Geontopower as a feminist analytic: an interdisciplinary triangulation of women,water and feminist politics in India

Abstract

In this article, I theorise the presence of a contemporary Indian and feminist subaltern consciousness that counters infrastructural striations of female subjecthood. Subaltern Studies scholar Partha Chatterjee notes that India's decentralised distribution of natural resources resulted in a politics of governmentality that slowly erased the twentieth-century Indian peasantry's insurgent consciousness. Chatterjee's observation suggests the need to unpack infrastructural-environmental-ontological constellations in rural India to assess their impact on subaltern agency and politics. I examine the biopolitical indices of this constellation using case studies of gender participatory water management initiatives to assess the impact of water privatisation on rural Hindu women's relationship to water infrastructure. During this discussion, the shortcomings of biopower as a parameterisation of subaltern oppression become highlighted and Elizabeth Povinelli's concept of geontopower is offered as a new materialist analytic through which to better clarify women's conditions under neoliberal water infrastructures and resist the latters' regimes.. Ultimately, I offer geontopower as a conceptual tool to argue that a form of contemporary subaltern insurgent consciousness is still present in India. The latter half of this article explores performative constructions of this insurgent consciousness through literary drama. I read Dalit playwright Vinodini's street play Daaham (2002) as a work that points to insurgent consciousness through the material confluences of water, the human body and the affective infrastructure of local wells.

In a 2012 essay titled ‘After Subaltern Studies’, Partha Chatterjee writes that India's subaltern ‘mass political subject’ has disappeared against the country's twenty-first-century national development efforts (2012: 46). The term subaltern describes a marginalised state of being that knows itself as in subjection to and as subject of a geographic and historical combination of ideological and coercive forces (Gidwani and Kumar, 2019: 144). In the aftermath of India's decolonisation, the notion of the subaltern as a mass-political subject arose from the united political consciousness of a rural peasantry that struggled against exploitative landlord gentries for rights and state power. However, contemporary politics and economic liberalisation have displaced the figure of the rebel-peasant and disrupted the cohesiveness and spatial dynamics that marked Subaltern Studies’ understanding of the Indian subaltern collective. Chatterjee consequently suggests that fresh projects and critical frameworks are needed to identify changing and emerging forms of subalternity at the risk of losing sight of a subaltern political consciousness against the politico-economic workings of the present moment.

In this article, I posit cultural anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli's concept of geontopower as one such fresh critical framework given its potential to illuminate developing forms of political consciousness amongst feminist subaltern groups, which I consider within the context of gender participatory water management (PWM) in India. Since the turn of the century, India's goals of increasing gender welfare and equity have been partially intertwined with its goal of developing sustainable water infrastructure through gender PWM projects. On the one hand, these initiatives have grown rural and urban women's interest in water governance as a method of strengthening their political agency at local and national scales (Paul, 2019). On the other hand, while privatised and national water policies and programmes have articulated gender-sensitive objectives to water governance and management, feminist water studies research notes that gender participatory interventions often hinge on a ‘segregated and apolitical mention of gender and/or caste concerns which, when translated into action, have often reinforced existing inequities’ (Joshi, 2011: 56). ¹ Many gender PWM projects problematically rely on Indian gender norms that identify women as household water gathers and therefore assume women's interest in and ability to manage communal water infrastructures, including spigots and taps. The naturalised gendered nature of water work thus not only functions in favour of state goals for the development of low-cost, long-term water infrastructure management, but it also reveals women's participation in these projects as a supervised extension of their traditional responsibilities within the private domain. In this way, tokenistic gender inclusion in PWM draws the parameters of women's agency and political empowerment in water discourse and management. Ultimately, such PWM projects reflect late liberalism's control of the relation between women and water in efforts to ensure the status quo. ²

Such a controlled relation suggests geontopower to be one of India's late liberal strategies of governmentality. Povinelli's concept of geontopower describes the ability to adjudicate what counts as Life and Nonlife in the social sphere. Practised by all human governance systems, geontopower is unaffiliated with any specific ideology or society, yet under late liberalism adjudication becomes a mode of political policing, since different categorisations of Life and Nonlife will enable or disable the emergence of certain political spaces and consciousnesses. This article reveals how late liberal geontopower manifested in gendered PWM both inhibits and counterintuitively furthers a feminist subaltern political consciousness by controlling the ways in which subaltern – lower-class, lower-caste and Dalit – women (Life) relate to water (Nonlife). My focus on geontopower encourages women's studies within India and beyond to engage Povinelli's theory as a supplemental lens to feminist thought working in the overlap of women's and gender studies and political ecology. I begin the article by elaborating on geontopower's presence within rural PWM projects and its obstruction of women's political subjectivity. I then present how late liberalism's use of geontopower in water management unwittingly creates a space in which a feminist, subaltern political subjecthood can coalesce and emerge. The latter half of the article performs an interdisciplinary pivot and offers a fictional case study of this space by analysing Dalit feminist playwright Vinodini's (2005) street play Daaham/Thirst. Daaham stages a group of Dalit women's struggles to ensure their rural community's access to local wells in the face of geontopolitical water management rooted in gender and caste discrimination. ³ Reading the play against the first half of the article, I illustrate how Daaham constellates Life and Nonlife in a reframing of geontopower, identifying a contemporary feminist subaltern political consciousness within this relation.

