From at least the early medieval period, village settlements were mapped onto a ritual-economic grid in which rights to soil, water and pasture were distributed according to ranked jati positions. As B. R. Ambedkar argued, caste was reproduced through spatial segregation: dalits were physically barred from wells, riverbanks and fertile plots, a denial that simultaneously curtailed their economic security and reinscribed brahminical purity codes (Ambedkar, 1948/2024). Land ownership, therefore, operated as both a material advantage and a ritual marker; control over arable acreage and irrigation sources secured subsistence and stabilised the symbolic boundary between purity and pollution that underwrote the hierarchy. Nevertheless, these arrangements were never entirely static or uncontested. Migration, education, conversion and anti-caste political mobilisation repeatedly unsettled the ecological fixity through which caste sought to naturalise itself, opening fragile but significant possibilities for renegotiating space and social presence.

Bama’s autobiography, Karukku, vividly illustrates this structural injustice. She documents how dalit communities like her own were systematically denied land ownership, forced into economically exploitative roles, and spatially segregated at the peripheries of village society (Bama, 1992/2012, p. 19). Holmström (1992/2012, p. xvii) sharpens the point, writing that village caste hierarchies survived by turning the soil itself into a weapon, exploiting dalit labour in the fields while confining their homes to stony, flood-prone margins so that every furrow ploughed and every lane blocked rehearsed the same lesson of subordination.

Mukul Sharma deepens this analysis by showing that caste does not merely distort ecological access but actively structures it. ‘The structuring of rural space is simultaneously the structuring of social and animal hierarchies’, Sharma (2024, p. 49) writes, as the exclusion of dalits from water sources, forests and groves also marks them as bearers of impurity, closer to the animal than the human. Wells and forests are governed by rules that turn every bucket drawn, or twig gathered, into a marker of rank. The enforced proximity of dalits to animal labour, carcass removal, cattle grazing and leatherwork is not incidental but central to their caste status. ‘To be treated like an animal or made to live with animals is a recurring experience for Dalits, shaping both their livelihoods and their social identity’ (ibid., p. 47). These exclusions, Sharma (2024, p. 5) insists, were neither improvised nor peripheral; they formed part of the material armature of caste, consciously policed so that dominant groups could retain their grip on water, fodder and fuel.

Surinder Jodhka and Jules Naudet reach a similar conclusion, noting that the systematic denial of land and common resources keeps rural caste domination alive. When fields, pastures and even burial grounds are parcelled out according to birth, the social and ecological orders reinforce each other so tightly that one cannot shift without the other (Jodhka & Naudet, 2023, p. 15).

The lived realities of this oppressive ecology are further amplified in cinematic representations such as Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan and Vetrimaaran’s Asuran. Both films depict rural violence against dalit communities struggling for fundamental land rights and dignity, effectively dramatising how caste oppression is rooted in control over ecological resources and space. The presence of animals, livestock, food or totems becomes a signifier of social marginality and everyday negotiation with power, a dynamic that Sharma (2024, p. 49) traces throughout dalit life writing and cinema.

Chandrabhan Prasad offers a nuanced perspective, arguing that the post-liberalisation era opened opportunities for dalits to escape rural ecological exploitation. In an interview with Shruti Rajagopalan (2021), Prasad discusses how economic reforms catalysed dalit migration from caste-bound village economies, offering pathways to industrial capitalism and urban markets. He further asserts in ‘Markets and Manu’ that, despite its imperfections, capitalism significantly weakened the feudal bonds of rural caste ecologies, enabling dalits to achieve greater social mobility and economic empowerment (Prasad, 2014, p. 2). Urban infrastructures, education, labour mobility and new economic institutions reshape, though never fully erase, the ecological conditions through which caste is lived.

