Duke University Press Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai

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. Review "This book is a fine intervention in anthropology, geography and sociology, as it troubles not just conventional understandings of how urban fragmentation works but is also an example of engaging creatively with socio-material assemblages and processes governing everyday life in the city.  . . . This book provokes a broader scholarly imagination––one that is as empathetic as it is innovative." Author: Sneha Annavarapu Source: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research "Using a rich, empirically grounded approach, Anand makes a major contribution to the existing literature on water services, citizenship and difference. . . . An exceptionally good read that will appeal to a broad range of audiences, both specialist and non-specialist." Author: Anke Schwarz Source: City “Nikhil Anand makes a most significant contribution to the anthropology of the state.” Author: Atreyee Majumder Source: Pacific Affairs “ Hydraulic City is an outstanding work. It will be of considerable interest to scholars of South Asian societies in general, especially those concerned with matters of the development, reproduction and undermining of states.” Author: Andrew Dawson Source: Journal of Asian and African Studies "Timely, expansive, and thoroughly researched. . . . Undoubtedly an important text that will go on to have important afterlives in scholarship on South Asia, infrastructure, water, cities, and citizenship." Author: Tessa Farmer Source: Anthropological Quarterly "Insightful and deeply engaging for both an ethnographer as well as a lay person. . . . Brings in a fresh perspective into urban cultural anthropology of water and its users." Author: Nakul Mohan Heble Source: Economic & Political Weekly Review "This beautifully written book is a major contribution to the growing scholarship on infrastructure, materiality, and humanity in anthropology and adjacent fields. Its major argument, which is anchored in the idea of hydraulic citizenship, will be most valuable for scholars of neoliberal and postcolonial states, of the maximum cities of the poorer parts of the world, and of the entanglement of technology and sociality in human life." Author: Arjun Appadurai, author of Source: The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition From the Author Nikhil Anand is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. About the Author Nikhil Anand is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.