Geontopower and gender politics

Chatterjee's observation of the subaltern's disappearance as a political subject foregrounds the workings of late liberal geontopower. Key to this disappearance is a change in how subaltern groups have historically interacted with modalities of enforced order. Whereas power once took the form of landlord gentries’ forceful attempts to quell peasant rebellions, the twenty-first century saw power emerge in the more nuanced form of public utilities distributing Nonlife. ⁴ As Chatterjee points out, ‘the activities of the government have penetrated deep into the everyday lives of rural people and affect matters like the supply of water to their fields or electricity to their homes’ (2012: 47). A crucial element in the structure of twentieth-century Indian subaltern ‘rebel consciousness’ was in the ‘location of the state and ruling authorities outside the bounds of the peasant community’ (Chatterjee, 2012: 46). However, in its cross-cutting of private domains, utility supply-and-demand brings coercive powers directly into households, smudging the borders that originally characterised the structure of the subaltern collective and exerting control by organising and dictating Life–Nonlife relations.

While such dictation might present itself as being in the service of development and poverty alleviation, it ultimately organises Life and Nonlife categories in a manner that nullifies the political subjectivity of subaltern groups. For example, during a series of neoliberal water reforms that took place in select Indian states from 1998 to 2005, authoritative powers managed rural subaltern agency by identifying groups’ water needs and controlling their fulfilment through privatised services. Rural communities that had drawn water from a water commons free of charge were suddenly divided into scatterings of individual or household-based water consumers forced to engage in payment systems to access water sources. ⁵ In one reform project in the Indian state of Rajasthan, villagers were expected to organise community bill collections based on angaa, a traditional payment system in which each household pays a unit price for water multiplied by the total number of water consumers (people and livestock) within a household (O’Reilly, 2011: 50). According to Kathleen O’Reilly in her analysis of the project, the system exacerbated established sociocultural beliefs regarding girl children's community ties before marriage. Within villages throughout the region, girls are traditionally not recognised as village citizens or even family members until they are attached to a household in marriage. As a result, while girls may drink water, they are not considered official water consumers since they have yet to become official community members. Pooling money together, villages chose to subsidise girls’ water consumption in what amounted not only to the deepening of girls’ subalternity within their communities but also to their exclusion from the very status of citizenship. If the neoliberal state responds to populations as consumers, then those who have citizenship status are ultimately those who are recognised as subjects of capitalism, that is, those who engage in monetised transactions, such as paying for their water consumption. By this logic, girls’ marginalisation primes their exclusion from citizenship status at the state and national scale.

Extractable from O’Reilly's analysis is the suggestion that gendered subalternity in these villages is parametrised by a socio-economic schema in which the governance of water markets equates to the governance of (gendered) difference. These two terms are notably used by Povinelli to describe the workings of geontopower, as introduced in Geontologies: a Requiem to Late Liberalism, where Povinelli indirectly illuminates the intentional management of relations between citizens and natural resources – a management that is covertly at work in Chatterjee's utility distribution observation and overtly at work in O’Reilly's analysis of angaa. Geontologies begins with the claim that biopower cannot elucidate the tactics of late liberal governmentality. Biopower's critical focus on the governance of life and tactics of death identifies how human life becomes subject to mechanisms of power circulating within the modern state. Yet, as Povinelli (2016: 7) observes, tactics and formations of power shift with history, and amidst twenty-first century national development and global markets biopower becomes encapsulated within and superseded by geontopower, the ability to adjudicate the categories of Life and Nonlife. No matter how these categories are partitioned, whether according to late liberal logic or otherwise, ‘what is sovereign is the division of Life and Nonlife as the fundamental ground of the governance of difference and markets’ (Povinelli, 2016: 35). Povinelli's critical intervention into theorisations of power is thus to situate geontopower as the ultimate orchestrator of society. Those who have the agency to transform their conceptualisations of what is Life and what is Nonlife into a widely diffused norm can influence social and economic narratives in ways that maintain or rupture coercive power.

Povinelli most clearly exemplifies late liberal governmentality's adjudication of Life and Nonlife in a case study that recounts a desecration lawsuit brought by Australia's Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority against OM Manganese Ltd., a subsidiary of a multinational mining corporation. In 2013, the company was found guilty of deliberately damaging an Australian indigenous geological site named Two Women Sitting Down, which the aboriginal Kunapa people held sacred and believed to be sentient. Two Women Sitting Down is a hilly formation that consists of two female ancestors bleeding together after having engaged in a fight. The rusty red manganese outcrops in the area, of which the sacred site is one, are believed to be the ancestors’ flowing blood, which OM Manganese was apparently eyeing when it blasted the foundation of a hill and caused the site's collapse. Though the guilty verdict was celebrated, Povinelli emphasises that the legal judgment tellingly reinforces a settler colonial differentiation between Life and Nonlife and illustrates its ramifications. While Two Women Sitting Down is considered by the Kunapa as an entity that has Life, it was unsurprisingly only considered by the court as a Nonlife geological formation representative of Kunapa cultural beliefs (Povinelli, 2016: 32). After all, in the minds of the legal assessors and the majority of the settler public, ‘rocks cannot perceive or intend or aim’ or feel (Povinelli, 2016: 35), meaning that the crime in question was not against a Life but against Indigenous rights to the protection of their cultural heritage. This inability to extend Life to all entities and assemblages marks late liberal geontopower's refusal to accept geontopolitical iterations that threaten the logic of its sovereignty by weakening, for example, established – here, mineral – markets. Ultimately, the court's ruling upheld a demand to ‘Indigenous people to couch their analytics of existence in the form of a cultural belief and obligation to totemic sites’ (Povinelli, 2016: 33), a longstanding tactic wherein settler late liberalism postures the recognition and acceptance of difference as it attempts to absorb and govern it.

