The Gandhamardan Hills embody a complex intersection of ecological richness, cultural heritage and socio-economic dependence. Sustaining diverse biodiversity and indigenous livelihoods, the region has become a site of conflict following the discovery of bauxite deposits. Competing claims by local communities, the state and corporate actors have intensified concerns over environmental degradation, displacement and cultural loss. The Gandhamardan movement, led by tribal communities, women and youth, represents a sustained form of grassroots resistance asserting land, livelihood and resource rights. This study examines the tensions between conservation and development, highlighting the movement as a significant case of environmental justice and community-led activism in India.
The expansion of commercial plantations has brought significant changes to the socio-economic landscape of hill tribes in Assam, with a particularly profound impact on women. This article examines the rise of pineapple cultivation in various parts of Karbi Anglong district and its implications for Karbi tribal women. Traditionally, Karbi women actively participated in jhum (shifting) cultivation alongside their communities, where labour and benefits were equitably shared. However, the shift to large-scale commercial pineapple plantations has disproportionately burdened women while offering them only a marginal share of the profits. Fieldwork reveals that although women are deeply involved in every stage of pineapple production from land preparation to harvesting, they are largely excluded from the marketing and profit-making processes, which are dominated by male family members. This gendered disparity is further exacerbated by the fact that Karbi women lack ownership rights over land and property, leading them into deeper marginalization under the commercial plantation regime. This article argues that the transformation from community-based cultivation to market-oriented agriculture has reinforced patriarchal structures and economic inequalities, particularly affecting the agency and livelihood of Karbi tribal women. This study situates Karbi women’s experience within a broader labour history framework, tracing the shift from collective, subsistence-oriented jhum labour to market-driven plantation work that reconfigures both economic value and gender relations. The findings of the study represent not only an agrarian transformation but also a restructuring of labour relations, where women’s collective and autonomous labour in jhum is replaced by gendered, informal and often invisible labour in commercial plantations.
Caste-based occupations continue to define the lives of Dalit workers in India, reinforcing systemic inequalities and limiting socioeconomic mobility. This article examines the lived experiences of multiple generations of a family working as gravediggers at Bengaluru’s Kalpalli Cemetery, highlighting the intersection of caste, labour and survival. Through the lens of Sowri Raja and his kin, it explores the unrecognized labour of gravediggers and their struggles for life and dignity. Despite incremental progress through collective action, many remain trapped in inherited roles, facing institutional neglect and economic precarity. Drawing on the foundational critiques of caste by Dr B. R. Ambedkar and superimposing them on observations from the field, this article ultimately questions whether true freedom from caste-based labour is achievable within a system that simultaneously depends on and devalues Dalit workers. This article reflects on the structural contradictions that govern Dalit livelihoods, revealing how dignity is routinely negotiated but often denied at the intersection of caste, labour and institutional neglect.
This article offers a comparative reading of Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (2003) and Sharankumar Limbale’s novel Sanatan: A Novel (2024), arguing that caste survives less through spectacular brutality than through the everyday, repeated, largely unremarked practices that Pierre Bourdieu names symbolic violence. Reading naming, spatial placement, ritual marking and institutional discipline across autobiography and fiction, the article traces how humiliation is absorbed into body and self until domination requires no further enforcement, appearing instead as custom, fate or pride. It argues further that both texts locate, within this same mechanism, the conditions of its undoing: memory, literacy and narration convert private shame into public testimony and reassemble a fractured selfhood. Reading autobiography and fiction together makes visible a shared grammar of domination that single-text criticism has so far only partly described.
