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This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. We look analytically and linguistically from this region to engage the terms 'mahaul', 'mausam' and 'aab‐o‐hawa' as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory and embodied registers. Gathered together, the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam) and sociomaterial entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab‐o‐hawa). An expansive yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. This essay on South Asian urban climates provides an analytical frame based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms provide evidence of a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates—in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caste is as an under-recognized marker of environmental inequalities in urban India, what this article names as "environmental unfreedoms" for their fundamentally humanity- and dignity-robbing traits. It argues that a theoretical framework that is attentive to the racialization of labour and property under colonial and capitalist urban relations can reveal the making of environmental unfreedoms. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Bangalore/Bengaluru in southern India, the article shows, in particular, how the criminalizing language of "encroachment", rooted in colonial urban planning lexicon and used to justify the spatial disciplining, containment, and eviction of labouring Dalits today, has dire consequences for the making of environmental unfreedoms. In turn, ecological narratives have also provided legal grounds for caste-based slum evictions. The article concludes that a framework that weaves together analyses of caste, racialization, and environmental unfreedoms in the urban context can identify opportunities towards transnational solidarities across anticaste and antiracist struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this special issue attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, I reflect on the under-recognized role of caste and its allied notions of pollution and purity in the making of deeply inequitable, environmentally unjust, and splintered Indian cities. Published in 2001, Graham and Marvin's Splintering Urbanism addressed the fragmented and unequal nature of infrastructure networks in the wake of globalization in cities of the Global South. Of particular interest to scholars since then has been to trouble the historicity of the book's central thesis, demonstrating that postcolonial cities have always been splintered along the lines of race, class, and ethnicity via unequal infrastructural networks and segregated housing; as such, globalization is not the primary cause of inequality. Yet, the category of caste, intersecting with class, religion, and gender, still has not featured centrally in critical urban studies and urban political ecology. Drawing on long-term research on Bangalore (southern India), I sketch mutually reinforcing axes of a research agenda in urban political ecology, namely the interrogation of caste power in urban property, infrastructure, and labor regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]