Quite often, as I sit on my bed and listen through the bedroom window, I hear water. It is a curious experience, for water, like a promise or a government assurance, is not supposed to make so much noise when it is absent. It is not that living in Hyderabad, this old city of the Musi, artificial lakes and an increasingly impressive collection of technological ambitions, has endowed me with an extraordinary faculty of hearing what is not there. It is simply that in its bastis, water is often loudest before it arrives, and sometimes louder still when it does not. Everything competes for audibility the metallic clang of empty vessels, the scraping of plastic buckets, the impatient sputtering of taps, the coughing of electric pumps and the voices of women calling across narrow lanes. Even silence, ordinarily the most democratic of sounds, seems to have acquired a class character. In an apartment, a quiet tap might mean that somebody has turned it off; in a basti, it may mean that somebody must wait, miss work or begin looking elsewhere. The disorientation is as much of the body as of the mind: one hears the promise of water in every mechanical groan, mistakes interruption for arrival, and finds one’s irritation turning into an uneasy mixture of wonder and disgust. So when I hear Hyderabad celebrated as a smart city, I feel an almost irresistible urge to ask whether its intelligence has mastered the alphabet: W for Water, certainly, but for whom and how long must the others wait?
How does one draw thirst when the tap is already running? In Bangla, jolanjali dewa literally means giving something up. The expression assumes, rather optimistically, that one possesses water to give away. In Hyderabad’s bastis, it is often the household that must make the offering: sleep, wages, cooking hours, the small luxury of not wondering whether the next vessel will be safe. Water here is not always absent. Sometimes it arrives brown, smelling of sewage, leaving a greasy film on utensils. Women in Film Nagar Basti have a name for these episodes: dirty water time. I find the expression disturbing, particularly its last word. Contamination has acquired a timetable, although the municipality has not necessarily supplied one. I gradually begin to notice that water, too, has lost its ordinary name. It becomes supply when it is expected, pressure when it disappoints, tanker when it must be purchased and complaint when somebody finally approaches an office. In more comfortable neighbourhoods, it becomes a calculation: litres per capita, connections, continuity. The figures resemble a medical report on a patient whose family has not been consulted. A connection may exist without dependable water; water may arrive without being drinkable. Until recently, I might have laughed at the expression water security. Now I wonder whose security is being measured: that of the household, the pipeline or the spreadsheet.
There are other ways of locating water. In Film Nagar Basti, Kadiri’s ethnography describes women whose days begin around uncertain supply and whose work takes them into nearby affluent apartments, where water runs with an altogether different sense of punctuality. Their journeys are short in kilometres and remarkably long in infrastructural experience. The sound of a pump, the colour of water collected in a brass vessel, the faint residue settling at its bottom these become ways of recognising one’s place in the city. Lakshmamma, a resident interviewed by Kadiri, describes distrusting water even when it appears clean. Such suspicion is not an eccentricity. It is knowledge acquired through repeated exposure to uncertain supply, damaged pipes and delayed repairs. A household learns to inspect water before drinking it, to calculate whether boiling it is worth the additional fuel, to decide which family member receives the bottled water that can be afforded. These calculations rarely appear in the city’s account of service provision. They are neither entirely private nor merely metaphorical. They are the bodily consequences of an address. Hyderabad’s maps can locate a basti with impressive precision; they are rather less successful at recording the hours of vigilance required to live in one.
Water is supposed to be benevolent. It blesses marriages, purifies bodies, sustains crops and supplies Hindi cinema with an apparently inexhaustible reserve of romantic rain. Hyderabad has a more complicated acquaintance with its affections. In September 1908, the Musi flooded catastrophically, killing thousands and helping to remake the city’s political and physical geography. The reservoirs of Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar subsequently became monuments to the promise that water could be controlled, stored and made useful. Yet a substance once feared for arriving in excess is now, in many households, feared for arriving unpredictably or in a condition that makes its arrival scarcely preferable to its absence. Brown water, sewage-tainted taps, overflowing drains and the anxiety of children falling ill are hardly the materials of a romantic duet. On television and in official explanations, responsibility is divided among familiar culprits: deficient rainfall, exhausted aquifers, population growth, illegal connections, encroachments and, when convenient, the allegedly disorderly settlement itself. Some of these explanations identify genuine pressures. But they cannot explain away the choices through which pipes are repaired promptly in one neighbourhood and neglected in another, or why the domestic labour of managing unsafe water remains largely invisible. Bandari and Sadhukhan’s study of 3,071 Hyderabad localities found that continuity of supply was distributed inequitably, with little correspondence to population density. The problem, then, is not simply that water has become scarce. It is that the city has become extraordinarily accomplished at making some people’s scarcity appear natural and other people’s abundance appear deserved.
