South Asian waterscapes as fluid archives and critical frontiers

Water has become one of the most important contemporary subjects for discussion across governments the world over. The subject has become even more critical ever since the debates over global warming-induced climate change have turned into a contested discourse, cutting across national and disciplinary boundaries. There are serious deliberations on issues relating to glacier melting, extreme weather events, water security, food security, ecological and environmental security, rapid urbanization, commercialization of water utilities, water contestations and conflicts, and so on. However, examining various narratives, including literary and cultural imaginaries, lived experiences, representations, and co-constitutive dependencies tied to water as a resource as well as identity has never been more important. In the contemporary South Asian context, water emerges not merely as a natural element but as a powerful force shaping social life, political structures, and economic realities in both everyday existence and critical moments of spectacle.

Literary works about water reveal its life-shaping power: as a repository of memory, a lived reality deeply connected to human movement, and a mirror of identity, water appears in texts as both life-bestower and destroyer, a source of mystery and transformation tying human lives to wider ecological rhythms. Across diverse literary works such as The Hungry Tide (2004), Ibis trilogy, The God of Small Things (1997), Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (1950/56), Padma Nadir Majhi (1936), Tejo Tungabhadra (2019), to name a few, water signifies momentous historical processes and conjectures, sustenance and livelihood, supporting agrarian and riverine economies, as well as embodies precarity through floods, erosion, and displacement. Socio-politically, water is a site of contestation and control, reflecting inequalities and environmental governance, as seen in works such as Corey Ross’s Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (2024) and Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (2017). These narratives reveal how access to and management of water are deeply entangled with power, often marginalizing vulnerable communities.

Through a diverse range of papers, this conference aims to foreground how a recognition of water’s critical presence in all aspects of our lives can encourage a radically inclusive and invigorated practice of cultural theory, social history, and ecological consciousness. This international, interdisciplinary conference, to be held in-person at IISER Bhopal, aims to turn a critical focus on narratives, histories, epistemologies, governance and sustainability surrounding water in South Asia.

Objectives

• To situate water historically across colonial, postcolonial, and planetary registers,while foregrounding non-Western epistemologies and ways of dwelling with water

• To anchor political, legal, and economic discourses at the forefront, bringing together questions of justice, memory, and representation, including the underexplored terrain of imaginations of water inequality.

• To address governance and crisis from an interdisciplinary angle, drawing on both political ecology and social hydrology to interrogate who manages water, for whom, and at what cost under the impact of climate change.

• To recover the religious and ritual dimensions often bracketed out of water studies, including the multiple forms of hierarchies embedded in who may, and how we, touch, use, or sanctify water.

• To give space to the granular, embodied world of waterside communities — fisher folk, farmers, ferrymen, water-carriers, whose lives rarely make it into policy or theory.

• To explore artistic and creative methodologies, making room for practice-based researchers, filmmakers, poets, and artists alongside scholars.

Topics for submissions may include, but are not limited to

• Aquatic Histories, Narratives, and Representations: Tracing water across time, text, and knowledge.

• Water Justice, Conflict, and Inequality: Deliberating on identity, memory, migration, and the politics of access.

• Social Hydrology, Hydro-politics, and Crisis Narratives: Governance failures, climate risk, and the future of water.

• Sacred Waters and Spiritual Ecologies: Ritual, religion, folk traditions, and social hierarchies at the waterline.

• Living Waterscapes: Livelihoods, Labor, and Everyday Life of Communities that fish, farm, ferry, and dwell at the water's edge.

• Water, the Human and Non-Human Body, and Creative Consciousness: Visual, linguistic, and artistic imaginaries of the aquatic.

Submissions will be reviewed and selected based on the following criteria:

• Relevance of the topic to the theme(s) of the conference

• Contemporary significance of the proposed study

• Conceptual clarity and soundness of methodological approach

All abstracts must be submitted through the designated Google Form before the specified deadline (11:59 PM, 31 October 2026). Submissions sent via email or those that do not adhere to the given guidelines will not be accepted.