Everyday politics of care and exclusion: Conceptualising agency in rural south India

Abstract

Confronting social exclusion is considered critical for grappling with poverty, livelihoods, inequality and participation in rural India. Studies highlight how exclusion is produced through hierarchical relations of caste, gender, class, religion, disability and ethnicity, while documenting people's agency to confront exclusions. However, the making of such agency through people's relations with ecologies and technologies is currently neglected. To address this neglect, we focus on different sociomaterial ways of relating – care and exclusion – which constitute people's agency. We argue that giving close attention to multiple ways of relating that coexist and interweave with each other, may be crucial for supporting grassroots transformations for justice and sustainability. To illustrate this ways-of-relating approach to agency, we rely on oral history narratives with three elderly people from rural Tamil Nadu, while building on insights from feminist scholars as well as science and technology studies. Central to the people's histories narrated in this article are uncertainties that yield non-linearities and loose ends. They foreground plural and flexible dimensions of each of our core concepts, from care and exclusion to intersections and relational agency. This open-ended plurality of dimensions, we conclude, may be crucial for concepts to find relevance in widely different settings.

though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed

in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,

they cannot snuff out the moon, so today,

nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed.

(Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

Introduction

In the first three months of the COVID pandemic from March to June 2020, 81 incidents of caste-based violence were reported in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu (Arya, 2020). Fourteen of these cases were murders. Exacerbated caste-based violence was reported from across India, lockdowns notwithstanding (Kumar, 2021; Wankhede, 2021). These atrocities maintain historical patterns of casteist tyranny that is targeted most violently against Dalit people (Ambedkar, 1936). Dalits are estimated to be 19% of India's population (Nagarajan, 2021). They are marginalised and excluded by other hierarchically structured caste groups (Teltumbde, 2010). Thus Dalits have been widely excluded from agrarian land ownership, accessing Hindu temples, profitable markets, ecological commons and much more.

Struggles against India's casteism have been waged for millennia (Teltumbde, 2010), which also foreground how caste intersects with gendered, ethnic and religious exclusions (Arya, 2020; Paik, 2018). These intersecting exclusions are seen as inflicting violent atrocities and oppression. They exacerbate poverty and inequality in India (Colemen et al., 2018; Mosse, 2018; Sharma et al., 2020). It is no surprise then that people resist relations of exclusion that marginalise and impoverish them (Agarwal and Levien, 2020; Tiwari, 2014).

However, studies on social exclusion currently neglect how relations of exclusion coexist with alternative ways of relating in constituting people's agency. Similarly neglected are the ways in which people's agency is constituted by their relations with nature and technology. The latter relations are approached typically in one way – that ecologies and technologies are objects mobilised and controlled for exercising the power to exclude others (Arora et al., 2020). This marginalises contrasting relations of care – with things like trees and soils, tools and techniques, as well as with people in social movements and families (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993).

In this article, we propose a new conceptual approach to people's agency, through which they struggle for freedom from exclusion while sustaining their livelihoods. To do so, we rely on oral history narratives of three people who are farm workers and smallholders in two villages in Tamil Nadu. To grasp people's histories we use conceptual insights on assemblages of heterogeneous relations involving humans and nonhumans, which constitute agency (Latour, 2005). We combine additional insights from Giddens' theory of structuration and from feminist scholarship on care. Our approach foregrounds how relations of care interweave with contrasting relations of exclusion. While the latter ways of relating are often characterised by violence and oppression, relations of care involve qualities such as attentiveness, love, solidarity and mutualism (Arora et al., 2020). Following our interlocutors who fluently interweave the social with the material in their oral narratives, we approach all relations as sociomaterial. Thus the two ways of relating as considered here – exclusion and care – span modern divides between nature and culture (Haraway, 1991; Latour, 1993; White et al., 2016).

Spanning modern divides is extensively attempted through concepts like actor-networks (Latour, 2005), assemblages (Callon, 2007), cyborgs (Haraway, 1991), hybrid geographies (Whatmore, 2002), and socionatures (Braun, 2006). These conceptualisations however devote little attention to the diversity of people's ways of relating with other humans and nonhumans. Diverse ways of relating are sometimes examined in feminist scholarship on politics of care (e.g. Haraway, 2008). Here, emphasis may be placed on how relations of care are subsumed within wider structures of power (Murphy, 2015; Narayan, 1995). Feminist scholarship shows how patriarchal structures constitute modern attempts to gain mastery over nature and women (e.g. Shiva, 1988; Tronto, 1993), while also turning the work of caring into an unequally distributed burden (Addlakha, 2020).

Building on the above insights and using a relational approach to power (Foucault, 2001), we argue that it is crucial to examine how people's agency is constituted by multiple ways of relating that interweave and overlap with each other, in order to support political transformations for justice and sustainability (Arora et al., 2020; García-López et al., 2021; Stirling, 2014; Woodly et al., 2021). In the following, we focus on the everyday politics of two contrasting ways – exclusion and care – through which people relate with each other mediated by social norms and values, while also involving nonhumans like tools, technologies, trees and water. In highlighting this sociomaterial complexity in everyday life, we aim to take uncertainties seriously. These uncertainties are revealed through the plurality and open-endedness of dimensions associated with concepts like care and exclusion. We argue that by embracing this open-ended plurality, the concepts of our approach can find relevance in widely different settings.

We begin with a review of the literature on social exclusion in rural India, focusing on how it approaches agency. Building on this we develop and illustrate our conceptual approach with people's histories. In conclusion, we reflect on how this approach can yield insights to support people's agency to confront social exclusion in rural India and further afield. More generally, we argue that our approach can help rethink policies and politics to support sustainability transformations by foregrounding marginalised people's agency to produce knowledge, livelihoods and freedom.

Exclusion and agency in rural India

Driven by hierarchical relations of gender, caste, religion and ethnicity, social exclusion in rural India restricts access to land, ecological commons, temples, educational institutions and to resources such as gas for cooking (Agarwal, 1994; Kabeer, 2006; Mines, 2005; Patnaik and Jha, 2020; Still, 2009). Such forms of exclusion shape adverse outcomes like poverty and inequality (Colemen et al., 2018; Mosse, 2018; Sharma et al., 2020). For example, caste- and gender-based exclusion from landownership can lead to exploitative labouring relations in agriculture which impoverish landless workers (Bhaduri, 1973; Harriss, 1982; Sharma et al., 2020). Similarly, poverty and inequality are exacerbated when oppressed people's participation in remunerative markets and institutional governance is restricted (Elias et al., 2020; Sen, 2000: 29); and when people are denied access to benefits from development interventions designed by the powerful (Patnaik and Jha, 2020; Tiwari, 2014).

