Seeing the unseen: locating the women of independent India’s dalit massacres using feminist geocriticism and digital cartography

Abstract

Dalits are the broken, or oppressed castes in India classified as the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs). They are often victimised through structural hierarchy of the caste system which denies them basic human rights and access to resources. Casteist oppression of the Dalits in India also manifests in the form of spatial or territorial segregation. This socio-spatial segregation of Dalits or spatial inequality and hierarchical access to societal and natural resources is based on the concepts of purity/pollution and untouchability of the caste system. Dalit scholars have explored the caste-based spatial segregation as, “geographical differentiation apartheid” (Spate 1952) or the cartography of caste (Gorringe 2016) that is still prevalent in rural India where the Dalits are relegated to the outskirts of the villages called cheris, colonies or ghettos (Ambedkar 1935).