The OM Manganese case can provide insight into the parameters of a gendered subaltern category at a historic moment in which sustainable resource management and gender equality are bound to the governance of difference and markets. In Geontologies, Povinelli never mentions the term subaltern, and her theorisation of geontopower maps the contemporary conditions of settler late liberalism from the perspective of Indigenous Australia. Geontologies nevertheless reads as an invitation to further investigate the ways in which geontopower operates across different contexts, issues and groups. Within the Indian postcolonial and feminist parameters of this article, I am not as much interested in parsing the differentiation between Life and Nonlife as I am in investigating, first, what types of political spaces open within the relation between adjudicated Life and Nonlife, and, second, how this relation affects the political agency of subaltern groups (caste, gender) and their subsequent formation of a political consciousness. Notably, any differentiation between Life and Nonlife names a relation between the two categories that influences social processes, practices and identities – which is why Povinelli emphasises geontopower as a ‘social project’ (2016: 173). In the context of this article, then, I am interested in the extent to which relations between Life and Nonlife, such as those visible in Indian PWM, further or frustrate subaltern women's political consciousness and empowerment.

A feminist political consciousness has struggled to emerge from the interstices of India's gender-inflected water discourse. While national water policies and programmes have articulated gender-sensitive objectives to water governance and management, many PWM initiatives inhibit women's ability to advance their engagement in water politics as a result of both patriarchal norms and the late liberal standpoint that ‘effective management of water resources’ only occurs ‘through recognition of water as an economic good’ (Delhi Jal Board, cited in Asthana, 2009: 106). ⁶ Gender participation in water management initiatives has been largely and problematically founded on women's traditional sociocultural identities as those who gather water (Joshi, 2011). In Hindu households, the fetching and handling of water for drinking, bathing, cooking and gardening is understood as women's responsibility, marking communal, non-agricultural water sources as feminine spaces in the Hindu cultural imaginary. With the introduction of water market reforms, the gendered nature of these spaces was extended to newly constructed water infrastructure, leading PWM project managers to assume that women's daily interaction with and reliance on water systems for domestic use renders women the most reliable, interested, efficient and low-cost maintainers of community water systems (O’Reilly, 2011). A Rajasthan participatory water management project made such assumptions discursively visible in its project handbook: ‘Women are the ones who will gain most from the project being accepted in the village and from the continued smooth functioning of the new facilities. Those who benefit most can also be expected to be most committed’ (cited in O’Reilly, 2008: 199). Placing women's education, empowerment and general wellbeing second to the smooth functioning and economic viability of water infrastructure, the handbook continues:

Women's groups must first and foremost serve the purpose of making the water supply system sustainable in the long run, i.e., women must be mobilized to take responsibility for the water management of their village. The health and hygiene education objective and the empowerment and self-help objective [of the project] are important but should be subordinate to this overriding goal (Cited in O’Reilly, 2008: 199).

The developing pattern of participatory projects claiming women's empowerment and yet emphasising women as cogs in a larger infrastructural machine has resulted in women's studies scholars noting that women are often only tokenistically involved in PWM (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Prokopy, 2004; Joshi, 2007; Hodzic, 2014; Roy, 2015). For example, India's multi-scalar Swajal project, a World Bank-funded water sustainability project applied to hundreds of villages throughout Uttar Pradesh (1996–2002), broadcast aims to empower rural women through participatory water infrastructure planning even as its project goals belied a race to development benchmarks that ultimately left women by the wayside. NGO and consultant staff explained the project's goals as follows: ‘identifying villages with undisputed, adequate water sources that can be developed … and ensuring that women are involved in project tasks—all of which [are] designed to ensure timely completion of project activities specified in the extensive technical guidelines’ (cited in Joshi, 2011: 61). While the number of women participating was actively monitored throughout the project, there were no mechanisms or indicators to assess levels of equity or effectiveness resulting from women's work and representation (Joshi, 2011: 61). Any allyship that Swajal might have extended to the Indian women's movement and women's empowerment efforts was consequently nullified.

