Poonam Argade

POONAM ARGADE, then a graduate student at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on”Organizing for water rights with Pani Haq Samiti (Water Rights Campaign) in Mumbai, Western India,” supervised by Dr. Himika Bhattacharya. This research studies the experiences of organizers involved with Mumbai’s Water Rights Campaign, who have been mobilizing for inclusive water access. The goals are to understand how alliance-based water rights organizing has come to be, where a majority of campaigners belong to oppressed caste communities. This organizing led to the generation of a unified platform, governance shifts, and implementation of more inclusive water supply despite severe retaliations against organizers. The objective of this research is to engage the perspectives of organizers who live and organize in their own settlements, and who are from historically marginalized groups (along caste, class, gender and religious lines) as theories rooted in their lived experiences. The methodology for the study is feminist ethnography, deploying narrative interviews, fieldnotes and multimedia materials. Based on the fieldwork, the following themes have emerged: 1) solidarities and resolve among organizers in the face of violent retaliations, threats and systemic neglect; 2) distinctive experiences of women organizers; 3) potential of critical collaborative ethnographic research; and 4) multiple ontologies of water that draw on regional histories of religious, gender, class and caste-based resistance — individual and collective experiences that give rise to alternate foundations for human rights organizing in this context.