From contested commons to ornamental ecologies: Environmental casteism and the blocked dialectic of urban lakes in Hyderabad

In this paper, we examine what Gopal Guru has called the “blocked dialectic of the commons,” which obstructs rights over common resources from moving from upper caste to lower caste communities. The case of urban lakes in Hyderabad is particularly illuminating in examining the politics, ideologies, and processes by which this occurs. By juxtaposing different kinds of lake spaces in the city of Hyderabad, we make a two-part argument. The first part of our argument is that caste communities grasp at a diminishing and increasingly polluted commons through divergent and non-co-operative caste-based strategies, which prevent them from effectively generating livelihoods, value, or other ecological benefits from the lake. The second part of our argument is that these identitarian, divergent and non-co-operative politics are not a result of ignorance or myopia, but rather they result from a squeeze on the political agency of lower caste communities enacted by the environmental casteism of larger structures of municipal governance and real estate expansion.