The growing thirst of data centres can be traced to the digital turn that began remaking Hyderabad’s western outskirts in the 1990s. What arrived first as a promise of software-led prosperity has since acquired a substantial physical appetite: land for server campuses, electricity to keep them running and, depending on their cooling systems, water to carry away the heat. The transformation has brought investment, employment and technological infrastructure to a city eager to establish itself as a global destination. Yet the apparently weightless world of cloud computing has a decidedly terrestrial metabolism. Servers produce heat; heat must be removed; and in evaporative cooling systems, some of the water used to accomplish this disappears into the atmosphere. Not every facility uses the same technology, and recycled water can considerably reduce pressure on freshwater supplies. Telangana’s investment plans accordingly promise treated-water infrastructure for new data-centre clusters. But the scale of the ambition is striking. The state advertises approximately 200 megawatts of operational IT capacity alongside 4.7 gigawatts of committed or early-stage capacity. The Council on Energy, Environment and Water estimates that India’s data-centre water consumption could more than double by 2030. The figures describe an emerging pressure, not an established explanation for Hyderabad’s present shortages. Nevertheless, I find something wonderfully perverse about the vocabulary of this revolution. The cloud, which we have been taught to imagine floating above our heads, turns out to require an impressive quantity of plumbing beneath our feet.
The water circulating through Hyderabad’s pipelines, having neither citizenship rights nor a particularly persuasive investment portfolio, is subject to decisions that long precede the arrival of artificial intelligence. Its uneven distribution belongs to the city’s history of land conversion, peripheral expansion, infrastructural investment and the selective recognition of settlements as deserving of dependable services. Data centres are not solely responsible for these conditions, and there is no demonstrated causal connection between a particular facility’s consumption and the contaminated taps of Film Nagar Basti. The more revealing question concerns the different kinds of certainty the city is prepared to manufacture. Telangana’s investment portal advertises high-capacity electricity and water infrastructure, dedicated land banks and planned treated-water supplies for data-centre campuses at Chandanvelly and Bharat Future City. In Film Nagar Basti, meanwhile, Yeshashwini Kadiri describes women whose mornings depend upon whether water, electricity and drainage can be persuaded to cooperate. The contrast is not between technology and people, as though the two were natural enemies. It is between two political arrangements of infrastructure: one in which continuity is recognised as essential to productive activity, and another in which interruptions are treated as ordinary features of domestic life. Even the environmental accounting is revealing. A World Bank report, citing the International Energy Agency, gives approximately two million litres per day as an illustrative figure for the combined direct and indirect water use of an average 100-megawatt hyperscale data centre in the United States. That is not a Hyderabad measurement, nor is all of it water consumed at the facility. But it demonstrates why the question of water sources matters. The Ministry of Environment stated in August 2026 that data centres do not automatically require environmental clearance solely because they are data centres; applicable building-project thresholds and other environmental laws determine the relevant scrutiny. The ministry also identified freshwater availability, water balances and wastewater reuse as matters for assessment where clearance is required. It is tempting to conclude that the question is simply how much water the machines will drink. The more difficult question is who gets to decide which uses of water are indispensable, which can be postponed and whose waiting does not appear in the calculation.