Laura Brueck advances a related argument by reading dalit fiction as a strategic map of flight. In Ajay Navaria’s Unclaimed Terrain, the move to the city is not merely economic but also ecological and spatial; the protagonist steps off the train into air that is no longer parcelled by caste wells, lanes or cremation grounds. Urban anonymity, crowded buses, rented rooms and shared taps dilute the visual cues that once fixed identity at a glance. The narrative records a double rupture: a bodily exit from rural spatialities structured by subordination and an entry into metropolitan spaces where caste visibility, though not erased, is at least loosened from its spatial anchors (Brueck, 2014, p. 128).

Because caste and rural ecology developed together, each tightening the other’s grip, the present push towards the city cannot be read as a simple change of address. It is the outcome of generations who learned, field by field and well by well, that the organisation of land itself had been enlisted as an enforcer. Tracing these environmental histories shows how dispossession was worked into the very layout of villages: the same embankments that saved upper-caste fields from flood also penned dalit hamlets into boggy ground, and the same grove reserved for temple timber denied dalit households access to fuel. As Sharma (2024, p. 49) emphasises, the boundaries of caste are lived not merely as abstract social rules but as daily, embodied and multispecies experiences, ‘a continual negotiation with land, animals and the violence of exclusion’. That cumulative geography of exclusion now propels entire communities towards urban spaces, where the hope is less that caste will vanish than that its markers will lose some of the fixed coordinates they once enjoyed.

Urban Anonymity and ‘Unclaimed’ Terrains: Dalit Migration as Emancipation

Ajay Navaria’s Unclaimed Terrain treats the city as a terrain where caste-marked ecologies are quietly dismantled and reassembled. The short story ‘Subcontinent’ places Siddharth Nirmal, once a boy who fetched water from the far end of a segregated tank, behind a polished desk in a Delhi office. The same hands that once carried mud-stained pots now sign appointment letters, and the first man he hires happens to be an upper-caste graduate whose father still owns the ancestral well back home. Siddharth’s daily commute from his rented flat to the glass-panelled workspace is, therefore, more than a routine journey; it becomes a reversal of the rural grid that once fixed him to stony fields and polluted gullies (Navaria, 2013, p. 26).

Moreover, the story ‘Yes Sir’ demonstrates urban ecological inversion through its protagonist, Narottam, a dalit bureaucrat. His position of authority over Tiwari, an upper-caste subordinate, dramatises how urban spaces disrupt rural caste ecologies by reversing caste-based power dynamics (ibid., p. 50). The narrative highlights the tensions inherent in these shifts. It portrays the anxieties, gestures of caste blindness and forms of resistance that emerge within urban spaces where caste hierarchies persist in modified forms, reflecting structural inequities such as workplace discrimination and social bias.

The transformative yet conflicted nature of urban dalit identity is also evident in ‘New Custom’, in which an urban dalit man returns to his village with newfound economic prosperity and social confidence. The symbolic act of smashing a glass to defy caste-based humiliation underscores urbanisation as a spatial and ecological shift that enables new assertions of dignity and agency that were previously difficult in rural caste environments.

Mukul Sharma extends this analysis by suggesting that urban migration does not simply erase caste’s ecological force. Instead, he shows how it reconfigures the boundaries of abjection and animality. In the city, the markers of pollution, stigma and proximity to animal labour may become less visible or are displaced; however, dalit bodies still encounter subtle forms of dehumanisation and exclusion. ‘The urban is not free from the burden of animality; rather, the politics of space, stigma and purity find new forms in urban anonymity and the bureaucratic and economic relations of the city’ (Sharma, 2024, p. 50). The forms of labour and associations with animality that shaped dalit existence in the village are often reconfigured through new regimes of surveillance, stereotyping and invisible boundaries that structure who is allowed to inhabit certain neighbourhoods, access specific jobs or belong to particular social circles (ibid., p. 51).

Chandrabhan Prasad elaborates on these dynamics, suggesting that urban capitalism has enabled dalits to engage more actively with markets previously inaccessible due to caste-based restrictions in rural settings (Rajagopalan, 2021). Prasad further argues in ‘Markets and Manu’ that urban economic structures can undermine traditional caste hierarchies, creating conditions for greater autonomy and new forms of ecological self-determination (Prasad, 2014, p. 2).

