Resistance against Domination in New Social Movements

When a group of people is denied dignity, economic security, or cultural recognition, they rarely stay silent forever. Across India, subordinate groups – Dalits, Adivasi communities, women, peasants, and regional minorities – have found in New Social Movements (NSMs) a powerful platform not just to protest, but to redefine who they are. Resistance in NSMs is not simply about opposing a policy or a ruler. It is about reclaiming identity. Collective identity becomes the language through which the marginalized speak back to power.

What makes NSMs different from older forms of resistance 🔗

Traditional social movements in India – peasant revolts, labour strikes, anti-colonial agitations – were primarily organized around economic grievances and class interests. Their targets were material: land, wages, rights. New Social Movements, by contrast, address issues of values, culture, subjectivity, and identity, often cutting across class lines entirely.

Sociologist Alberto Melucci argued that what holds participants together in a social movement – the “we” – cannot be reduced to pure economic logic. It always carries a dimension of meaning, belonging, and shared experience that goes beyond rational calculation. Social movements grow around relationships of new social identity, voluntarily conceived to empower members in the defense of that identity. This shift is at the heart of NSMs: the fight for recognition is inseparable from the fight against domination.

In India, this shift became visible from the 1970s onwards. As the state’s promises of development and social justice began to ring hollow for large sections of society, marginalized groups – women, peasants, tribal communities, Dalits – began launching their own independent movements. They were no longer waiting for mainstream political parties to represent them. They were articulating their own identities and demands.

Collective identity as a tool of resistance 🔗

Identity, in the context of NSMs, is not a passive label. It is actively constructed through mobilization and struggle. When subordinate groups come together to resist domination, the very act of coming together reshapes how they see themselves and how they are seen by others. The formation of a new collective identity signals a refusal to be defined by those in power.

Eyerman and Jamison observed that by articulating consciousness, social movements provide public spaces for generating new thoughts, activating new actors, and producing new ideas. Movements do not merely react to oppression – they generate new ways of understanding it, naming it, and challenging it. This cognitive and cultural work is what distinguishes NSMs from simple protests. They do not just demand change; they produce new knowledge about what is wrong and who has the right to say so.

In India’s specific social context, where domination operates through caste hierarchy, patriarchy, land dispossession, and cultural erasure, the emergence of new collective identities has taken many distinct forms. Each represents a different community asserting its right to exist on its own terms.

The Dalit Panthers: reclaiming identity against caste domination 🔗

One of the most dramatic examples of collective identity as resistance emerged in Maharashtra in 1972 with the formation of the Dalit Panthers. Founded by writers and activists including Namdeo Dhasal and J.V. Pawar, the movement arose in response to the continued caste-based oppression and economic marginalization of Scheduled Castes, despite India’s constitutional abolition of untouchability in 1950.

The name itself was an act of resistance. Inspired by the Black Panther Party in the United States, the Dalit Panthers challenged the narrative that independence had already been achieved by all Indians, declaring August 15 a “Black Independence Day.” This was a direct rejection of the dominant story of post-colonial progress – a story that had conveniently overlooked those still trapped at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.

Crucially, the Panthers transformed the very word “Dalit” itself. The term, meaning “broken” or “crushed” in Marathi, had long been a marker of subjugation. The Dalit Panthers reclaimed it as a symbol of collective identity, resistance, and pride, replacing the externally imposed labels like “Harijan” or “Scheduled Caste” with a term chosen from within the community. This was not just a semantic shift – it was a political one. To name oneself is to refuse the other’s power to define you.

The Panthers also broke new ideological ground by linking caste oppression with class exploitation, drawing on Ambedkar’s social theory alongside Marxist and Black Power frameworks. They built a radical collective identity that connected Dalit struggles to those of all oppressed people globally – one of the hallmarks of NSMs, which frequently draw on transnational solidarity to reinvigorate local resistance.

The Chipko Movement: ecology, livelihood, and women’s identity 🔗

A very different kind of identity-based resistance emerged in the hills of Uttarakhand in the 1970s. The Chipko Movement began when rural villagers, primarily women, used nonviolent methods – physically embracing trees to prevent loggers from felling them – to resist the commercial destruction of forests they depended on for survival.

What made Chipko significant beyond its immediate environmental outcome was what it said about identity. For Pahadi women in particular, the forest was not simply an economic resource. It was bound up with their roles as water-carriers, fuel-gatherers, and stewards of the local ecology. By leading the resistance, these women articulated a collective identity rooted in their relationship with the land – one that was under assault by state-backed commercial interests.

The movement cut across ethnic barriers, uniting Paharis and Bhotiyas who inhabited different altitudes but shared a common interest in protecting their forests. This coalition-building across difference is characteristic of NSMs: the collective identity that emerges is not inherited but actively constructed around shared experience of marginalization and a common vision of what is at stake.

Chipko’s most significant victory came when it succeeded in halting commercial logging in the Uttarakhand Himalayas, leading eventually to a 15-year ban on felling. But its wider legacy was the model it provided – of grassroots mobilization, women’s leadership, and ecological identity as a form of resistance – that inspired subsequent movements across India.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan: tribal and peasant identity against displacement 🔗

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) is perhaps India’s most powerful example of how NSMs articulate new collective identities in response to economic and cultural marginalization simultaneously. Spearheaded by native Adivasi communities, farmers, environmentalists, and human rights activists, the movement emerged in the 1980s to resist a series of large dam projects on the Narmada River, most notably the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

The dam’s construction threatened to displace over 250,000 people – mostly Adivasi and peasant communities whose entire way of life, culture, and livelihood was bound to the river valley. For these communities, the dam represented not just the loss of land but the erasure of identity – their language, spiritual practices, agricultural traditions, and community ties were all embedded in the land that would be submerged.

Led by Medha Patkar, the NBA refused to accept the state’s framing of the dam as inevitable “development.” Its slogans – Vikas Chahiye, Vinash Nahin! (Development wanted, not destruction) – articulated a counter-identity: communities who were not obstacles to progress, but people with their own vision of what development should mean. The movement combined peaceful protests, hunger strikes, legal battles, and mass awareness campaigns, drawing together coalitions of Dalits, Adivasis, women, environmentalists, and urban intellectuals – a broad collective identity built across difference.

The NBA also went beyond the local. Internationally, the movement built pressure on the World Bank, which had funded the project, and received the Right Livelihood Award in 1991. This transnational dimension reinforced the collective identity of the displaced as global subjects with rights – not merely citizens whose interests could be overridden by a national development agenda.

Regional identity and the Rajbanshi movement in North Bengal 🔗

Not all identity-based resistance in India takes the form of national movements. The Rajbanshi movement in North Bengal illustrates how regional and linguistic identity can become a platform for resistance against both cultural erasure and economic neglect. The Rajbanshis have organized against the gradual erosion of their cultural and linguistic identity and their economic marginalization, alleging that North Bengal has been economically neglected and politically dominated by a Kolkata-centred state administration.

What is notable here is how grassroots mobilization has rejuvenated an identity that was becoming marginalized – that of history, language, traditional social structure, and land rights. Young unemployed people, school dropouts, and educated youth have been drawn into a movement that gives their experience of economic exclusion a cultural name and a political direction. This is a recurring pattern in Indian NSMs: the coming together of economic marginalization and cultural assertion to produce new collective identities that resist domination on multiple fronts at once.

How grassroots mobilization articulates and rejuvenates identity 🔗

A critical insight from the sociology of NSMs is that collective identities are not simply pre-existing communities that decide to organize. They are produced through the process of mobilization itself. Emerging collective identities are shaped by ongoing mobilization and resistance against various forms of oppression – they evolve, are contested, and are continuously re-articulated in response to changing conditions.

This means that the act of resistance is itself generative. When Dalit women in a village refuse to perform menial caste labour, when Adivasi communities blockade a dam site, when Pahadi women encircle trees – these acts do not merely express a pre-formed identity. They create it. They give participants a new understanding of themselves as a collective, with shared grievances, shared dignity, and shared power.

NSMs in India typically begin at the grassroots level, engaging local communities and those people actually affected by an issue. This is why they can articulate identities with a specificity and authenticity that top-down political parties cannot replicate. The knowledge produced through lived experience of marginalization – of being pushed off land, denied access to public spaces, having one’s language dismissed, being told one’s culture is backward – becomes the foundation of a new collective self-understanding.

At the same time, NSMs do not simply celebrate existing identities. They rejuvenate them – rescuing them from the margins of dominant culture, giving them new contemporary meaning, and connecting them to broader struggles. The term “Dalit” went from a term of degradation to a badge of political solidarity. Adivasi identity went from being seen as primitive to being recognized as a model of ecological wisdom. This transformation of meaning is one of the most significant contributions of NSMs to Indian social life.

The limits and ongoing tensions of identity-based resistance 🔗

Identity-based resistance through NSMs is not without its contradictions. Even as movements articulate new identities and demand change, communities continue to compromise with structures of domination for their immediate livelihood security. Peasant movements have moved from radical to institutionalized forms over time, sometimes reproducing the very hierarchies they set out to challenge.

There is also the risk of co-optation – of movement agendas being absorbed by political parties or mainstream institutions in ways that dilute their radical content. The Dalit Panthers’ own history illustrates this: internal divisions and the pull of electoral politics fragmented the movement within a decade of its founding. The Panthers left a powerful political and cultural legacy in reshaping Dalit assertion and anti-caste resistance, but the organizational form itself could not be sustained.

These tensions do not invalidate the significance of NSMs as platforms of resistance. They point, rather, to the ongoing and unfinished nature of the struggle against domination. Identity is never fully secured, never completely beyond challenge. It must be continually defended, renegotiated, and reinvented – which is precisely what NSMs, at their best, enable marginalized communities to do.

What do you think? If collective identity is both a product of resistance and a tool for further resistance, does that mean domination can never fully succeed in silencing subordinate groups – or does it simply force resistance to find new forms? And in a country as diverse as India, can movements built around specific identities (caste, tribe, region, gender) ultimately coalesce into a broader challenge to structural inequality, or does that diversity itself become a source of fragmentation?

References

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