water – The Duke Reader

Pipes, Plumbers, and Politicians in Mumbai

2 Apr 2022 Etienne RP1 Comment

**A review of Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai, Nikhil Anand, Duke University Press, 2017.**

Hydraulic City In his book Oriental Despotism, published in 1957, historian Karl Wittfogel introduced the notion of the hydraulic state as a social or government structure which maintains power and authority through exclusive control over access to water. He believed that Asian civilizations veered towards despotism because of the collective work needed for maintaining irrigation and flood-control systems. In Hydraulic City, anthropologist Nikhil Anand asks how water infrastructures and urban citizenship can be sustained in a country known for its messy democracy and bottom-up style of governance. The case of Mumbai’s water services exemplifies all that is wrong with Indian democracy: the failure to provide basic public services and carry out job-creating infrastructure projects; the inability to recover the costs of supplying water; and the politics of patronage and clientelist networks that tie impoverished residents to local power-brokers. And yet one is forced to acknowledge the resilience of the Indian system of governance in the face of chronic underinvestment and fledging democracy. The hydraulic city that emerges from this description is not a centralized formation of power, but rather a network or an assemblage of pipes, storage reservoirs, and valves, more or less controlled by a variety of residents, engineers, and administrators that move water in the city. Hydraulic City addresses the paradoxes of Indian cities where planned, improvised, intended and accidental mechanisms simultaneously shape the urban fabric. The” infrastructures of citizenship” that it describes combine the material infrastructure of leaking pipes and draining reservoirs, the market infrastructure that makes water demand meet supply, and the political economy of patronage relations around water provision.

A city built on water

Mumbai is a city built on water. The present-day city stretches on what was originally an archipelago of seven islands covered by marshlands and mangrove forests. Over the course of its history, embankments were built, hills were flattened, the rubble dumped into marsh, and land was reclaimed from the sea. Today, the capital of Maharashtra is the second-most populous city in the country after Delhi and the seventh-most populous city in the world with a population of roughly 20 million. But several times a year, the sea and the monsoon remind themselves to its inhabitants. Large parts of the city go under water, the trains stop, and so does Mumbai. Then comes a season with less rainfall, followed by a reduction in the supply of water to the metropolis, and life again comes to a standstill. The city is forced to keep to its basic water needs and control its more wasteful ways. With climate change and its accompanying cyclonic events, storm surges, and sea level rise, most of the city may be submerged in next hundred years. Or alternatively El Niño may change seasonal weather patterns and the monsoons might disappear, leaving the city to dry itself to death. The history of water provision in Mumbai is therefore a tale of scarcity amid plenty. As it grew in population and expanded geographically, the paucity of water was a major concern that the city faced. Before large reservoirs and piped supply schemes were undertaken, pious citizens from the Parsi and Gujarati communities constructed many tanks and wells for public good, and water flowed from the many springs, bore wells, and reservoirs. But, none of these early schemes of water provision and management could meet the needs of the citizens since there was a tremendous increase in water consumption. By the 1820s, Bombay had a population of more than 300,000, making it the world’s sixth largest city.

During the British Raj, colonial engineers used different technologies for different populations: while proper pipelines and reservoirs were installed in civil servants’ quarters and extended to wealthy native merchant communities, simple wells were dug out for indigenous masses. This discrimination was largely based on the belief that British colonial administrators and Indian subalterns had different natures, and therefore different needs. Nikhil Anand argues that this approach has not completely disappeared in independent India. That Bombay’s water infrastructure had its roots in the government of a colonial city continues to matter to this day. The delivery of basic service is often adjusted depending on the social status of concerned populations. Residents living in settlements, who account for 60 percent of the city’s total population, get far less water per day than upper-class residents in authorized buildings and residential areas. According to local engineers, there is more than enough water entering the city to meet the demands of every urban resident. And yet whole neighborhoods are regularly deprived of water, and their residents are dependent on a schedule of irregular water availability made by engineers and planners. Settlers are marginalized by city water rules that allocate them smaller pipes and water quotas. Water lines serving the settlements are allowed to remain leaky and go dry. The delivery of basic services is often adjusted depending on the social status of concerned populations. State agencies do not consider the poor as equal citizens. Settlements that are predominantly Muslim have the most severe water problems and have to draw water extensively through unauthorized connections. Those who do not obtain water from the legal network get it from the many bore wells that have been reactivated after decades of disuse, or from private trucks that bring water to low-income neighborhoods.