Laura Brueck contextualises this urban ecological shift by emphasising that Navaria’s narratives reveal urban migration as an intentional act of resistance against oppressive rural ecologies. The city, according to Brueck, is a site of complex anonymity, both empowering and anxiety-inducing, where dalits continually negotiate their identities within persistent but altered caste dynamics (Brueck, 2014, p. 128).

While affirming the liberating potential of urban anonymity, Navaria’s narratives simultaneously expose the durability of caste-based structures in city life and trace the internal psychological negotiations of dalit characters. Residential segregation and professional bias remain operative hurdles. Sharma (2024, p. 52) observes that ‘the fantasy of urban emancipation is always shadowed by the persistence of stigma and exclusion, even as caste becomes harder to see’. Consequently, the urban transformation staged in Unclaimed Terrain cannot be read as a clean escape; it is a layered reconfiguration of caste, identity and ecological relations that captures the ongoing entanglement of mobility, aspiration and marginalisation within contemporary dalit urban experience.

Dalit Capitalism and the Reconfigured Ecology of Work

The transition from agrarian, caste-bound labour to urban-industrial work marks a decisive reconfiguration of dalit ecologies. In ‘Subcontinent’, Navaria tracks the same fracture through Siddharth Nirmal’s ledger of losses and gains. The memory still scalds: a dalit wedding procession mounts hired horses, landlords drag the animals down, beat the men and strip the women—an agrarian ecology whose rituals of humiliation are etched into fallow, landless plots (Navaria, 2013, p. 48). Delhi offers the opposite arithmetic. Siddharth now signs files in a government office, lives in a three-bedroom flat, and watches his convent-educated daughter leave for school in a pressed uniform. The shift from landlessness to salaried tenure rewrites the coordinates of precarity; rent, promotions and school fees begin to replace harvests and caste patrols. However, the old wound travels with him, folded into every city bill.

Chandrabhan Prasad interprets this migration through his concept of dalit capitalism, contending that post-1991 economic reforms ‘allowed Dalits to exit village economies historically organised around caste’ (Prasad, 2014, p. 4). In an interview with Shruti Rajagopalan (2021), Prasad observes, ‘A Dalit who once cleaned carcasses in a village can today own a transport company, hire a brahmin driver and invert the traditional order.’ Navaria’s ‘Yes Sir’ fictionalises this inversion: Narottam, a dalit officer promoted through reservations, orders his brahmin peon, Tiwari, to fetch tea, relishing the role reversal as Tiwari ‘muttered abuses under his breath’ (Navaria, 2013, p. 63). The subversion reaches its peak when the office toilets get blocked and, with no ‘untouchable’ at hand, Tiwari readily obliges Narottam to clean the mess after securing a promotion, asking, ‘What shame is there in work?’ (Giffard-Foret, 2016; Navaria, 2013, p. 64). However, caste seeps back into this modern office when Tiwari performs a Satyanarayan puja ‘to purify the workspace’, a ritual reminder that caste persists even within bureaucratic modernity and wage-labour institutions (Navaria, 2013, p. 64).

This shift away from agrarian servitude is sharply contrasted in Bama’s Karukku, where she describes dalit women ‘skinning dead cattle’ and ‘selling the flesh and hide for a few coins’, their hands ‘stinking of decay’ (Bama, 1992/2012, p. 23). Sharma (2024, p. 142) traces how such tasks migrate into industrial contexts without losing their caste inflexion: in tanneries and sanitation, ‘Dalit workers now labour amidst chromium vats and municipal drains, their work rebranded as modern but their exposure unchanged’. The stigma of animality, once linked to rural carcass work, ‘remains coded into urban occupations marked by risk, waste, and proximity to pollution, as caste follows Dalit bodies from the slaughterhouse to the tannery to the informal sector’ (ibid., p. 144). Even as dalit labour becomes ‘modernised’, the line between the human and the abject animal remains sharply policed by caste (ibid., p. 142).

