Caste and Water: A Colloquium
IHE Delft will host an online interactive discussion to deliberate on the persistent and violent entanglement of caste and water in South Asia on 20 April. Sukhadeo Thorat, Professor Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and IHE Delft MSc student Kiran Mane will discuss caste, gender and water during the event. Participants will be invited to join the discussion.
The caste system shapes access to water for Dalits and other socially marginalized groups in South Asia. Though water blurs social boundaries, caste remains an obstacle that can lead to violence and trauma. Even today, murder, lynching, public shaming, beatings and social ostracization are committed to penalize Dalits for accessing water from common sources. In this way, public drinking water sources become sites for the reinforcement of illegal caste hegemony, supremacy and oppression.
To challenge the role of water in maintaining caste boundaries, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, a social reformer and chief author of India’s constitution, and a Dalit himself, in 1927 drank water from a public tank in the town of Mahad in western India as a symbolic act of resistance known as Mahad Satyagraha. This was a crucial event in the history of social justice movements in South Asia that highlighted caste injustice and also galvanized calls for its annihilation.
Professor Thorat, an expert on Ambedkar, will discuss why Dalits, formerly considered untouchables, still face discrimination in accessing drinking water despite laws that protect everyone’s access.
Ambedkar’s birthday, 14 April, is celebrated as the public holiday Ambedkar Jayanti in India.