Often, hierarchies of caste, gender, religion, ethnicity and disability can work together, in enabling the powerful to extend control over markets and state interventions (Bosher et al., 2007; Buckingham, 2011; Deshpande, 2011; Kapadia, 1997; Shah et al., 2018). Intersections between caste and gender mean that Dalit women in particular can be excluded from access to assets, education and decision-making autonomy over crucial issues such as healthcare (Deshpande, 2011).

Social exclusion based on caste, gender and ethnicity can also impair public policy and civil society efforts to promote participatory development and decentralised democracy. Consider the Panchayati Raj reform of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment that enabled the opening up of leadership positions in local government institutions for women and Dalits (Bonu et al., 2011). In practice, however, Dalit people are often barred from using their elected positions to advance the well-being of their communities due to coercion and threats of violence by village-level dominant castes (Inbanathan and Sivanna, 2010). Similarly, places reserved for women on joint forest management executive committees in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh are observed as failing to tackle social exclusion (Elias et al., 2020). Beyond gender, Elias et al. observe how women's participation is shaped by their caste and Adivasi identities, as well as by economic status. Such intersections between class, gender, caste and ethnic hierarchies are complex (also see Mangubhai and Capraro, 2015). Playing out in different ways, they can shape diverse experiences of social exclusion within the same community, or even within a single household.

Social exclusion can be shaped by technologies and ecologies (Naz, 2015; Parthasarathy, 2002). For example, the deployment of modern techno-sciences of the Green Revolution, such as hybrid seeds and chemical pesticides, has been observed to limit farmers’ cultivation options, pollute agrarian ecologies and marginalise farmers’ knowledge (Kumar, 2016; Parthasarathy, 2002; Shiva, 1988). Similarly, environmental harms like the depletion of groundwater and dispossession of land are mapped as disproportionately affecting people subjugated by class, caste and ethnic hierarchies (Bhattacharjee, 2014; Naz, 2015; Williams and Mawdsley, 2006). However, excluded people's attempts to adapt technologies and resources for their benefit (e.g. Patnaik et al., 2017; Shah, 2003) are largely overlooked in the literature. This means that how people relate to ecologies and technologies in constituting their agency is currently neglected.

Agency of the ‘excluded’

It is crucial not to approach ‘people as mere objects of exclusionary processes’ (Skoda and Nielsen, 2013: 6). People exercise individual and collective agency to confront exclusion (e.g. Carswell and de Neve, 2013; Harriss-White, 2005; Tiwari, 2014). Collective agency includes organised protests and social movements for justice and equality (Agarwal and Levien, 2020; Williams and Mawdsley, 2006). Unfortunately, collective protests against exclusion may not yield substantial transformation of caste- and gender-based inequalities, such as in the case of Dalit protests against the dispossession of rural land for Special Economic Zones in Rajasthan and Telangana (Agarwal and Levien, 2020). Eventually, Dalit people received poor compensation for dispossessed lands. They were also denied significant participation in the labour market around the Special Economic Zones (Agarwal and Levien, 2020).

In the context of government reforms and laws such as the Right to Information Act, excluded people's individual and collective agency can be oriented towards ‘seeing the state’ (Corbridge et al., 2005). For instance, Adivasi smallholders and Dalit labourers may engage ‘with the state as citizens, or as members of populations with legally defined rights or politically inspired expectations’ (Corbridge et al., 2005: 18). These forms of agency are mapped as contingent on: (a) mobilisation by (left-wing) political parties, social movements and non-governmental organisations; (b) previous participation in direct encounters with the state; and (c) the circulation of information about welfare provision by the state, across boundaries of class, gender, ethnicity and locality (Kruks-Wisner, 2018). Largely overlooked in such analyses, however, are the roles played by ecologies and technologies in constituting people's agency of seeing the state.

Focusing on people considered as ‘destitute’, Harriss-White (2005) argues that they are unable to collectively stake claims for welfare or other state-driven development benefits. Similarly, Breman (2007) notes the lack of political transformation through collective mobilisation by bonded labourers, despite observing their individual agency of fleeing from bondage. Individual agency is also recognised by Harriss-White, of ‘destitute’ people who alter gendered divisions of labour within households (e.g., men collecting water and cooking food), while also seeking to form supportive networks among themselves.

In cyclone-prone and flood-prone areas of Andhra Pradesh, people who are Dalit and ‘backward caste’ are seen as forming village-level networks (Bosher et al., 2007). However, these local networks pale in comparison with dominant caste members’ trans-local networks with influential government actors. It is through the latter networks that dominant castes are able to access facilities such as financial assistance, healthcare, sanitation, community shelters and cyclone-resistant housing (Bosher et al., 2007). How people's supportive social networks, and indeed their agency, are constituted by their engagements with such technologies (and with ecologies) is not examined in the literature on exclusion.

This lack of attention to people's relations with ecologies and technologies is also observable in Tiwari's (2014) analysis of relational agency. Distinguishing the latter from individual and collective agency, Tiwari builds on Sen's (2000) capability approach to argue that collective agency as the ability of social groups to act, helps to strengthen individual capabilities. It is this strengthening of individual capabilities through engagements with collectives that points to relational agency (Tiwari, 2014). However, these relations for Tiwari are akin to social networks: while they constitute agency by linking excluded people with each other, engagements with the material world are missing from the picture. The same is generally true for studies on rural exclusion in other parts of the Global South (for exceptions from Indigenous South America, see Gómez-Barris, 2017 and Guzmán-Gallegos, 2019).

Relational agency beyond exclusion

There is a vast literature beyond social exclusion that explores the technological and ecological constitution of agency in rural areas of the Global South. Two strands are salient. The first strand explores how materials such as solar panels and water meters (re)assemble the agency of technology users (Akrich, 1992; Brown and Pena, 2016). To users, the meaning of such technologies is considered uncertain rather than self-evident. This uncertainty, for Brown and Pena (2016), points to the need of educating people on how to use new technologies in desired ways. In contrast, Lau et al. (2020) and Wilshusen (2019) observe that education and training are geared towards enrolling users of technologies as co-producers of dominant frameworks in rural development, such as ecosystem services and natural capital accounting. In this way, people's engagements with technologies are conditioned by training and education programmes, to co-produce dominant frameworks (Beck, 2016; Birkenholtz, 2009).

Following Latour (1993, 2005), some scholars conceptualise this co-production as being performed by humans and nonhumans (Fatimah and Arora, 2016; Watts and Scales, 2015). Agency is thus considered to be sociomaterial, distributed in assemblages of interrelated humans and nonhumans (Braun, 2006; Callon, 2007; Donovan, 2014). Such a view implies that as actors, nonhumans – like humans – do not just act in ways expected of them by the powerful. Nonhumans in action can contribute to resisting the control (or exclusion) that is attempted (Latour, 2005).

