Nikhil Anand | University of Pennsylvania (original) (raw)

Books by Nikhil Anand

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

WhatsApp to send a his toric map of Mumbai har bor to Ganesh Nakhwa, a young fisher from a fish i... more WhatsApp to send a his toric map of Mumbai har bor to Ganesh Nakhwa, a young fisher from a fish ing fam ily in Karanja vil lage, in Uran. Ganesh was active in fisher move ments. Nikhil met him at the pro tests against the Ministry of Surface Transport's Sagarmala pro ject in Sep tem ber 2018. Years later, in the win ter of 2021, Ganesh was excited to receive the map. Responding in a WhatsApp mes sage, he replied, "Clearly seen our fish ing areas marked. That's incred i ble. My grand fa ther always told [us that] old nets were at Mazgaon basin till entry point." Ganesh was notic ing the fish ing stakes, vis i ble in fig ure 1, above Bombay Island and below Coronja. In focus ing on the nets in the Mazgaon basin, Ganesh was both remem ber ing his grand fa ther's har bor and draw ing atten tion to the absence of nets-their unthink abil ity-in the amphib i ous mixes that now com pose a matrix of port infra struc tures in Mumbai, includ ing the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and the Bombay Port Trust. The nets are no lon ger there. Initially, they were likely removed or banned with the con struc tion of port infra struc ture and its demands to host mas sive war and con tainer ships in the nineteenth and twen ti eth cen tu ries. This is an absence that has been maintained since-a pro cess that we describe, build ing on Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy's work, as evis cer a tion. 1 The map Nikhil gave to Ganesh was a recip ro cated gift. Previously, in 2018, Ganesh had given Nikhil a dif er ent map-a nav i ga tion chart of Mumbai-that had grounded their friend ship. His trawl ers' cap tains used this map to know not just where to fish but also where they may not go. That map describes how the sea has since been filled with oil fields and ship ping infra struc ture. Nikhil couldn't stop looking at this map for weeks after Ganesh shared it. He did not expect the sea to be as marked as it was, to be so full of exclu sions. The con struc tion of Mumbai's ports in the nineteenth and twen ti eth cen tu ries, the leas ing of the Bombay High of shore oil and gas plat forms in the late twen ti eth cen tury, and the devel op ment of the trans port cor ri dors of the Sagarmala pro ject in the twentyfirst cen tury have fur ther eviscerated the sea while mak ing it ame na ble to hosting largescale ships and con tainer traf c. Mumbai, the his to rian Gyan Prakash argues, has been made by a dou ble col o ni za tion: a mil i tary col o ni za tion of Indi ans by the Brit ish, and a col o ni za tion of nature-the sea in par tic u lar-by cul ture. 2 While Brit ish col o ni za tion ended in 1947, the ter res trial city's col o ni za tion of the sea con tin ues to this day. Scholars have shown how the doc trine of terra nullius-"land claimed by no one"-was key to the estab lish ment of set tler col o nies and the dis place ment of Indigenous pop u la tions in the Americas, Asia, and Australia. 3 Just like land, so with water; and not just in the New World, but also in many other worlds. The world's greatest colo nial cit ies-Mumbai, New York, Singapore, and oth ers-have long been made by declar ing their seas, wet lands, inter tidal regions, and riv ers use less, empty-claimed by no one. Not terra nullius, but aqua nullius. 4 This is a wide spread phe nom e non. In her work on Indigenous water rights in Australia, Indigenous legal scholar Virginia Marshall describes an ongo ing set of legal maneu vers by the Aus tra lian state to, on the one hand, not see prior uses of water bod ies and, on the other hand, to see land and water as dis tinct for ma tions in prop erty law, even though the real i ties are always

The Promise of Infrastructure, 2018

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics o... more From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.

In Hydraulic City, Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonst... more In Hydraulic City, Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai's settlements, Anand found that Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition—what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"—is incremental, intermittent, and reversible. It provides residents an important access point through which they can make demands on the state for other public services such as sanitation and education. Tying the ways Mumbai's poorer residents are seen by the state to their historic, political, and material relations with water pipes, the book highlights the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging in the city.

