India’s ‘nature writing’ has traditionally encompassed ecology, geography and sacrality, but it has often bypassed Dalit eco-literary traditions. This article discusses the eco-literary, by focusing on Dalits and their relationship to the earth. It perceives the earth as an important locus of Dalit individuation, carving them as a free, working community, prior to the bearing of burdens of caste, and thus revealing irreducible instances of rights and claims. Placing archives of Dalits and ecocriticism, novel and river, caste and commons in tandem with each other, the article reads a literary text, A River Called Titash, deeply, and delves into the layers of making of Dalit environments. Written by Adwaita Mallabarman, a poor Malo Dalit, and autobiographic in a wider sense, the novel weaves a complex narrative of nature, place, time and community at the turn of the twentieth century. It shows how Dalit environments comprise a unique set of analytic, where earth,