Toward a critical caste ecology: how does agrochemical harm interact with caste relations in rural India?

Abstract Caste, despite its obvious relationships with land, colonialism, and injustice, is largely missing in sociological conversations about environment. Yet over one and a half billion human lives are structured through it, as are many more nonhuman lives. Building on existing scholarship that foregrounds caste and its ecological entanglements, this paper develops a framework that I call “critical caste ecologies.” By challenging the dominant paradigms of environmental justice shaped by both Western and Brahmanical epistemologies, the framework traces the historicity and materiality of caste relations and how they are maintained and reproduced by socio-environmental change. I first compare critical caste ecologies with critical environmental justice studies, demonstrating their shared concerns and how they differ. Drawing on ethnographic data, I examine caste in conjuncture with agrochemical environmental harm. By analyzing the emergence of pesticide stores and agrochemical networks shaped by “backward caste” farmers, this article highlights how caste-based social relations are actively reproduced by simultaneously transforming rural ecologies and Dalit livelihoods. I conclude by highlighting the advantages of using critical caste ecologies as a tool to unpack caste-based differentiation and its impact on socio-ecological life.