Navaria’s ‘New Custom’ captures this tension between urban anonymity and rural caste memory. When a dalit man returns from Delhi, his attire initially leads villagers to mistake him for an upper-caste thakur visitor because of his refined clothes and polished manner. Upon learning his true caste, a tea-seller demands he wash his own glass: ‘His hands had polluted it’ (Navaria, 2013, p. 79). Enraged by this sudden collision with the rural grid, he ‘bought the glass and smashed it on a stone platform’ (ibid., p. 80). Sharma (2024, p. 35) notes that such incidents reflect how ‘caste’s environmental codes, wells, utensils, and water, remain entrenched in rural ecologies’, even as urban cash transactions and mobility partially disrupt those deep-seated ritual logics.

Prasad celebrates these trajectories as evidence of dalit capitalism’s emancipatory potential: ‘The Dalit has left the soil that shackled him for the city, where contracts and consumption replace caste’ (Prasad, 2014, p. 8). However, Sharma cautions that neoliberal urbanism produces new vulnerabilities: dalits cluster in polluted peripheries, working in waste segregation, sanitation or precarious informal sectors, and are disproportionately exposed to urban toxicity (Sharma, 2024, p. 188). The reality of urban precarity complicates the promise of escape from agrarian animality: ‘Dalits are still consigned to invisible, hazardous zones, the dumps, the drains, the tanneries, where the very air and water are reminders of pollution and exclusion’ (ibid., p. 189).

In the story ‘Scream’, Tyson’s ascent from a beaten village boy to an urban figure adorned with ‘gold chains and Ray-Bans’ culminates in a poignant confession: ‘Every night, I still smelled the mud of home’ (Navaria, 2013, p. 117). Brueck (2014, p. 125) reads such moments as emblematic of Hindi dalit literature’s ‘rhetorical imagination of mobility shadowed by memory’. Economic reforms detach dalits from agrarian caste ecologies but cannot erase their embodied residues; the disciplined urban body carries an additional significance, marking an effort to reclaim visibility from a caste order that historically associated dalit labour with degradation, exhaustion and animality. Physical self-fashioning therefore emerges not merely as an individual aspiration, but as a collective struggle over dignity, perception and social legibility within the ‘hybrid ecology’ of the modern city (Sharma, 2024, p. 142).

Thus, dalit capitalism partially dislocates caste from agrarian land relations and inserts dalits into urban-industrial circuits mediated by wage and market, reshaping their ecological entanglements. However, Navaria’s fiction and Sharma’s critique underscore that this reconfiguration remains double-edged; it liberates dalits from village-bound oppression while binding them to new labour, debt and environmental hazard ecologies. The ‘unclaimed terrain’ of Navaria’s title becomes both an emancipatory horizon that enables an imagination of caste-free ecologies and a contested space where caste, capital and ecology continue to intersect, adapt and transmute one another in the contemporary age.

Oppressive Ecologies and Emancipatory Landscapes: Village Versus City

Dalit literature and cinema repeatedly contrast the village’s caste-encoded ecology, its segregation of space, land and labour, with the contested freedoms of the city. Ajay Navaria’s Unclaimed Terrain captures this tension through characters whose urban lives remain haunted by their rural pasts. In ‘Subcontinent’, Siddharth recalls his childhood village where ‘the Dalit hamlet sat on the edge of the fields, beyond the last well’, and crossing into upper-caste territory risked ‘a beating for stepping on their paths’ (Navaria, 2013, p. 45). The landscape is not neutral; caste is organised spatially through it, shaping where one draws water, where one lives and which paths one treads, all of which are tightly policed. Bama’s Karukku similarly depicts this geography: ‘Our street lay at the very end of the village, near the fields, far from the Naicker houses’ (Bama, 1992/2012, p. 7). Such physical marginalisation was reinforced through labour: Bama (1992/2012, p. 23) describes ‘women who skinned dead cows’ and ‘men who tilled Naicker lands’, labouring on soil they did not own.

