Call for Abstracts for Edited Volume

Urban Waters in South Asian Literary Cultures

While cities have often been considered as self-contained biomes in terms of their relationship with ecological habitats and resources, it has become increasingly exigent to rethink urban systems as assemblages wherein nonhuman life and climatological processes get deeply entangled with infrastructural systems and planning regimes. Blue urbanism extends the horizon of ecological urban thought by shifting focus from the terrestrial to the aquatic. In place of the long-standing emphasis on green infrastructures such as parks, forests, and biodiversity corridors, it foregrounds the constitutive role of oceans, riverbanks, lakes, canals, and waterfronts in shaping urban life.

Importantly, urban water systems are not just functional networks of supply or drainage: they structure urban experience itself, carrying with them the dual force of sustenance and risk. These systems are best understood as constitutive of the city’s very formation, shaping lives and livelihoods, structuring economies, mediating public health, and bringing into focus struggles over equity and justice. The hydrosocial cycle reconceives water as co-produced with society, so that scarcity, contamination, or flooding are understood as outcomes of planning and governance apparatuses and the ways in which they constitute everyday practices, as opposed to natural events alone. Thereby, urban belonging is often marked by access to water, among other infrastructures and institutions that signal social legitimacy and citizenship.

In South Asia, the subcontinent’s rivers, wetlands, estuaries, glaciers, and littoral zones have simultaneously sustained and endangered urban life throughout millennia. These waterscapes have served as more than peripheral adjuncts to cities: they contoured civilisational identities, notions of aesthetics, and profoundly constituted some of the key focal points of literary imaginations of urbanity’s evolving tryst with dialectics of nation, caste, gender, and community. With this legacy of the pluralistic literary culture of the subcontinent as our background, we propose, in this volume, to examine literary articulations of urbanity’s unfolding relationship with water and water systems in contemporary South Asia. We seek to frame the contemporary expansively in this project, commencing with the consolidation of imperial modernity towards the closure of the long nineteenth century, to provide scope for rooted assessments of how the subcontinent’s bhashas have adopted and adapted to the far-reaching structural transformations that have occurred in the tenets and trajectories of urbanisation in our region. Given that literary cultures of South Asia have a layered history of mediating on the constitutive role of water systems in setting the social, cultural, and economic identities of our cities, it will be instructive to consider how that legacy has evolved with the onset of first print and then digital culture, the rise of nationalist as well as regional consciousness, the multifarious impact of environmental degradation and pollution, and the inflection of the everyday by the seductions of networked capital. The essays which we wish to curate in this book may reflect on these and thematic pivots such as:

• Cultural memory and urban belonging
• Affective (after)lives of hydraulic infrastructure
• Inequities of access and the right to the city
• Corporeality of sewerage and pollution
• Maritime cultures and travel writing
• Monsoonal rasas ↔ urban flooding
• Waterscapes as thirdspaces of hope and solidarity

Please keep in mind that we aim to curate scholarship foregrounding narrativity in its engagement with themes including, but not limited to, those outlined above, drawing on the rich corpus of South Asian cities and on textual sites such as planning documents, newspaper articles, court judgments, pamphlets, and other cultural ephemera suited to literary methods. If you feel this speaks to you, please send us a 500-word abstract along with a 100-word bio-note to urbanwaters26@gmail.com by 15 January 2026. We welcome interested colleagues to discuss their ideas with us, but please note that scholarly work has its ebbs and flows—we would appreciate your patience with the process.

Anubhav Pradhan (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai)

Barsha Santra (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai)