Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. xiv, 296 pp. (Illustrations.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6269-2.
A quick history of twentieth-century rights jurisprudence would show a generational transition from the state as a guarantor of civil and political rights (as laid down in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) to the state as provider of basic material benefits that enable the effective exercise of rights and freedoms. This means economic and social rights, which are essentially guarantees for provision voiced by the welfare state (as encoded, for instance, in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights). Nikhil Anand provides a granular view of urban life in regards to water supply through the exercise of the infrastructural powers of the state. All the while, he alerts us to the micropolitics of living in and with this second generation of rights—rights essentially voiced by the citizen-subject along the lines of “yeh dil maange more” (“my heart wants more”). Anand shows a spectrum of citizenship organized around the series of speech acts that either request or demand. This mode of politics is distinctly different from the mode of politics adopted by, for example, the Narmada Bachao Andolan that has been protesting the state’s ecological and economic judgment in building large dams and questioning the sovereign exercise of eminent domain (see, Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley, Oxford University Press, 1995).
Nikhil Anand is not pointing at the conscientious objector or civil libertarian as a form of argumentative liberal subject. He is pointing us to a mode of citizenship that grows out of a keen, indeed clever, apparatus of everyday negotiation and bargaining with the technopolitical wing of the state on the pivot of incremental demand that expresses the mundane experience of water scarcity. I want to highlight the implicit correspondence Anand is undertaking with Aihwa Ong’s idea of “graduated sovereignty” that helps explain the global neighbourhood of nation-states positioned differentially on the developmental ladder (Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke University Press, 1999). Anand highlights a potential extension of Ong’s argument of seeing power as calibrated, graduated into the realm of citizenship where patronage—a quelling of need/want—is essentially sought in calibrated means, sometimes more, sometimes less, just like the trickle of time-bound tap water. To access more water, better water, one has to tap into multiple points of infrastructural as well as political access.
While Anand provides us with a larger history of hydraulic infrastructure, ecological life, and the associated peripheralization of urban hinterlands that surround the city, I wish to focus on the picture of argumentative, water-claim-making citizenship that emerges in his ethnography. Mirroring Nancy Fraser’s early qualification of Habermas’s “deliberative rationality” (“Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 [May-June 2000]) to reflect the proliferation of such rationality in making claims on the state, Anand draws up a comment on the everyday life of distributive politics. Distribution takes on the direct class-based perspective of the state, as Anand points to acts of silence on the differential allocation to different forms of built environment in the city—essentially settlements (Anand avoids the word “slum”) and high-rises. Distribution, in Foucaldian terms, becomes a clean technocratic exercise of matching perceived need with allocation of a scarce resource. In this mathematical discrimination of the technocratic state, Anand points to the life of worry, anxiety, cajoling, bargaining, and argument. Essentially, the book gives us a picture of participatory urban politics, and also “infrapolitics” (James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, 1990). But such politics are enacted not as much by attacking the ethical and juridical judgment of the state, but by arguing with the mathematical rationality and calibrative exercises undertaken by the technocratic distributive state.
This mode of mundane argumentative and bargaining citizenship is a qualification of the “infrapolitics” of Scott and Chatterjee’s (2004) invocation of Gramsci’s civil/political society. Chatterjee famously suggests that in postcolonial nations, the life of organized civic action and engagement with state (civil society) exists separate from unorganized, spontaneous acts of collective resistance that often straddle the divide between legality and illegality. Anand moves away from Chatterjee’s dualist treatment of urban political methods (65–66) and provides a detailed account of how marginal citizens invoke both sides of the civil/political society divide in their struggle for survival (76–78). Anand provides an account of how these marginal communities come to make use of the power of big men like Yusufbhai, even as he avoids the analytic of patron-client relations. Anand speaks of the power of “unsettled friendships” (78) across class, through which “incremental” resource access and survival is made possible. As Anand points to the oscillation of the water-demanding citizen between legal and illegal networks of support and patronage, I noticed a powerful exposition of how the citizen negotiates the bodily need for water in the political strategy of incrementality and simultaneous use of multiple points of access. This is a desperate yet entrepreneurial citizen—a citizen who engages directly in the calculative, calibrative rationality internal to the logic of operation of the technocratic state. This mode of everyday politics seems akin to the precarity and cleverness of the stock-market broker who plays on an incremental modality, always keeping an eye on the health of the market while making astute decisions, and operating between the ups and downs of today and tomorrow.
Let me move on to a final comment about the public performance of bodily need, a realm of study usually concerned with health, medicine and sexuality—all realms that have given way to biopolitical regulatory intervention. In the case of urban delivery mechanisms of water, I see Anand showing us a series of mundane stories arising out of settler life in Mumbai, where citizens bring out the truth of thirst and perform it in the political field. In this case, thirst and bodily need emerge as a register of truth that citizens draw up into a public, argumentative shape of liberal subjectivity. The state is shaped in this particular iteration as the rationing agent that measures particular scarcities with particular perceptions of localized demand. And the subject rises to match the battlefield that features this particular face of the state with an appropriate face of bargaining, cajoling, and most importantly, playing the calculative technopolitical field with his/her own judgment on such calibrative rationality.
To conclude, Nikhil Anand makes a most significant contribution to the anthropology of the state. Additionally, I see Hydraulic City as a book that participates productively in the debate over whether or not, and to what extent, one can apply public sphere theory to the context of postcolonial nations. In his future scholarship, I would urge Anand to move forward his attention on mundane citizen-state arguments on the lines of incrementality and calibrative rationality to an argument with Marxist rationalities about how, why, and under what conditions, a social or bodily state is identified as need. Given the burgeoning interest in anthropology and cognate disciplines, on the aggrandizing stance of neoliberal state-capital combinations, and the associated rollback of welfare mechanisms the world over, I would urge Anand to comment on the proliferation of citizen-rationalities—ones that struggle to keep up with the changing priorities of the state as opposed to taking directly oppositional stances—sometimes on the lines of incrementality that he so vividly describes in this book.
Atreyee Majumder
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada