Politics and Poetics of Water and Hydrosocial Crisis in Punjab

Abstract This essay explores the interconnections between eco‐aesthetics, narratives of development, and hydropolitics to better understand the twin material and narrative crises of water in Pakistan. Challenging the dominant narratives of water as external, passive, objective, and ahistorical, this essay provides a situated analysis of the co‐production of water and society in Punjabi landscape to reveal the entanglements of the prevalent water crisis, environmental imaginaries, and the politics of resource distribution. It explains the simultaneous existence of water scarcity and surplus as a factor of colonial and capitalist uneven development and highlights the aesthetic and political strategies employed to appropriate water commons in Punjab. The essay also argues that the material crisis of the environment reveals the narrative crisis of modern development as control over nature and makes a case for seizing this crisis as an opportunity to reimagine social relations and human relations with nature.