Vaishnavi Manju Pal
Vaishnavi Manju Pal
Pastures Lost: Caste, Climate Change and Nomadic Memory
Pastures Lost: Caste, Climate Change and Nomadic Memory
Pastures Lost: Caste, Climate Change and Nomadic Memory
Vaishnavi Manju Pal
Vaishnavi Manju Pal(she/they), a Gender Studies graduate from SOAS and lecturer in London, explores themes of feminist revolutions and Dalit assertion through her research and writing. A former President of the SOAS Ambedkar Society, she hoards books, runs for clarity, and dreams of shaping change one class and paper at a time.
Vaishnavi Manju Pal(she/they), a Gender Studies graduate from SOAS and lecturer in London, explores themes of feminist revolutions and Dalit assertion through her research and writing. A former President of the SOAS Ambedkar Society, she hoards books, runs for clarity, and dreams of shaping change one class and paper at a time.
Vaishnavi Manju Pal(she/they), a Gender Studies graduate from SOAS and lecturer in London, explores themes of feminist revolutions and Dalit assertion through her research and writing. A former President of the SOAS Ambedkar Society, she hoards books, runs for clarity, and dreams of shaping change one class and paper at a time.
“We might not always have had enough to eat, but there was always enough to drink,” my grandmother, Soni Devi Pal, reflected during our recent call. Born and raised in Mhow, now Dr. Ambedkar Nagar in Madhya Pradesh, her memories are steeped in nostalgia for a time when our community, known locally as the Pal Samaj, thrived as shepherds. “We had cows and sheep,” she explained, “and growing up, we lived on their milk.”
Her voice, warm yet edged with a loss that had sedimented over generations, carried vivid tales of a profession she regarded as sacred. Evoking Krishna and Jesus in the same breath, she said proudly, “Our work – shepherding, was the work of gods”. But beneath that reverence were the unsettling shadows of caste identity. When I gently pressed her about our jati, and why her father, who had been a carpenter and then a railway clerk, never took over the family’s shepherding profession, she paused. Her answers carried a quiet denial, a protective avoidance of the sticky stain that the social grammar of caste had placed on the occupation. Locally, their work was at once divine (in her telling) and debased (in the public gaze).
She then told me about the day the family gave up shepherding and moved into agricultural labour on someone else’s land. She did not frame that shift as a systemic failure or a crisis of ecology; to her it was “how God willed it”. But the story she told, of shrinking pastures, unpredictable rains, and the erosion of the rhythms that had once guided grazing routes, was an early, lived symptom of what we recognize today as climate change, even if she never used that term.
From Pastoralism to Precarity
Historically, the Gadariyas have survived and made meaning through pastoralism. Sheep and goats provided milk, wool, meat, and, crucially, a way of life that tied identity to ecological knowledge and seasonal mobility. Our rituals, our social ties, even our sense of self were braided with the movements of herds across grasslands. Anthropologist K. N. Sharma’s 1961 study Occupational Mobility of Castes in a North Indian Village shows how even then pressures, particularly the expansion of cultivation at the expense of common pastures, began squeezing castes like the Gadariyas out of their traditional livelihoods (Sharma, 1961).
Within the Gadariya umbrella, there are multiple sub-communities, including the Dhangars, whose historical experiences add a further layer of complexity. Under British colonial law, Dhangars and related pastoralist groups were classified as ‘criminal tribes’ through the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Their traditional practices of migration and herding, far from being respected, were actively criminalized by the state. Although this status was officially lifted after independence, and these communities became known as denotified and nomadic tribes (DNTs), the burden of suspicion and social stigma has never fully disappeared (Dadas, 2023).
Even today, the word ‘nomadic’ is often used as a euphemism for marginality, poverty, or criminality, rather than recognizing the adaptive strategies and deep ecological knowledge that have sustained these groups for generations. This legacy of criminalization and ongoing administrative ambiguity has left many Dhangar and Gadariya families doubly vulnerable, as both former pastoralists and as communities whose mobility, autonomy, and traditions have been subject to policing and suspicion by the state and society alike.
Today, that squeeze has been amplified and accelerated by climate volatility. “Earlier, rains were predictable, pastures abundant,” reminisces my grandmother. “Now, rainfall either comes too little or too violently, washing away whatever remains. We lost sheep faster than we could raise them,” she added, recalling what her father had told her. He had abandoned shepherding for a more stable, “honourable” job because uncertainty had become existential.
Climate data corroborate these oral histories. Rising temperatures, erratic monsoons, prolonged dry spells, and increasingly intense heatwaves have degraded pasture quality across central and northern India. My village of Unhel in Madhya Pradesh reflects this reality; its struggle mirrors those of pastoral communities in the Sahel and in Mongolia, where climatic stress has undermined the ecological bases of herding and forced large-scale occupational shifts. Everywhere, the destabilisation of traditional grazing systems has created cascading livelihood insecurity (Sissoko et al., 2010).
Faced with declining herd productivity and dwindling ecological space to sustain their animals, Gadariya families have been pushed, often without real choice, toward agriculture or wage labour. Sharma’s stage-wise model of occupational mobility is instructive – as traditional pastoralism faltered under environmental and demographic pressure, the next available avenue was cultivation or field labour, regardless of caste prescriptions.
Yet, this transition has not brought stability. My cousin, Sumit (name changed for privacy), describes his family’s shift into farming as forced and precarious, “We had sheep, but pasture vanished. We turned to farming, but the land we received was poor and water scarce. Agriculture barely feeds us”. Unlike castes for whom agriculture was a traditional or comparatively secure occupation, Gadariyas entering cultivation do so without the social networks, titles, or infrastructural entitlements that cushion others. Land tenure is insecure, irrigation access limited, and capital virtually absent. They are not choosing agriculture out of aspiration, they are seeking survival.
Further compounding the squeeze, younger Gadariyas confront systemic barriers when seeking alternatives beyond subsistence occupations. “I tried moving to the city,” recounts Sumit, “but without education or connections, I was stuck in daily wage labour. Eventually, I had to return.” Urban mobility, which might have offered a buffer, remains gated by inequality in educational access, social capital, and the linguistic and cultural fluency necessary to navigate urban jobs.
Bureaucratic Barriers and Who Gets Left Behind
Adding another layer of complication is the way state structures, through bureaucracy and policy design, shape who receives support and who is left invisible. Anthropologist Akhil Gupta, in Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, describes the everyday functioning of the Indian state as a “Weberian nightmare,” marked not by rational planning but by “contingency, guesswork, and barely controlled chaos.” (Gupta, 2012)
This arbitrariness, he argues, is produced and reproduced even when state elites design welfare programs with the best of intentions, and even when frontline workers administer them sincerely. This is, of course, if one sets aside the very real casteism that often underpins the behavior of state actors. Many members of the dominant castes, or savarna groups, continue to stigmatize Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi (DBA) communities as mere “quota” or “reservation castes,” using welfare systems not as tools of justice but as mechanisms of humiliation and control. The result is a form of structural violence, where harm is not caused by a single perpetrator but through neglect, delay, and the grinding machinery of bureaucracy. As Gupta writes, “it is impossible to identify a single perpetrator or cause,” because this violence is embedded in the very routines of governance. (Gupta, 2012)
The Gadariya community exemplifies this problem. Families forced off their pastures by ecological changes do not easily fit into the neat bureaucratic categories of landholding farmers, settled agriculturalists, or urban labourers. Their hybrid, nomadic past confuses administrative systems built to serve fixed, easily identifiable populations. As a result, they often fall through the cracks of welfare schemes. “My name is on no list, no quota,” an elderly farmer relative in Unhel told me. “Only on the list of people who have to survive without help.”
This structural disenfranchisement means that those most in need of state support, families navigating the painful transition from pastoralism to marginal agriculture with insecure land rights, minimal education, and heightened exposure to climate shocks, are often excluded. Instead of addressing their compounded vulnerability, bureaucratic processes flatten complexity, treating entire communities as homogeneous and erasing the layered forms of marginalization they experience. In this sense, the failure is not only one of policy oversight but also of a democratic project that has yet to fully reckon with the social and ecological realities of nomadic and pastoral groups.
Caste Hybridity, Stigma, and the Politics of Vulgarity
I carry this legacy myself. Born to a Gadariya (OBC) mother and a Scheduled Tribe father, I embody what Sonkar might call a child of caste hybridity. My life holds the lived histories of two deeply marginalized groups, both degraded in different ways by the Brahmanical model. This intersection reveals how rigid caste frameworks fail to account for complex identities like mine, one that is hybrid, liminal, and politically invisible. It is precisely this kind of nuance that our policy frameworks and social discourses continue to ignore (Sonkar, 2014).
The boundaries of caste are not natural; they have been carved, reinforced, and frozen through generations of social practice. As B. R. Ambedkar observed, caste emerged when endogamy was superimposed on exogamy, turning fluid social relations into rigid hierarchical categories. Sonkar’s work on hybrid castes adds another layer. Many communities labeled “low-born” are themselves products of inter-caste and inter-tribal mixing, yet these mixed origins have been rewritten as evidence of impurity or degradation, rather than complexity and resilience (Sonkar, 2014).
My own existence embodies that rewriting. Official forms, welfare schemes, and social encounters demand a singular identity, forcing layered and overlapping marginalities, OBC and Scheduled Tribe, into neat bureaucratic boxes. This process erases the compounded disadvantage that comes from inhabiting both. Hybridity becomes invisible. In that erasure, the fine gradations of stigma and privilege are flattened into blunt binaries, undermining the possibility of solidarity across intersecting marginalizations.
Shailaja Paik’s work, The Vulgarity of Caste, offers a critical vocabulary for understanding how this erasure is culturally and affectively produced. She shows how the term “vulgar,” the English proxy for the vernacular ashleel, becomes a weaponized category that bundles the improper, the rural, and the indecent. This categorization polices who is considered respectable and who is discarded. Paik illustrates how Dalit women performers in tamasha were celebrated as cultural icons and, at the same time, condemned as “vulgar.” Their bodies and labor were marked as tainted even as their performances sustained entire economies and traditions (Paik, 2022).
The Gadariya community lives out a similar tension. Shepherding, once a source of ecological expertise and local sustainability, has been alternately romanticized as pastoral folklore and denigrated as dirty. The same knowledge that enabled careful seasonal migration, animal health management, and resilient cohabitation with ecosystems is dismissed as “common,” “rural,” and unworthy of policy investment. That labour was made vulgar in the caste grammar, necessary yet degraded, visible in consumption but invisible in entitlement.
This stigma operates both in speech and silence. The reverence my grandmother expressed for her profession, invoking divinity, was laced with a hesitancy to name or own the caste background that linked her to shepherding. That hesitation was a survival tactic in a system that would have marked her work and identity as tainted.
Caste and the Stories We Tell
The collapse of pastoral livelihoods due to climate change has not only disrupted economic survival but has also intensified the social pressures surrounding caste identity. As families are pushed into new, precarious forms of labour, the stigma historically attached to their former pastoral roles persists, creating an additional layer of vulnerability. This tension plays out within families and communities, shaping how people narrate or conceal their histories.
Another face of this hybrid identity, or caste hesitancy, is the masking of caste consciousness in favor of hiding or untangling the stickiness of caste. Questions about caste history often receive evasive responses that invoke similarities between Jesus and Krishna, but those same relatives struggle to articulate the discrimination they faced at the hands of savarna castes. My aunt in Maharashtra once said, “Here, people just ask, ‘Who are your people?’, and if you tell them, you learn to say as little as possible.” In conversations with relatives across North India, from Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh, everyone offers a different story about our community’s origins and evolution, shaped by the region they inhabit.
In Rajasthan, for example, the logic of survival dictates hiding our identity in the murky waters of being Kshatriya Rajputs. Claiming Rajput identity carries more respect because it is associated with valor, landownership, and a higher place in the caste hierarchy, and the ambiguity around caste origins allows such claims to pass, especially in a political climate where Rajput pride has been amplified by Hindutva narratives. My cousin, Ajay, admitted, “If you say you’re Gadariya, you will never get respect. Rajput sounds better to outsiders. That’s just the way it is.”
I did this as a child, knowing that saying, “We are Rajputs,” would bring me more social acceptance than embracing the non-glamorous identity of ‘Gadariya.’ But caste is sticky. My attempts to pass as Rajput in high school were quickly countered with, “Don’t lie to us, we know Pals are Gadariyas, we have neighbors with the same surname and they take care of goats and are rural folks.” This led to three years of being called “Gaddu,” short for Gadariya, in school. I remember one classmate laughing, “Stop pretending! Once a Gaddu, always a Gaddu.” Even my childish attempts to avoid caste-based tagging ended in embarrassing revelation.
Still, some seek survival by masking identity. People try to be Kayasthas or Rajputs. Some even change their surnames to Kumar or Singh to escape caste. My uncle in Uttarakhand shared, “I added ‘Singh’ to my name for work in the city. People stop asking questions, but you always feel you’re just one question away from exposure.” Even for my grandmother, born in the revolutionary region of Mhow where Babasaheb Ambedkar was born, caste radicalism is a distant idea. She accepts and reveres Ambedkar for his contributions, but falls silent when asked about the history of our community’s evolution or the discrimination she cannot bring herself to articulate. Once, when I pressed her about why her father never spoke of their past as shepherds, she simply said, “Beta, some stories are better left in God’s hands.”
The hope, I believe, lies with the youth. Like me, many tried to learn the lessons their elders taught, survival through deradicalization. But when survival tactics fail, embracing full caste pride and acceptance as adults is the only option left. My younger cousin, Renu, told me, “In college, I got tired of hiding who I am. So, now I just say it, Yes, I am Gadariya, and I am proud of it. If someone laughs, that’s their problem.” Yet a full ethnographic account of the community is incomplete without mentioning the rise of Hindutva and the BJP in the Indian heartland. While many young people reject the promise of caste masking and the homogenization of Hindu identity, some even converting to Buddhism, there is also a section of the community that has embraced Hindutva rhetoric. My neighbor, Pramod, a recent convert to BJP politics, said, “Now we can be proud Hindus, not just Gadariyas. Unity is strength, that’s what they say.” But as Babasaheb Ambedkar warned, “Hindu unity is an illusion. A Hindu’s public is his caste. His responsibility is only to his caste. His loyalty is restricted only to his caste.” The future is yet to unfold, and we have yet to see the fallout of these political promises, but for now, the survivors and the radical dreamers of the community clash and coexist simultaneously.
The psychological cost of such erasure ripples through generations. Younger members inherit contradictory instructions to take pride in ancestral wisdom while distancing themselves from the social identity attached to it. Attempts at social mobility, whether through visible “respectability” projects or Sanskritization-like self-fashioning, require engaging and reproducing the very hierarchies that created the degradation. For clarity, Sanskritization is a term coined by sociologist M. N. Srinivas which refers to the process by which marginalized castes adopt the practices, rituals, and symbols of dominant upper castes in an effort to gain social mobility and respectability. (Bopegamage and Kulahalli, 1971)
As someone straddling hybrid marginalities, I experience these tensions in bureaucratic encounters, family conversations, and policy navigation. When forms demand that I choose one label, I am asked to fold myself, to flatten complexity into a legible category. Reservation and welfare schemes that assume identity is singular and homogeneous render intersectional disadvantage invisible. The policing of “purity” and the emphasis on difference fracture collective political imagination. When marginalized groups are pitted against one another in a hierarchy of suffering, the deeper commonalities that could form the basis of solidarity are lost. This fragmentation fails to build the cross-caste unity that leaders like Kanshi Ram envisioned, a solidarity based on shared oppression and political purpose rather than isolated identity boxes, preventing us from realizing the liberatory India he dreamed of and partially built through organizing Bahujans as a unified force. (Sagar, 2022)
Paik’s analysis reveals that vulgarity is not a neutral descriptor but a form of structural violence. It shapes what is valued and what is discarded, what is incorporated and what is expelled, across caste, gender, and body. The ecological knowledge of Gadariya shepherds, nuances of seasonal shifts, early signs of animal distress, and calibrated grazing rhythms, has been sidelined as merely “folk” knowledge, even as its absence intensifies vulnerability. Recognizing the grammar of vulgarity allows a more honest account of why our skills are appropriated when convenient but dismissed when it comes to state support, and why hybrid identities become administrative confusion instead of generative sites of intersectional insight (Paik, 2022) .