I notice how many sounds I have come to associate with an ordinary morning depend upon water: the splash of a vessel being rinsed, the brief rush of a tap, the soft violence of a bucket overturning in a bathroom, the bubbling of a pot on the stove. These are not grand sounds. Their importance lies precisely in the fact that one should not have to think about them. In Film Nagar Basti, Kadiri records something called dirty water time, when brown, foul-smelling water leaves a greasy film on utensils and women must sometimes discard what they have already spent hours collecting. I think of the Bangla expression jolbhora, filled with water, and of the ease with which fullness becomes a description of beauty, abundance or emotion. A jolbhora sondesh conceals a little sweetness inside its delicate shell. I have always liked the idea of a sweet that keeps its surprise in liquid form. But there is another history of water hidden inside domestic vessels, one less amenable to confectionery. It concerns the moment when a container that ought to preserve water instead preserves uncertainty. A bucket is filled, covered and placed aside; later, somebody removes the lid and finds that the contents cannot be trusted. The water has arrived, but the labour of obtaining it must begin again. I wonder whether this is the most disorienting aspect of the city’s water crisis: not simply that water disappears, but that its presence can no longer be taken as evidence of its usefulness.’How long have you had this?’ somebody asks, noticing the plastic drum beside the kitchen wall.
I look at its scratched sides, embarrassed by the faded colour. ‘Quite a few years,’ I say. ‘It still works.’
‘Not the drum,’ comes the correction. ‘The water.’
I look inside. There is nothing remarkable about its surface, which is precisely the trouble. The question is no longer whether the container can hold water, but whether the water it holds can be trusted.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
The drum has acquired a strange intimacy. It is a household reservoir, a substitute for a dependable connection, a little piece of municipal infrastructure purchased at private expense. Its capacity determines how carefully water must be rationed; its weight determines who can move it; its contents may determine whether cooking begins or another journey is necessary. I imagine emptying it and running my fingers along the residue at the bottom. Sediment, a faint film, perhaps nothing visible at all. A laboratory would be needed to establish what the water contained. Yet the vessel already records something the laboratory cannot measure by testing its contents alone: the hours spent waiting for it, the money spent storing it, the suspicion required before using it. Each of these burdens appears small when considered separately. Gathered together, they reveal how much of Hyderabad’s water infrastructure has quietly been transferred into the homes, working days and bodies of its residents.
My family insists that I buy a water purifier. I have had enough encounters with questionable drinking water to make them nervous. They have not protested against my refusal to buy several other domestic conveniences, but about the purifier they are uncompromising. So I buy one. The water stops coming. My mother suggests a storage drum. My father recommends a pump. Soon I have a purifier beside the sink, a motor near the tap and two blue plastic drums occupying the kitchen like particularly unhelpful relatives. They produce an assortment of sounds: the purifier’s mechanical murmur, the motor’s impatient whine, the hollow knocking of water against plastic. When the supply weakens, the motor changes pitch, its strained hum suggesting that it is trying to draw water from the very idea of water. I begin to think of these contraptions as my spare organs an artificial throat, an additional stomach, a pair of mechanical ears. Gradually, I am acquiring an entire body to compensate for the city’s missing plumbing.
A few weeks later, the motor begins making a peculiar noise. I telephone home.
‘The machine is choking,’ I announce.
‘What?’
‘The motor. It sounds as though somebody is strangling it.’
‘Is water coming?’
‘No.’
‘Then switch it off!’
There is laughter. I am irritated by it. I had imagined that a machine purchased to obtain water might possess some independent influence over its arrival. Instead, it has developed the rather bureaucratic habit of demanding precisely what it was bought to provide. I think of Sai Akka in Film Nagar Basti, whom Yeshashwini Kadiri describes waiting with a red pipe beside an electric pump during a power cut, listening for water that might arrive without the electricity needed to collect it. She calls this checking her luck. I find the expression troubling. Luck is what one invokes when the outcome is uncertain; infrastructure is what a government builds to make certain outcomes less dependent upon luck. Yet the silence of that pump contains a remarkable amount of information. It tells Sai Akka something about electricity, water pressure, municipal timing and the probable rearrangement of her morning. Someone passing through the lane might hear nothing at all. She hears the possibility of losing several hours. Listening, then, is not simply an activity of the ear. It is a form of practical knowledge distributed unequally among those who can afford not to listen and those whose days depend upon it.
