1. Colonizing the rains: Disentangling more-than-human technopolitics of drought protection in the archive.
- Author
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Tozzi, Arianna, Bouzarovski, Stefan, and Henry, Caitlin
- Subjects
RAINFALL ,ADMINISTRATION of British colonies ,IRRIGATION farming ,WATER management ,GROUNDWATER ,DROUGHTS - Abstract
• A critical reading of the archive gives voice to more-than-human actors within history. • Water worlds emerge through hydraulico-political configurations. • Water management policies have the power to bring water realities into being. • Colonizing the rains speaks to the ways some water worlds are made real and other less real. • A decolonial technopolitics engages with water beyond its liquid form. Preoccupations for the widening gap between irrigated and rainfed areas are central to debates addressing the agrarian crisis in semi-arid India. Yet policies are driven by a catch-up mentality that points towards an irrigated model of agriculture, demarcating rainfed areas as spaces of rural marginality. To unpack the historical causes behind this 'irrigation at all costs' mindset, the paper traces how the rainfed/irrigated gap became constituted through policies of drought-protection during British colonial time. Focussing on the Bombay Deccan after the establishment of the British Raj, it frames drought-protection as a more-than-human technopolitics to explore the performative power of technopolitical practices to bring water worlds into being. Through a critical reading of the colonial archive, we trace the ontological work of drought-protection as a practice that rearranged existing human-water relations to materialize a reality of water 'as irrigation'. Grounded on linear and predictable flows, this irrigated ontology divided the landscape along an irrigated-as-protected and rainfed-as-unprotected logic. Encountering a world that followed geographies of water 'as precipitation' however created sites of contestation blurring the partition envisioned by engineering plans. Rather than the imposition of hydrological power from above, colonizing the rains represents a contested project whereby certain water worlds became present and real while others discarded and less real. Contributing to scholarship shaking the ontological ground underneath water management regimes, we suggest a reflexive turn for these practices, as they must confront their power to materialize (water) realities and the possibility to enact a decolonial technopolitics beyond water's liquid form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
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