Conversely, rather than just aiming to control nonhumans (Arora et al., 2020), people may nurture alternative relations of care in everyday life and work (Hanrahan, 2015; Herman, 2015). In general, such relations involve ‘taking the concerns and needs of the other as the basis for action’ (Tronto, 1993: 105). Caring relations can involve aspects like ‘caring about’ specific things, ‘taking care of’ others through ‘caregiving’ while also ‘receiving care’ (Tronto, 1993). Care for other humans and nonhumans may involve attentiveness, nurturing, concern for well-being, friendship, solidarity and love (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Relations of care may thus be centrally constitutive of people's agency, within wider contexts that are shaped by structures of power (Murphy, 2015).

Building on such insights in the following, while adopting a relational perspective on what are otherwise seen as structures of power (Foucault, 2001), we develop a conceptual approach in which two different ways of relating – care and exclusion – interweave to constitute agency. As people's histories from rural Tamil Nadu illustrate below, relations of exclusion are forceful in constituting oppression and control. In contrast, interweaving relations of care are central to constituting individual and collective struggles for freedom through resistance and for realising livelihoods.

Conceptualising sociomaterial agency

Inspired by process philosophy we recognise that ‘all things flow’ (Whitehead, 1978: 234), which means that things change as they move through time and space while interweaving with other nonhumans and humans. Far from being inert objects that lack agency, things are vibrant and alive (Bennett, 2010). They grow, decay, slow down, adapt, resist, gather force or create change, as they form assemblages with humans in everyday practices (Latour, 2005). In such sociomaterial assemblages, things act to defy modern ontological divides between nature and culture (Latour, 1993; White et al., 2016). It is in assemblages that people's agency is constituted by their everyday relations with things of all kinds (from clothing and jewellery to tools and soils), which mediate people's relations with each other alongside cultural values and norms like patriarchal control, ethos of care and casteist endogamy (Arora and Glover, 2017; Guha, 2013; Kapadia, 1995). This relational process approach centred on assemblages, we argue, can be helpful in developing better political accounts of agency's dynamism, diversity and distributedness (Latour, 2005).

While it is widely accepted that cultural values and norms are political – that social power is exercised through them (e.g. Giddens, 1984), material things may be approached and articulated as objects assumed to be neutral or apolitical. This assumption overlooks that social hierarchies of gender and caste can be partially enacted through the manipulation and mobilisation of ecologies as resources (Bijker, 2007; Naz, 2015; Parthasarathy, 2002); and through the designs of technological materials such as irrigation infrastructures and heavy machinery (Cockburn, 1985; Shah, 2003). Yet, no design process or ecological manipulation is a straightforward process of realising what is intended by power (Joerges, 1998). Unexpected indeterminacies, non-linearities and complexities are always encountered, which means that the ‘same’ thing can be grasped differently depending on the particular assemblages it is entangled in (Mol, 2002; Law and Mol, 2002; Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003). We conceptualise this making of difference through relations, as agency in sociomaterial assemblages (Latour, 2005). Differences made include mediating, translating, knowing, crafting and governing the entangled flows of ideas, symbols, values, interests and materials.

In existing conceptualisations of sociomaterial assemblages (or actor-networks), three understandings of agency as relationally constituted difference are foregrounded. The first understanding of agency focuses on the fluidity (or rigidity) of entangling a specific entity into an assemblage (de Laet and Mol, 2000). Approached fluidly, an entity changes as it moves from one assemblage to another, in which it is developed and used. Together these assemblages can foreground the multiplicity of the ‘same’ thing like a water pump (de Laet and Mol, 2000), atherosclerosis (Mol, 2002), or biofuel policy (Fatimah et al., 2015).

Second, agency is approached as the reconfiguration of assemblages through the dis/entanglement of specific humans or nonhumans (Callon, 2007; Latour, 1991). Here the focus is on how agency is constituted by the participation (or not) of specific entities in assemblages (Hinchliffe, 2008), or on whether disparate entities in an assemblage are proliferated (Callon and Law, 2005). Over time and space, if the number of participating entities increases in an assemblage, then agency is seen as gathering force to enact power (Arora, 2014;Latour, 1991).

Third, agency as the making of difference points to proximity or distance within particular relations (Cooper and Law, 1995; Krarup and Blok, 2011). In knowledge production assemblages, the distance assumed from a phenomenon treated as an object of study, may be used to underpin (social) scientific claims of objectivity (Baptista, 2018; Cooper and Law, 1995). In contrast, more proximate views may reveal how ‘objective explanations’ rely on the work of interpretation that uses tools like surveys and statistics (Krarup and Blok, 2011; Latour, 1988). Crucially, proximal views may be based on approaching entities as subjects (rather than objects) embedded in their contexts (Giancola and Viteritti, 2014).

These three understandings of difference that agency makes in sociomaterial assemblages, share a common focus on magnitude in a single dimension – fluidity of entanglement, number of entities, or distance of entities from each other. Magnitude in a dimension is thus privileged over possible diversities of ways of relating (Arora and Stirling, 2021). Such privileging of magnitude(s) can marginalise attention to the coexistence of diverse ways of relating within and across assemblages. Similar marginalisation can also be sometimes observed in studies where specific ways of relating (like care and hospitality) are highlighted (see e.g. Barnett, 2005; Crawford, 2017; Mol, 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

Exceptions to this neglect can be found in feminist scholarship on politics of care, which holds that caring relations are formed within wider structures of power (e.g. Bartos, 2018; Haraway, 2008; Murphy, 2015; Woodly et al., 2021). Such conditioning can be so strong, that caring is considered as ‘rooted in relations of power’ (Bartos, 2018: 67; also see Robinson, 2011). This means that in patriarchal societies like many parts of India, women do much of the caregiving for the disabled, for the elderly and for children (see Addlakha, 2020; Ahlin and Sen, 2020). Beyond unequal distribution of caregiving responsibilities, structuring by power means that caring relations may themselves manifest as everyday relations of power – between racialised, national and professional groups (Beckett and Keeling, 2019; Narayan, 1995; Raghuram, 2016). Here, discourses of care may be used to justify control and domination of people who are ‘inferiorised’ as immature or backward. In addition, caring relations may be bounded to nurture particular nonhumans and humans, while others are excluded or even harmed (Bartos, 2018). This means that, alongside attentiveness, solidarity and the like, care can be expressed as power. In such framings, care can appear indistinguishable from social exclusion.

In settings permeated with patriarchal and casteist exclusion, such as the south Indian villages where our three interlocutors live, it is imperative that structures of power are distinguished from relations of care that constitute people's agency to confront exclusion. In the following therefore, we build on insights from politics of care by approaching them through Giddens’ (1984) idea of structuration. We account for power structures like casteist and gendered norms as everyday prescriptions and proscriptions that people are entangled with, alongside contrasting relations of care. In assemblages of sociomaterial relations then, agency is constituted through diverse conforming and transforming relations with power-laden norms and values, which intersect with other ways of relating like care. Intersections mean that different ways of relating impact on each other. And none of these ways of relating is stable. They can shift between love, attention, neglect, violence, oppression, indifference and more (Berlant, 2011; Govindrajan, 2018).