The governance and development of water markets in the Rajasthan and Swajal examples equate to a governance of gendered difference. More specifically, they illustrate how late liberal conceptualisations of women's participation in water management characterise the relation between women (Life) and water (Nonlife) as apolitical. Such a relation serves to govern gender difference by hamstringing the development of a subaltern feminist political consciousness. Nikhil Anand (2017: 69) helps to contextualise this relation and anticipate its consequences in Hydraulic City, an analysis of water, infrastructure and citizenship in Mumbai, where he describes infrastructure as a strategy used by late liberal governmentality to delineate the social from the political domain. Calling upon the work of historian Patrick Joyce (2003), Anand (2017: 69) considers how infrastructure has been used to organise cities in ways that maintain late liberal modes of government and suppress a politics of difference. ‘Political questions’, as Anand writes, ‘—such as those of water supply distribution—became matters of technical administration through the management of infrastructure. They could be administered from a realm beyond politics and serve to regulate populations at a distance’ (2017: 69; emphasis mine). Political questions surrounding gendered participation in PWM are similarly blunted into matters of technical administration through infrastructure management. Issues of gender justice are reduced to issues of maintenance based in gendered norms and divisions of labour. Gendered difference is regulated through this apoliticality, involving women as diagnostics of infrastructural and cost efficiency rather than as citizens collaborating in equitable water infrastructure governance and maintenance. Indeed, talk of empowerment and wellbeing in both the Rajasthan and Swajal projects rings disjointedly amidst the clear lack of political perspective on women's autonomy in water discourse. ⁷ Here, the relation forged between women and water, Life and Nonlife, is one of technical administration, empty of any form of support that would politically empower women. Women's state of subalternity is exacerbated by this lack of political inclusion.

The above analysis does not intend to understate the advancement of gender equity that has taken place through India's PWMs. Tanusree Paul has written that, despite tokenistic treatments of women's water work, women's ‘very act of coming out of domestic confines’ (2019: 186) into PWM constitutes a form of empowerment in a social context where women's participation in the public domain has been traditionally and often violently deterred. In a similar vein, Mary John notes that while Indian women's studies and the Indian women's movement continue grappling with feminist engagements with state power, there also exist ‘counter-vailing positions and influences’ within the state that are ‘in conflicting if not contradictory relationships to the state’ (2017: 111), which women can engage in to further feminist resistance to state tactics of governmentality. Shirin Rai gestures to this paradoxical dynamic in her consideration of Indian deliberative democracy and the varying degrees to which feminist participation in local politics counters biopolitical regulations of women's presence on panchayats, or village councils. In 1993, a constitutional amendment mandated a gender quota system at local levels of government, which stated that one-third of seats on panchayats be reserved for women. An ideal panchayat, Rai reflects, includes ‘the presence of “difference” within its boundaries’ (2007: 68), theoretically opening local deliberative politics to continued institutional reform through the disturbance of hegemonic discourse. Women's groups have iterated that quotas have removed many social barriers to the recognition and representation of women in politics (Rai, 2002), which has resulted in women engaged in water management expressing rising levels of self-confidence and aspiration (Buch, 2000; Paul, 2019).

In short, the point is not that women have been unable to develop a political consciousness via water work but that geontopower, when used as a feminist analytic, reveals additional avenues to further this consciousness by identifying ways in which women's political autonomy continues to be curbed. As a field, Indian women's studies has long been interested in how the state uses sociocultural gender norms and the sexism underlying them as a mechanism of biopower, even as continued affirmative action for women's rights and political representation has successfully advanced gender equality in India. By introducing Povinelli's geontopower to gender discourse, I argue that addressing and dismantling oppressive gender norms also includes recognising how late liberal governmentality comes to characterise and manage Life and Nonlife relations. If biopower draws attention to whether women are physically represented within water management, geontopower helps to highlight and explain why and how the advancement of gender equality in water management continues to be slow despite women's on-site presence.

In the rest of this article, I consider how geontopower may offer Indian women a road to a political future within water discourse. Povinelli describes late liberal geontopower as able to survive challenges to its sovereignty through a topological twisting, in which all threats to its continuation are incorporated into its functioning and therefore nullified. This initiates a stagnant, everlasting present that captures gender difference in what I describe as an ontology of endurance. On one hand, an ontology of endurance describes a state of forced, animated suspension, in which gender difference might be paid lip service to but never brought to meaningful fruition within the political realm. On the other hand, an ontology of endurance can present Indian women's studies and feminist studies at large with a countervailing analytic able to create another space from which women and feminist researchers and scholars might think, act and move into a future of political self-determination.

An ontology of endurance

Late liberal geontopower is maintained by a temporal freeze. To preserve its sovereignty, it only exists in the present tense, meaning that it never willingly allows change to Life–Nonlife adjudication and relation in ways that would advance human systems into futures beyond its control. Difference is therefore always ingested into late liberalism's very workings if it is not overtly suppressed, becoming enmeshed in what Povinelli calls a quasi-event, ‘a form of occurring that never punctuates the horizon of the here and now and there and then and yet forms the basis of forms of existence to stay in place or alter their place’ (2016: 21). In other words, change never takes place as a complete event, never inciting social evolutions and spatiotemporal contexts beyond late liberal frameworks. While change might occur within the circuits of dominant systems, radically different social worlds and ways of being, though conceivable, can never fully emerge. Colonial imperialism gives way, for example, to the neo-imperialism of poorly orchestrated gender PWM initiatives that capture subaltern populations in new forms of violence and dispossession even while proclaiming empowerment. Consequently, there is no such thing as futurity in relation to the quasi-event. The quasi-event ‘is only ever … nowish’ (Povinelli, 2016: 21), which Povinelli introduces as a new tense, a sticky present that offers the illusion of movement future-ward even as it ‘twines itself around and into the tense of the other, impeding, redirecting, and exhausting the emergence of an otherwise’ (2016: 21). ⁸ Nowish, as Povinelli explains, is a tense with a limited horizon that cannot designate a future beyond the purview of the powers and discourses at work in the present.

Nowish both enforces and offers testament to the endurance of subaltern communities and their visions of alternative social worlds. The continuation of subaltern practices, strategies and struggles emphasises endurance as an ontological state of communities fighting for basic needs, cultural sovereignty, political autonomy and human rights amidst late liberalism. This mode of being illustrates the ‘barely perceptible but intense daily struggles of many people to remain in the realm of the extreme poor rather than slip into something worse’ (Povinelli, 2016: 21). Yet even as subaltern groups balance within this realm, they also undercut and destabilise mechanisms of late liberal geontopower through their continued existence and the ways in which endurance generates glimpses of alternative futures. Notably, these moments are often deeply affectual and may be asserted in the public domain through ‘structures of feeling’ and the fore-fronting of bodies, their somatic responses and their energetic connections (Stoler, 2006: 2). Feminist postcolonial scholars have indirectly emphasised the potential of endurance to stage inside-out forms of affective resistance that function from within nowish enclosures. Srila Roy points out that contemporary Indian feminist thought and the Indian women's movement have sought ‘new kinds of political engagement and affective communities even as these remain embedded within … particular regimes of power’ (2012: 18–19; Nilsen and Roy, 2016). In S. Anandhi and Karin Kapadia's (2017) edited collection Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics in India, Kapadia provides a literal snapshot of one such type of political engagement with a photograph of two Dalit women who stand in a village gathering spot facing policemen in a protest stand-off. Behind these defiant figures sit more women, all wearing black cloths over their mouths to indicate a hunger fast in protest of caste discrimination (Kapadia, 2017: 1–2). The gags read as expressions of the double nature of the ontology of endurance: the cloths’ blocking of the enunciation of political protest literalises Dalits’ systemic sociocultural and political silencing while making an unmistakable political statement, rupturing oppression from within the very silence being endured. The black dashes not only disrupt the hold and timeline of casteist patriarchies on Dalits and Dalit women, but they also signal the continued existence of a daily politics of difference that stations itself before and against the patriarchy.

Other affective performances of a politics of difference also offer contemporary examples of feminist and subaltern consciousness rising to break the nowish. According to Farhana Sultana, these performances draw attention to how ‘emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources’ enable scholars and the public to comprehend ‘the complex ways resources and emotions come to matter in survival strategies and everyday resource management practice’ (2011: 163). In an online article about enhancing women's participation in water governance, for example, Priyam Das (2015) observes that a sense of solidarity and belonging amongst women water workers has been key to shaping empowering PWM projects. Das (2015) notes that in projects where women PWM participants created collectives to make their social presence unignorable to power, they were able to bargain for training to strengthen their knowledge and skills in water management as well as their local political standing. Such affective performances and survival strategies are even present in Indian cultural productions, from literary fiction to feminist theatre. In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization, literary scholar Neetu Khanna explores the somatic nature of empowerment in Urdu fiction to rethink the colonial and decolonial subject through the expression of daily ‘embodied experience and political feeling’ (2020: 1). Embodied political feeling composes what Khanna terms the body's ‘visceral logics of decolonization’ (2020: 1), which describes how unconscious and spontaneous psychosomatic reactions to colonialism – anger, cravings, the sense of touch – defy colonialism's very legacies. Such legacies, and their nowish aftermaths, are additionally countered in Indian fiction that locates subaltern political consciousness in the context of water infrastructure and management. In fact, water infrastructure twists throughout Indian literary history, spanning Rabindranath Tagore's 1922 play Muktadhara (Free Current), Kamala Markandaya's novel on colonialism and hydropower, The Coffer Dams (1968), and, more recently, Sarnath Banerjee's graphic novel on New Delhi's water crisis, All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015). As will be seen below, however, theatrical performance is a particularly powerful genre through which to illustrate and explore the political consciousness and affective strategies at the heart of this article. Tuntun Mukherjee's well known article, “How Fares the Well?” (2017), an analysis of water and gender in three Indian plays, even indirectly offers a starting point for tracing a subaltern feminist political consciousness and ontology of endurance through performance. Triangulating portrayals of water, women and water infrastructure in Bharati Sarabhai's verse drama The Well of the People (1943), Mahasweta Devi's stage play, Jal/Water (1976) and Vinodini's street play Daaham/Thirst (2002), Mukherjee points to how these texts transform spaces of controlled water access into spaces of political and human rights. Of the three plays, Daaham specifically seeks to rupture the nowish from within its confines. As if it were talking back to tokenistic or naïve PWM projects, Daaham highlights that gender empowerment is more than the technical administration that renders gender equity and gender politics feasible. Empowerment also derives from sets of affective, future-oriented strategies, wherein endurance, as a state of subjection and subalternity to sociocultural states of enforced beneath-ness (e.g. sexism, racism, casteism, fundamentalism, capitalism), becomes a site of political assemblage. I posit that a feminist subaltern political consciousness reveals itself here as a hypogeal energy that can puncture the nowish from its sub positioning. ⁹

Daaham's futurity

So far, this article's feminist and hydrological perspective illustrates that India's mass political subject has disappeared due to late liberal geontopower's nowish management of Life–Nonlife relations. Continuing the inside-out dynamics that have characterised Indian women's affective resistance to power, I now argue that a hypogeal rupturing of the nowish occurs through an affective recalibration of Life–Nonlife relations. An example of this recalibration is found in Daaham, which stages the future tense of subaltern women's political status in India. Here, political status refers to ‘the degree of equality and freedom enjoyed by women in the shaping and sharing of power and in the value given by society to this role’ (Sharma and Sujaya, 2012: 206). This definition frameworks politics via a unique conceptualisation of power: that which is shared and distributed throughout society and which leads to new futures as opposed to sticky presents. Politics and its power would thus function according to and amidst the situatedness of differences, caste-based, gendered and otherwise.

Daaham portrays the affective resistance of Dalit women to devaluations of their labour and bodies by caste traditions that inhibit their access to village well water. Though the play does not include a gendered PWM project, it models one form of inside-out resistance to the nowish by emphasising a relation of confluence between women as Life and water as Nonlife. This relation is brought into existence by Dalit women drawing attention to the human body as a site of mingling flows of water and bodily fluids that require what I will describe as a relation of confluence for survival. At the play's climax, the women in Daaham evoke a village-wide recognition of the very interiority and permeability of the body, whereupon the nowish of caste hierarchy becomes ruptured and the village opens upon a political futurity beyond the governance of difference.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to contextualise Daaham within Indian feminist theatre since very little is known of its performance. In an introduction to the play in a women's theatre anthology, Mukherjee writes that Daaham, as a street play “scripted in 2002 and enacted by Dalits, has been a phenomenal success” (2005: 467). No information, however, can be found on the 2002 performance or whether the play has been staged since. Due to this, Daaham is consequently analysed below as literary drama rather than theatrical performance. Yet since the 1970s, feminist playwrights have used street theatre as a form of activism to advocate for women's issues. ¹⁰ For instance, after months of campaigning against marriage dowry through public demonstrations, the Delhi women's organisation Stree Sangharsh (Women's Struggle) resorted to street theatre as a ‘more direct method of communication with people’ (Stree Sangharsh, cited in Bhatia, 2004: 15). ¹¹ By leaving the contained space of the theatre and giving public vocal expression to women's rights, feminist street performances become acts of situated speaking and feminist collectivity. Furthermore, as postcolonial scholar Nandi Bhatia explains, many feminist street theatre groups create and direct their own plays, with women actors often shaping scripts from personal experiences (2004: 117). Sharing these experiences – moments of intense interiority – is meant to build solidarity with as well as ‘provoke questions from the audience and turn those questions into discussions about female self-empowerment’ (Bhatia, 2004: 117). Street theatre thus often performs an ontology of endurance, enacting women's daily struggles and personal domains of interiority not only through bodily performance but also through the very bodies of gathered audience members, who may relate to what takes place on stage. As actors and audiences together engage in this situated speech, they form an affective community that undercuts the ways in which power manages women's identities and possibilities in the social and political spheres. Actors and audiences thereby work together towards a feminist future.

In Daaham, the possibility of a feminist futurity involves dismantling geontopower's spatiotemporal lockdown, which local caste tradition uses to configure spaces of gender disparity and limit the social distribution of well water and power. Set in a rural village in an unspecified time period, Daaham opens upon a scene of transgressed boundaries, in which Souramma, a Dalit woman, stumbles across the threshold of her family's hut, having been beaten by upper-caste women for breaking caste social law and drawing water from the local well. In Hindu society, the discrimination of Dalit bodies as unclean led to the historic and ongoing ritualistic belief that any water or water source touched by Dalits would become polluted and unfit for drinking. ¹² Here, caste-imposed rules establish Life–Nonlife relations. Dalits are prohibited from touching wells and well water, meaning that Dalit women carrying out gendered water work must rely on caste women at the well-side to draw water for them. The relation between Dalit women and water is thus one of oppressive mediation. Weeping, Souramma tells her family what happened after hours of standing in the sun, waiting on the goodwill or pity of upper-caste women to fill her pitcher, none of whom did:

I couldn't stand there any longer. Waiting in the hot sun made me feel dizzy. Then I stood up and looked around … there was nobody there. Quickly I went up to the well and put the rope on the eastern side. That's all. Wherever they rushed from … they came like vultures falling on the carcass …. First that bloody woman came hurling abuses, saying whatever she wanted … then the others surrounded me like barking dogs. You low-caste woman, should not go up to the well, should not touch, actually the well is theirs, and on and on they screamed .… They jumped on me, pushed my chest, and threw me down. They beat me … broke my pitcher and said go and cry wherever you want (Vinodini, 2005: 495).

At first glance, the episode emphasises Souramma's ontological state of endurance. Her breach of caste-regulated spatiotemporality is immediately punished, her body beaten for transgressing its proper relation with water. However, Souramma's movement of the rope cracks the nowish. By mixing previously separated spaces – water space, Dalit space – Souramma suddenly performs for the Dalit community, to borrow the words of African American scholar Tina Campt, ‘a future that hasn't yet happened but must’ (2017: 17). In other words, the movement of the rope enacts a disruptive tense of feminist futurity that reaches out towards its own birth, pulling it wilfully into existence.

Souramma's act is recognised as a very real threat to the traditions and beliefs that structure the caste system's ontological architecture and enable caste-based geontopower. To neutralise this seizure of Dalit agency, the town's village council issues an order: Souramma's husband, Narsaiah, either pays an exorbitant fine to rectify his wife's dishonouring of caste law or she will be stripped, ‘her head will be shaved, and she will be paraded naked around the village’ (Vinodini, 2005: 498). The council, populated by upper-caste men, knows that the sum it asks of Narsaiah is impossible, meaning that Souramma's humiliation is specifically intended to reinscribe the Dalit body into the dominant social order through degradation. ¹³ Justice, says Pedda Reddy, the council head, must be exacted, otherwise ‘the village's reputation will dissolve in water’ (Vinodini, 2005: 498). Though a turn of phrase, the comment highlights how a relation between Life and Nonlife is utilised to justify patriarchal dictates. Pedda Reddy's figurative language builds an analogy between the purity of the water and the purity of caste hierarchy, not only implying that the integrity of the latter derives from the maintained quality of the former but also naturalising caste tradition through its very comparison to water. The relation between Life and Nonlife is presented as a natural order of things, a balance struck between social and environmental systems that is destabilised by the so-called pollution of well water at Souramma's hands, which endangers the systems’ functioning and components. Venkata Reddy, another upper-caste council member, directly emphasises this danger as life-threatening, telling Narsaiah, ‘this is a village, not a graveyard, isn't it? That means, it also has a custom, isn't it? That's why if she's not punished the village won't accept it’ (Vinodini, 2005: 498). Venkata Reddy's comment attempts to nullify difference through a reasoning that custom breathes life into society, notably not through the maintenance of human rights and dignity but by adherence to socio-legal frameworks crystallised in the naturalisation of caste traditions. The loss of established social order amounting to death-as-social-disintegration fuels Venkata Reddy's reasoning that Souramma's reparations must satisfy a village-wide sense of justice. Ultimately, it is the water's purity rather than its life-giving qualities that imbues caste hierarchy with its own figurative life and pseudo-legal framework. Whereas late liberal geontopower managed the relation between Life and Nonlife in PWM projects by transforming women into cogs servicing an infrastructural, economic and national development machine, here caste-based geontopower controls difference by managing the relation between Dalit woman and water as one of gendered and caste criminality.

However, the rope's movement jars the local Dalit community, making them suddenly alert to the possibility of an alternative time and social space beyond the nowish they inhabit. In a display of solidarity, they refuse to allow Souramma's sentence to be carried out, and in the play's final scene appear at a village assembly to demand the cessation of caste discrimination. These concluding moments of action are calibrated according to a deliberate reconfiguration of Life–Nonlife's relation through the biological-hydrological intimacy of the female body. As the assembly begins, the Dalits come to the fore as the voices of social justice. Refusing to pay the fine, they call for the upper-caste women to apologise to Souramma and announce to the village council that they will no longer endure caste traditions of water access and distribution. The heated discussion that ensues is interrupted three times by an unnamed woman who enters to tell Ganga, a Dalit woman and wet nurse to the infant son of Pedda Reddy's daughter-in-law, that Ganga must feed the hungry Reddy baby, who will not nurse from his mother and is bordering on starvation. The woman is repeatedly ordered away by the Dalits, who vow that Ganga will not feed the child until their demands are met, stating, ‘Were you bothered, ever, when so many [of] us along with our children thirsted for a little drinking water? …. Did you even think about us and our babies even once? … Why should we give milk to your children?’ (Vinodini, 2005: 510). The questions evoke two previous moments in the play that share the extreme measures that the Dalits took to survive if they did not receive water at the well. In the play's second scene, after Souramma returns home, Narsaiah, lamenting her transgression, tells her, ‘If there's no water, we’d have lived drinking urine’ (Vinodini, 2005: 495). Then, in the assembly, Souramma shares with the village council that Dalits frequently ‘walked ten miles and brought dirty water from puddles—bathing water for dogs, pigs, and cattle—and drank that’ to avoid dying from dehydration (Vinodini, 2005: 509). Though it remains unacknowledged and unstated by the characters themselves, these moments of survival suggest that the material realities of unpotable drinking sources regularly mingle with the Dalit body, including with the biological elements of Dalit women's breastmilk. These material realities are then transferred to the upper-caste infants by their wet nurses. Ironically, this might be considered the ultimate contamination of an upper-caste's hydration source by the Dalit body, though one that powerfully gives life and, as will be seen below, enables the possibility of a diverse and ethical social future.