Loss of Ecological Knowledge, Gendered labour, and the Limits of State Support
The shift away from pastoralism among the Gadariya has produced a profound loss of ecological knowledge, the consequences of which are felt acutely as climate patterns grow more erratic. Traditionally, pastoralist communities have acted as environmental sentinels, holding deep knowledge about weather cycles, soil health, and sustainable grazing practices. This knowledge was not abstract but lived, transmitted across generations through practice, oral tradition, and daily observation. Now, as the community is absorbed into marginal agriculture or wage labour, much of this expertise has been rendered obsolete or undervalued.
Pastoralism required constant attention to environmental signals, reading cloud patterns to predict rain, identifying resilient grasses during droughts, or managing herd movement to prevent overgrazing and allow pastures to recover. This was climate adaptation in practice, long before policy-makers began to speak of resilience. Such wisdom offered a buffer against environmental shocks, a collective toolkit built from centuries of observation. With the erosion of these practices, the Gadariya have lost more than just a livelihood; they have lost a living archive of strategies for coping with climate variability.
Women were at the center of this ecological knowledge system. They managed milk, cheese, and wool production, tended sick or birthing animals, and made crucial decisions about daily grazing routes and seasonal movement. Their labour was inseparable from their authority as stewards of both herd and household. As the family economy shifted to agriculture or wage work, women's roles changed dramatically. Many now labour as daily-wage workers in others' fields or travel long distances to fetch water, while their former expertise in animal care, food preservation, and medicinal herbs has been devalued or forgotten.
This shift has produced an intensified, gendered burden. Women continue to shoulder the majority of domestic work while also engaging in physically demanding wage labour for low pay and little security. One relative in Unhel remarked, “My mother used to decide when the herd would move, what milk would be sold, who needed medicine. Now she waits for a contractor’s truck or lines up at dawn for water.” The decline of pastoralism has removed not only an economic safety net but a domain in which women exercised knowledge, autonomy, and communal authority.
The gendered impacts of climate vulnerability are sharpened by this loss. As rainfall patterns become more unreliable and water sources dwindle, women and girls are the first to feel the strain, walking farther for water, taking up informal work in nearby towns, or pulling children from school to help with household chores. The erosion of communal knowledge means that adaptive strategies which once mitigated hardship, such as rotating pastures or storing milk products, have been replaced by dependence on volatile markets and erratic wage labour.
Despite this embodied knowledge and lived adaptation, Gadariyas remain largely overlooked in climate resilience planning. Their mobility, pastoral expertise, and hybrid identities are rarely built into scheme design. State support for agriculture, livestock insurance, forest rights, or climate adaptation often assumes sedentary, titled landholders or unambiguous caste categories. Those who were pushed off by ecological change, who carry hybrid stigmas, or who lack formal documentation, are thus structurally excluded from programs meant to buffer precarity.
Radha, a community activist, once told me, “Climate change doesn’t come with a name, but it always seems to find the same people, us.” Her words echo when I listen to Meena, a middle-aged woman who now works as a sharecropper, reflect, “Even when I work under the sun for hours, tilling someone else's land, I think of my grandfather’s herd and how he slept under the stars while the animals grazed. That life was hard, yes, but it was ours.”
Critically, this knowledge is not just of historical value. In an era of increasing climate shocks, the loss of these skills weakens the entire community’s resilience. Efforts to design climate adaptation policies often ignore or marginalize the insights of women who once managed the daily intersections of ecology and economy. Without recognizing and reintegrating such voices, adaptation schemes risk repeating the same patterns of exclusion that forced the community out of pastoralism to begin with.
Conclusion: Claiming Visibility and Resilience
I have unfolded how environmental change, caste hierarchies, policy blind spots, and the psychic freight of hybrid identity coalesce to shape the lived reality of the Gadariya community today. The loss of pastures and the collapse of traditional pastoralism, superimposed on centuries of caste degradation and compounded by the blunt instruments of affirmative action that flatten heterogeneity, have created a landscape where survival is a constant negotiation.
And yet, possibility remains. The ecological knowledge embedded in Gadariya pastoral practices, the layered identities that straddle official categories, and the resilience built through adaptation carry seeds for a different politics. A politics that recognizes hybrid marginality as strength, not confusion, and that sees the so-called vulgar not as degraded but as historically shamed by the hegemonic forces of Brahmanism, pointing to specific sites where repair and justice are possible through community support and allyship.
Climate change is not merely an environmental crisis. It is a social and cultural one, reshaping livelihoods, identities, and the politics of belonging. The Gadariya community stands at this intersection, wounded by erasure, stretched between past and future, yet persistently refusing to disappear. Our pastures might be drying and our herds diminished, but the shepherd’s spirit endures - resilient, attentive, and hopeful.
References
Gupta, Akhil, (2012), Red Tape : Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Orient Blackswan
Bopegamage, A. and Kulahalli, R.N., (1971). ‘Sanskritization’ and Social Change in India, European Journal of Sociology, 12(1), pp.123–132. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s000397560000223x
Chaudhury, Pradipta, (2004), The ‘Creamy Layer’: Political Economy of Reservations, Economic and Political Weekly : 1989-1991
Dadas, Dada R., (2003), Indian Pastoralism Amidst Changing Climate and Land Yse: Evidence from Dhangar Community of Semi-arid Region of Maharashtra, The Palgrave Handbook of Socio-ecological Resilience in the Face of Climate Change: Contexts from a Developing Country, Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, Pp. 85-97.
Sharma, Kailas N., (1961), Occupational Mobility of Castes in A North Indian Village, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 17.2,Pp. 146-164.
Paik, Shailaja, (2022), The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India, Stanford University Press.
Sagar, (10 April, 2022), Kanshi Ram’s Political Vision for Bahujans Can Still Unseat India’s Ruling Class, The Caravan, 10 Apr. 2022, caravanmagazine.in/politics/kanshiram-unseat-ruling-class, Accessed on 6 September 2025.
Sonkar, C. L., (2014), Low Born-Hybrid Castes and Their Origin and Development, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. Vol. 75, Indian History Congress.
Sissoko, Keffing, et al., (2011), Agriculture, Livelihoods and Climate Change in the West African Sahel, Regional Environmental Change 11.Suppl 1, Pp. 119-125.
“We might not always have had enough to eat, but there was always enough to drink,” my grandmother, Soni Devi Pal, reflected during our recent call. Born and raised in Mhow, now Dr. Ambedkar Nagar in Madhya Pradesh, her memories are steeped in nostalgia for a time when our community, known locally as the Pal Samaj, thrived as shepherds. “We had cows and sheep,” she explained, “and growing up, we lived on their milk.”
Her voice, warm yet edged with a loss that had sedimented over generations, carried vivid tales of a profession she regarded as sacred. Evoking Krishna and Jesus in the same breath, she said proudly, “Our work – shepherding, was the work of gods”. But beneath that reverence were the unsettling shadows of caste identity. When I gently pressed her about our jati, and why her father, who had been a carpenter and then a railway clerk, never took over the family’s shepherding profession, she paused. Her answers carried a quiet denial, a protective avoidance of the sticky stain that the social grammar of caste had placed on the occupation. Locally, their work was at once divine (in her telling) and debased (in the public gaze).
She then told me about the day the family gave up shepherding and moved into agricultural labour on someone else’s land. She did not frame that shift as a systemic failure or a crisis of ecology; to her it was “how God willed it”. But the story she told, of shrinking pastures, unpredictable rains, and the erosion of the rhythms that had once guided grazing routes, was an early, lived symptom of what we recognize today as climate change, even if she never used that term.
From Pastoralism to Precarity
Historically, the Gadariyas have survived and made meaning through pastoralism. Sheep and goats provided milk, wool, meat, and, crucially, a way of life that tied identity to ecological knowledge and seasonal mobility. Our rituals, our social ties, even our sense of self were braided with the movements of herds across grasslands. Anthropologist K. N. Sharma’s 1961 study Occupational Mobility of Castes in a North Indian Village shows how even then pressures, particularly the expansion of cultivation at the expense of common pastures, began squeezing castes like the Gadariyas out of their traditional livelihoods (Sharma, 1961).
Within the Gadariya umbrella, there are multiple sub-communities, including the Dhangars, whose historical experiences add a further layer of complexity. Under British colonial law, Dhangars and related pastoralist groups were classified as ‘criminal tribes’ through the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Their traditional practices of migration and herding, far from being respected, were actively criminalized by the state. Although this status was officially lifted after independence, and these communities became known as denotified and nomadic tribes (DNTs), the burden of suspicion and social stigma has never fully disappeared (Dadas, 2023).
Even today, the word ‘nomadic’ is often used as a euphemism for marginality, poverty, or criminality, rather than recognizing the adaptive strategies and deep ecological knowledge that have sustained these groups for generations. This legacy of criminalization and ongoing administrative ambiguity has left many Dhangar and Gadariya families doubly vulnerable, as both former pastoralists and as communities whose mobility, autonomy, and traditions have been subject to policing and suspicion by the state and society alike.
Today, that squeeze has been amplified and accelerated by climate volatility. “Earlier, rains were predictable, pastures abundant,” reminisces my grandmother. “Now, rainfall either comes too little or too violently, washing away whatever remains. We lost sheep faster than we could raise them,” she added, recalling what her father had told her. He had abandoned shepherding for a more stable, “honourable” job because uncertainty had become existential.
Climate data corroborate these oral histories. Rising temperatures, erratic monsoons, prolonged dry spells, and increasingly intense heatwaves have degraded pasture quality across central and northern India. My village of Unhel in Madhya Pradesh reflects this reality; its struggle mirrors those of pastoral communities in the Sahel and in Mongolia, where climatic stress has undermined the ecological bases of herding and forced large-scale occupational shifts. Everywhere, the destabilisation of traditional grazing systems has created cascading livelihood insecurity (Sissoko et al., 2010).
Faced with declining herd productivity and dwindling ecological space to sustain their animals, Gadariya families have been pushed, often without real choice, toward agriculture or wage labour. Sharma’s stage-wise model of occupational mobility is instructive – as traditional pastoralism faltered under environmental and demographic pressure, the next available avenue was cultivation or field labour, regardless of caste prescriptions.
Yet, this transition has not brought stability. My cousin, Sumit (name changed for privacy), describes his family’s shift into farming as forced and precarious, “We had sheep, but pasture vanished. We turned to farming, but the land we received was poor and water scarce. Agriculture barely feeds us”. Unlike castes for whom agriculture was a traditional or comparatively secure occupation, Gadariyas entering cultivation do so without the social networks, titles, or infrastructural entitlements that cushion others. Land tenure is insecure, irrigation access limited, and capital virtually absent. They are not choosing agriculture out of aspiration, they are seeking survival.
Further compounding the squeeze, younger Gadariyas confront systemic barriers when seeking alternatives beyond subsistence occupations. “I tried moving to the city,” recounts Sumit, “but without education or connections, I was stuck in daily wage labour. Eventually, I had to return.” Urban mobility, which might have offered a buffer, remains gated by inequality in educational access, social capital, and the linguistic and cultural fluency necessary to navigate urban jobs.
Bureaucratic Barriers and Who Gets Left Behind
Adding another layer of complication is the way state structures, through bureaucracy and policy design, shape who receives support and who is left invisible. Anthropologist Akhil Gupta, in Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, describes the everyday functioning of the Indian state as a “Weberian nightmare,” marked not by rational planning but by “contingency, guesswork, and barely controlled chaos.” (Gupta, 2012)
This arbitrariness, he argues, is produced and reproduced even when state elites design welfare programs with the best of intentions, and even when frontline workers administer them sincerely. This is, of course, if one sets aside the very real casteism that often underpins the behavior of state actors. Many members of the dominant castes, or savarna groups, continue to stigmatize Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi (DBA) communities as mere “quota” or “reservation castes,” using welfare systems not as tools of justice but as mechanisms of humiliation and control. The result is a form of structural violence, where harm is not caused by a single perpetrator but through neglect, delay, and the grinding machinery of bureaucracy. As Gupta writes, “it is impossible to identify a single perpetrator or cause,” because this violence is embedded in the very routines of governance. (Gupta, 2012)
The Gadariya community exemplifies this problem. Families forced off their pastures by ecological changes do not easily fit into the neat bureaucratic categories of landholding farmers, settled agriculturalists, or urban labourers. Their hybrid, nomadic past confuses administrative systems built to serve fixed, easily identifiable populations. As a result, they often fall through the cracks of welfare schemes. “My name is on no list, no quota,” an elderly farmer relative in Unhel told me. “Only on the list of people who have to survive without help.”
This structural disenfranchisement means that those most in need of state support, families navigating the painful transition from pastoralism to marginal agriculture with insecure land rights, minimal education, and heightened exposure to climate shocks, are often excluded. Instead of addressing their compounded vulnerability, bureaucratic processes flatten complexity, treating entire communities as homogeneous and erasing the layered forms of marginalization they experience. In this sense, the failure is not only one of policy oversight but also of a democratic project that has yet to fully reckon with the social and ecological realities of nomadic and pastoral groups.
Caste Hybridity, Stigma, and the Politics of Vulgarity
I carry this legacy myself. Born to a Gadariya (OBC) mother and a Scheduled Tribe father, I embody what Sonkar might call a child of caste hybridity. My life holds the lived histories of two deeply marginalized groups, both degraded in different ways by the Brahmanical model. This intersection reveals how rigid caste frameworks fail to account for complex identities like mine, one that is hybrid, liminal, and politically invisible. It is precisely this kind of nuance that our policy frameworks and social discourses continue to ignore (Sonkar, 2014).
The boundaries of caste are not natural; they have been carved, reinforced, and frozen through generations of social practice. As B. R. Ambedkar observed, caste emerged when endogamy was superimposed on exogamy, turning fluid social relations into rigid hierarchical categories. Sonkar’s work on hybrid castes adds another layer. Many communities labeled “low-born” are themselves products of inter-caste and inter-tribal mixing, yet these mixed origins have been rewritten as evidence of impurity or degradation, rather than complexity and resilience (Sonkar, 2014).
My own existence embodies that rewriting. Official forms, welfare schemes, and social encounters demand a singular identity, forcing layered and overlapping marginalities, OBC and Scheduled Tribe, into neat bureaucratic boxes. This process erases the compounded disadvantage that comes from inhabiting both. Hybridity becomes invisible. In that erasure, the fine gradations of stigma and privilege are flattened into blunt binaries, undermining the possibility of solidarity across intersecting marginalizations.
Shailaja Paik’s work, The Vulgarity of Caste, offers a critical vocabulary for understanding how this erasure is culturally and affectively produced. She shows how the term “vulgar,” the English proxy for the vernacular ashleel, becomes a weaponized category that bundles the improper, the rural, and the indecent. This categorization polices who is considered respectable and who is discarded. Paik illustrates how Dalit women performers in tamasha were celebrated as cultural icons and, at the same time, condemned as “vulgar.” Their bodies and labor were marked as tainted even as their performances sustained entire economies and traditions (Paik, 2022).
The Gadariya community lives out a similar tension. Shepherding, once a source of ecological expertise and local sustainability, has been alternately romanticized as pastoral folklore and denigrated as dirty. The same knowledge that enabled careful seasonal migration, animal health management, and resilient cohabitation with ecosystems is dismissed as “common,” “rural,” and unworthy of policy investment. That labour was made vulgar in the caste grammar, necessary yet degraded, visible in consumption but invisible in entitlement.
This stigma operates both in speech and silence. The reverence my grandmother expressed for her profession, invoking divinity, was laced with a hesitancy to name or own the caste background that linked her to shepherding. That hesitation was a survival tactic in a system that would have marked her work and identity as tainted.
Caste and the Stories We Tell
The collapse of pastoral livelihoods due to climate change has not only disrupted economic survival but has also intensified the social pressures surrounding caste identity. As families are pushed into new, precarious forms of labour, the stigma historically attached to their former pastoral roles persists, creating an additional layer of vulnerability. This tension plays out within families and communities, shaping how people narrate or conceal their histories.
Another face of this hybrid identity, or caste hesitancy, is the masking of caste consciousness in favor of hiding or untangling the stickiness of caste. Questions about caste history often receive evasive responses that invoke similarities between Jesus and Krishna, but those same relatives struggle to articulate the discrimination they faced at the hands of savarna castes. My aunt in Maharashtra once said, “Here, people just ask, ‘Who are your people?’, and if you tell them, you learn to say as little as possible.” In conversations with relatives across North India, from Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh, everyone offers a different story about our community’s origins and evolution, shaped by the region they inhabit.
In Rajasthan, for example, the logic of survival dictates hiding our identity in the murky waters of being Kshatriya Rajputs. Claiming Rajput identity carries more respect because it is associated with valor, landownership, and a higher place in the caste hierarchy, and the ambiguity around caste origins allows such claims to pass, especially in a political climate where Rajput pride has been amplified by Hindutva narratives. My cousin, Ajay, admitted, “If you say you’re Gadariya, you will never get respect. Rajput sounds better to outsiders. That’s just the way it is.”
I did this as a child, knowing that saying, “We are Rajputs,” would bring me more social acceptance than embracing the non-glamorous identity of ‘Gadariya.’ But caste is sticky. My attempts to pass as Rajput in high school were quickly countered with, “Don’t lie to us, we know Pals are Gadariyas, we have neighbors with the same surname and they take care of goats and are rural folks.” This led to three years of being called “Gaddu,” short for Gadariya, in school. I remember one classmate laughing, “Stop pretending! Once a Gaddu, always a Gaddu.” Even my childish attempts to avoid caste-based tagging ended in embarrassing revelation.
Still, some seek survival by masking identity. People try to be Kayasthas or Rajputs. Some even change their surnames to Kumar or Singh to escape caste. My uncle in Uttarakhand shared, “I added ‘Singh’ to my name for work in the city. People stop asking questions, but you always feel you’re just one question away from exposure.” Even for my grandmother, born in the revolutionary region of Mhow where Babasaheb Ambedkar was born, caste radicalism is a distant idea. She accepts and reveres Ambedkar for his contributions, but falls silent when asked about the history of our community’s evolution or the discrimination she cannot bring herself to articulate. Once, when I pressed her about why her father never spoke of their past as shepherds, she simply said, “Beta, some stories are better left in God’s hands.”
The hope, I believe, lies with the youth. Like me, many tried to learn the lessons their elders taught, survival through deradicalization. But when survival tactics fail, embracing full caste pride and acceptance as adults is the only option left. My younger cousin, Renu, told me, “In college, I got tired of hiding who I am. So, now I just say it, Yes, I am Gadariya, and I am proud of it. If someone laughs, that’s their problem.” Yet a full ethnographic account of the community is incomplete without mentioning the rise of Hindutva and the BJP in the Indian heartland. While many young people reject the promise of caste masking and the homogenization of Hindu identity, some even converting to Buddhism, there is also a section of the community that has embraced Hindutva rhetoric. My neighbor, Pramod, a recent convert to BJP politics, said, “Now we can be proud Hindus, not just Gadariyas. Unity is strength, that’s what they say.” But as Babasaheb Ambedkar warned, “Hindu unity is an illusion. A Hindu’s public is his caste. His responsibility is only to his caste. His loyalty is restricted only to his caste.” The future is yet to unfold, and we have yet to see the fallout of these political promises, but for now, the survivors and the radical dreamers of the community clash and coexist simultaneously.
The psychological cost of such erasure ripples through generations. Younger members inherit contradictory instructions to take pride in ancestral wisdom while distancing themselves from the social identity attached to it. Attempts at social mobility, whether through visible “respectability” projects or Sanskritization-like self-fashioning, require engaging and reproducing the very hierarchies that created the degradation. For clarity, Sanskritization is a term coined by sociologist M. N. Srinivas which refers to the process by which marginalized castes adopt the practices, rituals, and symbols of dominant upper castes in an effort to gain social mobility and respectability. (Bopegamage and Kulahalli, 1971)
As someone straddling hybrid marginalities, I experience these tensions in bureaucratic encounters, family conversations, and policy navigation. When forms demand that I choose one label, I am asked to fold myself, to flatten complexity into a legible category. Reservation and welfare schemes that assume identity is singular and homogeneous render intersectional disadvantage invisible. The policing of “purity” and the emphasis on difference fracture collective political imagination. When marginalized groups are pitted against one another in a hierarchy of suffering, the deeper commonalities that could form the basis of solidarity are lost. This fragmentation fails to build the cross-caste unity that leaders like Kanshi Ram envisioned, a solidarity based on shared oppression and political purpose rather than isolated identity boxes, preventing us from realizing the liberatory India he dreamed of and partially built through organizing Bahujans as a unified force. (Sagar, 2022)
Paik’s analysis reveals that vulgarity is not a neutral descriptor but a form of structural violence. It shapes what is valued and what is discarded, what is incorporated and what is expelled, across caste, gender, and body. The ecological knowledge of Gadariya shepherds, nuances of seasonal shifts, early signs of animal distress, and calibrated grazing rhythms, has been sidelined as merely “folk” knowledge, even as its absence intensifies vulnerability. Recognizing the grammar of vulgarity allows a more honest account of why our skills are appropriated when convenient but dismissed when it comes to state support, and why hybrid identities become administrative confusion instead of generative sites of intersectional insight (Paik, 2022) .
Loss of Ecological Knowledge, Gendered labour, and the Limits of State Support
The shift away from pastoralism among the Gadariya has produced a profound loss of ecological knowledge, the consequences of which are felt acutely as climate patterns grow more erratic. Traditionally, pastoralist communities have acted as environmental sentinels, holding deep knowledge about weather cycles, soil health, and sustainable grazing practices. This knowledge was not abstract but lived, transmitted across generations through practice, oral tradition, and daily observation. Now, as the community is absorbed into marginal agriculture or wage labour, much of this expertise has been rendered obsolete or undervalued.
Pastoralism required constant attention to environmental signals, reading cloud patterns to predict rain, identifying resilient grasses during droughts, or managing herd movement to prevent overgrazing and allow pastures to recover. This was climate adaptation in practice, long before policy-makers began to speak of resilience. Such wisdom offered a buffer against environmental shocks, a collective toolkit built from centuries of observation. With the erosion of these practices, the Gadariya have lost more than just a livelihood; they have lost a living archive of strategies for coping with climate variability.
Women were at the center of this ecological knowledge system. They managed milk, cheese, and wool production, tended sick or birthing animals, and made crucial decisions about daily grazing routes and seasonal movement. Their labour was inseparable from their authority as stewards of both herd and household. As the family economy shifted to agriculture or wage work, women's roles changed dramatically. Many now labour as daily-wage workers in others' fields or travel long distances to fetch water, while their former expertise in animal care, food preservation, and medicinal herbs has been devalued or forgotten.
This shift has produced an intensified, gendered burden. Women continue to shoulder the majority of domestic work while also engaging in physically demanding wage labour for low pay and little security. One relative in Unhel remarked, “My mother used to decide when the herd would move, what milk would be sold, who needed medicine. Now she waits for a contractor’s truck or lines up at dawn for water.” The decline of pastoralism has removed not only an economic safety net but a domain in which women exercised knowledge, autonomy, and communal authority.
The gendered impacts of climate vulnerability are sharpened by this loss. As rainfall patterns become more unreliable and water sources dwindle, women and girls are the first to feel the strain, walking farther for water, taking up informal work in nearby towns, or pulling children from school to help with household chores. The erosion of communal knowledge means that adaptive strategies which once mitigated hardship, such as rotating pastures or storing milk products, have been replaced by dependence on volatile markets and erratic wage labour.
Despite this embodied knowledge and lived adaptation, Gadariyas remain largely overlooked in climate resilience planning. Their mobility, pastoral expertise, and hybrid identities are rarely built into scheme design. State support for agriculture, livestock insurance, forest rights, or climate adaptation often assumes sedentary, titled landholders or unambiguous caste categories. Those who were pushed off by ecological change, who carry hybrid stigmas, or who lack formal documentation, are thus structurally excluded from programs meant to buffer precarity.
Radha, a community activist, once told me, “Climate change doesn’t come with a name, but it always seems to find the same people, us.” Her words echo when I listen to Meena, a middle-aged woman who now works as a sharecropper, reflect, “Even when I work under the sun for hours, tilling someone else's land, I think of my grandfather’s herd and how he slept under the stars while the animals grazed. That life was hard, yes, but it was ours.”
Critically, this knowledge is not just of historical value. In an era of increasing climate shocks, the loss of these skills weakens the entire community’s resilience. Efforts to design climate adaptation policies often ignore or marginalize the insights of women who once managed the daily intersections of ecology and economy. Without recognizing and reintegrating such voices, adaptation schemes risk repeating the same patterns of exclusion that forced the community out of pastoralism to begin with.
Conclusion: Claiming Visibility and Resilience
I have unfolded how environmental change, caste hierarchies, policy blind spots, and the psychic freight of hybrid identity coalesce to shape the lived reality of the Gadariya community today. The loss of pastures and the collapse of traditional pastoralism, superimposed on centuries of caste degradation and compounded by the blunt instruments of affirmative action that flatten heterogeneity, have created a landscape where survival is a constant negotiation.
And yet, possibility remains. The ecological knowledge embedded in Gadariya pastoral practices, the layered identities that straddle official categories, and the resilience built through adaptation carry seeds for a different politics. A politics that recognizes hybrid marginality as strength, not confusion, and that sees the so-called vulgar not as degraded but as historically shamed by the hegemonic forces of Brahmanism, pointing to specific sites where repair and justice are possible through community support and allyship.
Climate change is not merely an environmental crisis. It is a social and cultural one, reshaping livelihoods, identities, and the politics of belonging. The Gadariya community stands at this intersection, wounded by erasure, stretched between past and future, yet persistently refusing to disappear. Our pastures might be drying and our herds diminished, but the shepherd’s spirit endures - resilient, attentive, and hopeful.
References
Gupta, Akhil, (2012), Red Tape : Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Orient Blackswan
Bopegamage, A. and Kulahalli, R.N., (1971). ‘Sanskritization’ and Social Change in India, European Journal of Sociology, 12(1), pp.123–132. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s000397560000223x
Chaudhury, Pradipta, (2004), The ‘Creamy Layer’: Political Economy of Reservations, Economic and Political Weekly : 1989-1991
Dadas, Dada R., (2003), Indian Pastoralism Amidst Changing Climate and Land Yse: Evidence from Dhangar Community of Semi-arid Region of Maharashtra, The Palgrave Handbook of Socio-ecological Resilience in the Face of Climate Change: Contexts from a Developing Country, Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, Pp. 85-97.
Sharma, Kailas N., (1961), Occupational Mobility of Castes in A North Indian Village, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 17.2,Pp. 146-164.
Paik, Shailaja, (2022), The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India, Stanford University Press.
Sagar, (10 April, 2022), Kanshi Ram’s Political Vision for Bahujans Can Still Unseat India’s Ruling Class, The Caravan, 10 Apr. 2022, caravanmagazine.in/politics/kanshiram-unseat-ruling-class, Accessed on 6 September 2025.
Sonkar, C. L., (2014), Low Born-Hybrid Castes and Their Origin and Development, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. Vol. 75, Indian History Congress.
Sissoko, Keffing, et al., (2011), Agriculture, Livelihoods and Climate Change in the West African Sahel, Regional Environmental Change 11.Suppl 1, Pp. 119-125.
“We might not always have had enough to eat, but there was always enough to drink,” my grandmother, Soni Devi Pal, reflected during our recent call. Born and raised in Mhow, now Dr. Ambedkar Nagar in Madhya Pradesh, her memories are steeped in nostalgia for a time when our community, known locally as the Pal Samaj, thrived as shepherds. “We had cows and sheep,” she explained, “and growing up, we lived on their milk.”
Her voice, warm yet edged with a loss that had sedimented over generations, carried vivid tales of a profession she regarded as sacred. Evoking Krishna and Jesus in the same breath, she said proudly, “Our work – shepherding, was the work of gods”. But beneath that reverence were the unsettling shadows of caste identity. When I gently pressed her about our jati, and why her father, who had been a carpenter and then a railway clerk, never took over the family’s shepherding profession, she paused. Her answers carried a quiet denial, a protective avoidance of the sticky stain that the social grammar of caste had placed on the occupation. Locally, their work was at once divine (in her telling) and debased (in the public gaze).
She then told me about the day the family gave up shepherding and moved into agricultural labour on someone else’s land. She did not frame that shift as a systemic failure or a crisis of ecology; to her it was “how God willed it”. But the story she told, of shrinking pastures, unpredictable rains, and the erosion of the rhythms that had once guided grazing routes, was an early, lived symptom of what we recognize today as climate change, even if she never used that term.
From Pastoralism to Precarity
Historically, the Gadariyas have survived and made meaning through pastoralism. Sheep and goats provided milk, wool, meat, and, crucially, a way of life that tied identity to ecological knowledge and seasonal mobility. Our rituals, our social ties, even our sense of self were braided with the movements of herds across grasslands. Anthropologist K. N. Sharma’s 1961 study Occupational Mobility of Castes in a North Indian Village shows how even then pressures, particularly the expansion of cultivation at the expense of common pastures, began squeezing castes like the Gadariyas out of their traditional livelihoods (Sharma, 1961).
Within the Gadariya umbrella, there are multiple sub-communities, including the Dhangars, whose historical experiences add a further layer of complexity. Under British colonial law, Dhangars and related pastoralist groups were classified as ‘criminal tribes’ through the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Their traditional practices of migration and herding, far from being respected, were actively criminalized by the state. Although this status was officially lifted after independence, and these communities became known as denotified and nomadic tribes (DNTs), the burden of suspicion and social stigma has never fully disappeared (Dadas, 2023).
Even today, the word ‘nomadic’ is often used as a euphemism for marginality, poverty, or criminality, rather than recognizing the adaptive strategies and deep ecological knowledge that have sustained these groups for generations. This legacy of criminalization and ongoing administrative ambiguity has left many Dhangar and Gadariya families doubly vulnerable, as both former pastoralists and as communities whose mobility, autonomy, and traditions have been subject to policing and suspicion by the state and society alike.
Today, that squeeze has been amplified and accelerated by climate volatility. “Earlier, rains were predictable, pastures abundant,” reminisces my grandmother. “Now, rainfall either comes too little or too violently, washing away whatever remains. We lost sheep faster than we could raise them,” she added, recalling what her father had told her. He had abandoned shepherding for a more stable, “honourable” job because uncertainty had become existential.
Climate data corroborate these oral histories. Rising temperatures, erratic monsoons, prolonged dry spells, and increasingly intense heatwaves have degraded pasture quality across central and northern India. My village of Unhel in Madhya Pradesh reflects this reality; its struggle mirrors those of pastoral communities in the Sahel and in Mongolia, where climatic stress has undermined the ecological bases of herding and forced large-scale occupational shifts. Everywhere, the destabilisation of traditional grazing systems has created cascading livelihood insecurity (Sissoko et al., 2010).
Faced with declining herd productivity and dwindling ecological space to sustain their animals, Gadariya families have been pushed, often without real choice, toward agriculture or wage labour. Sharma’s stage-wise model of occupational mobility is instructive – as traditional pastoralism faltered under environmental and demographic pressure, the next available avenue was cultivation or field labour, regardless of caste prescriptions.
Yet, this transition has not brought stability. My cousin, Sumit (name changed for privacy), describes his family’s shift into farming as forced and precarious, “We had sheep, but pasture vanished. We turned to farming, but the land we received was poor and water scarce. Agriculture barely feeds us”. Unlike castes for whom agriculture was a traditional or comparatively secure occupation, Gadariyas entering cultivation do so without the social networks, titles, or infrastructural entitlements that cushion others. Land tenure is insecure, irrigation access limited, and capital virtually absent. They are not choosing agriculture out of aspiration, they are seeking survival.
Further compounding the squeeze, younger Gadariyas confront systemic barriers when seeking alternatives beyond subsistence occupations. “I tried moving to the city,” recounts Sumit, “but without education or connections, I was stuck in daily wage labour. Eventually, I had to return.” Urban mobility, which might have offered a buffer, remains gated by inequality in educational access, social capital, and the linguistic and cultural fluency necessary to navigate urban jobs.
Bureaucratic Barriers and Who Gets Left Behind
Adding another layer of complication is the way state structures, through bureaucracy and policy design, shape who receives support and who is left invisible. Anthropologist Akhil Gupta, in Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, describes the everyday functioning of the Indian state as a “Weberian nightmare,” marked not by rational planning but by “contingency, guesswork, and barely controlled chaos.” (Gupta, 2012)
This arbitrariness, he argues, is produced and reproduced even when state elites design welfare programs with the best of intentions, and even when frontline workers administer them sincerely. This is, of course, if one sets aside the very real casteism that often underpins the behavior of state actors. Many members of the dominant castes, or savarna groups, continue to stigmatize Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi (DBA) communities as mere “quota” or “reservation castes,” using welfare systems not as tools of justice but as mechanisms of humiliation and control. The result is a form of structural violence, where harm is not caused by a single perpetrator but through neglect, delay, and the grinding machinery of bureaucracy. As Gupta writes, “it is impossible to identify a single perpetrator or cause,” because this violence is embedded in the very routines of governance. (Gupta, 2012)
The Gadariya community exemplifies this problem. Families forced off their pastures by ecological changes do not easily fit into the neat bureaucratic categories of landholding farmers, settled agriculturalists, or urban labourers. Their hybrid, nomadic past confuses administrative systems built to serve fixed, easily identifiable populations. As a result, they often fall through the cracks of welfare schemes. “My name is on no list, no quota,” an elderly farmer relative in Unhel told me. “Only on the list of people who have to survive without help.”
This structural disenfranchisement means that those most in need of state support, families navigating the painful transition from pastoralism to marginal agriculture with insecure land rights, minimal education, and heightened exposure to climate shocks, are often excluded. Instead of addressing their compounded vulnerability, bureaucratic processes flatten complexity, treating entire communities as homogeneous and erasing the layered forms of marginalization they experience. In this sense, the failure is not only one of policy oversight but also of a democratic project that has yet to fully reckon with the social and ecological realities of nomadic and pastoral groups.
Caste Hybridity, Stigma, and the Politics of Vulgarity
I carry this legacy myself. Born to a Gadariya (OBC) mother and a Scheduled Tribe father, I embody what Sonkar might call a child of caste hybridity. My life holds the lived histories of two deeply marginalized groups, both degraded in different ways by the Brahmanical model. This intersection reveals how rigid caste frameworks fail to account for complex identities like mine, one that is hybrid, liminal, and politically invisible. It is precisely this kind of nuance that our policy frameworks and social discourses continue to ignore (Sonkar, 2014).
The boundaries of caste are not natural; they have been carved, reinforced, and frozen through generations of social practice. As B. R. Ambedkar observed, caste emerged when endogamy was superimposed on exogamy, turning fluid social relations into rigid hierarchical categories. Sonkar’s work on hybrid castes adds another layer. Many communities labeled “low-born” are themselves products of inter-caste and inter-tribal mixing, yet these mixed origins have been rewritten as evidence of impurity or degradation, rather than complexity and resilience (Sonkar, 2014).
My own existence embodies that rewriting. Official forms, welfare schemes, and social encounters demand a singular identity, forcing layered and overlapping marginalities, OBC and Scheduled Tribe, into neat bureaucratic boxes. This process erases the compounded disadvantage that comes from inhabiting both. Hybridity becomes invisible. In that erasure, the fine gradations of stigma and privilege are flattened into blunt binaries, undermining the possibility of solidarity across intersecting marginalizations.
Shailaja Paik’s work, The Vulgarity of Caste, offers a critical vocabulary for understanding how this erasure is culturally and affectively produced. She shows how the term “vulgar,” the English proxy for the vernacular ashleel, becomes a weaponized category that bundles the improper, the rural, and the indecent. This categorization polices who is considered respectable and who is discarded. Paik illustrates how Dalit women performers in tamasha were celebrated as cultural icons and, at the same time, condemned as “vulgar.” Their bodies and labor were marked as tainted even as their performances sustained entire economies and traditions (Paik, 2022).
The Gadariya community lives out a similar tension. Shepherding, once a source of ecological expertise and local sustainability, has been alternately romanticized as pastoral folklore and denigrated as dirty. The same knowledge that enabled careful seasonal migration, animal health management, and resilient cohabitation with ecosystems is dismissed as “common,” “rural,” and unworthy of policy investment. That labour was made vulgar in the caste grammar, necessary yet degraded, visible in consumption but invisible in entitlement.
This stigma operates both in speech and silence. The reverence my grandmother expressed for her profession, invoking divinity, was laced with a hesitancy to name or own the caste background that linked her to shepherding. That hesitation was a survival tactic in a system that would have marked her work and identity as tainted.
Caste and the Stories We Tell
The collapse of pastoral livelihoods due to climate change has not only disrupted economic survival but has also intensified the social pressures surrounding caste identity. As families are pushed into new, precarious forms of labour, the stigma historically attached to their former pastoral roles persists, creating an additional layer of vulnerability. This tension plays out within families and communities, shaping how people narrate or conceal their histories.
Another face of this hybrid identity, or caste hesitancy, is the masking of caste consciousness in favor of hiding or untangling the stickiness of caste. Questions about caste history often receive evasive responses that invoke similarities between Jesus and Krishna, but those same relatives struggle to articulate the discrimination they faced at the hands of savarna castes. My aunt in Maharashtra once said, “Here, people just ask, ‘Who are your people?’, and if you tell them, you learn to say as little as possible.” In conversations with relatives across North India, from Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh, everyone offers a different story about our community’s origins and evolution, shaped by the region they inhabit.
In Rajasthan, for example, the logic of survival dictates hiding our identity in the murky waters of being Kshatriya Rajputs. Claiming Rajput identity carries more respect because it is associated with valor, landownership, and a higher place in the caste hierarchy, and the ambiguity around caste origins allows such claims to pass, especially in a political climate where Rajput pride has been amplified by Hindutva narratives. My cousin, Ajay, admitted, “If you say you’re Gadariya, you will never get respect. Rajput sounds better to outsiders. That’s just the way it is.”
I did this as a child, knowing that saying, “We are Rajputs,” would bring me more social acceptance than embracing the non-glamorous identity of ‘Gadariya.’ But caste is sticky. My attempts to pass as Rajput in high school were quickly countered with, “Don’t lie to us, we know Pals are Gadariyas, we have neighbors with the same surname and they take care of goats and are rural folks.” This led to three years of being called “Gaddu,” short for Gadariya, in school. I remember one classmate laughing, “Stop pretending! Once a Gaddu, always a Gaddu.” Even my childish attempts to avoid caste-based tagging ended in embarrassing revelation.
Still, some seek survival by masking identity. People try to be Kayasthas or Rajputs. Some even change their surnames to Kumar or Singh to escape caste. My uncle in Uttarakhand shared, “I added ‘Singh’ to my name for work in the city. People stop asking questions, but you always feel you’re just one question away from exposure.” Even for my grandmother, born in the revolutionary region of Mhow where Babasaheb Ambedkar was born, caste radicalism is a distant idea. She accepts and reveres Ambedkar for his contributions, but falls silent when asked about the history of our community’s evolution or the discrimination she cannot bring herself to articulate. Once, when I pressed her about why her father never spoke of their past as shepherds, she simply said, “Beta, some stories are better left in God’s hands.”
