Keywords
Caste
Urban Space
Refugee
West Bengal
Untouchability
Symbolic Violence
How to Cite
Abstract
What does the city feel like from the wrong end of caste? This article addresses that question through original empirical research and a multi-theoretical framework rooted in Dalit studies, feminist epistemology, and critical urban sociology. It focuses on Bengali Dalit communities living at the peripheries of Kolkata and the wider metropolitan region. Drawing on mixed-methods fieldwork involving one hundred respondents, the article advances four arguments. First, West Bengal’s urban periphery is not a zone of mere economic disadvantage; it is a caste space — socially produced through the convergence of untouchability’s spatial logic, the political economy of post-1971 Dalit refugee resettlement, and the durable hegemony of bhadralok cultural formation. Second, the Left Front’s analytical reduction of caste to class was not merely a theoretical error but a structural exclusion: it systematically depoliticised caste grievance and rendered Dalit spatial claims illegible within the dominant frameworks of socialist urbanism. Third, Dalit women within these communities endure a compounded marginalisation that cannot be captured by either caste analysis or gender analysis alone; a Dalit feminist standpoint, following Sharmila Rege, is epistemologically necessary to grasp this constitutive entanglement. Fourth, West Bengal’s mainstream urban planning apparatus has been structurally incapable — and in significant degree institutionally unwilling — to recognise caste as a category of spatial analysis, thereby reproducing the very inequalities it nominally seeks to address. The theoretical apparatus draws on B. R. Ambedkar’s sociology of caste as a self-reproducing system of graded inequality, Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space, Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence and habitus, Anupama Rao’s account of Dalit politics and modern India, Gopal Guru’s phenomenology of humiliation, and the growing tradition of Dalit feminist scholarship. The article concludes by proposing the outlines of a caste-conscious urbanism adequate to West Bengal’s particular social geography.
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