These accounts demonstrate what Mukul Sharma terms ‘caste ecologies’, where ‘access to land, water and even air is regulated through caste hierarchies that naturalise exclusion’ (Sharma, 2024, p. 35). Dalits’ relationship to the environment in the village is mediated through subordination; they work the fields but do not own them, fetch water from separate wells and occupy ecologically degraded fringes. In Karukku, Bama recalls fetching water from a ‘pond filled with frogs and slime’ while upper-caste households drew from ‘clear wells shaded by mango trees’ (Bama, 1992/2012, p. 14). Sharma (2024, p. 42) insists that such ‘environmental codes, wells, utensils, and land, remain core mechanisms by which caste reproduces itself and enforces the boundaries between pure and polluted, human and animal’. Ecological disparity is inseparable from social hierarchy, and dalit experience is repeatedly shaped through processes of abjection and animalisation: ‘the stench of carcasses, the labour in drains, and the proximity to waste, all bind Dalit bodies to the landscape of the village as a kind of living pollution’ (ibid., p. 47).

Cinematic texts sharpen this link. In Asuran (2019), Sivasamy’s ownership of panchami land, a rare foothold for dalits in the agrarian order, provokes violent retaliation from the upper caste. A pivotal scene shows upper-caste men torching the dalit hamlet, ‘the huts burning like dry grass’, forcing Sivasamy’s family to flee across marshy fields and forests under pursuit (Vetrimaaran, 2019). The film’s imagery recalls Ambedkar’s indictment of the village as ‘a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism’ (Ambedkar, 1936/2014). The rural landscape—fields, wells and paths—is not merely a backdrop but the terrain on which caste power enforces itself, and the space where animality and dehumanisation become everyday realities (Sharma, 2024, p. 48).

Navaria’s urban narratives respond to this ecological inheritance. In ‘New Custom’, a dalit man returning from Delhi confronts these village hierarchies anew; mistaken for an upper-caste visitor because of his clothes, he is later humiliated when the tea-seller, upon learning his caste, orders him to ‘wash the glass he had touched’ (Navaria, 2013, p. 79). His retaliatory act, buying and smashing the glass, symbolises his rejection of a caste-coded ecology where even everyday objects become markers of pollution (ibid., p. 80). As Sharma (2024, p. 42) notes, caste ‘reproduces itself through environmental codes: segregated wells, utensils, fields and even air breathed in separate spaces’.

If the village embodies an oppressive, caste-encoded ecology, the city offers what Navaria calls an ‘unclaimed terrain’ (Navaria, 2013, p. 11), one marked by both mobility and instability. Urban anonymity allows dalits to move through spaces unmarked by visible caste. In ‘Yes Sir’, Narottam’s office life contrasts sharply with Siddharth’s village memories; bureaucratic ranks replace ritual status, and access to clean offices and state housing complexes signifies a new spatial order (ibid., p. 63). However, as Giffard-Foret (2016, p. 4) observes, Navaria’s fiction ‘complicates the modernist narrative of urban liberation’ by showing how caste ‘re-emerges in subtle, insidious ways in the metropolis’. Gossip about reservations in offices, landlords inquiring about surnames before renting flats and the segregation of slums at the city’s periphery all demonstrate how caste adapts within urban ecologies. Sharma (2024, p. 188) reinforces this, observing that ‘urbanity does not erase caste’s environmental codes but remaps them onto new spaces of exclusion and labour, waste-picking, sanitation and peripheral settlements, where animality and abjection are re-inscribed through modern infrastructures’.

Pa. Ranjith’s Kaala (2018) vividly visualises this urban terrain. The film opens in Mumbai’s Dharavi with a sweeping shot of slum rooftops framed by encroaching high-rise developments. Kaala, a Tamil dalit migrant, leads Dharavi’s residents against state-backed developers who brand their neighbourhood ‘illegal’ and promise to ‘clean up’ the city, language that resonates with caste notions of purity. In a key sequence, Kaala confronts the politician Haridev Abhyankar, declaring, ‘Land is our life’. The ensuing clashes over eviction dramatise how urban ecologies, though partially removed from agrarian caste codes, continue to reproduce exclusion through planning, policing and development schemes.