My family suggests buying another drum. It seems to me that they have begun treating water containers as medicines, each new purchase intended to cure the symptoms of a disorder that lies beyond the household. I now possess enough equipment to feel temporarily reassured, but the tap remains unreliable. Nor does every household possess the money, space or electricity required for these private arrangements. In Film Nagar Basti, Kadiri documents how women manage contaminated supply, overflowing drains and interruptions that compel them to reorganise domestic work. A motor’s hum may summon someone from another room; the clang of a vessel may announce that a neighbour has begun collecting water. These sounds travel between households, but their meanings are not equally shared. A woman preparing to leave for paid work hears a deadline where a child hears a commotion. A resident waiting beside a tap hears an opportunity where a passer-by hears an ordinary machine. I begin to suspect that the city’s water routes are also routes of listening, along which information, obligation, anxiety and occasional cooperation circulate. They are cultural soundscapes precisely because the same noise can carry different consequences for different people.
One night I cannot remember which I dream of my grandmother standing in the kitchen, examining the drums with considerable suspicion.
‘What are those?’ she asks.
‘For storing water.’
‘And that machine?’
‘For bringing it upstairs.’
‘And the other one?’
‘For making it safe to drink.’
She looks at me as though I have confessed to purchasing the same thing three times.
‘We spent our lives carrying water,’ she says. ‘Did we work so hard so that you could spend your earnings buying machines to do what a tap should?’
I cannot remember what I tell her. I remember only hearing a motor somewhere outside, starting, stopping and starting again. I do not know whether it belongs to the household next door or to somebody farther down the lane. Nor do I know whether its owner has received any water. That is the trouble with listening: sounds may travel freely across the city without granting their listeners equal access to what produces them. I lie awake thinking about the women who recognise a failing pump from its pitch, who distinguish an approaching supply from the noises of an empty pipe, who know when a vessel must be placed beneath a tap before the opportunity disappears. Their ears have become instruments for interpreting a city whose infrastructures cannot always be trusted. And I wonder whether Hyderabad’s celebrated intelligence might begin, not with another machine, but with learning to listen to those who have already spent their lives listening for water.
Being ‘connected’ the hydraulic equivalent of being invited to dinner and discovering that the host has forgotten to cook was one of the more curious privileges of urban citizenship; so suggests Nikhil Anand’s account of Mumbai’s water infrastructure, which introduces a tantalising political complication into the apparently straightforward business of opening a tap. Can one extend Anand’s argument to suggest that a pipe without water is not so much a public service as an elaborate practical joke? A household may possess a legal connection, an impressive assortment of plumbing fixtures and a water bill that arrives with the punctuality of a tax demand, yet remain uncertain whether anything drinkable will emerge from the tap. The municipality, apparently, has mastered the art of serving an empty plate without neglecting to charge for dinner. In Hyderabad’s bastis, meanwhile, residents must develop an appetite for the smallest acoustic indications of supply: the gurgle of an awakening pipe, the sputter of a tap, the motor’s increasingly desperate attempt to extract something from nothing. They listen, calculate, collect and store, never quite certain whether the main course will arrive before the kitchen closes. A motor running dry is an especially instructive sound. It resembles a stomach protesting against an absent meal, except that the stomach belongs to a machine and the hunger to an entire household. Could one reasonably expect residents who have spent hours waiting for a few buckets of water to regard a municipal connection as sufficient nourishment? But would Hyderabad’s self-appointed custodians of technological modernity those distinguished gourmands of smart cities, forever sampling another helping of digital infrastructure approve of such an unappetising definition of progress?
There is a reason why I have begun finding water in everything I read. This is, I suspect, a scholarly form of chronic indigestion. I open a history of Hyderabad and encounter the Musi, whose catastrophic flooding in 1908 demonstrated that the city had considerably more water than it knew what to do with. I turn to Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar, constructed in the decades that followed, and discover an elaborate programme of hydraulic restraint. The city had once suffered from an excess of water; its modern engineering ambitions were partly organised around preventing that excess from becoming catastrophic again. Yet the historical appetite for controlling water did not necessarily produce an equal enthusiasm for distributing it. In photographs of Hyderabad’s lakes, fountains and increasingly spectacular technological skyline, I find myself looking for the less respectable members of the hydraulic household: the plastic drum, the leaking connection, the electric pump that refuses to cooperate with the municipal timetable. These objects, unlike ornamental fountains, have never enjoyed much success as symbols of urban civilisation. I am reminded of Yeshashwini Kadiri’s account of Sai Akka in Film Nagar Basti, waiting beside a silent pump during a power cut, listening for water that might arrive without the electricity needed to collect it. She calls this checking her luck. What an extraordinary digestive system the city possesses. It can swallow rivers, reservoirs, transmission mains and ambitious development schemes, yet seems to suffer an acute bout of indigestion when asked to deliver water and electricity to the same household at the same time. The resident is left to administer the equivalent of Gelusil: another storage drum, another improvised arrangement, another hour spent waiting for the system to settle. The metaphor, admittedly, has its limits. A stomach that cannot digest its dinner generally inconveniences its owner. Hyderabad’s infrastructural indigestion has the more remarkable ability to make somebody else suffer the heartburn. The city, apparently, requires a stronger antacid.
‘Soundscape’ was once a rather appetising word for someone like me. I imagined it as an acoustic banquet at which every sound was invited to contribute something to the atmosphere: rain drumming on tiled roofs, fountains splashing with the self-importance of expensive appetisers, the evening azaan travelling across neighbourhoods, vessels striking one another around a communal tap. Water, I thought, was the most obliging of the elements, forever pouring, dripping, gurgling or making an exhibition of itself. But an acoustic banquet, like an actual one, is not necessarily democratic. Somebody enjoys the meal; somebody prepares it; somebody washes the utensils afterwards. A motor’s hum may announce the filling of an overhead tank in one household, the exhaustion of a shared source in another, and the beginning of an unpaid working day for the woman responsible for collecting water. The clang of an empty vessel may be an invitation, an accusation or the opening argument in a negotiation over whose bucket deserves precedence. The sounds are shared; their consequences are not. Steven Feld’s concept of acoustemology, or knowing through sound, helps explain why listening is never simply a matter of possessing functioning ears. It requires knowledge acquired through repeated encounters with a place and its material arrangements. A municipal engineer may measure pressure in technical units, a planning document may count connections, and an official may congratulate the city upon the quantity of water supplied. The woman waiting beside the tap, meanwhile, measures the same infrastructure in interrupted sleep, missed wages, unfinished cooking and the changing pitch of a motor. Her knowledge is no less technical for having been acquired without an engineering degree. No city can compel its residents to listen so attentively for water without producing a remarkably sophisticated culture of hydraulic interpretation. Yet the state continues to behave like a diner who has eaten his way through the entire menu and is astonished to discover that somebody must wash the dishes. In the official account, water has been supplied; in the household, the labour of obtaining, carrying, storing, testing and rationing it has scarcely begun. The municipal imagination, it seems, suffers from an unusual form of selective deafness. It hears the roar of investment, the applause accompanying new infrastructure and the reassuring arithmetic of litres supplied per day, but develops a sudden difficulty distinguishing the sound of an empty vessel from that of a satisfied citizen. Perhaps the problem is not that Hyderabad has forgotten how to make water flow. It is that the city has acquired an extraordinary appetite for being called world-class without developing an equally healthy appetite for listening to the people who keep it alive.
On the day we watch All That Breathes (Sen, 2022), a friend sends me a photograph of the water collected from her tap. ‘Does this look drinkable?’ she asks. It is a peculiar shade of brown, somewhere between weak tea and a rather unsuccessful attempt at cha. I tell her that colour alone cannot establish whether water is safe. This is scientifically correct, although I suspect she had hoped for something more useful than a lecture on the limitations of visual evidence. When we meet in the evening, another friend, who knows nothing about the documentary, asks whether it is a horror film.
