ABSTRACT
This chapter, by drawing from the narratives of Dalits in a small village called Meenkera in Bidar district of north Karnataka, engages with the complexities of explaining changes in caste relations from below in a particular fashion or direction. It presents their encounters with caste in several spheres of life that mirrored changes, continuities, adaptations and new formulations, which took varying forms depending upon the specific situation. These diverse experiences of caste illustrate that there is no common story of change in caste relations for Dalits even in a micro space and a single person, family or sub-caste can signify several views of caste, which makes the familiar explanations of caste relations based on hierarchy, differences, flexibility, conflict, accommodation or any other across spaces and situations problematic when looked at from below. Caste, in this particular context, crystallises more at an individual level as its power dynamics has already come out of organised institutional structures to accommodate itself to spaces and situations. Highlighting the resilience of caste and its experiential dimensions for Dalits in Meenkera, the chapter argues that it is the situation in which a person encounters caste that gives meaning to caste relations and form to its expressions irrespective of the mobility that a Dalit person or an individual Dalit caste as a whole has achieved.