As a result, the relational constitution of agency is never predetermined. It is always uncertain. Equally uncertain are the ways in which power structures are conformed and transformed in different ways, to varying extents, as agency is enacted through sociomaterial assemblages. Taking uncertainty seriously in these ways, is the first of two additional contributions we make to the conceptualisation of agency in sociomaterial assemblages. Our second contribution attends to interweaving ways of relating. Both contributions are outlined below, which we argue are required to do full justice to the personal histories narrated later in this article.

Taking uncertainty seriously

Situating agency in different sociomaterial assemblages points to the importance of admitting uncertainties in knowledge (Arora, 2019). Flowing through interrelated humans and nonhumans (none of whom is inert), courses of action are underdetermined and unpredictable (cf. Wynne, 1992). Accounts of agency are therefore replete with uncertainties. Unlike risk that is quantifiable based on probabilities attached to the occurrence of predictable events, uncertainty points to incomplete knowledge because possible events cannot be fully characterised (Callon et al., 2009; Wynne, 1992).

While the importance of uncertainty may sometimes be recognised for weather patterns and climate disruptions (e.g., FAO et al., 2018), it is very often reduced to the quantitative language of risk and probability (Yates-Doerr, 2015). In general, uncertainties that are not reduced to risk, can be marginalised or even concealed in modernist knowledge production (Arora, 2019; Stirling, 2019). For example, modern technologies may be promoted to work without problems, in accordance with design manuals while suppressing associated uncertainties, which can later manifest as social, technical or ecological problems. If the adverse impacts of such problems are unequally distributed to disproportionately harm the marginalised, as shown in studies on environmental injustice and caste for example (Scandrett et al., 2019; Williams and Mawdsley, 2006), then the suppression of uncertainties can intensify relations of exclusion.

In the conceptual framework used for narrating the oral histories below, taking uncertainties seriously means that the relational assembling of agency is approached as always underdetermined. The manner in which any assemblage constitutes the agency to exclude others or to struggle for freedom, is never given a priori. Relational effects are emergent.

In constituting actions that ripple through assemblages, a way of relating framed as singular – care or exclusion – can take multiple forms. Such multiplicity implies that any way of relating may be approached as a polythetic category (Cairns et al., 2021; Wouters, 2015). The plural dimensions of a polythetic category are contingent on specific sociomaterial assemblages in which the category is observed as being enacted (de Hoop and Arora, 2017). However, plurality and open-endedness do not imply the relativism of ‘anything goes’. The plurality embraced under any polythetic category is situated and conditional (Stirling, 2011), which means that plural dimensions of care can be distinguished from those of exclusion across assemblages. Approached as different but interwoven ways of relating, care and exclusion can then be grasped as constituting agency together.

Interweaving ways of relating

Our second conceptual contribution points to the interweaving, in the same narrative, of two contrasting ways of relating – exclusion and care (while approaching both as sociomaterial). A polythetic definition of exclusion as a way of relating, includes the following plural dimensions (as detailed in the exclusion and agency in rural India section): (a) violent oppression and regulation of others’ behaviour, particularly of Dalit people (Arulselvan, 2016; Jodhka, 2016; Jose et al., 2013), on the basis of caste, gender and class hierarchies; (b) restricting subjugated people's access to resources and markets (Acharya, 2018; Agarwal and Levien, 2020); (c) fixing subjugated people in place or limiting the possible paths on which people can move (Arora, 2014); (d) attempting to control technological development and use, for embedding modern divides between nature and culture (Arora et al., 2020; White et al., 2016); and (e) incorporating people as workers and cultivators into markets and projects, for extracting value from their labour and resources (Fischer, 2011).

In contrast, relations of care are associated with the plural dimensions such as: (a) asymmetric provisioning of the means that help other humans and nonhumans thrive (Haraway, 2008; White and Tronto, 2004); (b) embracing values like solidarity with the oppressed (Mander, 2015); (c) attentiveness towards changes in the situation of vulnerable others (Tronto, 1993); (d) socioecological mutualism that spans modern categorical divides of nature and culture, subjects and objects (Arora, 2019; Arora et al., 2020); (e) respect for difference and ‘plurality as a condition for politics and action’ (Paik, 2021: 135); and (f) friendship and love that can transgress hierarchically structured divides of caste, religion and ethnicity (e.g., Sharma, 2018). Caring relations can help some people access labour markets and develop skills and knowledge (e.g. through collegiality and apprenticeships). They can also be practised through close engagement with tools and with ecological materials like soils and plants (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

Political interweaves between care and exclusion as contrasting ways of relating can surface in different ways. The first way in which such interweaves emerge is through the central role played by care in enabling people's agency to resist forms of oppression that are inflicted through relations of exclusion (Hanrahan, 2015; Sen, 1999). Such resistance can sometimes go unnoticed (or tolerated) by members of the dominating castes – for instance, when it is performed as part of ‘traditional’ rituals in which Dalit people express opposition to caste dominance (Gorringe, 2016; Rao, 1996). If constituted by relations with/in wider social movements (Agarwal and Levien, 2020; Mines, 2005), ritualised resistance can help open up possibilities of transforming power structures and relations of exclusion. Such forms of resistance can also trigger backlash from those exercising the power to exclude (Arulselvan, 2016).

Political interweaving with exclusion arise when care that is given and received within circumscribed settings of one's own family, caste or even grassroots movement, is used as a basis to unleash the exclusion of others (e.g., men silencing Dalit women's voices in participatory development: Elias et al., 2020). In contrast, relations of care can help constitute people's agency that is aimed at avoiding specific relations of exclusion. For example, supported by unequally structured caring relations within families, excluded people may migrate to urban areas where exclusionary power constituted by rural relations of exclusion (around landownership, caste and gender) is partly circumvented (Vijaybaskar, 2020). Such intersections are highlighted in the following personal narratives based on oral histories of three people – Xavier, a small landowning Dalit farmer; Madhavi, a landless agricultural worker from one of the two dominant castes in her village; and Asai, a Dalit agricultural worker whose marginal landholding is now controlled by her son. Xavier, Madhavi and Asai live in two villages located in northern Tamil Nadu. We worked with Xavier, Madhavi and Asai not only because of their different caste and gender identities but also due to the divergent forms taken by their agency in resisting exclusion and building livelihoods.

