(iPoster) India Lives in Its Hamlets: Patterns of Intra-Village Residential Segregation

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries & South Asian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: South Asian Politics

Abstract

"India lives in its villages" is a rhetoric scholars, activists, and politicians have employed ever since Gandhi first popularized it. However, every rural sociologist of India knows that the Indian village is not the elementary spatial unit of residence. The Indian village is spatially made up of nearly homogeneous nucleated and spatially segregated hamlets. Over almost a century, the distinguished Indian village studies tradition has produced a large body of ethnographic research on how this intra-village spatial sorting of caste groups is not only crucial to the making, remaking, and maintenance of caste boundaries but is at the heart of persistent social inequities. This paper uses administrative data on hamlet caste group composition from every district in India (n ≈ 1.7 million hamlets) to present the first-ever quantitative portrait of nationwide intra-village spatial segregation. We focus on the most critical intra-village spatial segregation axis --- the boundary between Dalit (formerly ``untouchable'' caste groups) and others.

We introduce a new multi-scalar segregation measurement framework that allows us to directly and consistently compare the extent of intra-village segregation with segregation between villages in a panchayat (the elementary unit of local government in rural India) or panchayats in a sub-district. We find that intra-village segregation is greater than segregation at higher aggregations. We also document how Dalit groups, on average, live in the most diverse villages. Thus, the spatial marginalization of Dalits is related to intra-village segregation rather than inter-village segregation.

Our analysis forces a rethink of India's fundamental spatial unit of residence. India lives in its hamlets and not villages. Our results show that structures of dominance in India's caste society cannot be understood without a comprehensive portrait of how hamlets are not merely spatial units but spatialized caste units. We draw up a research agenda for the political economy of rural India that accounts for this elementary spatial demography fact.

Authors

• Gopinath Annadurai, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

• Deepak Malghan, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore