Overview

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.

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Reviews

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 neo-liberal 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. --Arjun Appadurai, author of <i>The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition</i>

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. -- Anke Schwarz * City * 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. -- Sneha Annavarapu * International Journal of Urban and Regional Research *

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. -- Sneha Annavarapu * International Journal of Urban and Regional Research * 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. -- Arjun Appadurai, author of * The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition * Hydraulic City provides a riveting account of what water pipes do to political assertion, social identity, and individual life-worlds in a charismatic metropolis. Mumbai is a crowded cityscape for urban research, but this work finds a fresh-washed window for looking at the production and contestation of the liberal city. Pellucid writing makes a sparkling stream of this book where erudition, eloquence, and empathy combine for wonderful results: a landmark contribution to social anthropology and South Asian studies. -- K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University

Hydraulic City is a thoughtful ethnography of how hopes, desires, and distributions of life are mediated by and accrete in the everyday infrastructures that surround us--systems that are perpetually falling apart and, much like our own lives, relations, and imaginaries, require constant upkeep and maintenance. Such a focus is beautifully reflected in the book's form. -- Shreyas Sreenath * Anthropology Book Forum * An important contribution towards understanding how infrastructure and society interface in complex and dynamic ways. . . . Anand's ability to draw from multiple bodies of scholarship and communicate the otherwise dense, multilayered and messy real-world precarity of citizenship and access with nuance and detail is impressive. The book helps refocus, re-scale and recontextualize water's inaccessibility as linked to intimate and dynamic facets of everyday life. -- Sameer H. Shah * Progress in Development Studies * Anand proficiently merges theories of infrastructure and citizenship to explain the uncertainty surrounding water in Mumbai. Thanks to his clear writing and evocative ethnographic story-telling, readers can gain a solid social and technical understanding of the leaking leviathan of Mumbai . . . A fantastic, highly enjoyable ethnography that will probably have a strong influence on debates about cities and the fluid (i.e. volatile) links between infrastructure and urban citizenship. -- Lukas Ley * City & Society * Deftly brings together historic and ethnographic narratives about the quest for water in the city of Mumbai and its long entanglements with the politics of citizenship. It is a work that nimbly shifts between scales and time, moving between historic narratives of installing the public water system and everyday experiences of gathering water. . . . Rife with fluidity and movement . . . This is a book that has a broad appeal that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. -- Chitra Venkataramani * Asian Journal of Social Science * 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. -- Nakul Mohan Heble * Economic and Political Weekly * 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. -- Tessa Farmer * Anthropological Quarterly * 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. -- Andrew Dawson * Journal of Asian and African Studies * Nikhil Anand makes a most significant contribution to the anthropology of the state. -- Atreyee Majumder * Pacific Affairs * 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. -- Anke Schwarz * City * 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. -- Sneha Annavarapu * International Journal of Urban and Regional Research *

Hydraulic City provides a riveting account of what water pipes do to political assertion, social identity, and individual life-worlds in a charismatic metropolis. Mumbai is a crowded cityscape for urban research, but this work finds a fresh-washed window for looking at the production and contestation of the liberal city. Pellucid writing makes a sparkling stream of this book where erudition, eloquence, and empathy combine for wonderful results: a landmark contribution to social anthropology and South Asian studies. -- K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University 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. -- Arjun Appadurai, author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition

Author Information

Nikhil Anand is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

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