‘It is’; ‘in a manner of speaking’ we answer together.
All That Breathes follows two brothers, Saud and Nadeem, who rescue injured black kites falling from Delhi’s increasingly inhospitable skies. The brothers work amid pollution, waste and the political anxieties of a city whose inhabitants have learned to coexist with environmental deterioration. Somebody in the film complains that the water smells again. I turn towards my friend. Had she not been complaining about something similar that morning? She is drinking from a bottle brought from home, although there is a jug of perfectly respectable-looking water on the table. I have often wondered whether one might wash contaminated water in the manner of washing rice, rinsing away its impurities until the liquid becomes clear. Unfortunately, water is a singularly uncooperative material for such domestic ingenuity. One cannot wash water without requiring more water, which must presumably be washed in turn. The exercise threatens to continue indefinitely, rather like a municipal grievance travelling from one department to another. The water may eventually become clean; the complainant is considerably more likely to become exhausted.
Throughout the film, there is an uncomfortable exchange between the images on the screen and the conversations taking place outside it. Just as I begin complaining about the cost of replacing the purifier’s filter, the brothers attend to another injured creature whose survival depends upon an improvised apparatus of care. We look towards the machine in the kitchen. Its little indicator is glowing reassuringly, although I am unsure whether the reassurance extends beyond the machine’s own internal condition. It can tell me when its filter requires attention; it cannot tell me why the water supply has failed to arrive. I find myself admiring Shaunak Sen’s attention to the zoological life ordinarily excluded from the respectable portrait of a metropolis: insects, birds, animals moving through refuse, creatures inhabiting the suburbs of human vision. Then I begin imagining a similar camera travelling through Hyderabad’s water routes, following the organisms living in stagnant pools, the mosquitoes breeding in neglected drains, the small aquatic lives that appear and disappear without troubling the city’s architectural imagination. The camera would have to acquire an exceptionally good microscope to accommodate some of them. What a strange civilisation we have produced, I think, in which a creature too small to be seen may enter the human body through water, while an entire neighbourhood can remain invisible to the institutions responsible for supplying it.
In the film, the brothers describe the remarkable adjustments animals make to the changing city. Birds alter their behaviour in response to traffic and pollution; other creatures discover unexpected uses for the materials humans discard. Every life form, it seems, must improvise. I think of the women in Hyderabad’s bastis who have developed an equally impressive repertoire of adjustments to the irregular arrival of water. They recognise changes in a motor’s pitch, anticipate the hours when supply might resume, arrange vessels in readiness and reorganise domestic work around the uncertain cooperation of pipes and electricity. Yeshashwini Kadiri describes Sai Akka in Film Nagar Basti listening beside a silent electric pump during a power cut, waiting for water that may arrive without the electricity required to collect it. She calls this checking her luck. I find the phrase extraordinarily revealing. A public utility has apparently acquired the temperament of a lottery. The resident must purchase the ticket with her time, her labour and her willingness to remain at home. There is no guarantee of winning, and the municipality does not appear obliged to refund the price of admission. Such ingenuity is frequently celebrated as resilience. But could one reasonably expect a woman who has sacrificed her working hours to an unpredictable water supply to regard the resulting expertise as a particularly desirable accomplishment? The distinction between adaptation and accommodation begins to trouble me. One is the capacity to survive changing circumstances; the other may be the political expectation that certain people will continue surviving circumstances that ought to be changed.
There is a kind of unnatural selection operating through the city’s water network. Nikhil Anand’s account of hydraulic citizenship suggests that pipes, pressure and the ability to negotiate with officials participate in determining who can make effective claims upon urban infrastructure. The possession of a connection does not necessarily guarantee the arrival of water, any more than the possession of a ration card guarantees that its owner will never go hungry. In Hyderabad’s bastis, the distinction between formal recognition and material access can be particularly consequential. A household may possess an address, a connection and the documents required to demonstrate its existence, yet remain dependent upon an uncertain supply. I wonder whether the city’s pipes have developed their own peculiar immigration department. Water may enter one neighbourhood with all the confidence of a distinguished guest and approach another as though its credentials require further verification. Of course, pipes possess neither prejudice nor political ideology. Their distribution, maintenance and operation, however, are organised through institutions that distinguish among places and populations. The apparent impartiality of the material should not be mistaken for the impartiality of the system through which it moves.