In Daaham's final moments, the infant's cries and his family's growing concern reach fever pitch and culminate with the village council yielding to the Dalits’ demands. Souramma is issued an apology by the women who beat her, whereupon Ganga ‘sits down with the child in her lap’ and begins to breastfeed (Vinodini, 2005: 511). The act of breastfeeding initiates a shift in focus from the organisation of the body politic in relation to the external, ideological space of caste-based geontopower to the organisation of the body politic according to the interiority of a body-born justice that suggests a redefinition of the social according to a common corporeality – that is, according to a shared affectivity and vulnerability of the body as that which is in constant interchange with other bodies, whether human (such as the body of a wet nurse) or nonhuman (a body of groundwater).

In the transaction of flows between Ganga and the infant's bodies, materialities become connected in an intimate formulation that revises the relation between Life and Nonlife from one dictated by patriarchal ordinance to one based in the concept of confluence. Occurring at the junction of two or more rivers, confluence describes the mergence or parallel flow of riverine waters within the same riverbed. The unique colours and sediments of each individual river are often visible during confluence, marking the moment of conjoined flows as a particularly powerful symbol of non-hierarchical order. Ganga's breastmilk similarly exhibits confluent flow as a cumulation of hydration sources in what is, on one hand, a literal embodiment of caste injustice and, on the other, a platform for subaltern insurgency and a political consciousness. In her refusal to feed the child until Souramma and the Dalit collective receive an apology from the upper castes for their abuse, Ganga seizes her own female body from the patriarchal lexicon. Recognising herself as a corporeal expression of allegiance between bodily (Life) and hydrological (Nonlife) flows, she uses this expression as an articulation of her political status. No longer agreeing to allow herself to be a tool in the technical administration of caste hierarchy – which administrates both caste-based strictures over well water access and caste control over the hydrating power of the Dalit female body – Ganga's control over her body-as-confluence ruptures the time barriers of the nowish that have hitherto dictated the relation between Life and Nonlife, Dalit and water. Ganga opens a future for the Dalits in which the life of the village is not the result of custom, as Venkata Reddy argued, but the result of the acknolwedgement of humanity's common corporeality, that is, the shared condition of the permeable body made vulnerable by the presence or absence of resource flows. The child itself becomes a charged symbol of this condition, one that emphasises that the only way to keep the village from becoming a graveyard due to custom – a possibility that haunts the street theatre stage as the starving infant body – is via rethinking the distribution of power. As the stage curtain drops, the village community, gathered around Ganga, gives witness to this future, literalised in the moment in which Ganga feeds the infant.

From a feminist and hydrological perspective, late liberal geontopower's management of the relation between women and water has threatened to overwrite a subaltern political consciousness. The relation of technical administration between Life and Nonlife laid out in this article has hinged on power's ability to inhabit what Ann Stoler has in another context called the ‘domains of the intimate’ (2006: 2), which describes those everyday physical and emotional spaces that are co-opted by power with the intent to produce the modern subject through its very management. In a lecture at the India International Center in New Delhi in February 2020, the historian Uma Chakravarti demonstrated an awareness of the ontology of endurance that has resulted from such management and its specific capture of female bodies. Chakravarti (2020: 200) does not speak about how women and environmental materialities such as water interact but rather traces a history of how patriarchal ideologies embedded in Indian culture and tradition yield ongoing caste and class violence against women. In the process, she indirectly articulates the existence and trauma of the nowish: ‘The women's movement has spilled over into every arena of work and culture using innovative strategies to conscientize the public. Yet while much has been gained over a 30-year period … women are simply not safe anywhere …the virtual war against women was/is not yet over’ (Chakravarti, 2020: 200). Chakravarti's words emphasise that Povinelli's nowish is not a theoretical abstraction but a lived reality. The Indian women's movement's continual troubling of the imperative of the nowish is the relentless making of a future in which women's political status is affirmed and the political realm reinvented through the materiality of bodies that contest monologic elaborations of development and power and rewrite the relational parameters between Life and Nonlife. In PWM projects, women will continue to exercise political consciousness by calling for and constructing empowering participatory experiences as a growing group of water managers and decision-makers on local water-related technologies and priorities. Similarly, political consciousness arises in Daaham as a radical intervention in patterns of oppression that have historically conjoined India's ecologies and subaltern populations. In both cases, geontopower is being rewritten as a socio-political project of radical justice.

As India turns to face climate change-induced water scarcity, geontopower offers a theoretical framework embedded in embodied, material relations that will help scholars and activists interested in gender water equity to, first, anticipate how strategies of power might continue to dictate the subalternity of women groups, and, second, identify opportunities for meaningful subaltern and gendered political empowerment. Daaham's conclusion is a statement that the very work of water work is in the intimate act of furthering life; this includes not only the biological life of the body but also the political life of the community. In fact, a Life–Nonlife relation based in convergence reterritorializes politics as the domain of the intimate, which is to be understood as a domain in which relations are free from the technical administration of gender or caste norms. Ganga's body reimagines water management as an affective interfacing, rather than a disciplining, of flows and energies. The relation between Life and Nonlife is a reclaiming of resources at the level of interiority as a woman, faint with thirst, agrees to feed a baby and draws a parallel between the life-giving flows of breastmilk and water.