Public Water and the Intimacy of Hydraulics

Here, I seek to make a contribution to the literature on publics, and to work that has drawn attention to the intimacy of material infrastructures in the city. See, for example, Ara Wilson, “The Infrastructure of Intimacy,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41 no. 2 (2016): 247–280; and Christina Schwenkel, “The Current Never Stops: Intimacies of Energy Infrastructure in Vietnam,” in The Promise of Infrastructure, eds. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel (Duke University Press, 2018), 103–127.

Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (MIT press, 1991 {1962}).

Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy,” Social text 25/26 (1990): 56–80; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2011).

Catherine Fennell, Last project standing: Civics and sympathy in post-welfare Chicago (University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Francis Cody, “Publics and politics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 37–52.

Michael Warner, “Publics and counterpublics,” Public culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90.

Brian Larkin, “The politics and poetics of infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.

Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–391; Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (MIT Press, 2005).

Noortje Marres, Material Participation: Technology, The Environment and Everyday Publics (Springer, 2016).

In part for this reason, states have long sought to manage publics by managing access to and relations with water. See Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1959); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford University Press, 1992).

Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.”

Key texts that more fully develop the relation between intimacy and bureaucracy include Elif M. Babül, Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2017); Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A special issue,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 281–288; Wilson, 2016.

See Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (MIT Press, 2003); Patrick D. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (Verso, 2003).

Babul, Bureaucratic Intimacies.

Berlant, “Intimacy,” 283, emphasis added.

In a more recent piece Berlant also argues that “the repair of broken infrastructure is… necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself.” Lauren Berlant, “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393–419. Intimate relations, here mobilized in moments of breakdown, and are a mode of praxis that intervene in, and remake publics and infrastructures in everyday life.

Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2017).

Julia Elyachar, “Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empowerment in Cairo,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 3 (2010): 452–464.

By this, I mean that Salim’s visit to the engineer’s office revealed the power he wielded as the councilor’s son. Here his gender and his position as the councilor’s son was neither incidental to his authority nor to the modes in which he was able to address city government. It was because he was the councilor’s son (and not daughter or father) that he was received by the city engineer. As her son, he was seen to be the legitimate bearer of her offices. While the rules of political offices had been recently altered to ensure that more women sat in the state and city legislatures, men like Salim frequently found ways to insert themselves into political offices all the same. In the previous city election, the electoral constituency of Premnagar had been declared as reserved for women candidates. In the election that ensued, Salim’s mother, as the Congress party candidate, had defeated the wives of many powerful politicians in the area. Yet, if the election conferred her a significant degree of political power, she also delegated some of this power to Salim, who travelled with the privileges and responsibilities of her position.

In her work with water engineers in Karen Coelho has demonstrated how engineers and settlers (also called slum dwellers) both use the English term “public” to refer to the urban poor that are located at the margins of the state, and subject to erratic services and also, consequently, political patronage. Karen Coelho, “Unstating the ‘Public’: An Ethnography of Reform in an Urban Water Utility in South India,” in The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development, eds. David Lewis and David Mosse (Pluto Press, 2005), 171–195. Following Coelho, I find the residents in Mumbai also appeared as a public in engineer and councilor offices, particularly to redress complains. As a public, they had a certain set of expectations of what (and who) government should be for. Juxtaposed against the bourgeois public sphere posited by Habermas which is located beyond, and distinct from the state and state practice, the emic category of the public that gathers in Indian cities is mobilized to make normative claims on state practices. When settlers or engineers would insist that water was of and for ‘the public’, they were insisting that it was the primarily responsibility of the government to fairly manage and distribute water as a public good. Publics here were those that had access to and were formed by claims to public water in the city.

Anand, Hydraulic City.

Michael Herzfeld defines cultural intimacy as “the recog­nition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality, the familiarity with the bases of power that may at one moment assure the disenfranchised a degree of creative irreverence and at the next moment reinforce the effectiveness of intimidation.” Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (Routledge, 1997), 3, emphasis added.

See Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1999); Suzanne Brenner, “Private Moralities in the Public Sphere: Democratization, Islam, and Gender in Indonesia,” American Anthropologist 113, no. 3 (2011): 478–490.

Berlant, “Intimacy,” 282.

Wilson, “The Infrastructure of Intimacy,” 5.

The Promise of Infrastructure, eds. Anand, Gupta, and Appel.

See Andrew Barry, Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline (John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Tess Lea, “What has water got to do with it? Indigenous public housing and Australian settler-colonial relations,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 4 (2015): 375–386.

Anand, Hydraulic City.

Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, eds. Tarleton GIllespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (MIT Press, 2014), 221–239.

Marres, Material Participation, 47.