What constitutes situations of marginality for different groups or individuals situated variously in the Indian social structure? What do their articulations of marginality tell us about ourselves and others, our idealised versions of them? Such questions and concerns have repeatedly been posed in the literature on marginality since the time it came into vogue in the early decades of the 20th century. Given the more globalized, post- colonial world, which marginals in our society inhabit, any interrogation into marginalities and marginalization in India warrants a reassessment of the analytical and historical category of marginality itself, while raising critical questions about the nature of social power and its linkages with structural and cultural processes. The sense of loss of certainty of identities caused by the process of globalization has ironically led to the consolidation of group identity visible not only in India but also elsewhere. The marginality trope does reveal to us the problematic character of Indian modernity, of how the supposed triumphalism of modernity in India, is rudely violated by increasing marginalization in our society.While highlighting the practices of marginalizing of hitherto low ranked groups, I would like to interrogate how the state, local bureaucracies, justice delivering local institutions are implicated in arenas of contestations in spaces, writings, speech acts.I would like to argue that a more grounded notion of justice critical to sustainable, integrated societies is rendered possible when struggles among the oppressed castes, seeking justice, is imagined by groups not from a universalist or transcendental Kantian or Rawlsian positions but one that emerges from interactive, relational and agonistic Bourdieusian-like fields that are historically saturated with meanings.