The political and environmental emergencies in Sen’s film are related without being interchangeable. The injured birds inhabit an atmosphere damaged by human activity; the brothers’ lives unfold amid anxieties about belonging and citizenship. Hyderabad’s waterscape presents a similarly uncomfortable conjunction. There is the environmental question of water availability, contamination, groundwater depletion and the changing condition of the Musi and its associated water bodies. There is also the political question of whose water is made dependable, whose complaints receive attention and whose labour compensates for the failure of infrastructure. It would be convenient to blame every interruption upon scarcity, as though scarcity were a particularly ill-tempered monsoon that had developed an individual grievance against the poor. Yet scarcity does not explain everything. Water can be physically available and unequally distributed; a connection can exist without adequate pressure; a supply can arrive without being safe to drink. The city, it seems, has developed a sophisticated vocabulary for distinguishing among these failures, while its residents are expected to experience them simultaneously.
There are omens everywhere in Hyderabad’s waterscape, although they rarely possess the courtesy of announcing themselves as such. The Musi, whose catastrophic flooding in 1908 made water impossible to ignore, now occupies a complicated place in the city’s environmental and political imagination. Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar, constructed in the decades following the flood, remain monuments to the ambition of regulating water through engineering. Yet the grandeur of a reservoir tells us surprisingly little about the condition of the tap in a basti. A lake may be celebrated as heritage, advertised as a desirable view or discussed as an ecological asset, while a plastic drum remains an unremarkable item of household equipment. I find this hierarchy of objects rather curious. The reservoir stores water against uncertainty; the drum performs much the same function on a considerably less impressive scale. One is photographed, commemorated and occasionally incorporated into the city’s self-congratulatory accounts of progress. The other is scrubbed, filled, covered and dragged across a kitchen floor. The difference is not merely one of size. It is also a difference in whose labour is recognised as infrastructure. In Film Nagar Basti, Kadiri documents the difficulties produced by contaminated supply, sewage overflow and the failure of water, electricity and drainage systems to operate together. These conditions are neither spectacular nor necessarily exceptional to the people living with them. They are folded into the ordinary organisation of domestic life. The ominous becomes routine; the routine becomes unremarkable; and what ought to be a public emergency is gradually reduced to a private inconvenience. The city, apparently, has discovered a remarkable method of treating infrastructural illness: instead of curing the patient, it teaches the patient to stop complaining about the symptoms.
I return to the relationship between political and environmental climates when I begin reading Steven Feld’s work on acoustemology, the possibility of knowing through sound. The term makes me reconsider the apparently innocent expression soundscape. I had once imagined a soundscape as an acoustic landscape, a place furnished with sounds in much the same way that a painting is furnished with trees and buildings. But listening, I begin to realise, is not an equal opportunity activity. The same motor may announce the filling of an overhead tank to one household, the exhaustion of a shared source to another, and an entirely inconsequential mechanical disturbance to somebody passing through the lane. Its meaning depends upon the listener’s relationship to the water it is supposed to deliver. A woman waiting beside a tap may recognise a change in pressure before anybody else notices it. A neighbour may hear the clang of a vessel and understand that the supply has resumed. Another resident may interpret the silence of a pump as a warning that electricity has failed at precisely the wrong moment. These sounds circulate through the neighbourhood, carrying information, obligation, irritation and occasionally cooperation. They are not merely the background music of poverty. They are part of the cultural system through which people negotiate space, gender, labour and belonging.
