Inheriting Heat: Caste and the Injustice of Cooling

Let’s do a visualisation exercise. Pause for a few seconds and imagine yourself sitting in a cold, air-conditioned room, reading this. How does it feel?
Now, change the setting to a well-shaded public park. There’s a bench there—sit for a while and mindfully experience that too.
Now, if you had to choose between an AC and access to well-shaded green spaces—what would seem more desirable to you?

Cooling as a Choice or a Privilege?

Whatever the answer is, it likely depends on two things. First—and most obviously—whether you did the exercise with mindfulness. And second, your deeply rooted interactions with either comfort or helplessness.

Perhaps generations of experiencing comfort or discomfort shape how we understand our choices. One can choose, given their privileges; but for someone else, there may be no choice for the want of them.

For instance, both Prakash and Ramesh, who went to the same university, agreed that shaded green spaces were ideal for heat mitigation. But at a personal level, Ramesh saw them as restorative spaces and associated them with his romantic experiences with nature during childhood. Prakash, however—who comes from a Dalit community—saw ACs as a more realistic and accessible goal.

“Do I have the privilege to access and use that space freely and perpetually? ... For someone like me, what matters most is material support… Don't expect me to just plant trees and be satisfied… I have my own limitations … Real solutions must come from the state…

“And besides, there’s a reason why Dalits hate environmentalists,” Prakash might have smirked while saying this on the other end of the line.

Sites of Exclusion in Refuge

But at a more ground-level reality—something he felt every day while studying at Ambedkar University Delhi—Prakash found relief in the library or the IT Cell. These were limited spaces, accessible only because everyone naturally gravitated to areas where modern cooling worked. Many so-called chill spaces, on the other hand, weren’t socially accessible.

“You could only go where you felt comfortable. Some areas felt elite. I didn’t feel like I belonged.”

During extreme heat, in the past (when students could still protest), student bodies would challenge the administration—motivated by the assumption that home is, at the very least, a place of thermal comfort. They would demand that the university suspend classes or move them online.

However, for Prakash and many others, such demands felt insignificant and changed very little—if anything, they only made the crisis worse. At home, he didn’t have an AC or any better cooling infrastructure. The university, which could have been a refuge, became yet another site of exclusion.

Isn’t heat abstract—just as abstract as our minds when momentarily seethed by the sun on hot Delhi afternoons? Heat is perceived and understood quite differently by individuals and institutions. In the language of policy, it is often reductively defined as a lack of modern cooling or green infrastructure.

However, in Rambo’s life, it simply meant learning to endure.

“I don’t feel the heat that much… I don’t need an AC… I can survive with a fan... Besides, AC makes me a bit slow. Dull, even,” he continues.

“And to be honest, AC makes us sick… Maasi came to visit from the village recently. We went to India Gate and the Delhi Zoo. We booked a cab, but nobody rolled up the windows. Nobody asked for the AC. Not once.”

This made me think—where does this idea come from, that AC makes you sick? It’s not just something Rambo says. I’ve heard it back in my hometown, Nagina, too. Many people believe ACs aren’t good for health.

But maybe the real question is: who gets to say that, even in villages? And what do they own?

Often, the ones dismissing ACs are those with large plots of land—fields, orchards, spacious homes with better ventilation. Their homes are cooler not because of machines, but because of ownership. Rural areas also have less concrete, which naturally reduces heat. In such places, saying "we don’t need AC" becomes a symbol of rustic wisdom. But that wisdom is not universal—it’s rooted in material comfort.

So, when people from these villages migrate to urban areas, they carry this idea with them. The belief that AC makes you sick, that fans are enough, gets passed on like a cultural inheritance—an unscientific normalisation of sweat. And now imagine: who gets to move to cities? Or rather, who has no choice but to go?

Accepting discomfort and ignoring the possibility of a better quality of life is not just about habit. It is deeply entwined with caste.

The Inheritance of Discomfort

There seems to be a deeper reason why Rambo resists the idea of comfort. Perhaps it is generational. His family never had access to cooling—neither in the village nor in the city.

His story pushed me to rethink the framing of adaptation in urban climate discourse. Who adapts, and how? Who is allowed to stay cool?

In cities like Delhi, where even washrooms in some places are air-conditioned, this contrast becomes a stark indictment of caste inequality itself.

Now, outside the university, Rambo’s reality shifts starkly—from lectures to hard physical labour. His family runs a small clutch plate manufacturing unit: three rooms with no proper ventilation. In the summer, work slows down significantly.

“We take breaks every hour. The number of plates goes down, and the margin per unit is pretty low. But we have to keep going.”

He rents a room where he lives with three other family members. A section of the room serves as a kitchen.

“During summers, I feel the difference in my concentration. There’s fatigue, constant dehydration, and a sense of being pulled apart—by heat, by pressure, by the feeling that you can’t afford to stop.”

The cost isn’t just limited to bills or electricity—it lies in the time lost, the learning interrupted, the plates that could have been made. A constant negotiation between survival and ambition.

As climate inequality becomes embodied: hasn’t Prakash inherited heat, then? By choicelessly accepting discomfort and being denied a better quality of life.

Caste, Care, and the Climate extremes

However, Rambo is clear about what he’d rather invest in:

“I would want to spend my money on green spaces, not on an AC. But the city doesn’t let us. Open spaces around informal settlements are ignored—no trees, no shade. And soon, they become garbage dumps.”

In these spaces, the state’s absence is both literal and symbolic. Urban development rarely centres the cooling needs of the working poor—let alone the dignity of Dalit residents. While mainstream climate debates focus on rising sea levels, emissions, and global pledges, Rambo’s story reminds us that the everyday experience of heat is also about caste and care—or the lack of it. Without addressing this, it becomes yet another form of heat-based casteism, inflicted upon Dalits by universities and student leaders.

Structural heat cannot be addressed without listening to the perspectives of Dalit communities.

It’s about listening to the bodies that were forced to register endurance in shackles—beaten blue and black by casteism since time immemorial—until they learned it by heart and came to call tolerance by the name of endurance.