Scarcity amid plenty

As a result, the water infrastructure is full of contests and controversies. As Nikhil Anand remarks, “Every year, as the summer begins, for as long as I can remember, engineers and administrators have held press conferences to nervously announce the danger of failing monsoons and the likelihood of water cuts.” Engineers from the city’s water department are caught in a zero-sum game: to give one hydraulic zone more water is also to give another zone less. Installing pumps to boost water pressure uphill makes it more difficult for water to flow through the entire urban water system. Mumbai inhabitants are familiar with the sight of chaviwallas, municipal employees who turn street valves on and off and allow water to flow in a neighborhood for a limited time. Homes are equipped with water storage tanks sitting on the roof and connected to the water grid through a complex system of pipes. In Mumbai, wealthy and poor residents alike do not get individual household connections, but share their water connections with their neighbors. There are no individual meters or ways to measure water consumption with a certain degree of accuracy: as a result, residents are billed with water they did not consume, or escape payment and consider it normal. Residents often work with plumbers to redirect pipes without the permission of the water department. But for those who fall beyond the grid or receive irregular service from the public system, purchasing water as a private commodity is prohibitively expensive.

For Nikhil Anand, scarcity is not a given: “scarcity is made through discursive and material practices.” Discourses of scarcity efface and silence knowledge about the availability of other kinds of water in Mumbai. They also hide and make invisible the encroachment made by the city on water resources in its hinterland. The case for water scarcity is made by mobilizing numbers that are stabilized and received as objective facts, but that are based on fiction. Demand for water is vastly overestimated, adjusting to the fact that over a third to the city’s water leaks into the ground and through unauthorized connections, and supply does not take into account the vast resources in groundwater that the monsoon regularly replenishes. City engineers insist that subterranean water is polluted, contaminated, and dirty; but it is used by rich and poor alike through a complex system of pumps and wells (some of which are close to one hundred years old) that escape the control of the water administration. Emphasis on scarcity also permits the city’s water department to demand that more water be moved from proximate rural rivers and dam reservoirs to the city. Dams and river lakes as far as one hundred kilometers away collect and store water through the monsoon season and direct it into huge pipes to irrigate the city. The interests of the urban population are clearly prioritized over the life conditions of rural residents, who lack water to hydrate their fields and families during the dry season. Such imbalances are exacerbated in times of scarce rainfall. Droughts deprive farmers of their livelihood and uproot them from their lands, as they are forced to join the mass of migrants living in the city’s slums. In turn, city officials and nativist politicians clamp down on migration by making it extremely difficult for settlers who do not have the correct documents to establish legitimate water connections. Only in Mumbai do settlers require a panoply of documents to get a water connection, including a food ration card, as well as proof of habitation over the last twenty years. Through laws and polices, water is constituted as an entitlement that is “granted” by the city administration only when a person “belongs” to the city.

Governing through water

Hydraulic citizenship is, like water services, unequally distributed, intermittent, partial, and subject to constant negotiations. “Residents in Mumbai are only too aware of the ways that the promises of citizenship are only fitfully delivered, even to those who have all the necessary documents that establish their claims to the city.” They receive only a portion of all the promises and guarantees attached to citizenship. This is why legal water connections deliver more than water in Mumbai. Water bills and pipe connections demonstrate to various branches of the city government that their subjects are recognized citizens. They connect populations to particular places, and can be called upon by the courts to prove that settlers have lived in the structure with the knowledge of the state. Faced with the threat of evacuation, they offer protection from the periodic appearances of state bulldozers, officers, and their disciplinary actions. Proof of residence may include receipts, fines, voter identity cards, ration cards, bank account statements and, of course, water bills. Even if they get their daily water ration from the itinerant water truck or from unregulated bore wells, settlers also desire water through the public system because the documents it generates, printed on government stationary, allow them to claim and access other public urban services like housing, health, and education. To be recognized as formal residents, settlers mobilize personal relationships with city administrators, big men, and social workers, entering into networks of patronage, clientelism, and friendship. They also protest the living conditions to which they are submitted through liberal democratic means—voting, rallying, petitioning, and organizing protest marches in the city’s center. Concepts such as civil society, political life, and material infrastructure are insufficient to describe the complex assemblage of pipe circuits and social networks that hydraulic citizens navigate.

