ABSTRACT
Social exclusion of dalits in India is often understood in terms of discriminatory social structures embedded in oppressive cultural domains of pure versus polluted. Territorial demarcation of dalits into separate neighbourhoods is yet another way of perpetrating and sustaining the graded inequality of caste. However, over the last few years, dalits have gathered strength to defy social exclusion by reterritorialising their segregated living spaces into radical sites of social contestation. Dalit counter-culture and alternative dalit heritage are what provided the necessary material for this reterritorialisation. A critical examination of factors and forces that led to the transformation of separate dalit neighbourhoods into social territoriality of contestation is the central concern of this study.
