‘Water Taps’ and the Politics of Access and Control in a Caste Society: Empirical Evidences from Purulia District, West Bengal, India

• Main Author: Sarkar, Soma
• Other Authors: YSI Asia Convening 2019
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: H. : ĐHKT 2020
• Subjects: Water; Caste society; India; Politics
• Online Access: http://repository.vnu.edu.vn/handle/VNU_123/70983
• Institution: Vietnam National University, Hanoi

Struggle for water, in a caste-based society like India, is simultaneously a struggle for power wherein people (mostly women) negotiate the social cleavages clustering around the dynamics of water, gender and caste in their daily lives. But water, in a caste society, is not just a physical entity. Though in absolute space, water, has a boundary but at the relative and relational level, caste subjectivities and consciousness challenge these boundaries. This paper is an exploration of the “spatiality of water” in a caste society and the many registers through which water becomes both the producer and carrier of caste – its principles of discrimination, ordering of bodies vis-à-vis nature, ability to navigate newer technological artifacts such as the water tap into its extant system. In doing so, the paper problematises the ‘tap space’ in two ways: firstly, the spatial distribution of water taps itself vis-à-vis the social setting; and secondly, the ‘tap space’ becoming a space of discrimination which translates in to encountering water as a ground of contestations over dignity, justice, (caste) honour, democratic and civil rights, and as an object that enables acts of caste humiliation. The arguments are based on empirical evidences from Purulia District, West Bengal, which is one of the most backward districts in the country. The research draws insights from a political ecology framework and in addition to using GIS techniques to map the distribution of taps, it adopts a story-telling methodology to present multiple accounts of people’s experiences of water and tap spaces and its entangled nexus with caste.