Gendered infrastructure and liminal space in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies

Introduction

Dotted across India’s capital are more than 2000 neighborhoods that are designated as unauthorized colonies (UCs). Home to an in-between range of both lower and middle socio-economic groups, these Delhi neighborhoods are typically described as “illegal settlements.” They have been constructed and expanded through unsanctioned land transactions, lacking official entitlements to vital infrastructures such as municipal roads, water, and sewerage. As a consequence, residents of UCs reside in a liminal space outside of the prevailing logics, provisions, and maps of urban master plans. For example, residents’ sources and negotiations for vital urban resources including roads, water pipes, and drainage systems remain widely invisible within discourses and meta-narratives regarding how the city works. In this article, I refer to “liminal infrastructural space” to indicate how urban space in UCs is shaped by “in-between” and fragmented infrastructures that cannot be characterized as fully legal or illegal, formal or informal. Furthermore, many of the infrastructures in UCs remain in an ongoing state of transition, both materially and legally: tubewells are frequently defunct or have run dry, roads erode and are repaved regularly, and many residents engage the state in order to slowly transition from informal access to networked infrastructure and more formalized arrangements and payments. Thus, in these settlements, residents procure and access water, sewerage, roads, and electricity through what Teresa Caldeira (2017) calls a “transversal logics.” Here, city-dwellers engage transversally with the official logics of legal property, access to services, and state regulation in ways that redefine those logics, co-producing infrastructures and building the city of a growing majority (Caldeira, 2017: 7).

This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal infrastructural space in UCs. Drawing on feminist and embodied political ecology approaches, the paper analyzes how gender relations are produced, reworked, and embodied in relation to infrastructure. With regard to UCs, this includes an investigation of how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are co-produced through residents’ everyday relations with infrastructures beyond the network. The article traces the ways residents’ negotiation of liminal infrastructural space relies on gendered social relations, labor, and socially differentiated embodied practices. I specifically show how fractured water networks ultimately constitute “gendered infrastructural assemblages,” which enable and maintain water’s circulation across neighborhoods but also serve to deepen forms of gendered marginality and differentiation. My findings show the ways that gender relations and labor become critical to how liminal urban spaces are produced, managed, and ultimately made livable. Here, gendered infrastructural practices and labor to negotiate and supplement fragmented components of water infrastructure (such as broken pipes, absent tankers, and diminishing wells) shape subjectivities and possibilities for social relations and urban claims-making. As such, the circuitry of gender relations and infrastructural assemblages expose both the potential and limits of city-making practices within these urban spaces.

After detailing the history of UCs in Delhi and nesting the paper within socio-material and feminist political ecology (FPE) approaches to urban infrastructure, the paper first traces how both tubewell and tanker networks operate through a logic of “mutual exceptions” made by both residents and the state. These informal networks foster a deepening reliance on gendered infrastructural labor. Specifically, I show how these “gendered socio-technical assemblages” result in differing and unequal embodied experiences of liminal infrastructural space in these neighborhoods. Ultimately, the social and material dimensions of water infrastructure in UCs combine to shape both residents’ situated experience of urban liminality as well as its transcendent possibilities.

Data for this paper comes from research conducted from 2011 to 2012, with follow-up visits in 2015 and 2017, in an agglomerated unauthorized colony of Delhi. ¹ Ethnographic methods, including observing both infrastructures and residents, 25 semi-structured individual and group interviews (including residents and key political actors such as local politicians), and neighborhood street gatherings and walk-alongs, were used to gather data on the politics and uneven experiences of fragmented and heterogeneous water infrastructures in the area. Additional data including relevant legal-juridical procedures, master planning documents, and urban water and housing policies were retrieved from various state agencies (including the Delhi Jal Board and Public Grievance Commission) and used to analyze both the structures of inequitable infrastructural provisioning in UCs, as well as their in-between and marginalized spatial, political, and legal status.