After leaving the convent, Bama’s return to her village in Karukku reflects another axis of this ecology. Despite her new awareness of injustice, she finds that ‘nothing had changed. The Naickers still walked with their heads high. Our people still bent low in the fields’ (Bama, 1992/2012, p. 56). Her alienation underscores how urban exposure reshapes dalit subjectivity; once aware of city freedoms, the village’s oppressive rhythms, its seasonal labours and segregated spaces feel intolerable.

Thus, dalit literature and cinema juxtapose village and city not as simple opposites but as historically linked ecologies. The village’s caste-bound landscape drives migration, while urban spaces offer contested freedom: anonymity and modern infrastructure enable dignity, yet slum peripheries and labour precarity reinscribe hierarchies. Sharma’s (2024, p. 188) call for an ‘anti-caste environmentalism’ insists that dismantling caste entails transforming both spaces, reclaiming rural commons, securing urban land rights and confronting how caste writes itself into soil, water and cityscapes alike.

Film Analyses

From Ecology to Anti-caste Aesthetic

As Kumar (2021, p. 367) argues, dalit films such as Karnan, Asuran and Pariyerum Perumal embody a ‘political aesthetics’ that merges realism with moments of formal excess, musical ruptures, surreal imagery and long uncut shots of landscapes to ‘force viewers into recognition of both political violence and aesthetic violence that sustains caste erasure’. These films mobilise ecology not as a pastoral backdrop but as terrain saturated with caste’s inscriptions: arid roads without bus stops (Karnan), contested wells (Asuran) and spectral dogs haunting scrubland (Pariyerum Perumal).

Edachira’s (2022, p. 266) concept of ‘affective expressive archives of anti-caste sensibilities’ illuminates how these films assemble soundscapes, folk songs, rap, Gaana, textures, mud, scrub, stagnant ponds and visual motifs into a sensorial language that registers dalit struggle at the level of embodiment. For example, in Karnan (Selvaraj, 2021), the folk song sequences—villagers drumming and singing by the pond—operate both diegetically, as rural festivity, and politically, as cultural assertion rooted in place.

Moreover, these films resist the ‘translation of caste into class’ that Kumar (2021, p. 363) critiques in mainstream Hindi cinema, where remakes such as Dhadak efface caste altogether. By anchoring their narratives in specific ecological markers of caste oppression, land disputes, water denial and infrastructural neglect, they preserve caste’s material and spatial particularity. As Pariyerum Perumal’s opening hunt and Asuran’s burning fields demonstrate, dalit cinema insists that caste is not merely a social stigma but a lived geography.

Positioning Dalit Cinema Within Dalit Ecologies

Placing these films alongside Unclaimed Terrain reveals their shared emphasis on ecological entanglement. Navaria’s urban stories, though metropolitan, remain tethered to village memory; his protagonists recall muddy lanes, separate wells and ‘hamlets on the fringes’ (Navaria, 2013, p. 45). Dalit cinema returns us to these terrains, rendering them cinematically vivid while staging acts of defiance within them: Karnan’s smashing of the bus, Pariyan’s refusal to retaliate even after humiliation, and Sivasamy’s flight through the wetlands. By doing so, these films bridge ecological critique and anti-caste politics, embodying what Sharma (2024, p. 188) terms ‘dalit environmentalism’, a praxis that ties ‘environmental degradation and denial of access to the persistence of caste structures’. They dramatise how ecological justice—access to land, water and infrastructural resources—is inseparable from dismantling caste order, while also expanding dalit ecologies beyond rural stasis towards insurgent reclamations.

In short, these cinematic ecologies provide an affective and visual counterpart to Navaria’s literary urban ecologies; together, they form a continuum of dalit experience in which land, water and memory are reinscribed through anti-caste struggle, seamlessly bridging literature and film and positioning this section as a foundation for the concluding synthesis.

Conclusion