Fragments of Water in a Himalayan Town

Abstract

Narrativizing water conditions in hill settlements only through the optic of water scarcity hides more than it reveals. This piece has employed fragment as a trope to understand and read the different modes through which water intertwines with the quotidian, policy, and governance framework in Kalimpong, India. Here fragment has acted as a critique of a whole; whole as sameness, ubiquity, and undifferentiated spatiality. The first one looks into the question of water governance as unconventional, nonrepresentative, and partisan. The second one looks at citizens’ absence of effective claim making as one of the markers of the water question. The third fragment intrigues the distributive aspect of water that can never be essentialized into a coherent and immediately comprehensible form. The last fragment reads the different shades of water in a community at the city fringe that entangles historical relocation, parastatal powers, and intracommunity differences. Based on ethnographic and archival engagement, we explore studying a differentiated waterscape in place of looking at the town through the singular optic of water paucity. The study recommends coproduction as the sustainable recourse to the water problem in Kalimpong, albeit with caution.

从缺水角度去描述山区居民地的供水条件, 其揭示的信息少于其掩盖的信息。本文以“片段”为比喻, 旨在理解水与印度卡林朋(Kalimpong)地区的日常生活、政策和统治框架的各种作用模式。片段是对整体的批判, 而整体则拥有相同性、普遍性和无差别空间性。第一个片段认为, 水治理具有非常规性、非代表性和党派性。第二个片段将公民缺乏有效索赔作为水问题的一个标志。第三个片段意味着我们永远无法系统性地、简洁地去阐述水分配。最后一个片段解读了水在一个城市边缘社区的不同影响, 该社区涉及历史迁移、半官方权力和社区内部差异。基于人种学和档案研究, 我们没有从单一的缺水角度去研究城镇, 而是探索了差异化的水景。本文建议, 我们需要谨慎地合作探讨卡林朋水问题的可持续解决途径。

Llevar a la narrativa las condiciones hidrológicas de los asentamientos montañosos, meramente a través de la óptica de la escasez de agua, oculta más de lo que revela. Este escrito ha utilizado el fragmento a manera de tropo para entender y leer los diferentes modos a través de los cuales el agua se entrelaza con los marcos de lo cotidiano, lo político y la gobernanza en Kalimpong, India. Aquí, el fragmento ha actuado como la crítica de una totalidad; el todo como igualdad, ubicuidad y espacialidad no diferenciada. El primero explora la cuestión de la gobernanza del agua, como algo no convencional, no representativo y partidista. El segundo explora la ausencia de las reivindicaciones efectivas de los ciudadanos, como uno de los marcadores de la cuestión del agua. Al tercer fragmento le intriga el aspecto de la distribución del agua, que nunca puede configurar su esencia en una forma coherente y de inmediato comprensible. El último fragmento analiza los diversos grados del suministro de agua en una comunidad ubicada en el borde de la ciudad en donde concurren cuestiones de relocalización, los poderes paraestatales y las diferencias intracomunitarias. Con base en exploración etnográfica y archivista, abocamos el estudio de un paisaje hídrico diferenciado, en lugar de observar la ciudad a través de la óptica singular de la escasez de agua. El estudio permite recomendar la coproducción como el recurso sustentable al problema del agua en Kalimpong, aunque de manera cautelosa.

Key Words:

• coproduction
• fragment
• Global South
• Kalimpong
• water

关键词：:

• 合作
• 片段
• 发展中国家
• 卡林朋
• 水。

Palabras clave::

• agua
• coproducción
• fragmento
• Kalimpong
• Sur Global

Acknowledgments

We recognize the efforts of the two reviewers in evaluating this research. It greatly assisted us in refining our arguments. We are especially appreciative of Natasha Cornea, University of Birmingham, and Tina Harris, University of Amsterdam, for their much needed critical insights on this work. Thanks are also overdue to all the students who accompanied Swasti Vardhan Mishra in the field. Their vibrancy and zeal at the fringe of always lacking educational infrastructure are noteworthy. The faculty who joined Swasti Vardhan Mishra in interviewing and disentangling the enquiries and responses have somehow coproduced this—Subhash Bakuli, Hirak Mahata, Shubham Pramanick, and Shantanu Chakraborty. Amiya Gayen and Pritam Ghosh are always available to assist with cartographic and diagram-based questions and their resolution. Special thanks go to the Swasti Vardhan Mishra’s student (coresearcher and supervisor at times in the field) Dipti Tamang. Her research acumen in the field is way above par. The earlier version of this article was read at SMUS Conference Brazil 2022.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The Chhat festival is celebrated across Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (in India) and also by those who are from these states across the whole world. Being a festival that worships Sun God, it is the only one, people believe, that worships a “visible God.”

2 A front (morcha) of young (yuva) people from Bihar is a diaspora. They look after the cultural requirements of Biharis in Kalimpong.

3 By loyalty, we mean the attentiveness we must place on the field as we visit them for research. Unlike a “going and conquering” attitude, we have tried to immerse ourselves into knowledge transaction through dwelling by staying loyal to its multiple positions, locations, and relationalities.

4 Although we move away from totalizing scarcity, we are attentive and keen to learn from such attempts. For instance, Sullivan’s (2002) framing of a Water Poverty Index brings into consideration both the social and the physical factors for its computation. The consideration of social heterogeneity even within a family is exciting and has a directional impact.

5 Gorkhaland is the name given to “imaginative geographies” (Wenner 2013), where Nepali Gorkhas are the majority in an otherwise Bengali-speaking Indian state of West Bengal (Joshi 2014). The movement for carving out a separate state for Gorkhas was taken up between 1986 and 1988 (Chhetri 2021) by the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF). It waned with the creation of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council. The demand for a separate state was again ignited when one Bimal Gurung split with GNLF and formed the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) in 2007. In 2012, GJM agreed to give up their demands in lieu of an administrative body with some governing powers, the GTA (Joshi 2014).

6 Interview with Rajesh and Suresh Singh.

7 Interview with the Chairman of Kalimpong municipality.

8 Interview with Sandeep Jain, editor-in-chief of the Himalayan Times and a prominent citizen of Kalimpong.

9 Approximately US $0.25 million.

10 Sui (2004) referred to Goodchild, who is of the opinion that Tobler’s First Law must be the second law of geography as it deals with spatial dependency, which in itself is a second-order effect.

11 Interview with Rajesh and Suresh Singh.

12 The term water mafia holds interesting theoretical and practical traction in India. Ranganathan’s (2014) invoking of it while discussing water provisioning in Bangalore and the Kalimpong Health Officer’s invocation in a completely different city (in terms of topography and distance) highlights its pervasiveness.

13 Interview with Sarala Devi, Rajesh and Suresh Singh, Manohar Kumar, and Hariharan Singh.

14 Interview with Suraj Thapa. He said the value as an eight-decimal value.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Swasti Vardhan Mishra

SWASTI VARDHAN MISHRA is a Faculty at the Department of Geography, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata 700050, India. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interest lies in critical urban theories of the Global South, decolonization of knowledge, and critical cartography.

Subhadeep Mondal

SUBHADEEP MONDAL is a PhD Student at the Center for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067, India. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests lie in social geography and critical geographies.

Sk. Mafizul Haque

SK. MAFIZUL HAQUE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Calcutta, Calcutta 700 019, India. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests center around urban political ecology, earth observation technologies, and health.