Context and method

In 2016, Tamil Nadu was home to roughly 75 million people (GoI, 2020), who live across hundreds of cities and thousands of villages and belong to different castes and ethnicities while practising multiple religions and speaking numerous languages. To approach Tamil Nadu as a single context for our work would therefore be a fallacy. Yet our narratives from two villages must be situated in a wider context. For this reason, we offer here an overview of some studies focused on caste and gender hierarchies in rural Tamil Nadu.

Mobilisation by oppressed castes has arguably shaped Tamil Nadu's politics more than other states in India (Gorringe, 2005). However, caste-based and intersecting patriarchal norms of hierarchy are seen as still central to everyday life. Such norms often manifest as violence, particularly in rural Tamil Nadu. Within this hierarchy, agency of the oppressed has been foregrounded in a few recent studies (e.g. Anandhi, 2017; Rao, 2015). These studies show how Dalit women, for example, act with resolve and patience to struggle against gendered caste hierarchy, while trying to reconstruct roles and responsibility within households and at work. Agency can be enabled by wider development interventions, for example women's Self-Help Groups (SHGs) for micro-credit (Anandhi, 2017), which Dalit women have used not just to seek better employment (as was intended by SHGs’ designers) but also to demand landownership.

In contrast to this emphasis on the enabling of agency through development interventions, Guérin et al. (2013) argue that women's agency to make decisions, which are considered culturally the preserve of men, cannot be understood as straightforward empowerment. Instead exercising such agency can make them lose status and respect from their kin and neighbours. The loss of status and respect can have a disempowering effect, particularly on women from oppressed castes. In this way, development interventions like micro-credit organisations can inadvertently end up circumscribing marginalised women's agency.

The intersection of patriarchal norms with caste can shape Dalit masculine agency in such a way that men may seek to control women even as the latter are remuneratively employed (Anandhi et al., 2002). It is in this context that Kapadia (2017) calls for the need to understand Dalit women's voices and their everyday practices as a subaltern group, while mapping hegemonic caste and patriarchal narratives. Equally important for Kapadia are wider economic relations that continue to marginalise Dalit women, such as public policies for deregulation of labour markets and privatisation of healthcare.

Intersections of caste and patriarchy can also constrain the radical redistribution of power within the domain of formal politics. For example, Gorringe (2017) points out that the VCK, a Dalit party, upholds women's liberation as essential to social justice and has a strong women's wing. However, patriarchal bias of male cadres, and the wider hierarchical caste system in Tamil Nadu, stifles the articulation of anti-caste gender politics.

It is with such a contextual background that we gathered oral histories in two villages of the Tiruvannamalai district. Based in a nearby town, two co-authors visited the villages every day for a period of seven months (October 2017 to April 2018). We conducted 5–8 detailed open-ended interviews with each of the three people whose narratives are recounted in the following section. Despite the small number of interviewees, these in-depth and biographic interviews allow us to illustrate different conceptual dimensions of care and exclusion as constitutive of people's agency. While foregrounding a plurality of conceptual dimensions, the three narratives nevertheless offer a necessarily incomplete picture of the diverse ways in which relations of care and exclusion can coexist and interweave to constitute the three interviewees’ agency.

All interviews were audio recorded. In addition, we had several informal conversations with each of the three respondents. These conversations and the recorded interviews were held in their homes, farms and other village spaces while they engaged in everyday activities like grazing cattle, cooking and working in the fields. There were also intermittent follow-up interactions with some participants through short visits until December 2018. The interviews were conducted in Tamil and the audio recordings were translated into English.

The interviews were time-intensive, with a single interview often lasting more than two hours. They were geared towards grasping people's perceptions of long-term changes in their lives and agrarian surroundings since the early 1970s. In this rice-growing region, significant transformations driven by modern expertise have taken place in the last five decades (see Farmer, 1977 for an early account). These transformations are often associated with the so-called Green Revolution and have brought to farms many industrial technologies developed in electrical, mechanical, chemical and biological laboratories (Cullather, 2004; Sharma, 2019). Our focus in such modernising transformations was on the agency of excluded people, particularly on its constitution by hierarchical relations of caste and gender. Feminist and Dalit scholarship has employed oral histories in the past to undo the silences of institutional histories of development and state-building (Arnold and Blackburn, 2004; de Heering, 2016; Kamra, 2013). Committed to privileging people's everyday lived experiences (Mander, 2010), oral histories can offer means to promote the democratisation of knowledge for and about rural development and social inclusion.

Through oral history interviews, we approached people's memories not as chronological recalling of events in the form of ‘facts’, but rather as reflections on and interpretations of processes of change (Portelli, 1981: 99). Our initial interviews were open-ended as possible and asked participants to recall and elaborate on critical events that shaped their lives. After developing rapport and familiarity we began asking more focussed questions about changes in livelihood practices, memories of agricultural industrialisation as well as related processes and transformations in participants' everyday life. Recognising the difficulties that people encounter in articulating exclusionary experiences and other hardships in their lives (de Heering, 2016), we used a conversational mode so people could enunciate self-representations of class, caste and gendered positions. Our interviews reveal not just the immutability of such positions but also the possibilities for sociopolitical transformation (Chari, 2004; Delcore, 2004). Even as they pose interpretive challenges and limitations, valuable about the personal narratives constructed out of oral history interviews, is the collaborative process of assigning polythetic significance to concepts, between researchers and interviewees.

Narrating sociomaterial relations through people's histories

The personal histories we narrate in the remainder of this article, are uncertain, open-ended and fragmented. They are far from neat causal explanations of processes of social exclusion, or of people's agency to resist and build livelihoods through relations of care. What we narrate are often non-linear and messy accounts of how people act through different ways of relating with state and non-state actors and with ecologies and technologies. While constituting people's agency, these sociomaterial relations are also re-produced, reinforced or transformed through agency in multiple domains – of work and home and associated everyday situations.

Xavier and Madhavi are residents of a large village, with approximately 1000 households. Majority of households rely on agricultural livelihoods, silk saree weaving, or work in the rice mills of a nearby town. Men also temporarily migrate to Chennai or Bangalore for construction work, and even travel as far as Mumbai and Surat to work in the textile industry. Land under cultivation in this village has been declining, with depletion of groundwater and real estate development. This has led to a significant decline in the availability of agricultural work for landless households. Asai lives in a smaller predominantly agrarian village, with about 160 households. Most landless Dalit men in her village migrate for work while their families often stay in the village due to the prohibitive cost of housing and living in the cities. Women therefore are disproportionately represented in agricultural labour force.

Xavier

Xavier is 77 years old. He emphasises that, as a Dalit, caste is central to the relations of exclusion constituting his agency. However, relative to other Dalit people in his village, Xavier has developed an extensive network with agricultural extension officers and panchayat members. His daughter-in-law and son are also both gainfully employed.

