Fragments of Water in a Himalayan Town

Abstract

Narrativizing water conditions in hill settlements only through the optic of water scarcity hides more than it reveals. This piece has employed fragment as a trope to understand and read the different modes through which water intertwines with the quotidian, policy, and governance framework in Kalimpong, India. Here fragment has acted as a critique of a whole; whole as sameness, ubiquity, and undifferentiated spatiality. The first one looks into the question of water governance as unconventional, nonrepresentative, and partisan. The second one looks at citizens’ absence of effective claim making as one of the markers of the water question. The third fragment intrigues the distributive aspect of water that can never be essentialized into a coherent and immediately comprehensible form. The last fragment reads the different shades of water in a community at the city fringe that entangles historical relocation, parastatal powers, and intracommunity differences. Based on ethnographic and archival engagement, we explore studying a differentiated waterscape in place of looking at the town through the singular optic of water paucity. The study recommends coproduction as the sustainable recourse to the water problem in Kalimpong, albeit with caution.