Paper short abstract

This paper explores how anthropology can be practiced with water through ethnography by listening to the Bharalu river in India. Treating Bharalu as a collaborator, it examines sensory and relational engagements with a polluted fluvial environment shaped by development, neglect, and contested care.

Paper long abstract

The Bharalu (Bahini) River in Guwahati, Northeast India was once an active waterway embedded in everyday life. It now extends through the city as a polluted drain shaped by growth-centric development. Situated within emerging debates in blue ecologies, this paper explores how anthropology can be practiced with fluvial environments by engaging the Bharalu as a collaborator. Rather than treating rivers merely as resources or infrastructures, the paper approaches the Bharalu as a relational entity shaping culture, memory and social life. Drawing on multimodal field engagement including walking alongside the river, observing everyday encounters, listening to its sounds, documentary filming, interviews, and household surveys, the paper examines human-riverine relations. Smell, stagnation, urban flooding and practices of avoidance emerge as ethnographic cues through which residents, bureaucrats and activists negotiate care, indifference and responsibility. In this sense, the river becomes constitutive of the ethnographic process itself, structuring what can be sensed, remembered, and narrated, directing attention toward fractured hydrosocial relations rather than abstract sustainability frameworks. Engaging insights from the blue humanities, critical spatial theory and political ecology, the paper analyses historically embedded community relationships with the river, wetland stewardship and ecological restraint rooted in local memory. By bringing these lived experiences into dialogue with contemporary water management, the paper points toward hybrid approaches in which the Bharalu actively participates as a socio-ecological commons rather than a waste-space, shaping blue anthropology and its possibilities in a polarised world marked by contested ecologies, neglect and care.