The hope, I believe, lies with the youth. Like me, many tried to learn the lessons their elders taught, survival through deradicalization. But when survival tactics fail, embracing full caste pride and acceptance as adults is the only option left. My younger cousin, Renu, told me, “In college, I got tired of hiding who I am. So, now I just say it, Yes, I am Gadariya, and I am proud of it. If someone laughs, that’s their problem.” Yet a full ethnographic account of the community is incomplete without mentioning the rise of Hindutva and the BJP in the Indian heartland. While many young people reject the promise of caste masking and the homogenization of Hindu identity, some even converting to Buddhism, there is also a section of the community that has embraced Hindutva rhetoric. My neighbor, Pramod, a recent convert to BJP politics, said, “Now we can be proud Hindus, not just Gadariyas. Unity is strength, that’s what they say.” But as Babasaheb Ambedkar warned, “Hindu unity is an illusion. A Hindu’s public is his caste. His responsibility is only to his caste. His loyalty is restricted only to his caste.” The future is yet to unfold, and we have yet to see the fallout of these political promises, but for now, the survivors and the radical dreamers of the community clash and coexist simultaneously.
The psychological cost of such erasure ripples through generations. Younger members inherit contradictory instructions to take pride in ancestral wisdom while distancing themselves from the social identity attached to it. Attempts at social mobility, whether through visible “respectability” projects or Sanskritization-like self-fashioning, require engaging and reproducing the very hierarchies that created the degradation. For clarity, Sanskritization is a term coined by sociologist M. N. Srinivas which refers to the process by which marginalized castes adopt the practices, rituals, and symbols of dominant upper castes in an effort to gain social mobility and respectability. (Bopegamage and Kulahalli, 1971)
As someone straddling hybrid marginalities, I experience these tensions in bureaucratic encounters, family conversations, and policy navigation. When forms demand that I choose one label, I am asked to fold myself, to flatten complexity into a legible category. Reservation and welfare schemes that assume identity is singular and homogeneous render intersectional disadvantage invisible. The policing of “purity” and the emphasis on difference fracture collective political imagination. When marginalized groups are pitted against one another in a hierarchy of suffering, the deeper commonalities that could form the basis of solidarity are lost. This fragmentation fails to build the cross-caste unity that leaders like Kanshi Ram envisioned, a solidarity based on shared oppression and political purpose rather than isolated identity boxes, preventing us from realizing the liberatory India he dreamed of and partially built through organizing Bahujans as a unified force. (Sagar, 2022)
Paik’s analysis reveals that vulgarity is not a neutral descriptor but a form of structural violence. It shapes what is valued and what is discarded, what is incorporated and what is expelled, across caste, gender, and body. The ecological knowledge of Gadariya shepherds, nuances of seasonal shifts, early signs of animal distress, and calibrated grazing rhythms, has been sidelined as merely “folk” knowledge, even as its absence intensifies vulnerability. Recognizing the grammar of vulgarity allows a more honest account of why our skills are appropriated when convenient but dismissed when it comes to state support, and why hybrid identities become administrative confusion instead of generative sites of intersectional insight (Paik, 2022) .
Loss of Ecological Knowledge, Gendered labour, and the Limits of State Support
The shift away from pastoralism among the Gadariya has produced a profound loss of ecological knowledge, the consequences of which are felt acutely as climate patterns grow more erratic. Traditionally, pastoralist communities have acted as environmental sentinels, holding deep knowledge about weather cycles, soil health, and sustainable grazing practices. This knowledge was not abstract but lived, transmitted across generations through practice, oral tradition, and daily observation. Now, as the community is absorbed into marginal agriculture or wage labour, much of this expertise has been rendered obsolete or undervalued.
Pastoralism required constant attention to environmental signals, reading cloud patterns to predict rain, identifying resilient grasses during droughts, or managing herd movement to prevent overgrazing and allow pastures to recover. This was climate adaptation in practice, long before policy-makers began to speak of resilience. Such wisdom offered a buffer against environmental shocks, a collective toolkit built from centuries of observation. With the erosion of these practices, the Gadariya have lost more than just a livelihood; they have lost a living archive of strategies for coping with climate variability.
Women were at the center of this ecological knowledge system. They managed milk, cheese, and wool production, tended sick or birthing animals, and made crucial decisions about daily grazing routes and seasonal movement. Their labour was inseparable from their authority as stewards of both herd and household. As the family economy shifted to agriculture or wage work, women's roles changed dramatically. Many now labour as daily-wage workers in others' fields or travel long distances to fetch water, while their former expertise in animal care, food preservation, and medicinal herbs has been devalued or forgotten.
This shift has produced an intensified, gendered burden. Women continue to shoulder the majority of domestic work while also engaging in physically demanding wage labour for low pay and little security. One relative in Unhel remarked, “My mother used to decide when the herd would move, what milk would be sold, who needed medicine. Now she waits for a contractor’s truck or lines up at dawn for water.” The decline of pastoralism has removed not only an economic safety net but a domain in which women exercised knowledge, autonomy, and communal authority.
The gendered impacts of climate vulnerability are sharpened by this loss. As rainfall patterns become more unreliable and water sources dwindle, women and girls are the first to feel the strain, walking farther for water, taking up informal work in nearby towns, or pulling children from school to help with household chores. The erosion of communal knowledge means that adaptive strategies which once mitigated hardship, such as rotating pastures or storing milk products, have been replaced by dependence on volatile markets and erratic wage labour.
Despite this embodied knowledge and lived adaptation, Gadariyas remain largely overlooked in climate resilience planning. Their mobility, pastoral expertise, and hybrid identities are rarely built into scheme design. State support for agriculture, livestock insurance, forest rights, or climate adaptation often assumes sedentary, titled landholders or unambiguous caste categories. Those who were pushed off by ecological change, who carry hybrid stigmas, or who lack formal documentation, are thus structurally excluded from programs meant to buffer precarity.
Radha, a community activist, once told me, “Climate change doesn’t come with a name, but it always seems to find the same people, us.” Her words echo when I listen to Meena, a middle-aged woman who now works as a sharecropper, reflect, “Even when I work under the sun for hours, tilling someone else's land, I think of my grandfather’s herd and how he slept under the stars while the animals grazed. That life was hard, yes, but it was ours.”
Critically, this knowledge is not just of historical value. In an era of increasing climate shocks, the loss of these skills weakens the entire community’s resilience. Efforts to design climate adaptation policies often ignore or marginalize the insights of women who once managed the daily intersections of ecology and economy. Without recognizing and reintegrating such voices, adaptation schemes risk repeating the same patterns of exclusion that forced the community out of pastoralism to begin with.
Conclusion: Claiming Visibility and Resilience
I have unfolded how environmental change, caste hierarchies, policy blind spots, and the psychic freight of hybrid identity coalesce to shape the lived reality of the Gadariya community today. The loss of pastures and the collapse of traditional pastoralism, superimposed on centuries of caste degradation and compounded by the blunt instruments of affirmative action that flatten heterogeneity, have created a landscape where survival is a constant negotiation.
And yet, possibility remains. The ecological knowledge embedded in Gadariya pastoral practices, the layered identities that straddle official categories, and the resilience built through adaptation carry seeds for a different politics. A politics that recognizes hybrid marginality as strength, not confusion, and that sees the so-called vulgar not as degraded but as historically shamed by the hegemonic forces of Brahmanism, pointing to specific sites where repair and justice are possible through community support and allyship.
Climate change is not merely an environmental crisis. It is a social and cultural one, reshaping livelihoods, identities, and the politics of belonging. The Gadariya community stands at this intersection, wounded by erasure, stretched between past and future, yet persistently refusing to disappear. Our pastures might be drying and our herds diminished, but the shepherd’s spirit endures - resilient, attentive, and hopeful.
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