Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the circulation of people, water, and hydrological discourse in Delhi, India. It articulates how water, class, and social relationships are intertwined in tenements and informal "slum" housing, and how domestic workers make the transition to water-rich areas everyday.

Paper long abstract:

Everyday 1,000 people in-migrate to Delhi, India—some propelled by the promise of economic opportunities of the world-class city, and others pushed by stagnating growth of their villages or the fragmentation and desiccation of their farms. Several enter Delhi's informal economy as domestic workers, living in tenements or in illegal "slums" with limited access to the critical resource of water and then must cross daily into the water-rich areas where they are employed. This research explores the disparity of India's water access through the perspective of these domestic workers, who must cross literal and symbolic thresholds everyday. One salient change is their relationship to water as they move from their home environments, where the bare minimum of water is used to sustain them, into a water abundant culture that uses the resource liberally. As these workers step from their communities into the private spaces of the homes where they work, they are exposed to new ideologies of modernity, purification, and the value of water. This paper asks how marginalized stakeholders evaluate the legitimacy of the inculcation of modern, bourgeois, urban aesthetics and their implications on their access to water. Though domestic workers are implicit as producers of the world-class lifestyle, they are also agents that create innovative networks of social and infrastructural support, ultimately populating an integral part of modern urban water structures and cultures.