Built Environment and Caste: Producing Dalits in Bombay, 1900–39

The built environment – which includes physical structures like houses, roads, factories, sewage systems and cultural institutions like schools – is shaped by the State, capital, and the people who stay within it and make use of it. Class stratification is mapped easily on to the built environment; in a city like Mumbai for instance, the localities of the urban poor are easily identifiable from its built environment. What is the relationship of other logics of stratification, like caste, to Mumbai’s built environment? The paper explores this question through the study of housing reports, labor reports, pamphlets, newspaper articles, sociological studies, and municipal reports between 1900 and 1939. Labor in the city was recruited along caste lines in factories, docks, and municipal departments; caste and class were therefore entangled socio-economic processes. The former untouchable castes for instance, who are known as Dalits today, had access mostly to low paying jobs and therefore poor housing; caste and class were important factors in their economic and social marginalization. In accounts of the Dalit castes in this period though, class and their lives as labor are ignored and their social ostracism is attributed to “their culture”. The poor quality of the built environment, and the houses in which Dalits lived, were attributed to their living habits. This paper argues that in this period, the State, city elites, landlords, social reformers, and political movements were complicit in forwarding this argument; it helped them identify Dalit castes in a modern city in which, theoretically, caste identities were obscured. It also helped create fissures within the labor movement; Dalit cultural differences from the city’s working class are highlighted in a period in which the labor movement is ascendant.