How Water Changes (Every)Things: A Feminist Study Of How ‘Water Worlds’ Shape Processes Of Rural Agrarian Transformations In Maharashtra, India

This chapter argues that the relational materiality of water – co-emergent between water’s biophysical characteristics and its sociocultural situatedness – impacts the unfolding of gender and livelihood dynamics in specific contexts. Taking the case of semi-arid areas of Maharashtra, India, this chapter examines processes of rural transformation through the lens of a transition between two waters moving across the landscape, probing the resulting shift in gender labor relations. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in two regions, one where livelihoods are dependent on monsoonal rainfalls and another where farmers use wastewater irrigation, we focus on three more-than-human elements at play in this transition: water solutes and sediments, soil organisms and goats. Exploring these as our analytical entry points, we reveal the importance of reconceptualizing labor as a more-than-human relation to better understand how agrarian environments are reshaped by irrigation infrastructure projects. In a feminized agriculture sector, where ecologies are enrolled into processes of agrarian transformation, this perspective problematizes narratives of efficiency behind their stories of successes, demanding metrics that capture the invisibilized work people and their ecologies do together. Further, this work contributes to scholarship on water’s materiality, demanding that we engage with the obligations of our more-than-human relatedness to bridge feminist struggles with environmental concerns.