Georgina Drew

Water Management in Post-colonial Darjeeling: The Promise and Limits of Decentralised Resource Provision

Abstract Water crises are spreading across the length of South Asia at an alarming rate, and some of the pockets of stress include unexpected locations such as Darjeeling, West Bengal, where rainfall is plentiful. This article explores the problems of post-colonial water management in the former British hill station to illuminate the prospects for integrated resource provision. We argue that to improve the scope of water distribution and provision, post-colonial townships such as Darjeeling need to acknowledge and address the multiple ways in which people get water from the centralised supply as well as the decentralised solutions that have arisen through community organisation in collectives known as samaj. Notably, the samaj have a distinct character based on histories of colonial neglect that prompted villages throughout the Darjeeling region to solve socioeconomic problems independently of centralised systems. The discussion overlaps the numerous resource pathways with the plethora of social and political organisations operating in Darjeeling to argue that municipalities would do well to harness the varied ways in which water flows through the township. Integrated within larger questions of sustainable development in India’s urbanising townships, the text offers a glimpse into the possibilities for more holistic and equitable water management.

Decolonising Indigenous Water ‘Rights’ in Australia: Flow, Difference, and the Limits of Law

This article addresses Indigenous Australian claims to water resources and how they inform and relate to current Australian law and contemporary legal thinking about future possibilities. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from historical records, previous ethnographic investigation with Indigenous Australians, current legal scholarship, and social anthropological theory. In doing so, it analyses Indigenous dependencies on water, the history of settler colonial orientations to water bodies, the evolution of settler colonial–Indigenous relations to natural resources, and the development of the Australian legal systems regulation of water. This provides foundations for a discussion of the limitations of settler colonial notions of property and the failure of settler colonial law to understand and incorporate the dynamism of Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the meaning and productive capacity of water flows within Indigenous cosmologies and sociocultural and ecological systems. Calling for a decolonial turn in legal approaches to Indigenous access and water resource determination, the authors explore the ways in which Australian law may need to ‘unthink’ settler colonial notions of resource ownership as a prerequisite for reformulating future water policy and planning. This reformulation relies on a more extensive legal philosophical engagement with the concept of ‘flow’, a concept that already exists in both water law and planning, but which has not been adequately theorised and enacted. A more comprehensive legal understanding of flow in the context of Indigenous understandings of, and claims to, water provides more sustainable and equitable legal and analytical foundations for managing future water resources issues. The article creates the space for a more culturally relevant notion of ‘Indigenous water rights’ and for new ways of honouring the interrelationship between water flows, meaning-making practices, and cultural continuity.

Transformation and Resistance on the Upper Ganga: The Ongoing Legacy of British Canal Irrigation

This article compares colonial and post-colonial transformations to the upper stretches of the River Ganga in north India. Exploring mixed sensitivities to the Gangas developmental and religious significance, the discussion draws on the historical record to compare the implementation and impacts of canal irrigation technologies under the British with contemporary policies to build hydroelectric dams on the sacred river. The article evaluates similarities between the two, while investigating the veracity of activist claims that the British were more sensitive than the independent Government of India to the demands of river devotees that the Ganga continue to flow unfettered past sites of cultural and religious significance.

Mountain Women, Dams, and the Gendered Dimensions of Environmental Protest in the Garhwal Himalaya

Abstract Mountain womens resistance to inequitable development practice manifests itself in several ways; one of the most visible ways is their campaigning with social movements. The efforts to save the Ganges (Ganga) River from hydroelectric dams in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, India, are a case in point. Within these movements, men often take leadership roles, while women from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds form the base of participation at meetings, assemblies, and rallies. Based on ethnographic research from 2007–2010, this article explores the particularities of womens engagements with dam opposition efforts, their motivations for activism, and the degree to which their concerns for environment and development receive attention. Although women make extensive contributions, movement leaders often do not adequately represent the specifics of their development concerns, and this impacts the ability of policy-makers to respond to womens demands. This article shows mountain womens locations on multiple social and geographic peripheries and argues for more gender sensitivity and critical reflection in social movement campaigns and decision-making processes as a prerequisite for expanding the possibilities of gender-inclusive sustainable development.

Contested modernities: place, subjectivity, and Himalayan dam infrastructures

The Himalaya are a f inal frontier for much of the world’s dam infrastructure. When set within seemingly remote border areas, these projects intersect with sociocultural landscapes in ways that reveal nuance in how the development agenda is accepted, adapted, resisted, or rejected. Focusing on a contested dam built along the Ganges – a river sacred to Hindus – in the Indian Himalaya, this chapter explores a diversity of responses to hydroelectric development alongside the mixed evaluations that interlocutors expressed about the projects of modernization and modernity. Analyzing these complexities, the chapter considers if the selective concession to dams in the Himalaya enable a better appreciation of the contested modernities that may be evident in the mountains that serve as Asia’s ‘water tower.’This introductory chapter lays out a roadmap of the book regarding its overarching themes, conceptual concerns, and individual chapter highlights. It attempts to initiate a trans-Himalayan study aimed at an ethnoculturally and ecologically coherent but geopolitically demarcated world region. Based on the borderland perspectives of the contributors, it deems the trans-Himalayan region a space of multiple state margins between which connectivity and disconnectivity concurrently take place. Concerning the diversity of trans-Himalayan livelihood, territoriality, and modernity, the chapter emphasizes the criticalness of ecological forces, which, along with human-induced global-local forces of change, reshape the multidimensional borderland engagements between different ethnic communities and nation-states in the greater Himalayan region, including the highlands of Southeast Asia and Southwest China.

The Cultural Politics of Development in an Indian Hydropower Conflict: An Exploration of ‘Fame-Seeking’ Activists and Movement-Abstaining Citizens

ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural politics of hydroelectric development produced by citizens and social movements. Focusing on contentious and competing discourses, it investigates the accusation that activists leading the fight against a series of dams proposed for the Indian Himalayan reaches of the River Ganga were motivated by their self-interested pursuit of name recognition. Through the study of these critiques—which emerged during an ethnographic research project spanning from 2008 to 2009—the article gives insight into an often-overlooked sociological phenomenon: the issue of why more people do not join dam opposition movements in contemporary India.