Representation of Urban Ecology as Caste-Ecology in Namdeo Dhasal's Poetry

Namdeo Dhasal (1949-2014), one of Marathi literature's most radical voices, pushes this into the urban realm. His poetry maps the city as ecological terrain-not pristine or pastoral, but formed by refuse, sewage, manual scavenging, cremation grounds, congested tenements, and laboring bodies. For Dalits in Dhasal's poems, ecology is inseparable from caste: pollution, displacement, and environmental abuse are also social instruments of exclusion. This paper argues that Namdeo Dhasal's urban poetry reconceptualizes ecology through the lived, caste-inflected experience of the city's marginalized. Reading Dhasal not as an abstract nature poet but as an urban ecologist, I show how his poems convert streets, drains, scavenging grounds, cremation ghats, and slums into ecological sites where caste violence, labour exploitation, and bodily precarity are enacted and contested. Through close readings of representative poems and sustained attention to imagery, register, and form, the paper demonstrates how Dhasal reframes environmental categories (land, waste, water, air) as instruments and archives of caste power, producing what I call "urban caste-ecology". The study situates Dhasal's work within Dalit literary practice and environmental humanities, arguing that recognizing caste as an ecological factor expands both Dalit criticism and eco-criticism.