The following is an excerpt from Mukul Sharma’s Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environment Justice.
In The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs, Urmila Pawar narrates the travails of her weather life in the Konkan region of Maharashtra. She travelled early morning to the Ratnagiri market to sell various things, by crossing over rocky land and dangerous hilly slopes of the Sahyadris ranges running along the coastline. It was a harsh landscape – howling winds blew continuously, ferocious enough to topple a person to one’s death, and fear of injury often made Urmila’s heart cold with terror. In the rains especially, her life hung by a thin thread. Urmila remembers the rains:
Survival was as dicey as gambling. The rain pouring down in huge torrents, as if the sky itself was collapsing; lightning striking across the sky in deafening roars; streams fiercely gushing down the hills; rocks exposed under receding layers of soil, like teeth jutting out of monstrous mouths, ready to tear the traveler’s feet to shreds; thick shrubs, huge trees with wild creepers weaving tangled webs, and dense, dark forests sprawling around; rivers swollen with floods, weathered wooden bridges over them, ready to collapse at any moment.
Dalit writer and activist Vasant Moon experienced dead heat in his vasti (neighbourhood) in Nagpur city in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra.He describes how summer began to burn since March; by April it was impossible to go outside after the morning; and by May the roads were empty in the afternoon. The turbulent air would give impetus to whirlpools, and then the harshly burning winds would lift up the dust in the field and blow it into the neighbourhood. The hot blast of air would subside at night and only after two in the morning, when a clear, tranquil wind provided a cooling touch on their bodies, could they sleep. The summer was always stubborn, but people were equally hard-headed. Moon also details out the joys of the monsoon – thick clouds, first rains, whirling birds, playing in the flowing water, heavy showers, drains overflowing, catching and cooking the crabs, and celebrating the welcome change in weather.
Mukul Sharma’s
Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environment Justice,
Cambridge University Press (2024)
Weather and climate, key markers of climate change in contemporary times, have been central to Dalit life. In a large number of Dalit life narratives, weather patterns and climate systems often appear, and can be taken as lighthouses to enhance our understanding of climate change. Dalit experiences have their own characteristics, which are usually defined differently from dominant climate discourses. Identifying these is not only to sketch the victims and the vulnerable, and the cluster of causes and effects, but also to recognize the ambiguities and complexities around meanings of weather and climate, and their close connections with Dalit life. Dalit life narratives reflect the compound reality of living with weather over a period of time, spread over months and years. They experience climate change through everyday and cataclysmic events. Caste overwhelmingly determines their weather and climate sense.
Day-to-day functioning of the atmosphere, like temperature, rainfall, wind, humidity, sunshine, and cloud, are heavily filtered through living and labouring conditions. A cold morning, a sunny afternoon, a rainy day, or a chilly night can be generalized in broad descriptions. However, their experience and impact are never static and are often caste- and Dalit-specific. Urmila Pawar is a Mahar. In her village, poor Mahar women had no choice but to journey through a difficult road amidst slopes and hills, with heavy bundles on their heads, filled with firewood or grass, rice, or semolina, long pieces of bamboo, and baskets of ripe or raw mangoes. Animals attacking people on their way were not uncommon. Women were also occasionally assaulted by men hiding in shrubs and trees. In Pawar’s description, women and weather together acquire a particular state of being:
With their emaciated bodies covered in rags, bony sticklike legs, bare feet, pale, lifeless faces dripping either with sweat or rain, sunken stomachs, palms thickened with work, and feet with huge crevices like a patch freshly tilled, they looked like cadavers floating in powerful streams, propelled by a force hurtling them along the strong currents, being dashed against rocks and thrust forward by powerful waves.
Various weather elements continued – day by day, year by year – and created a combined weather–climate regime, not in a narrow sense of average weather or statistical description but in a wide set of the complex human– climate system, consisting of interactions between labour, land, atmosphere, exploitation, development, and change. Pawar witnessed the working of such a regime in her village, in her home, and in her everyday life. Her tiled roof house constantly got hotter; the firewood stove in the kitchen was completely blackened with smoke; food had to be gathered from the forest, river, and sea even in extreme times; and cooking and cleaning done amidst water scarcity. Changing climate and its impact was very much visible here and now:
Gradually the tide would flow in, water rising from all sides. Then they yelled warnings at each other, hurried one another, swiftly cut off huge pieces of rock with oysters in it, filled their baskets, trying to collect as much as they could. In the hurry sometimes novices would simply pick up rocks thinking they were oyster shells. When the water rose to their knees, they would hurry out of the water, balancing the heavy basket on their heads. Some women lost their lives because they didn’t notice the water rising. My maternal uncle’s daughter Lakshi was saved from drowning by some people. But they could not save the two other women with her who drowned.
When Urmila later visited the village of her husband, the climate was no different – barren lands, parched dry grass and shrubs, and land-owning farmers burning their land as preparation for the next planting season. In Vasant Moon’s portrayal of ‘neighbourhoods’, ‘heat and rain’, ‘falling star’, ‘callousness and clouds’, the unmitigated weather–climate regime has a life and death implication. He views it as a natural, human creation, and a matter of caste and location, emergency, and fortune. Accounts of heat waves, shivering nights, and overflowing rivers abound. He narrates a story of sudden flooding of the river Wainganga, and the courage of a young girl, Nathi, who swims through the fast-flowing waters. She defines an individual’s capacity to express freedom from climate circumstances, as she instinctively decides to express her independence by challenging the stream.
When Urmila later visited the village of her husband, the climate was no different – barren lands, parched dry grass and shrubs, and land-owning farmers burning their land as preparation for the next planting season. In Vasant Moon’s portrayal of ‘neighbourhoods’, ‘heat and rain’, ‘falling star’, ‘callousness and clouds’, the unmitigated weather–climate regime has a life and death implication. He views it as a natural, human creation, and a matter of caste and location, emergency, and fortune. Accounts of heat waves, shivering nights, and overflowing rivers abound. He narrates a story of sudden flooding of the river Wainganga, and the courage of a young girl, Nathi, who swims through the fast-flowing waters. She defines an individual’s capacity to express freedom from climate circumstances, as she instinctively decides to express her independence by challenging the stream.
Dalit lives show an acute awareness of the complexities of weather, climate, and climate change, where caste distinctions play a critical role in shaping their experiences. In a Dalit life, climate can be the sum total of a dynamic state of living, where temporal and permanent, every day and episodic, variable and stable, extreme and ordinary can co-habit at all times and locations. Jeya Rani explains sharply the intersections of weather, climate, and caste: ‘Dalits are not afraid of climate change or any other natural disasters, because socially and economically, they have been leading a disastrous life forever. For them, disaster caused by the upper-caste Hindus is the real problem.’ Dalit experiences of weather and climate are further amplified through a case study of the brick kiln industry in Haryana, and a sociological analysis of caste relations in climate change.
The case study is based on my fieldwork in June–July 2018 in six small and medium-sized brick kilns of Passour, Badli, Kablana, Khungai, and Kanonda villages of Jhajjar district in Haryana. These villages are known for their brick kiln industries. I thus selected them for my field work. I have used a qualitative, case-study methodology through field visits, interactions, and observations within the brick kilns and labourers’ homes in the area of study. I have travelled five times to the area and interviewed thirty brick kiln labourers (ten women), twelve villagers, and representatives of labour and Dalit organizations. During my fieldwork, quantitative and qualitative evidence and data was collected through extensive interviews and group interactions with labourers and representatives of government departments and civil society organizations in the city. In the villages, I was often accompanied by a local resource person. In different villages and in Jhajjar city, I cross-checked and cross-referenced facts and situations that were mentioned in the interviews. These were then supplemented through other published records and printed sources. Academic writing on brick kilns and labouring population, governmental, and nongovernmental reports were also included in the research.
Understanding climate change through caste relations
Haryana’s Jhajjar district is 50 kilometres away from the national capital of Delhi. A network of national highways and railway stations connect the district to neighbouring cities likes Gurgaon, Rohtak, Bhiwani, and Rewari, and to the states of Delhi and Rajasthan. The district is predominantly rural and agricultural in nature. The 2011 Census counts a total of 185,334 households in the district, of which 136,503 are rural, which are largely engaged in cultivation and agricultural labour. Since the early 1990s, districts like Jhajjar, Bahadurgarh, Badli, and Beri also became important industrial sites for large, medium, and small industrial units in diverse sectors like leather goods, sanitary wares, chemicals, plastics, electronics, steel wires, utensils, pharmaceuticals, paper products, and glass wares.
In the 1990s, brick kilns, too, developed as an important industry in Haryana. In particular, Jhajjar became known for its large production of bricks – red, fly ash, clay face, handmade, and perforated. The district has more than 400 brick kilns, the highest in the state, which are owned by local and regional manufacturers, known variously as Raj Singh Bricks, Mehar Bricks, Sri Sai Enterprises, Shiv Enterprises, Hanuman Bhatta Company, Shiv Bhatta Company, Jai Maa Laxmi Builder, and many more. The industry employs around 50,000 local, seasonal, and migrant labourers every year between October and July. The urban and rural landscape of Jhajjar is often identified with smoke-billowing chimneys of brick kilns, tin-roofed sheds stuffed with rows of freshly moulded bricks, and 6-foot-high shanties of workers covered with plastic roofs and loosely arranged brick walls. Traditional brick kilns are energy intensive and a source of greenhouse gas emissions. A study of labourers, subjected to occupational and metrological heat stresses in hazardous situations, unravels a journey of temperature, heat, greenhouse gas emissions, and their specific caste origins, along with Dalit links to this chain. Intersections between socio-economic injustices and climate change risks show how caste matters in heating up temperature, and the placement of Dalits in anthropogenic climate situations.
India is the second largest producer of bricks in the world, manufacturing roughly 240 billion bricks annually. There are around 140,000 brick kilns that contribute more than 10 per cent to the total brick production of the world. They employ about 10 million workers and consume around 25 million tons of coal annually. Brick kilns have also been documented extensively for their severe violations of labour and human rights, including of women, children, and bonded labourers. A majority of the kilns belong to the informal sector, operate in an unregulated manner, and employ migrant labourers. Systems of contractors, bondages, advance payments, loans, and compound interests are widely prevalent here. Research recently analysed the heat risks for migrant workers at brick kilns. It combined occupational conditions and climate change, and suggested local technical solutions and appropriate technologies, which can be applied to mitigate worsening heat stresses. Another report strikingly studies heat risks in brick kilns for labourers and animals together, amidst hazardous and tough situations, and states unambiguously:
It’s hard work for both equines and people who work there. For equines, the harsh environment causes serious health problems such as disease, injuries and lameness, and with temperatures exceeding 120°F, heat stress is also an issue. It’s a serious condition which, if left untreated, can lead to life-threatening heat stroke.
Of late, several governmental and non-governmental organisations have initiated field research and various measures in the Indian brick sector, with a perspective of reducing emission of high air pollutants and introducing cleaner raw materials and fuels. At the same time, caste and Dalits are closely aligned to the brick kilns in Haryana.
Mukul Sharma is a professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University.
