Seeking Begumpura: Making an Anti-Caste City Within Mumbai

Abstract

This thesis examines how Indian urbanism is structured by caste through planning, policy, and ritual practices that reproduce spatial hierarchies across the city. It shows how Hindu ritual extends beyond temples into streets, festivals, and temporary structures, forming a distributed system that stabilizes dominant social orders. In response, the thesis explores how counter-urban forms can emerge by reworking ritual as a spatial and political tool. It proposes an alternative urbanism through pilgrimage, anchored in the Buddhist 22 vows of conversion. Mapping a network of Buddha viharas and Dalit neighborhoods across Mumbai, the project traces collective movement beginning and culminating at Chaityabhoomi. By reframing ritual as design, the work renders the Dalit city visible, collapsing dispersed sites into a continuous spatial and symbolic network that reorganizes the city’s social and spatial logic, and opens pathways for more just and inclusive urban futures.