Cast(e) Away: Histories of Displacement and Survival

In our continued exploration of Dalit bastis and their histories, we spent time in Harijanpur and Chamrauha in Uttar Pradesh this week. In the dense forests near Manikpur district, a group of families fleeing caste violence began to build a life from scratch in the early 1960s. They were Dalits, pushed out of their homes in Banda district for refusing to do caste-assigned labour like disposing of cow dung or cleaning toilets. Among them was Ramlali, then just a child. She remembers her father carrying their steel plates, water pots, and bedding on his head through the jungle, looking for land where they would not be humiliated daily. “They beat us if we refuse to do sanitation work,” she recalls.