Indulata Prasad

Indulata Prasad is an Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Following an early career in journalism, Prasad turned to the social sciences to examine women’s activism around land rights in South Asia and received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin in 2016. As an interdisciplinary feminist and anti-caste scholar of social change, Prasad continues to focus on social activism, political economies, access to ecological resources, and the risks of violence, disease, or displacement experienced by marginalized groups due to their class, caste, or gender positions in India and the South Asian diaspora.

Her first monograph — Feminist and Anti-caste Activism in the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Rural Bihar: “We Achieved Great Feats!” (Routledge 2026) — is a comprehensive study of a little-known social movement of the 1970s-1980s that resulted in Dalits, including women, securing land ownership in India. Dalit activism and gaining control of land helped unravel an institution of agrestic slavery and alter social hierarchies in southern Bihar. 

While conducting extensive fieldwork in Bihar, Prasad realized that standard ethnographic methods of survey and interviews were inappropriate as her formerly enslaved elderly interlocutors had been forbidden from learning to read and write and were reluctant to talk to non-Dalits. She therefore adopted cultural geography’s social mapping method by asking Dalit women to draw maps of their village and social spaces. The resulting paper, “Caste-ing Space: Mapping the Dynamics of Untouchability in Rural Bihar, India,” was awarded the Bluestone Rising Scholar Prize in 2021. Prasad also incorporated Dalit women’s protest chants and songs in “Towards Dalit Ecologies” for a special issue of Environment and Society, where she joined other scholars seeking to index the dual processes of racialization and systemic ecological dispossessions experienced by global Black populations, including Dalits racialized as Black. 

Community-engaged collaborative research undergirds Prasad’s ongoing scholarship. Because Dalit histories, experiences, and ecological or agricultural expertise are so poorly documented, in 2018, she began consulting with land activists about co-creating an interactive digital archive for marginalized communities in rural Bihar. In collaboration with Nancy Godoy, Director of the ASU Community Driven Archives program, and local communities in Bihar, Prasad developed workshops to train Dalit and Indigenous youths to record elders’ oral histories and songs about their participation in social movements. The resulting Youth-Community Driven Archive (Y-CDA) is expected to include redress gaps in education and increase youth consciousness of community histories, bridge the urban-rural digital divide, and improve intergenerational relationships. 

The Y-CDA constitutes a methodological innovation that is already generating new avenues of research. One entails mapping the social and ecological results of the government’s efforts to digitize land records in Bihar. Another examines ongoing Dalit and Indigenous mobilizations around the 2006 Forest Rights Act and its implications for how experiences of ecological vulnerability are shaped by gender and caste-based discrimination in rural India. Prasad is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled The Memory of Resistance: Articulating Possibility among Dalit and Adivasi Youths in Environmental Activism in India Today, based on this research.