Postcolonial narratives of water and the nation in the Indus Basin

I read two texts – the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT, 1960) and Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story, “Yazid” (1951) – within the context of postcolonial Indian politics. I treat water as a hydrosocial production, i.e. as the product of social, spatial, and ecological relations. I ask what textual ideas of water tell us about the social relations that constitute them and, conversely, how the ideas contribute to reshaping social relations. I argue that attending to literary and discursive constructions of water reveals the new imagination of water that emerges in the subcontinent post-Partition. This new imagination – what I term “national water” – reflects the violence, imagined and realized, of Partition. The conceptualization of the divided hydroscape of the Indus Basin reinforces the narrative of a natural hostility between India and Pakistan and the inevitability of separation. The contemporaneous promises and violences contained in the IWT and “Yazid” remind us, I suggest, of the close relationship that exists between the processes of nation building and the material and imaginative transformation of environments in postcolonial India.