Xavier remembers assembling a livelihood through farm labour, sharecropping and driving a bullock cart for transportation. Xavier's wife has also worked as a farm labourer. His sharecropping experience was particularly exploitative. While Xavier bore all expenses and labour, his dominant caste landlords appropriated half the harvested crop. This inability to retain the fruits of his labour, through sharecropping relations of exclusion, was central to constituting Xavier's agency to struggle for freedom. Sharecropping's exclusions firmed Xavier's resolve to save money and buy his own parcel of land.

Interwoven with these relations of exclusion constituting Xavier's agency to acquire land, were alternative relations of care with members of his family. Among these were relations with his parents, from whom Xavier inherited a small piece of uncultivable land that he sold a few decades ago for 42 rupees, with which he bought a piece of gold jewellery. By selling this piece of jewellery and by relying on all of his family's (his wife's, son's and daughter-in-law's) savings, Xavier purchased a small parcel of cultivable land over a decade ago.

Xavier was only able to afford a piece of dry land. Without irrigation, he could not cultivate, so he submitted a request for an electricity connection. A few years passed before the electricity was finally connected. Xavier spent substantial amounts of money to get the connection and to dig a bore-well for irrigation. Central to assembling this agency to secure irrigation, were relations of care with workers who did the digging (using machines), a supportive junior engineer from a government department, an investment of tens of thousands of rupees (again with support from family), electricity, a pump and – perhaps most significantly – groundwater.

Crucially, Xavier's relations of care with groundwater are asymmetric. While the groundwater reservoir helps Xavier cultivate his fields, Xavier cannot simply reciprocate and be attentive to replenishing the groundwater. Critically, his agency to replenish is constrained by the relations of exclusion underpinned by modern divides between nature and culture, land and life, which have been promoted through agricultural industrialisation since the Green Revolution (Arora et al., 2020). Mediated strongly by modern technologies, the Green Revolution's relations constitute farmers’ agency to extract groundwater in the region but not to replenish village irrigation tanks through careful harvesting of rainwater (Janakarajan, 2005).

Through modern relations that enable farmers’ agencies to extract groundwater using the bore-well and electricity, Xavier is able to cultivate paddy. In this process, Xavier engages with chemical pesticides bought from a local shop. The shopkeeper offers guidance on how to use the chemicals and Xavier applies the pesticides to multiple crops including beans, groundnut and lentils. At first sight, Xavier's relationship with pesticides and the local shopkeeper may appear to be based on caring for his crop. However, this relation of apparent care is itself made possible by other relations of exclusion that are mediated by the technology of pest control. Through these modern relations of exclusion, nonhuman insects are approached as pests to be controlled, and Xavier is made dependent on chemical technologies developed in (industrial) laboratories and on a local shopkeeper's expertise.

Contrasting relations of care with ecological surroundings are central to assembling other forms of Xavier's agency as a farmer. For example, some years ago Xavier nurtured a few fledgling coconut trees by collecting water from leaking municipal supply pipes. In turn, the leaves from the trees helped Xavier cultivate his chilli saplings by sheltering them from sunlight. The same leaves were crucial in building the roof of a shed on Xavier's farm. The coconut trees also contribute food for his family. As constituted by their caring relationship with each other, Xavier's agency and that of the coconut trees yield mutual benefits.

Xavier remembers contesting an election to become the village panchayat president, which he lost by a small margin. This election, and his lifelong membership in a Dravidian political party, may be understood as attempts to resist historical marginalisation produced by casteism. Xavier's agency to contest the election was assembled through a loan of 25,000 rupees from a nephew. Just like other forms of Xavier's agency, contesting the election was characterised by uncertainty. The election also tied Xavier into another relation of exclusion – indebtedness. To circumvent this relation, Xavier repaid his debt by relying on property rights over his land that was acquired through agency enabled by many relations of care (see above). He transferred three-fourths of an acre of land in the nephew's name.

Xavier emphasises particular values he cares about. First, he believes in social progress that makes people more ‘civilised’ over time. Such progress for Xavier does not depend on the agency of social movements. Referring to the local Ambedkar movement (Gorringe, 2005), Xavier says ‘the eradication of untouchability [in Tamil Nadu] is due to cultural and political civilisation rather than this movement’. Second, Xavier cares for himself by connecting with values of self-discipline (cf. Pandian, 2010), due to which he has never succumbed to alcoholism and has worked hard all his life, even for meagre wages and often doing multiple jobs simultaneously.

Inherent to sociomaterial assemblages with interwoven relations of exclusion and care that constitute Xavier's agency are the uncertainties of inadequate rainfall, low crop prices and his old age. These uncertainties often make it hard to do extended work in the field. Rather than suppressing such uncertainties to convey an impression that Xavier is in control of his livelihood, Xavier embraces the uncertainties as unavoidable aspects of life. Perhaps the biggest uncertainty is that of death itself, which Xavier appears to also take in his stride: on a day when three of us visit him, Xavier refuses to accompany his wife to an astrologer. He says: ‘My time is good, I do not need a fortune-teller’. However, at the same time, Xavier talks about the recent passing away of a close friend. He also narrates his dream from three or four nights ago involving the lord of death assisted by three policemen. Xavier says the lord of death sported ‘a big moustache, riding a buffalo. He asked his assistants to call me. I told them that I have more days to live’. Arguably it is this hope for a better future, that has been a part of Xavier's many struggles against caste-based exclusion.

Madhavi

Madhavi's husband passed away a few years ago. All three of her daughters are married. Madhavi now lives alone. She and her husband did not inherit any land, nor were they able to buy any later. Madhavi belongs to the Yadava caste. In Madhavi's village, Yadavas own significant parcels of land and are quite dominant in economic and political terms.

Madhavi recalls how she was ridiculed for not having a male child. Central to such ridiculing as a form of agency are relations of exclusion associated with patriarchy. Madhavi highlights how patriarchal norms condition the privileging of sons over daughters: ‘The last rites are to be performed by a male child. He only has to carry the fire for cremation’. Yet Madhavi also articulates resistance against patriarchal relations by asking if daughters can also carry out the last rites. She observes: ‘Some girls are now boldly doing just that!’

Over four decades ago, when Madhavi got married, she remembers bringing a cow from her village as dowry. Caring for this one cow bequeathed through patriarchal relations of dowry, Madhavi and her husband gradually built up a herd of 15 cows. However, patriarchal relations entered the picture yet again, as Madhavi and her husband were forced to sell 14 of the cows to pay for their daughters’ weddings. Madhavi eventually gifted the last cow to one of her daughters.

Madhavi and her daughters share a bond of care. Madhavi notes how the daughters offer her financial support every time they visit. They also phone her regularly to inquire about her health and well-being. If her voice sounds feeble on the phone, they ask her to consult a doctor and to not work. These relations of care play a crucial role in constituting Madhavi's agency to live well and build a livelihood.

