Presentation short abstract

Building on scholarship in STS, embodied ecologies and new materialism, this presentation probes the material reality of groundwater change, differently apprehended by actors based on their caste position and institutional location, and parsed through epistemic hierarchies.

Presentation long abstract

The material reality of groundwater in India’s Kaveri delta is contested. The governmental discourse portrays relative abundance and stability, informed by shallow, conveniently located monitoring wells. In contrast are the narratives of the delta’s residents, emphasising decline and salinisation. However, even among residents, groundwater (degradation) carries different meanings, based on their caste/class-based interactions with its materiality -- to large upper-caste land owners, groundwater salinisation is understood as ‘ppt measurements’ of laboratory-tested water samples, and represents the challenge of continuing paddy cultivation. Dalit landless residents are more concerned about kidney diseases from drinking salty groundwater. Their phenomenological understanding of salinisation is based on water’s taste, its residues caking canals and cooking vessels, the yellowing of rice cooked in it, and their embodied experiences of disease from drinking it. Yet, they are keen to see their lived experiences through the Western scientific register, illustrating the 'hybridity' of majority-world perspectives -- during my fieldwork, Dalit villagers were particularly enthusiastic about using TDS meters to validate and legitimise their embodied understandings of groundwater salinity.

Therefore, tied to the question of 'what is happening to the delta’s groundwater' are epistemological and methodological questions around knowledge production. While there is no singular way of understanding (ground)water, knowledges are neither equally powerful nor equally valid; yet they cumulatively shape the materiality of the resource. This presentation interrogates two related questions, of 'whose knowledge counts' and 'which knowledge is valid', and how to arbitrate among their sometimes divergent answers, amid colonial, caste-based and institutional hierarchies.