Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the the diverse ways that cultivators in rural central India imagine, engage with, and care for groundwater in ways that unsettle the boundaries between 'science', 'tradition', and 'superstition'.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the imaginaries and practices of agriculturalists in rural India as they navigate the complex materiality of subsurface hard rock aquifers. For cultivators in semi-arid regions, irrigation is a matter of grave concern. Access to warer opening up novel agricultural possibilities - new crops, multiple crop cycles, and greater profits. Yet, knowledge of the subsurface is elusive and uncertain, leading farmers to call on spirits, gods, astrologers, and hydrogeologists in their quest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Malwa region of central India, this paper attends to the diverse ways that cultivators imagine, engage with, and care for groundwater, and in doing so, unsettle the boundaries between 'science', 'tradition', and 'superstition'. Building on the panel's central premise that all modes of knowing groundwater entail some degree of speculation, I explore the tensions and convergences between these scientific and extra-scientific methods. Further, I examine how farmers from oppressed castes do not simply speculate on, but also speculate with, groundwater. While surface access to land reflects long-standing structural inequalities, subterranean uncertainties can potentially unsettle them, opening up novel possibilities for the emergence of anti-caste ecological imaginaries and practices. Bringing debates in STS into conversation with scholarship in the environmental humanities and critical caste studies, this presentation considers the theoretical and political possibilities opened up by speculative engagements with groundwater.