Madhavi's livelihood is assembled through farm-labouring and a few other jobs. She emphasises the difficulty of finding farm-work in some months, particularly when there is little rain. One day when we meet her, she has waited for a few hours along with 50 other people to find a bit of farm-work. Eventually included in the market for farm-labour, Madhavi earned a meagre wage of 30 rupees that day. Madhavi highlights the unfavourable terms of such inclusion, by asking how anyone can afford to buy nutritious food for such a wage. She highlights that her survival depends crucially on the few kilogrammes of rice accessed every month, without payment, from the public distribution system. Perhaps this system represents a relation of care with the government of Tamil Nadu.

Madhavi highlights a relation of exclusion with mechanical harvesters which displace farmworkers like herself. Yet, within this displacement, Madhavi highlights how uncertainty (of rainfall patterns) plays a role. If rainfall is adequate and the crop is plentiful, farmers look beyond machines and employ farmworkers to help harvest. In this story, sociomaterial relations of exclusion and care interweave in uncertain ways to constitute farmworkers’ agency to realise a livelihood. Relations of exclusion with labour-displacing machines and landlords (who are generally men belonging to dominant castes), intersect with farmers' and workers' relations of care with the crop. However, within this interweaving, the uncertainty of rainfall patterns implies precarious livelihoods for Madhavi and her fellow farmworkers.

Important in the sociomaterial assemblage constituting Madhavi's agency is her old-age pension from the state. While the pension enables Madhavi to care for herself, in the process of securing this pension, Madhavi encounters many interwoven relations of exclusion (involving state bureaucracy and officials). According to Madhavi, applying for the pension begins with submitting proof to the local village agricultural officer that the applicant owns no land and has no family members providing for her. If the village agricultural officer gives a signature of approval, the approval of two sub-district officials is required. To move an application through these multiple levels of bureaucracy, bribes have to be paid often to each officer involved. To circumvent these relations of exclusion with the state, Madhavi opted to apply through a broker, paying him 4000 rupees (a substantial amount at that time). The broker helped fill in and submit all the forms, collect the required signatures and secure the pension.

Beyond her old-age pension and farm-labour, Madhavi relies on two occupations for her livelihood. First, Madhavi cleans the kitchen and utensils at her village's milk centre. This makes Madhavi engage with milk measurement vessels, kitchen sinks, water and cleaning materials. She also encounters dairy farmers and the milkmen who purchase milk from them. For this job, Madhavi receives a small salary. She also receives 200 mL of milk in the morning and the same quantity every evening. Relations of care, such as those with the milk and with other nonhumans and humans she works with, are central to constituting Madhavi's agency to realise her livelihood and well-being.

Madhavi also works as a spiritual healer. She says: ‘I am possessed by my family god and I cure people who are sick using a mantra’. She is known in her village for getting rid of the ‘evil eye’. In addition to cultural beliefs and values linked to such practices, Madhavi's agency as a healer relies on careful engagement with materials such as turmeric, lime, a small pot-like vessel and water. This agency as a healer is central to Madhavi's relations of care with many other non-Dalit women in the village.

Madhavi describes how she confronts the forms of exclusion that are constituted by patriarchal relations. For instance, before the birth of her third daughter, Madhavi's husband left the village to live with his lover. He took Madhavi's gold earrings with him. To care for her daughters as a single parent, Madhavi had to put in more hours of work as a farm-labourer. She was also subjected to cultural exclusion by the village community. For example, while her husband was away, Madhavi and her daughters were asked to stay away from village events meant for families.

When Madhavi's husband returned to the village three years later, he sent gifts to appease Madhavi. She declined to accept them. Madhavi also sent her husband back out the door each time he came to visit her. In this way she resisted her husband re-entering her life. This resistance was eventually broken by the intervention of a village headman. According to Madhavi, the headman said her husband had ‘realised his mistake and asked [Madhavi] to be silent and accept him’. In this situation, it is clear to see how patriarchal relations constitute the agency of village and caste headmen, also as a backlash against anti-patriarchal resistance.

Asai

Asai is about 65 years old. Her husband passed away over a decade ago. She is a mother to four daughters and a son, and grandmother to 16 boys and girls. She feels responsible for the families of her children, saying she carries ‘the burden of five families’ on her mind.

Asai has a title to 1.2 acres of unirrigated land, but the land is effectively under her son's control. The same is true for the house she built. Her son occupies it now with his wife and children. Asai has no access to the house. Her exclusion from her land and house is just one situation among many in which she faces the brunt of patriarchal relations. Other instances include her landowning father excluding her from any inheritance; her alcoholic husband selling a part of their land to buy alcohol; and her bearing the burden of repaying the loans taken by her son and husband. Intersecting with patriarchy, relations of exclusion associated with caste are crucial to Asai's marginalisation as a Dalit woman.

Probably the most critical form of exclusion experienced by Asai occurred a few decades ago. She was then pregnant with her first child. Dalit people were barred from accessing commons such as the village water tank. On a day when Asai and some other members of the village's Dalit community were catching fish from the tank and collecting firewood nearby, they were seen by some dominant caste villagers who decided to ‘punish’ Asai and her companions in public by forcing them to do 20–30 sit-ups while holding their ears. Such sit-ups were commonly used by teachers to discipline children in schools. Asai was subjected to the humiliation of repeatedly squatting and standing while she was pregnant.

A few years after this incident, Asai remembers how she was made to lose her job as a cook in the government-run childcare centre: the village balwadi. Many privileged caste villagers had asked their children to refuse the food cooked by Asai because she was Dalit. Under pressure from caste villagers, government officials then decided to terminate Asai's appointment. Asai believes this dismissal driven by relations of caste and state-based exclusion, was meant as further ‘punishment’ for her political activism against casteism. By this time Asai was actively engaged with Ambedkar Makkal Iyakkam (AMI), the Ambedkar People's Movement.

‘I was determined to gain our rights over the tank’, says Asai about her resistance. During a meeting organised by AMI, Asai took the microphone to announce that ‘the village tank is located on common land so it should be accessible to all inhabitants. However, (dominant) caste villagers punish Dalit people for accessing the tank for fish or firewood and also appropriate all firewood from the tank area. Money from auctioning this firewood is used only for celebrating their festivals. The Dalit community does not receive its share’. To challenge and change this, Asai and others in AMI collected signatures on a petition. Asai travelled to deliver this petition to the government's Block Development Office, emphasising that Dalit people want a share of the money generated through the auctioning of firewood, to help pay for community events at the church in the Dalit part of the village.

Upon returning from the Block Development Office, Asai was beaten by her husband. He demanded that Asai go back to say that Dalit people did not need a share of the auction money. Her husband feared Asai (and her family) would be attacked by dominant caste people. However, the husband's agency of patriarchal violence, intersecting with the threat of caste violence, failed to shake Asai's resolve to struggle for what she believed to be Dalit people's rights.

