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Title: Dreams and Boundaries: An Ethnographic Exploration of Desire and Aspiration among Dalit Youth in a Caste-Segregated Village in Karnataka, India.

Abstract: This study explores how caste, gender, and religious norms produce and regulate the bodies, desires, and aspirations of Dalit youth in rural Karnataka, India, focusing on intimate partner choice as a key site of agency and social control. While caste scholarship often highlights spectacular violence and legal reform, less attention has been paid to the everyday practices through which hierarchy is re-produced, even as aspirations for autonomy are negotiated within families and communities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Madiga youth and parents in a caste-segregated village in Bellary district, the study engages anti-caste, feminist, and postcolonial scholarship to examine how intimate relationships become sites where power is negotiated. The study argues that autonomy is not simply denied but shaped through strategic navigation of moral and social structures that regulate bodies and desires. Educational and constitutional aspirations expand youth’s horizon of possibility yet remain embedded within hierarchies that both enable and constrain intimate choice. The study contributes to debates on caste, youth, and relational power in South Asia by offering an account of how structural inequality is reproduced and challenged through everyday intimate life.

RSVP: SocSci-PGR@sussex.ac.uk. 

By: Eve Wilcox
Last updated: Wednesday, 4 March 2026