Though the Musi’s waters have undergone considerable transformations since the flood of 1908, the city’s relationship with water continues to produce its own distinctive sensory unease. The smell of sewage, the sight of stagnant water, the hollow sound of an empty vessel and the strained whine of a pump are not simply aesthetic details. They may be warnings, though they are not always sufficient evidence of the danger they suggest. Water that looks clear may be unsafe; water that smells unpleasant requires investigation rather than an immediate conclusion about its contents. The senses can alert a household to possible trouble without supplying the means to identify its cause. I find this particularly disturbing. The resident must decide whether to drink, boil, filter, discard or purchase water on the basis of incomplete information, while the institutions equipped to test and regulate its quality remain elsewhere. It is an extraordinary division of scientific labour. The state possesses the laboratory; the household supplies the experimental subject.
Could water be as indifferent as time? Does it care whether it enters a reservoir, a river, a corporate campus or a plastic bucket in a basti? If water possesses no political preferences, why does its distribution so often appear to recognise the distinctions of class, location and infrastructural entitlement? I wonder whether we have been blaming the wrong participant in this arrangement. Water does not decide which neighbourhood receives repairs first. Nor does it determine whose working hours may be sacrificed to an interrupted supply. Those decisions belong to the institutions and arrangements through which water is governed. The distinction matters because the language of environmental crisis can sometimes make historically produced inequalities appear as unavoidable features of nature. A dry tap is not necessarily evidence that the city has run out of water. It may also be evidence that the city has failed to deliver it.
We are all related through water, I find myself thinking. The proposition is hardly revolutionary in a biological sense: water moves through plants, animals, soils, rivers and human bodies, sustaining forms of life that cannot survive without it. Yet the universality of dependence has never guaranteed equality of access. A democracy of everything that drinks would be a beautiful idea, although it might present considerable administrative difficulties to a city still struggling to distribute water dependably among its human residents. Perhaps the more radical proposition is that water’s necessity should not have to be demonstrated anew by every household waiting beneath a tap. What if hydraulic citizenship meant not merely possessing a connection, but being able to depend upon it? What if the labour of listening, waiting, collecting, carrying and storing were counted as part of the real cost of urban water? The city might then discover that some of its supposedly inexpensive supplies are extraordinarily expensive to those who receive them. The accounting department, I suspect, would require a stronger antacid.
After my friends leave, I return to the kitchen and examine the purifier. Its little light continues to glow. I open the tap. There is a brief sputter, followed by silence. I check the storage drum, then the motor, then the purifier again. Each appears to be functioning according to its own limited understanding of the world. The water has not arrived. How does one reset a city?
There is a reason why I, like many of Hyderabad’s more fortunate citizens, have come to regard a little pink bottle of Gelusil, or its orange alternative, Aqua Ptychotis, as an indispensable companion to the city’s hydraulic ambitions. No metropolis can swallow reservoirs, pipelines, pumping stations and several generous helpings of world-class infrastructure without developing chronic heartburn. But the state, too, suffers from a peculiar digestive disorder. In 1908, the Musi delivered more water than Hyderabad could stomach; in its contemporary bastis, municipal taps may deliver less than a household can drink. What was once an embarrassment of excess has become an everyday exercise in rationing absence. The State, apparently, requires a stronger antacid.
This ‘Other’ hydraulic citizen, meanwhile, has cultivated a more intimate acquaintance with leaking pipes, temperamental pumps and the unmistakable acoustics of an empty stomach masquerading as a municipal connection. But would Hyderabad’s world-class admirers self-appointed custodians of infrastructural refinement, who mistake a pipeline for water and a connection for citizenship approve? Or is the real cause of their indigestion that the basti resident, having spent a lifetime listening to the city’s pipes, can tell precisely when its celebrated promises are nothing more than a rather expensive municipal burp?
Sohagni Roy enjoys working at the intersection of heritage, storytelling, and public history, tracing how regional cultures are archived, remembered, and made visible across borders. She is currently relearning Bangla, this time with intention and curiosity, and without the pressure of exams and subpar instructors.
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Works Cited
Bandari, Adithya, and Shubhajit Sadhukhan. “Analysis of Spatial Pattern of Water Supply Continuity in an Indian Metropolis: A Case Study of Hyderabad.” Urban Water Journal, vol. 21, no. 7, 2024, pp. 839–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/1573062X.2024.2360180.
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