Papers by Nikhil Anand

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2024

Contemporary infrastructure projects in the sea reterritorialize port environments, continuously ... more Contemporary infrastructure projects in the sea reterritorialize port environments, continuously discarding historic occupants and coastal occupations in their wake. In this article the authors dwell on the ongoing histories through which fish and fishers are eviscerated in Mumbai's seas via the proliferation of massive infrastructural operations currently being staged by the Indian state. In so doing, they make two arguments. First, they show how infrastructures at sea are accretive forms that are simultaneously articulated at different time scales. New infrastructures currently being built in the sea in postcolonial India only intensify the expropriations of colonial projects that were staged in the sea. Second, urban fishers work not only at sea but also on the dry land of the city. As chances for making livelihoods at sea are steadily foreclosed, fishers are increasingly turning to their small parcels of land in the city, exploring how and if these might be made real estate to secure their futures.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

We look analytically and linguistically from South Asia, using the Hindustani/Urdu words mahaul, ... more We look analytically and linguistically from South Asia, using the Hindustani/Urdu words mahaul, mausam, and aab-o-hawa to articulate a framework of South Asian urban climates. We engage these critical concepts, first, as a heuristic to bring together concerns about political and ideological armatures, lived and embodied experiences, and heterogeneous materialities of the climate-and to consider how structural dimensions are already always imbued within local and embodied conditions, and vice versa. Second, and more generally, we are also interested in the affective dimensions of a broadened climate lexicon-and particularly how the cultural significance or usages of particular terms can support and thicken analytical explorations. 4 4 These terms from Urdu/Hindustani are not easily translatable to English. While we recognize that these terms are not used throughout South Asia, they nevertheless capture particular 'structures of feeling' we want to render about 3 The physical and discursive boundaries of South Asia, both external and internal, represent the fraught interaction of biophysical materiality with histories of colonialism, neo-colonial interventions, and geopolitical tensions at various scales. 2 A review of some of this literature is provided by Coelho and Sood (2021). For examples of scholarship offering comparative perspectives on urbanization in India see also the Economic and Political Weekly Review of Urban Affairs issues and Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan (2013). For broader perspectives on Asian cities see Bunnell and Goh (2018) and Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan (2017). Important collections that look comparatively at cities and architecture in South Asia are Anjaria and McFarlane (2016) and Siddiqi (2020) respectively.

City & Society, 2020

In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai—a new pr... more In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai—a new program to upgrade the city’s water infrastructure. Amongst several initiatives was a proposal to connect new settlements to water lines regulated by prepaid meters. In this paper I focus on the surprising and unexpected appearance of the prepaid water meter in Mumbai to make two arguments. First, I argue that based on the particular technopolitical history of Mumbai’s water infrastructure, the neoliberal technology that was the prepaid meter represented not a withdrawal, but an extension of state services in the city. Second, I argue for an attention to the accreted and relational politics produced by infrastructural assemblages. The politics of technical devices or infrastructure are not discrete and singular, nor are these contained by the meter. Instead, the political effects of the meter are plural, and emerge from the relations between the meter and the accreted materials, histories,...

Environment and Planning D, 2023

In this article, I describe Mumbai's sea as an "anthroposea"-a sea made with ongoing anthropogeni... more In this article, I describe Mumbai's sea as an "anthroposea"-a sea made with ongoing anthropogenic processes across landwaters-to draw attention to the ways in which it troubles both urban planning and the making of environmental futures. I focus on three moments in which Mumbai's more-than-human life now emerges in the anthroposea. First, I describe the surprising proliferations of lobsters, gulls, and fishers in a sewage outfall. Second, I draw attention to the city's flourishing flamingo population amidst industrial effluents in the city's industrial zone. Finally, the article floats towards a popular city beach where citizen scientists at Marine Life of Mumbai show the ways in which the city's phenomenal biodiversity is making homes in and with the city's plastic waste. I argue that these ongoing and dynamic relations between urban waste and morethan-human life make unstable and tenuous the modernist distinctions of nature/culture on which environmental and urban projects depend. The anthroposea does not easily permit the making of near futures. Instead, by crossing spatial scales and epistemological boundaries, the anthroposea holds the city and its citizens in the muddy materialities of an ongoing present; a present in which the vitalities of waste are intransigent, permanent, and generate life in the city's landwaters.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2022

In this essay, I focus on the remarkable process through which Mumbai's urban administration has ... more In this essay, I focus on the remarkable process through which Mumbai's urban administration has continued to release its sewage, largely untreated, into the Arabian Sea. I show how it does this by rendering sewage both legally and materially ambiguous. I urge an attention to the processes of legal and material ambiguation, through which 'slow violence' is unevenly administered in Mumbai. Building on the work of Jacqueline Best, I argue that ambiguity does not simply leave open improvised forms of technocratic administration; ambiguity also defers bureaucratic activity in particular domains, while permitting activity in others. Taken together, the municipal administration mobilizes ambiguity so as to evade rendering toxicity an actionable problem of urban living and distributed social vulnerability in the city. 'The Arabian Sea warned Mumbaikars last year. And right on cue, the warning comes yet again. Sending a strong reminder to the city to stop using its waters as an extended dumping ground, the Arabian Sea threw back garbage onto Marine Drive, extending down to Juhu and Gorai beach. The BMC [Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation] collected over 185,000 kgs of garbage over the weekend, working through the pouring rain and stench'. Conde Nast Traveller, 'Mumbai gets its annual reminder from the Arabian Sea' (

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2022

In this comparative and collaborative collection of essays we work through contemporary and histo... more In this comparative and collaborative collection of essays we work through contemporary and historical practices of governing urban waters in Philadelphia and Mumbai. Taken together, the essays in this collection argue that events of enduring harm visited upon racialized, marginalized citizens are produced through slow bureaucratic processes of aversion, ambiguation and ambivalence, perpetuated in and through regulatory regimes, water quality standards, legal discourses and everyday practices in the city. These practices entangle racialized and poorer populations in situations of durable and everyday harm and are central to the creation, maintenance and reproduction of vulnerable and disposable human and non-human life in the city.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2020

This paper builds on the work of Steven Jackson to theorise the breakdowns of hydraulic infrastru... more This paper builds on the work of Steven Jackson to theorise the breakdowns of hydraulic infrastructure not as exception, but as an ordinary condition of living with infrastructure. Rather than take breakdown to be an interruption in the life of infrastructures, it is suggested that breakdowns be read as an initial condition from which new infrastructures emerge through the labour of maintenance and repair. Drawing attention to the extraordinary labour of plumbers, municipal employees and engineers, the paper argues that the invisibilities of infrastructure are themselves contingent on the invisibilisation and subjugation of maintenance workers, who are placed beyond sight to regularly and constantly work to make water flow again.

City and Society, 2020

In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai-a new pr... more In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai-a new program to upgrade the city's water infrastructure. Amongst several initiatives was a proposal to connect new settlements to water lines regulated by prepaid meters. In this paper I focus on the surprising and unexpected appearance of the prepaid water meter in Mumbai to make two arguments. First, I argue that based on the particular technopolitical history of Mumbai's water infrastructure, the neoliberal technology that was the prepaid meter represented not a withdrawal, but an extension of state services in the city. Second, I argue for an attention to the accreted and relational politics produced by infrastructural assemblages. The politics of technical devices or infrastructure are not discrete and singular, nor are these contained by the meter. Instead, the political effects of the meter are plural, and emerge from the relations between the meter and the accreted materials, histories, and rationali-ties already embedded and at work in infrastructural systems.

In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages i... more In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not only a technology of politics, produced and managed by municipal water engineers and their subjects. Leakages, and the ignorances of leakages, are also enabled by the vital materiality of the city’s infrastructure. As engineers work hard to improvise resolutions to the leakages they can fix, and ignore the thousands of others they cannot, the processes of leakage always exceed the control of the city’s government. As such, the uncertain appearances of leakage in Mumbai not only provide the grounds for the work of the state. Leakages also constantly disrupt governmental projects in ways that make the water department vulnerable both to the claims of marginalized subjects and to new reform projects in the city.

Cultural Anthropology, 2011

In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day... more In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city’s upper-class residents, the city’s settlers have to consistently demand that their w ater come on “time” and with “pressure. ” T aking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to the city’s infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water department. The outcomes of settlers’ efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly Muslim settlement draw water despite the state’s neglect, I conclude by pointing to the indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.

Ethnography, Dec 2012

Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, pla... more Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn’t not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to claim less desirable water through the deliberate inaction of city engineers and technocrats, this article shows the iterative process through which abjection is made through tenuous and contentious infrastructural connections between the government and the governed.

In scholarly and popular texts, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban in... more In scholarly and popular texts, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban informal settlements in the twenty-first century. While such representations oscillate between tropes of accommodation and marginalization, they often obfuscate the compromised and historical successes of settler politics in the city. In this paper, the authors use an international urbanization conference as a starting point for exploring Mumbai settlers’ housing practices. They examine the processes through which emergent forms of inclusion have been conceptually unhinged from longstanding struggles against inequality. By examining the complex interplay of housing politics, social mobilization, and municipal policy in Mumbai, the paper argues for more careful attention to new regimes of governing that accompany aspirations for “inclusion” in the cities of the urban age.

Conservation and Society, Jan 1, 2010

This paper explores how NGOs, state agencies and activists par- ticipated in the preparation of I... more This paper explores how NGOs, state agencies and activists par- ticipated in the preparation of India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Ac- tion Plan (NBSAP). The study is based on three months of fieldwork in the summer of 2003, during which I conducted semi-structured interviews and re- viewed the documents used and produced in the planning process. While some critics view NGO involvement in state policy making with suspicion, others see it as a successful outcome of a long-standing demand for greater partici- pation in governance. I argue that the form and structure of the NBSAP process provided a limited, yet critical, space for activists. On one hand, activists used this space to make strong critiques of state conservation practices, and to promote inclusive conservation practices. On the other, they were continuously pressured to make compromises, because of their new responsibilities as plan makers and in order to increase the likelihood of ‘buy-in’ from the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). Rather than being seen as encompassed or ‘co-opted’ by state strategies of power, however, it is more useful to see activists and NGOs as engaging in tactical manoeuvres and practising an imperfect, yet necessary, form of politics. Conscious that they were participating in an unequal and temporally limited space, activists in NGOs sought to make this project of government as plural and fair as possible. Finally, I note that although the planning document was eventually rejected by the MoEF, the network that was initiated to create the plan may produce results that go beyond the NBSAP process itself.

Draft). nikhil. anand@ yale. edu, Jan 1, 2003

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

The Promise of Infrastructure, 2018

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2024

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

City & Society, 2020

Environment and Planning D, 2023

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2022

Economic and Political Weekly, 2020

City and Society, 2020

Cultural Anthropology, 2011

Ethnography, Dec 2012

Conservation and Society, Jan 1, 2010

Draft). nikhil. anand@ yale. edu, Jan 1, 2003

e-flux Architecture, 2019

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2018

As water crises become conditions of the everyday in Mumbai, in Flint, in Newark, California and ... more As water crises become conditions of the everyday in Mumbai, in Flint, in Newark, California and Cape Town, what does it mean to live with crisis? And what does crisis talk do? In this short essay, I make three brief points. First, that contemporary shortages of clean and sufficient urban water have less to do with the availability of water and more to do with the paradigms with which people imagine, design, distribute and use water infrastructure in everyday life. Second, that talk of the urban water crisis is not just produced by the inequality of distribution. Crisis talk produces inequality in the city. Finally, I wish to suggest that the urban water crisis demands we join studies of urban politics and bureaucracy with together with the study of technology and infrastructure. For it is through and with infrastructure that cities and citizens are made and unmade.

Nikhil Anand's contribution to the " Just Environments " series examines the making of urban ineq... more Nikhil Anand's contribution to the " Just Environments " series examines the making of urban inequality, focusing on water infrastructure as a key site for banal yet fundamentally political decision-making that neglects or harms poor citizens. In both Flint and Mumbai, environmental injustice is generated through bureaucratic routines that rarely take into account the humans they a!ect. Challenging these injustices, Anand argues, requires engaging in the " boring " technopolitics of infrastructure.

Between 2003 and 2009 the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) delegated a team of Worl... more Between 2003 and 2009 the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) delegated a team of World Bank–appointed management consultants, Castalia Advisors, to reform and “improve” the distribution regime in one ward of the city. This effort failed spectacularly in 2008 for a variety of reasons, not least because the consultants were unable to stabilize their measures of water during the water audit. The reform effort also ran into trouble when slum dwellers opposed the pilot project, both through their daily practices, and by insisting that water was a public good. Here, I draw attention the ways in which residents regularly demand water, as a public matter, in the offices of city councilors and public hydraulic engineers. Their demands describe the quotidian ways in which hydraulic publics are made and managed in the city.

Why an infrastructure toolbox? Infrastructure has long been a central conceptual tool—a productiv... more Why an infrastructure toolbox? Infrastructure has long been a central conceptual tool—a productive metaphor—for critical theory and the analysis of social life more broadly. We speak of making concrete arguments, those (like infrastructure) that seem to offer tangible evidence of their claims. But what happens when infrastructure is no longer a metaphor? What happens to theory-making and ethnographic practice when roads and water pipes, bridges and fiber-optic cables themselves are our objects of engagement? In part, we need new tools—tools that allow us to think infrastructure’s metaphorical capacities with its material forms, and to think those material forms along with their capacities to generate aspiration and expectation, deferral and abandonment.

Infrastructures accrete. They gather and crumble incrementally and slowly, over time, through la... more Infrastructures accrete. They gather and crumble incrementally and slowly, over time, through labor that is at once ideological and material. Infrastructures are seldom built de novo. They are innovated, installed, and brought into being on top of already existing infrastructures that both constrain and enable their form (Star 1999). In this brief essay, I highlight how infrastructures are unsteady accretions of non/human relations to make three points. First, as gatherings, infrastructures are brought into being out of a multiplicity of historical forms and technopolitical relations that, while bound together, seldom fully cohere. Second, as accretions that are formed slowly over time, infrastructures are made by and constitutive of diverse political rationalities, past and present. Finally, thinking of infrastructure as accretion draws our attention to how these are not smooth surfaces that perform as planned; instead they are flaky, falling-apart forms that constantly call out for projects of management, maintenance, and repair.

Cultural Anthropology Online, Nov 26, 2012

Jessica Lockrem and Adonia Lugo: Do you see an "anthropology of infrastructure" as a fruitful new... more Jessica Lockrem and Adonia Lugo: Do you see an "anthropology of infrastructure" as a fruitful new area of inquiry?

Anthropology News, 2006

... The Anthropology of Global Productions: Producing and Critiquing the Global. Hannah Appel,;Ni... more ... The Anthropology of Global Productions: Producing and Critiquing the Global. Hannah Appel,;Nikhil Anand,; Elif Babul,; Robert Samet,; Rania Sweis. Article first published online: 20 JAN 2011. DOI: 10.1525/an.2006.47.6.16. Issue. Anthropology News. ...

Anthropology News, 2006

... New Work on Environmental Science Friction. Jeremy Campbell,; Nikhil Anand,; Adam Henne,;Amel... more ... New Work on Environmental Science Friction. Jeremy Campbell,; Nikhil Anand,; Adam Henne,;Amelia Moore,; Shaila Seshia. Article first published online: 20 JAN 2011. DOI: 10.1525/an. 2006.47.6.20. Issue. Anthropology News. Volume 47, Issue 6, pages 20–21, September 2006 ...

This review forum stems from an author-meets-critics session on Austin Zeiderman’s Endangered Cit... more This review forum stems from an author-meets-critics session on Austin Zeiderman’s Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá and Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. The session was organized by Asher Ghertner and held at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston, MA. The forum includes reviews by Malini Ranganathan, Diane Davis, and AbdouMaliq Simone, with an introduction by Asher Ghertner and responses from the authors.

Read the entire collection of essays at: http://societyandspace.org/2017/11/28/endangered-city-by-austin-zeiderman-and-hydraulic-city-by-nikhil-anand-review-forum/

Amidst unmanageable flows of people, dramatic political transitions and a visibly channeled and p... more Amidst unmanageable flows of people, dramatic political transitions and a visibly channeled and polluted Bagmati river, the director of an urban NGO in Kathmandu wonders aloud: 'Can you please tell me what urban ecology means?' (p. 31). Taking this question seriously, Anne Rademacher's book Reigning the River is a wonderful urban ethnography exploring the narratives, meanings and river restoration projects that congealed around the Bagmati during Nepal's volatile political upheavals between 1997 and 2008.

How do people come to care for something they call the environment? To answer this question, Arun... more How do people come to care for something they call the environment? To answer this question, Arun Agrawal has written a historically and contextually rich study in which he pays attention both to the ways in which the environment is made as object of government, as well as the ways in which subjects are made by expanding regimes of governance.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2325548X.2016.1187511

As in many cities, in Mumbai we barely witness the passage of water from rain to sea via lakes, w... more As in many cities, in Mumbai we barely witness the passage of water from rain to sea via lakes, watersheds, pipes, pumps, pots, human and animal bodies, drains and sewers. Even as these hidden passages describe a unique social, chemical and political structure, a map of ourselves in the modern world. More than many of us, residents in the slums of Jogeshwari spend time waiting and hurrying around this substance, its leaks and sources. As part of an investigation into the social life of water in these areas, Ek Dozen Paani is the result of a collaborative project between youth of two community organizations- Aakansha Sewa Sangh and Agaaz, with CAMP and Nikhil Anand.

Initiated in 2008, we worked through questions of citizenship and distribution by looking at how residents form relationships with water and its infrastructures: including official water supply, alternative plumbing, ground water, tanker politics, and so on.
As the name of the project suggests, water has several narrative flows, multiple scales and notes attached. The group has been shooting on their own, bringing their footage into a collective pool, writing over images in analytical, diarisitic or essay styles. What has emerged are a series of writings, short films and image-vignettes from four different slum areas, each one shot by one group and written over by another, collaboratively authored and edited."