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  • Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai by Nikhil Anand
  • Tessa Farmer
Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 312 pp.

Nikhil Anand's timely, expansive, and thoroughly researched text is a valuable addition to scholarship on citizenship, infrastructure, and urban governance. Anand investigates the material, socio-political, and historical ties that are dialectically constituted by hydraulic infrastructure in the city of Mumbai. His writing is clear and persuasive, encompassing a substantial array of theoretical literatures that enable him to probe a particular case of post-colonial water infrastructure for its more-than-human ramifications (Abram 1996). Through this ethnographic study, he illuminates the unfolding of human and material entanglements that both create and threaten particular political and material possibilities in cities. Traversing literature on subjectivity, citizenship, cultural geography, and critical studies of capitalism, and neoliberalism, the text is organized around the layered theoretical interventions that Anand offers.

The principle intervention that Anand asserts is that the histories, material particularities, and attendant socialites of hydraulic infrastructure do not simply produce the material possibility of life and political possibility of liberal cities, but also always exceed and destabilize these forms. Anand builds on earlier scholarship that demonstrated the constitutive nature of infrastructure in creating the possibility for urban liberalism, or "free, continuous flows of people, ideas, and things" by demonstrating that the more-than-human nature of hydraulic infrastructure generates possibilities outside of "the form and performance of the liberal city" (7). That is to say, the inherent destabilization that hydraulic infrastructure engenders is not only internal to liberal political rule, but in fact also produces an "outside" that exceeds it. [End Page 823]

Building on this central thesis, Anand makes three subsidiary arguments about the processes that generate the hydraulic city and hydraulic citizenship. The first is that hydraulic citizenship, which is meaningful incorporation into the distribution network of water within the city, is not a singular event after which citizenship is irrevocably conferred and universally applicable. Hydraulic citizenship is, instead, an iterative process that can be reversed and can vary across different types of material recognition. Marginalized urban residents can become incorporated into the water distribution networks only to later to lose full access as technological patterns or political winds shift. They could also be meaningfully incorporated into the city's electrical grid, and education or health systems while, at times, struggling to maintain water services. In this terrain of multidirectional and shifting inclusions and exclusions, settlers with whom Anand worked could have formal citizenship granted through legal acknowledgment while experiencing patchy substantive citizenship as material services couple and disconnect across time and service category. Citizenship here reads as processual, uncertain, full of labor, and fundamentally tied to the sociotechnical realities of the infrastructures that substantiate citizenship through the extension of services.

This leads to Anand's second subsidiary argument, which is that the kinds of political subjectivities enabled by infrastructures are tied to the materialities of the infrastructures themselves. Extending the recognition of the ways in which infrastructures are political technologies that have embedded human imaginaries, Anand asks the reader to attend to the ways in which the details of such structures influence which kinds of states, cities, and subjects are called into being. The kinds of subjectivities that are created by hydraulic infrastructure are distinct from, but related to, the kinds of political subjectivities called into being by other sociotechnical systems. Hydraulic infrastructures are multi-temporal, with old pipes that are layered over with new regimes and logics. They are heterogeneously discursive, in that they are re-made across varied ideological and political endeavors. Hydraulic infrastructures are also dialectic projects of human-material relations that are imperfectly remade in many everyday practices by varied constitutive members. Given this, Mumbai's hydraulic infrastructure is an unstable relation that exceeds both human attempts to master it and to-date theoretical attempts to describe it.

Anand's third subsidiary argument builds on this understanding of hydraulic infrastructure as leaky, iterative, and multi-temporal as the foundational [End Page 824] reason for the continued existence of public water systems in Mumbai. Given its status as an...

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