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.

An ethnography of everyday life in Shivaji Nagar, a predominantly Muslim slum locality in Mumbai, illustrates how its "Muslimness" complicates the residents' access to water, a commodified and politicised amenity. The struggles of local Muslims to access water also involve holding the state accountable through localised "mundane" politics at the periphery. The state's inability to address the differential access to water is challenged through locally elected political representatives. The paper also explores the role of "intermediaries" who are accused of being the "water mafia" by the state and the English media and argues that they play an important role in making the state accessible through acts of subversion and collaboration.

In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city’s upper-class residents, the city’s settlers have to consistently demand that their water come on “time” and with “pressure.” Taking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to the city’s infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water department. The outcomes of settlers’ efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly Muslim settlement draw water despite the state’s neglect, I conclude by pointing to the indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.

In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city’s upper-class residents, the city’s settlers have to consistently demand that their w ater come on “time” and with “pressure. ” T aking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to the city’s infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water department. The outcomes of settlers’ efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly Muslim settlement draw water despite the state’s neglect, I conclude by pointing to the indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.

Infrastructure has been a somewhat recent revelation in anthropology. Urban ethnographers have long analyzed cities from the ground up; now many are viewing them from the entrails out. This approach is on exacting display in Lisa Björkman's account of the flows and stoppages of water in Mumbai's M-East Ward. What, she asks, is the relationship between the marketization of water in an era of economic liberalization and the actually existing material networks and social processes of water distribution? And what kind of politics does this distribution produce? As Björkman explains early on, Mumbai does not have a water shortage, nor does its sewage department have insufficient funds; rather, its distribution is erratic in both rich and poor neighborhoods. Hers is not a simple story of the lawn mowering of a city by global investment capital, nor is it a celebration of urban informality or resistance politics in the face of planned, state-led modernity. Rather, drawing on Karl Polanyi's notion of embedded markets, Björkman seeks to address Mumbai's changing built space by deciphering water networks and markets for what they are and not viewing them as parables of something else. The central structures in Björkman's tale are the pipes—who controls them, who monitors them, where they go and at what elevation. This book shows how infrastructure itself becomes a site for politics, which Björkman reveals in her granular analysis of how water moves in the city. She describes pipe politics as " the new arenas of contestation " in the business, brokerage, secondary markets, and sociopolitical networks around water distribution vis-à-vis the project to remake Mumbai into a world-class city (3). Central to pipe politics is the question of land, a puzzle that Björkman identifies as a need to reconcile soaring land values with social projects such as infrastructure. This leads us to the book's metanarrative on the world-class city, specifically, how to square the imperative to attract global investment capital with the needs of the local citizenry. Björkman challenges the neat boundaries of this narrative by documenting the regimes of knowledge and authority that water inhabits and tracking the way flows are configured

Two decades ago, the rules governing the provision of piped municipal water supply in Mumbai became linked to the policy frameworks governing eligibility for a property titling scheme. This article outlines the ideological basis and practical implications of the shift, as well as the contradictions of the new regulatory regime. The article demonstrates how these contradictions have been mediated by the material and practical knowledge, embodied expertise, local authority and wide-ranging socio-political work of two sets of actors: municipal water engineers and a cast of characters known locally as 'plumbers'. The social, political and hydraulic imaginaries animating the work of 'plumbing' are bound up with a temporal and spatial imaginary distinctly at odds with the network-flow conception of hydraulic engineering within which the work of water supply planning and distribution in Mumbai is conceptualized, materialized and institutionalized. The hydraulic and legal contradictions of these clashing infrastructural idioms––of flow and event––have rendered the regulatory framework highly unstable. These contradictions eventually erupted in Mumbai's waterscape, leaving the city's water infrastructures suspended in a highly politicized state of limbo between dueling infrastructural imaginaries.

This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipal housing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context of liberalization‐era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary that posits the unplanned, illegal and informal ‘slum’ as the self‐evident conceptual counterpoint to a planned, formal, ‘world‐class’ city. The story of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political and highly unstable nature of this binary — and thus insists upon an account of the shifting political and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood's emergence as an illegal slum has been mediated by the liberalization‐era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood's water pipes — dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of the neighborhood as a discursive effect.