Ensuring that each individual household gets access to water is more than a matter of engineering: it is intrinsically linked to the political, social and cultural foundations of city life. Divided into different water supply zones, each neighborhood receives water for a fixed period of time. The intermittent water supply, its schedules and varying pressures, produces a particular time and tempo in the city. For settlers, water time is an active social event, requiring negotiations with the city’s engineers and councilors, and determining how gendered and classed identities are enacted. Women maintain their social status by using water at the right times of the day and in the right places. Washing clothes usually takes place outside in front of the door, while the floors in settlers’ homes are kept sparkling clean. Water time reproduces the gendered division of labor, requiring that someone will be at home and available to collect water during supply hours. Water also determines the organization of political life. Through water delivery and scarcity, hydraulic citizens assess the legitimacy of state officials and municipal institutions. In Mumbai, politicians eagerly compete for the political loyalties of their subjects through direct, known, and personal interventions. Local intermediaries and community leaders offer to fix people’s various problems by connecting them to the administrative bureaus and political patrons who can help them. Affiliation to a political party increases access to development projects, water lines, or lucrative city contracts. In exchange for this patronage, party workers are expected to mobilize their friends, neighbors, and associates whom they “helped” to support the party. But many citizens resent the reputation of corruption and cronyism that comes with party membership. Social movements and NGOs not affiliated with political parties are more respected by residents because of their independence from party machines.

Privatization schemes

The author’s fieldwork in Mumbai coincided with a time water privatization was discussed. Although Hydraulic City is not a case against privatization, it gives many arguments to explain why settlers and city engineers are attached to the public provision of water services. World Bank-supported water privatization projects in Delhi and Bangalore have met with fierce opposition from the population. Private firms, overwhelmed by the proliferation of illegal connections and inhibited by the reluctance of citizens to pay more, have been unable to find a financial equilibrium. In Mumbai, World Bank consultants and city officials were careful to frame their Water Distribution Improvement Project not as a privatization scheme, but as a “study” to help improve service delivery to the inhabitants. They tried to lure consumers with promises to provide not intermittent but continuous water supply, ending the punctuated time schedule of waiting for water. But as Nikhil Anand notes, no one aside from the management consultants were demanding 24/7 water supply. Instead, women in the settlements demand the right amount of water at the right time, and with the right pressure. This is a more modest demand, one that recognizes that for people of their class position, a scheduled water supply might be cheaper than one regulated by market tariffs. Residents were only too familiar with the problems of escalating rates that accompanied the privatization of electricity and were concerned about the same thing happening with water. Through documenting the Water Rights Campaign that local activists waged against the World Bank project, Nikhil Anand shows that discourses of rights, justice, and entitlements do not come from “outside” but are grounded in social and material infrastructures that legitimate people’s right to the city.

Straight From the Gut

16 Aug 202011 Sep 2020 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World, Kath Weston, Duke University Press, 2017.**

Although published in a book series high in theory octane, Kath Weston is not interested in theory. She prefers to tell stories. She is mischievous about it: in a field where theory is everywhere and academics have to live by their theoretical word, she plays with theory like a kitten plays with yarn. She wiggles it, unrolls it, shuffles it around, drags it across the floor, and turns it into a story. For stories is what she is interested in. Of course, as she herself acknowledges, “in an era when ‘post-‘ is all the rage and everyone reaches for a beyond,” she cannot ignore postmodernism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, new feminisms, the narrative shift, or the ontological turn. Or, being published by Duke University Press (and handpicked by its editor, Ken Wissoker), vibrant matter, animacies, new materialisms, the affective turn, everyday intimacies, experimental futures, global insecurities, and new ecologies (to quote book titles or series from the same press.) But she knows her strength lies in storytelling, not theory-making or abstract criticism. She realizes her book will be remembered for the stories she tells (or for the haunting book cover she selected), not for the theories she discusses or the concepts she forges. She uses references to the academic literature, especially in endnotes, to make clear that her book should not be considered as fiction or reportage, but as an attempt, as the subtitle puts it, to make “visceral sense of living in a high-tech ecologically damaged world.” She avoids ontological claims or conclusions: when she elaborates on animates and intimacies, she explores contemporary ways of living—and not ontology-based corrections of an error called modernity.

