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Paper short abstract

By showcasing how diverse social groups in two rural-urban sites in India respond to everyday precarity, the paper argues that existing approaches and discourses for building resilient communities must address how structural inequality impedes the ability of some communities to adapt and cope.

Paper long abstract

By documenting how diverse social groups respond to drastic forms of agrarian change and urban precarity, this paper showcases how structural inequality (landlessness and unequal land ownership and caste based hierarchies) and patriarchal gendered norms enables some dominant communities to adapt better often at the cost of impeding the adaptive capacity of marginalized communities such as landless Dalit agricultural labour, seasonal and daily wage labour. We show that while dominant caste communities are better able to adapt to agrarian pressures by maintaining, building, and forging caste, kinship, economic, and political based dominance and associations, social, environmental, and economic constraints (debt, caste status, informal and precarious wage work, fragile social networks) limits the ability of the marginalized and precariously laboring communities to respond to everyday economic precarity.

This paper draws from the fieldwork conducted by the author in two rural-urban areas in the Patiala district of Punjab in India as part of her doctoral work, sites which have been experiencing drastic changes owing to it's stagnating agrarian economy, migration, and urbanization. By showcasing how diverse social groups in two rural-urban sites in India respond to everyday precarity, the paper, thus, argues that existing approaches and discourses for building resilient communities must address how structural inequality impedes the ability of some communities to adapt and cope.