Rethinking Urban Agriculture: Environmental Casteism, Subjectivity, and the Labor Politics of Food Production in Mumbai

Abstract

In urban India, food gardening has proliferated among upper-caste, middle-class people to mitigate food safety and self-sufficiency concerns. In the past two decades in cities like Mumbai, organic gardening communities have engaged in food production in private homes and apartments. The fears and anxieties of “unsafe” food and degrading urban ecologies have driven upper-caste, middle-class people to intervene through food gardening. In Mumbai, urban farming along railway tracks was initiated as a state-driven measure to deal with food insecurity and was later formalized through Green Revolution policies. Presently, seasonal, rural, lower-caste migrant farmers grow food along 400 acres of public railway lands to sustain their livelihoods. These farmers have faced lawsuits from elite constituents over the use of sewage water, pesticides, and fertilizers to grow vegetables.This research examines how the complex interplay of caste, class, and gender shape practices and discourses for differently situated groups involved in urban agriculture. Using archival and qualitative methods, this dissertation shows that urban agriculture is not a universal good. Rather, it has served to deepen caste domination and environmental inequality through a process I call “environmental casteism.” I trace agrarian transformation in different historical junctures to demonstrate that 1) caste and class are fundamentally interconnected through land and caste labor relations in food production across the rural-urban divide; 2) urban organic food gardening initiatives are contingent on caste-based ideologies, spatial segregation, notions of purity and pollution, and gendered reproductive labor; and 3) caste-based waste labor is reworked as a practice for environmental sustainability.