Bedtime stories

Animate Planet begins with a bedtime story. Its meaning is rather confusing: there is a before and an after, inanimate agents with capital letters (such as Alienation and Capital), birds and humans (such as in the picture on the book cover), lords and lieges, turtles and sea otters, glass castles and islands, forests and deserts, water and ice. The whole seems oddly familiar and yet alien, as in the liminal state of consciousness when bedtime stories are told, as the mind drifts into sleeping and imagination roams free. This is, as the author tells, modernity’s story, the dream in which we are caught and from which we may never awaken. It is a story of ecological destruction, resource depletion, rising sea levels, disappearing species, damaged habitats, and inevitable disaster. This initial folk tale is to be followed by many other stories, drawn from anthropological literature or from the author’s own research. Most stories adopt a language of crisis and catastrophe, of precariousness and destitution; some stories end with a more positive ring, as they develop ways to live in an increasingly inhabitable planet. They take us to places as diverse as northern India suffering from drought and water pollution, Japan living under the spell of Fukushima, and Navajo reserves marketing homeland products in the United States. Four main families of stories emerge, linked to the themes spelled out at the beginning of each chapter: food; energy; climate change; and water.

The story of food starts in a Californian school where pupils were mandated to wear an identification badge containing a radio frequency identification transmitter, or RFID. In the United States, RFID technology is widely used to track cattle in the agribusiness industry. It responds to the perceived need to trace animal products “from farm to fork” and to connect the consumer to the processed commodity, beyond species exploitation and labor alienation. We ask technologies to supply the intimate knowledge that people have long derived from direct contact and interactions. This “techno-intimacy” is especially relevant for the way we connect with food (we need “food stories” to consume a particular wine or dish), with animals (“Wir geben Fleisch ein Gesischt,” advertises a German farm producer) and with children (although the RFID badge project in the Californian school was finally abandoned.) Under the guise of biosecurity, US agencies track livestock and poultry to secure the food supply chain and prevent epidemics, even while farm inspection budgets are being cut and meatpacking regulations are being loosened. We grant nationality to animals (“US beef”) even while we deny it to undocumented immigrants. As the author records, “a cow in the United States might have as many as five different identification codes associated with it, each keyed to a different program.” Meanwhile, genetically modified organisms enter the food chain without any regulation or tracking. The techno-intimacies that are experimented on animals find their ways into social applications designed to track humans and monitor their behavior.

Japan’s radiation moms

Kath Weston was in Tokyo in March 2011 when the great earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima catastrophe took place. Every day brought news of fresh radioactive releases and monitoring radiation became part of daily life, with new benchmarks and units such as megabecquerels (MBq), millisieverts (mSv), or counts per minute (CPM). For every measurement that the government sponsored, activists associated with the small but growing antinuclear movement created one of their own. People with no particular technical training would take technology into their own hands and equip themselves with Geiger counters and other portable electronic devices. The Internet became the preferred medium for circulating the results of grassroots radiation monitoring that appeared in the form of crowdsourced radiation maps and databases. Meanwhile, “radiation moms” took the habit of taking their Geiger counter to the market and scanning their rice and seaweed before preparing dinner. For Kath Weston, the blurring of lines between bodies, technologies, and contaminated ecologies creates a “bio-intimacy” in which humans incorporate contaminating elements into their daily lives. Treating the body as something to be protected from an environment imagined as “out there” makes no sense: the surrounding milieu is already part of the body and reconfigures it through absorbed radiations, chemicals, and poisonous substances. The pollution of our environment creates unwanted intimacy with invisible matter that creeps into our cellular fabric and alters its physiology.

The chapter on climate change begins with the story of climate skeptics for whom “it doesn’t feel hotter these days.” People have always used their body in order to decode shifts in both wether and climate, and talking about the weather has always been a favorite topic of conversation. Trusting the body makes scientific sense: it is part of the “visceral” knowledge referred to in the book’s title. Bodies have long been integral to scientific inquiry: Marie and Pierre Curie exposed themselves to radium burns and took precise measurement of the lesions produced, and the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane wrote an essay “On Being One’s Own Rabbit” in which he recounted using his body for experiments. This being told, bodily sensations are a poor instrument for assessing climate change: perceptions are fleeting and subjective, and they can not monitor shifts that take place on a yearly basis or at the scale of decades, if not centuries. The important point is to link bodily observations with broader narratives generated by climate science: this way, body sensations can assume evidential status, and scientific evidence of climate change can make visceral sense and generate political engagement. Weather reports now use the notion of “felt temperature” or “bio-weather” to tell people what effects they might experience in their bodies. This kind of bio-intimacy with temperature, humidity, wind, and hydration is as important and no less scientific than objective measurement. Referring to the useful data generated by bird watchers who record migratory patterns, Kath Weston calls for a grassroots climate science that would mobilize the potential of citizen science and amateur observation to document an increasingly damaged planet.

Holy water

Water in some parts of India is so polluted that even birds reject tap water and drink only from the filtered water that is offered to them. Many rivers can only be described as “sewers”, and most household equip themselves with water filtration systems. Meanwhile, a water-and-architecture extravaganza called the Grand Venice has been built in the Greater Noida suburb of New Delhi. The real estate development project advertises “eco” features for visitors and residents, allowing them to cultivate a spiritual connection with water that is constitutive to Indian culture; but the gondola rides and cascade fountains come at the price of severe strain on water resources and energy consumption. Water from the tap in ordinary households comes laden with heavy minerals and is incompatible with life; while water in the Grand Venice shopping mall quenches people’s inherent need for spectacle and entertainment. Kath Weston reminds us that in the urban ghettoes of the United States, people have always opened fire hydrants in the streets in hot summer to play around; similarly, in monsoon regions like northern India, people rush outside as soon as rain comes and raise their faces to the sky to greet the first raindrops. The transformation of Indian rivers into sewer canals gives rise to scatological humor and lively public protests. Drawing on Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, she calls this drive for fun and merriment the “carnivalesque” and considers it fair play.

The destruction of the planet has been amply documented. But ecological consciousness doesn’t lead to political action. As Kath Weston asks, “What does it mean to know but not to grasp, to have realization end in a shrug?” Or, to put it differently, “Knowing what we know, why are we stuck?” Her answer is to substitute intellectual knowledge with a “visceral” sense of living. Some of our thoughts and feelings are deeply entrenched and rooted in our bodily existence. They do not come from the brain or from the heart, but “straight from the gut.” What is visceral is not only human: it also originates from the bacteria and germs that populate our digestive organs and that have a major influence on our metabolism. Viscera are an inter-species composite that forms what scientists describe as the microbiome and that makes us plural: from the perspective of our internal organs, we are multitude. But of course there are risks in advocating a visceral shift toward a more intimate engagement with the world that surrounds us: gut feelings may be wrong and lead us astray. We know what usually comes out from our bowels, and we don’t want to play with it the way we engage with thoughts and emotions. As an example, Kath Weston reminds us of the “new car smell” that car salesmen never failed to point out to convince potential buyers, notwithstanding the fact that the smell came from potentially carcinogenic chemicals such as adhesives and solvents that were used in the production process. Making visceral sense of the world may lead us to the same blunders that have caused our predicament.

The unrelenting power of narratives

Another way to affect behavior and to trigger a spiritual conversion is to tell stories. Narratives stay with us and linger in our memory for a longer time span than do theories. From the fairy tales of our childhood to the myths and legends that form the basis of whole civilizations, we live in a world shaped by stories in which we incidentally take part. Theories are interested in the general and seek to describe the specific in non-specific terms, whereas stories are time- and space-bound. Any theory mistakes the provincial for the universal; it reduces the yet unknown to a particular, provincial conception of things human. It denies the possibility that things could be otherwise than they are; that mutations of the possible might occur that we cannot grasp with our already established ways of thinking and knowing. A theorist already knows (everything). But what if the thing one attempts to think through in terms of this or that theory, in its own dynamic, in its own singular configuration, were such that it actually defies the theory used to explain it? By contrast, narratives start with the recognition that the new and the different is conceptually incommensurable with the already thought and known. They create an intimacy—recall the book’s bio- and techno-intimacies—that makes us familiar with the unknown, the unprecedented, the queer and alien. Even theories can be understood as narratives for the figures they summon, the rhythm they create, and the conclusions they reach. I, for one, read nonfiction books (and particularly books by Duke University Press) as bedtime stories. I am interested in the vistas they open to the world, their openness to the unfamiliar and the unexpected, their capacity to decenter and to displace well-established borders and categories. Theories I read and tend to forget; stories I recall and I revisit. This is why Kath Weston’s Animate Planet, with its stunning book cover and its tapestry of narratives, will linger with me.