ABSTRACT
The novel Alma Kabootari describes the travails of the group of the Kabootara men and women living in the Kabootara basti with its makeshift shacks precariously existing on the margins of a village with its own dynamics of familial and caste morality. Despite the apparently unbridgeable social divide between the village and the Kabootara basti, the lives of people from these two conglomerations are intertwined in a web of complex personal and group relationships. This chapter discusses the various forms of protests, through which the nomadic communities and especially the DNT have used their cultural resources and political potential to challenge the hegemony of socially powerful classes and castes. History provides a way of looking at one’s own location within the social network, and an absence of history, or having a history generated by groups that seek to reproduce repressive relations, is bound to reinforce marginalization.