“In-between” people and infrastructures in the UCs of Delhi

Located in Southwest Delhi, Saroj Bagh ² is an agglomerated unauthorized colony that consists of four contiguous settlements. It is home to roughly 300,000 people ( Delhi Jal Board, 2011). Saroj Bagh is one of Delhi’s more than 2000 UCs that have been historically described as “illegal settlements,” constructed through unsanctioned land transactions. Unlike more socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, such as designated slums and jhuggi jhopri clusters, residents of UCs such as Saroj Bagh can be conceptualized as constituting a “missing middle” class (Mawdsley et al., 2009) of homeowners and renters, many of whom can afford to privately invest significant portions of their income in infrastructures for water, drainage, roads, and multi-story rebuilds of homes (Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal, 2013). The presence of resident welfare associations (RWAs) (which are normative to planned areas of the city), high levels of deeded land ownership, and access to small networks of formalized infrastructure illuminates the in-between nature of these urban spaces and environments. These settlements remain in a liminal urban space: they are neither fully legal nor illegal in terms of home ownership, land occupancy, and infrastructural access, but remain in ongoing states of transition. This is, in part, because the land of UCs was originally designated to be used for agricultural uses, not residential. While many residents are owners of their homes with legal titles, the state does not recognize the land transaction itself as legal due to the unsanctioned development of UCs. As a result, residents lack official entitlements from the state to key infrastructures such as connections to the public water supply and sewerage networks. Residents of UCs often auto-construct their own infrastructures (paying privately for streets to be paved, houses to be rebuilt, and tubewells to be installed), as well as rely on key political actors and authorities (such as Members of the Legislative Assembly, water engineers, and local strongmen) for piecemeal provisioning of roads, water pipes, and drainage. Incremental infrastructures are also, at times, provided at the discretion of state agencies themselves, such as the Delhi Jal Board (the state water utility) and the South, North and West Delhi Municipal Corporations. These incremental and piecemeal infrastructures produce differing embodied effects and experiences for residents within UCs themselves. Urbanites of differing genders, classes, castes, and religions experience differing forms of access, control, and engagement with the politics of fragmented networks.

While (at the time of research) few UCs in Delhi had achieved full regularization since the 1980s, ³ despite ongoing drives and promises by the state and national government, the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that UCs must be provided with services prior to regularization, resulting in residents perceiving formalization of infrastructure as an important and necessary step forward. The Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling also demonstrates the paradoxical legal space that characterizes governance in UCs, where rights to urban services like centralized water connections and sewerage are not officially granted until regularization, but state infrastructures are expected to be installed in order to qualify for regularization. Thus, it is common to find unique configurations of quasi-legal, formal and informal infrastructures within UCs, in which both the state’s and residents’ infrastructural practices remain in a “gray zone” (Truelove, 2019) . Such unique configurations demonstrate the need to further disentangle the infrastructural and political variations that shape everyday life, tenure security, and the forging of urban in-roads within these neighborhoods.

Despite Saroj Bagh’s residential illegality and thus exclusion to centralized infrastructures for water, roads and sewerage, its liminal position is marked by the presence of a number of formal and state-sponsored infrastructures. Regarding the water supply, this includes 26 tubewells that internally distribute untreated water that is billed by the state (the Delhi Jal Board), roads installed and repaved at the discretion of the local Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), and some piecemeal (and often open) drains that run alongside specific lanes. This is in part due to the strong clientelist politics in UCs, whereby local politicians (including MLAs and Municipal Councilors) politically benefit from provisioning state resources through discretionary budget allocations to areas with substantial vote banks (Berenschot, 2010: 896). However, steps toward the formalization of infrastructures in and of itself cannot be taken as synonymous with improved access. In fact, formalization can result in either no substantial change for residents or sometimes an actual worsening of conditions, as we will see below.