When government officials arrived to oversee the auction, Asai was called to meet them. While recognising Dalit people's rights to their share of the auction proceeds, the officials asked Dalits to give up their share because dominant caste villagers needed the money for a special fire festival that year. Asai retorted that caste people had enjoyed the auction money for many years. She added: ‘We are also conducting the Mary festival at our church. Please ask them to give up the money this time’. And so the auction money came to be shared, and a step was taken towards transforming exclusionary relations of caste in Asai's village. Eventually, Dalit people were able to access the tank for fishing and for other uses, but only to the portion of the tank that adjoined their residential part of the village.

This story illustrates Asai's agency to help transform the caste-based relations of exclusion that target Dalit people in her village. The agency of resistance involved the mobilisation of many Dalit women and men in the village, as well as the wider AMI.

It is important to emphasise that Asai's agency as an activist was realised within an assemblage of sociomaterial relations. In this assemblage, while being entangled in caste- and state-based relations of exclusion, Asai was enabled by many relations of care. These included relations with AMI activists from outside her village; with petitions and signatures; with fish and firewood; with the church and religious festivals; with values of equality against the caste fallacy that some people are ‘superior’ than others; with a spirit of indomitable entrepreneurship – Asai started a few small businesses selling vegetables and cooked snacks; and with modern technologies like the microphone and modes of transportation.

In addition to resistance, Asai describes her attempts to circumvent power and build a livelihood. She does the labouring work of transplanting rice, the wages for which often depend on the number of saplings handled by a worker. Asai notes how workers in a nursery compete with each other to collect more saplings for transplanting. Regarding this competition, Asai notes: ‘People are not fighting over property, they are struggling for wages.’ She observes how modern agricultural production is permeated with power to depress wages for farm-work.

First, like Madhavi, Asai highlights how modernising technologies are adopted to displace human and animal labour. She observes how water for irrigation is now extracted from a well at the flick of an electrical switch, displacing the hard labour of pushing a wooden water wheel until one's ‘legs shivered with strain’. Similarly, the use of synthetic fertilisers does away with the need of keeping cows and buffaloes for manure. The farm-labour involved in caring for cattle and in producing manure is displaced by synthetic fertilisers produced by chemical industries located in (peri)urban areas. In this process, farmworkers’ relations of care are displaced by industrial technologies produced in sociomaterial assemblages where modernist relations of exclusion are central.

Second, Asai points out how a large share of the low wages earned by farmworkers is used to pay for their children's education; for industrial goods such as clothing, detergents and toothpaste; for modern healthcare; and for motorised transportation. A farmworker thus has little left to spend on food, which means the price of food is kept low. Low food-crop prices squeeze small and mid-sized farmers’ incomes, constraining their ability to pay decent wages to farmworkers. This is particularly true in the last two decades of chronic indebtedness among small and mid-sized farmers, not least due to the costs incurred for expensive chemicals and seeds used in modern industrial agriculture (Arora, 2012; Vasavi, 2012). In such ways, a wider society built on multiple intersecting relations of exclusion – from caste to modern technological expertise – enacts power not just over the most marginalised landless workers but also the small and mid-sized landholding farmers.

Concluding reflections

People's histories narrated above show how intersectionality between different relations of exclusion – shaped by ecologies, technologies and class as well as based on gender, caste and state power – compounds oppressions while being geared toward controlling people's agency (Crenshaw, 1991; Paik, 2018). In constituting the agency of the excluded to struggle for freedom and to build livelihoods, however, the above histories also show how exclusionary ways of relating interweave with alternative relations of care. The latter ways of relating are not just parts of people's social support networks with members of their family and other groups, but they also connect people with nonhuman materials from trees and plants to tools and lands. Such sociomaterial relations of care that constitute excluded people's agency, have been largely neglected in studies on social exclusion in India and beyond.

People's histories narrated above also foreground the complexity of interweaves between different ways of relating. Firstly, farmers' relations of care involving technologies like pesticides may be subsumed under wider relations of exclusion engineered through modern expertise. This observation corroborates existing feminist insights on the conditioning of care by wider structures of power (e.g. Murphy, 2015; Narayan, 1995). Secondly, relations of care may be established with the modern welfare state. These relations may involve an old-age pension or free rice distributed by the state, which can help marginalised people to struggle against or circumvent caste- and gender-based exclusions. Interweavings between care and exclusion are thus diverse, situated across everyday sociomaterial assemblages. To grasp this diversity, it is important to approach casteist and patriarchal structures as situated relations of exclusion that are co-constituted with relations of care in everyday lives of the marginalised.

Permeating such attempts to grasp the everyday politics of different ways of relating, are unavoidable uncertainties in knowing. Here, admitting uncertainties demands that the concepts of care and exclusion be approached as polythetic. Clearly, each concept's plural constituting dimensions are open-ended and flexible, amenable to revision and multiplication beyond the aspects highlighted by the people's histories narrated above. The more polythetic the concepts, the more readily they can find relevance in a wide variety of local and trans-local contexts. Finally, it is a central argument of this article that a polythetic approach focused on ways of relating, can help address crucial questions for policies and politics to apprehend multiple forms of social exclusion while contributing to transformations for justice and sustainability. Questions include:

What dimensions of caring ways of relating in assemblages, such as those manifesting in Asai's activism, offer fertile grounds for constituting agency to struggle for freedom from compounded exclusions? How do public policies and civil society strategies support such sociomaterial relations of care? How can policies and strategies help resist backlash by those who exclude others through caste, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, and technology?

In helping to constitute people's agency of struggling against exclusion, how do some social movements forge relations of care in which local concerns are kept central? How can policymakers move beyond standardised solutions to emulate the carefully situated support provided by such movements?

In building livelihoods and enacting resistance, excluded people produce ‘subaltern’ knowledge about and beyond dominant development paradigms of modernisation, like the Green Revolution. How can policies and civil society strategies promote such knowledge to help realise alternative possibilities for transformation towards justice and sustainability?

People's everyday histories do not respect modern siloes between areas of activity, or divides between nature and culture, social and material, and subjects and objects. For appreciating the sociomaterial hybridity of everyday life (White et al., 2016), and for supporting struggles to realise convivial sustainability (Arora et al., 2020), crucial may be conceptual frameworks that foreground politics of interweavings between divergent ways of relating and knowing. We hope to have contributed to developing one such framework.

Highlights

• People's agency to confront social exclusion relies on their relations with each other and with ecologies and technologies.

• Crucial in the assembling of people's agency are their sociomaterial relations of care, which intersect with relations of exclusion.

• Focusing on everyday politics of intersections between divergent ways of relating crucial for supporting sustainability transformations.

• Uncertainties in narratives of agency point to the importance of plural open-ended dimensions associated with each concept.