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Confronting social exclusion is considered critical for grappling with poverty, livelihoods, inequality and participation in rural India. Studies highlight how exclusion is produced through hierarchical relations of caste, gender, class, religion, disability and ethnicity, while documenting people's agency to confront exclusions. However, the making of such agency through people's relations with ecologies and technologies is currently neglected. To address this neglect, we focus on different sociomaterial ways of relating – care and exclusion – which constitute people's agency. We argue that giving close attention to multiple ways of relating that coexist and interweave with each other, may be crucial for supporting grassroots transformations for justice and sustainability. To illustrate this ways-of-relating approach to agency, we rely on oral history narratives with three elderly people from rural Tamil Nadu, while building on …