Simone (2013) and Simone and Rao (2012) find urban “in-between” neighborhoods, similar to the UCs of Delhi, to be a relatively invisible majority in major urban centers because of difficulties in accounting for their diversity, and because such population groups lack an internal coherence. For example, despite approximately one third of Delhi’s population residing in UCs, this missing middle of the city has been under-analyzed and too often subsumed within studies of the urban poor and slum clusters, without sufficient analysis of how such populations differentially experience liminal space, differing iterations of (il)legality, and complex forms of everyday governance on the ground. Similar to Delhi, Simone (2013) notes in relation to Jakarta’s mixed districts:

Even as historic districts persist with a highly differentiated temporal mix of middle-class stability, decline, renewal, new investment and construction, there is a persistent tendency to characterize these mixed districts as districts of the poor (Simone, 2013: 5)

Despite such tendencies, Simone asserts:

It is difficult to discern a downward spiral into greater depths of slummification, as small improvements are continuously made and households do what they can to stabilize livelihood. (Simone, 2013: 4)

Liminal space and gendered infrastructures

In analyzing gendered infrastructures in Delhi’s UCs, I bring an FPE approach to a growing body of scholarly work that views infrastructure as neither inert nor apolitical, but rather as simultaneously social, political, cultural, and technical (Amin and Thrift, 2017; Anand et al., 2018; Elyachar, 2010; Fredericks, 2018; Hetherington, 2019; McFarlane, 2018; Schmidt, 2020). Pointing to the mutual constitution of cities, infrastructure, and human sociality, Amin and Thrift (2017: 3) state:

Together, the arrangements of water, electricity, logistics, communication, circulation and the like, instantiate and sustain life within and beyond cities in all sorts of ways: allocating resource and reward, enabling collective action, shaping social dispositions and affects, marking time, space and map, maintaining order and discipline, sustaining transactions, moulding the environmental footprint.

A social and material approach to infrastructure is particularly useful in the context of the infrastructural fractures and fragments of UCs (Coutard and Rutherford, 2015). For example, in neighborhoods like Saroj Bagh, infrastructure is often at the heart of social, political, and spatial margins that shape people’s practices, urban trajectories, and life possibilities. This includes installing and navigating dysfunctional pipes, new layers of concrete that block and impede water networks, and the uneven distribution of wells, water tankers, and tanks across the neighborhood that funnel water to some houses more than others. Unequal and fragmented infrastructures in Saroj Bagh act as both a material and socio-political medium through which residents experience structural constraints and unequal rights to the city and its resources, particularly their exclusion from official rights and centralized access to vital networked services like water, waste removal, and sewerage. However, as Lancione (2016: 17) illuminates, margins, rather than being just a matter of places, services, institutions, or procedures are “entanglements of bodies and objects, discourses and power.” As such, city-dwellers’ engagement with infrastructure can also work to extend and/or supersede structural economic, political, and social constraints, revealing how the liminal space of UCs is claimed and remade in ways that both challenge and exist within systems of exclusions. For example, in relation to Delhi’s UCs, I will examine how both the state and residents make compromises and mutual exceptions (specifically turning a blind eye to informal or quasi-legal practices), regarding each other’s engagement with informal infrastructures in ways that complicate rather than simply rearticulate structures of power and exclusion. However, such mutual exceptions pose unique gendered consequences, including reifying gendered social relations and normalizing the gendered labor that is critical for quasi-legal water networks function and flow.

In this vein, the paper draws on FPE to bring a gendered lens to the ways liminal infrastructural space is unevenly experienced, embodied, and managed in relation to accessing water beyond the centralized network. While critical infrastructure studies details the ways infrastructure is tied to how urban residents negotiate and remake space (for example, see Anand, 2017; McFarlane, 2018; Lancione and McFarlane, 2016; Schmidt, 2020), less has been examined in terms of the multiple ways gender relations are produced, reworked, and embodied in relation to infrastructure. Seeking to contribute to a small, but growing, body of work on the gendered dimensions of infrastructure (for example, see Elyachar, 2010; Schwenkel, 2015; Sultana, 2020; Fredericks, 2018; Thompson, under review), this article draws on FPE to examine the ways that the liminal water infrastructures in UCs are gendered and unevenly embodied. FPE contributes an important framework for analyzing gendered infrastructures by showing the complex ways ecologies, infrastructures, and gendered social relations are mutually constituted (Truelove and Sabhlok, under review). In FPE studies on wells and water (Sultana, 2011; Thompson et al., 2017; Truelove, 2011), toilets and sanitation (Desai et al., 2015, Doshi, 2017; O’Reilly, 2006, 2010), and critical food networks (Hovorka, 2006; Jarosz, 2011), scholars demonstrate how both political ecologies of resources and infrastructure are tied to (intersectional) gendered relations, subjectivities, and unequal forms of social power.

