Unfixing Space: Toward Anti-Caste Philosophies of Nature

Responding to recent calls to rethink space, nature, and social difference outside of North American frameworks, this article draws on the anti-caste tradition in India to explore critiques of hierarchical “natures.” It focuses on the thought of the towering anti-caste leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), who put forward an egalitarian critique of Brahmanical (upper caste) philosophy’s emphasis on permanence and spatiotemporal fixity. The article situates Ambedkar’s critique in the doubly colonial—British and Brahman—context in which he formulated his thought, and emphasizes Ambedkar’s attempts to effect an epistemic break from Brahmanical conceptions of the world, including caste-based conceptions of space and nature. This critique, which is part of a broader tradition of anti-caste thought in western India, has received scant attention in international scholarship on nature and hierarchy. This tradition, the article argues, contains the seeds of an ecologically attuned anti-caste critique and can open new avenues for strengthening anti-caste/anti-racist solidarities. It particularly resonates with the works of Sylvia Wynter and those who have built on her insights about the struggle to define the human, and by extension, the nonhuman. This points toward egalitarian visions of ecology that break away from the fixity (or, more strongly, captivity) that characterizes hierarchical conceptions of nature.