For example, a number of FPE-aligned studies on water and waste networks reveal how gendered labor, power relations, and subjectivities become reworked through people’s engagement with networked and fragmented infrastructures. Sultana’s (2011) work on wells in Bangladesh shows how gendered and classed subjectivities and forms of social power perpetuate, and are reinforced through, uneven patterns of well access and control. The gendered dimensions of wells are also unevenly embodied through differing affective and emotional responses to the stresses and strains of negotiating access and navigating various levels of arsenic contamination. Such research shows how material infrastructures, water ecologies, and social power are co-constituted and embodied in ways that that produce particular types of inequities for women and men in daily life. In a parallel vein, Schwenkel’s FPE-aligned (2015) work on the breakdown of water networks in Vinh City, Vietnam reveals the ways gendered labor and moral orders work in tandem with water infrastructure’s transformation over time. In the case of Vinh City, Schwenkel traces how the breakdown of the network actually suspended gendered divisions of labor, offering opportunities for new types of collaboration in households and neighborhoods. Shifts in gender relations through transformations in water infrastructure produced “new forms of solidarity and gendered social practice” (Schwenkel, 2015: 531). Finally, recent and critical work on fragmented infrastructures such as water kiosks in Lilongwe (Alda-Vidal et al., under review), tubewells in Cameroon (Thompson, under review), and household waste disposal in Dakar (Fredericks, 2018) importantly reveal how each of these infrastructures are produced through pre-existing gendered relations and rely upon gendered labor, producing unequal social and embodied consequences for women and men.

Seeking to draw from and contribute to this growing body of work, this article demonstrates that gendered discourses and labor are critical to how liminal space and infrastructures are navigated in Delhi’s UCs. I show how the gendered infrastructure of women’s labor, bodies, and social networks enables the circulation of water from water tankers and tubewells, ultimately serving to make liminal space livable and water resources accessible. Here, “people are infrastructure,” but not only in Simone’s (2004) sense of social networks of cooperation and collaboration, but also in the socio-material sense of women’s bodies literally acting as infrastructure to circulate vital-to-life resources in peripheralized spaces (see also Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022). Yet, as this critical labor is naturalized through gender relations and household divisions of labor, it remains invisible in dominant narratives regarding how urban water is circulated and infrastructure maintained (Truelove, 2019). Furthermore, as a consequence of these gendered infrastructural assemblages, I show that women tend to experience unequal ramifications and disproportionate hardships. However, these gendered infrastructures not only produce socially differentiated constraints and hardships, but “provide spaces of agentic possibilities” (Aceska et al., 2019) in which women creatively use water and its fragmented infrastructures as a platform to destabilize gendered labor and shift wider gendered patterns of domesticity and discourses concerning women’s claim to space and rights in their homes, communities, and city at large.

Tubewells: Material fractures and states of mutual exception

In this section, I examine how fragmented tubewell networks in UCs operate through a logic of “mutual exceptions” made by both residents and the state, which in turn fosters a deepening reliance on gendered infrastructural labor. Following Caldeira’s (2017: 7) elaboration of the ways peripheral spaces frequently unsettle official logics, but do so by transversally “engaging the many problems of legalization, regulation, occupation, planning and speculation,” I show how both the state and residents make compromises for each other’s illegal tubewell practices. The political consequences of these mutual exceptions are complex: rather than simply reproducing uniform systems of infrastructural and socio-spatial exclusion, these compromises between the state and residents often help to forge in-roads to more permanent and/or stable infrastructures. However, I will show that such in-roads and gains not only rely on, and reinforce, gendered power relations, they also have differentiated and unequal embodied effects for women’s bodies and labor as household water managers. In order to elaborate the ways tubewells become gendered infrastructures, I begin by detailing their complex governance and liminal status in these colonies.

Although the state water agency, the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), is not officially obligated to provision piped water to Saroj Bagh as the colony is “unauthorized,” as of 2012 the agency had nonetheless installed 26 DJB tubewells with accompanying pipes across the neighborhood (Delhi Jal Board, 2011). This compromise in state-provisioned water access maintained the neighborhood’s overall exclusion to the centralized and treated water supply, but rather provided an internal, untreated water source that residents could optionally connect to, along with water bills from the public utility. As such, DJB installations constituted a legal and formalized arrangement on paper, requiring a rather steep initiation fee (Rs. 300/square meter of one’s house), a meter installation (Rs. 1100), as well as regularly billed water payments. However, there was no guarantee that water would actually run through tubewell pipes after their installation. The sporadic flow of tubewells, which fluctuated seasonally and according to falling groundwater levels as well as water pressure, also depended on several additional factors related to the built environment. These included how close homes were to the nearest tubewell, the location of concrete roads that might impede local pipes, house rebuilds (which often also disrupted pipes), and local hills that affected water pressure. The chronic unreliability and uneven supply of water from wells resulted in the state and residents alike making mutual exceptions for each other’s informal and/or illegal practices that became necessary as “work arounds” for the absence and failure of a functioning, networked system.

First, residents commonly resorted to unsanctioned and unmetered connections to the state-run tubewells, to which the state generally turned a blind eye. In regular conversations across the neighborhood, residents described why they chose to bypass expensive initiation fees and meters, instead accessing water in homes in an unmetered (and illegal) fashion. Some households reported that no water would come from pipes for months at a time, making the high costs of initiation fees not worthwhile (Resident Interviews, 2012, 2015). Others reported that pipes would become regularly cut through construction projects, and that they did not want to repeatedly pay initiation fees every time infrastructure shifted (Resident Interview, 2012). One male resident summarized that bypassing the state’s costly initiation fee (and meter) was more norm than exception among households of the colony, since initiation fees were an expense that would not necessarily guarantee running water. As tubewell pipes had already been installed in the area, unmetered connections provided an opportunity to both access the water supply and avoid steep fees (Resident Interview, 2015). Despite normative informal practices of residents to illegally connect to wells, the state nonetheless continued to formally bill illegally connected residents for water use. In this case, the fee for water was established by pooling all unmetered households together and dividing the water expense evenly across this group (Resident Interview, 2015). As such, informal practices were brought into the formalized system of billing, allowing far more residents to financially bear the costs of connecting to the piped supply, and mitigate their investment given the unreliability of tubewells.

At the same time, the provisioning of “formal” water pipes resulted in residents equivalently making exceptions for the state through compromising on inaccurate, and potentially unjust, water billing. As mentioned above, households that bypassed official connections and meters for their tubewell access received a pooled bill, in which each household (without a meter) had to pay an equal share of the total water used between them, regardless of each house’s share of water (if any). As a result, many residents reported receiving a DJB bill for water that was never accessed. This was more norm than exception in the households I interviewed. Residents faced the choice of either paying for water that never arrived or facing delinquency on the bill—which they perceived might jeopardize future state water deliveries (see also Ranganathan, 2014). Interviewing residents throughout the area, it was common to hear statements similar to what one woman expressed during a group discussion:

There is no supply of water, as in, the one provided by the government. We pay the water bill even when there is no water (Personal Communication, 2012)

(Re-)Producing gender subjectivities and social relations through infrastructural fragments

States of mutual exception between residents and the Delhi Jal Board produced distinct material and embodied effects that shaped the uneven negotiation and experience of liminal infrastructural space in the neighborhood. As mutual exceptions regarding the governance of tubewells concretized fragmentation and unreliability as relatively permanent fixtures of water’s circulation, these political and material factors intersected with patriarchal discourses and social relations, placing women with the primary responsibilities of household water management as part of their reproductive labor. In particular, in South Asia (and beyond), household water management has been socially relegated as part of women’s domestic and reproductive labor (Sultana, 2011; Truelove and O’Reilly, 2021). Women (and girls) are primarily responsible not only for procuring household water for their families, but problem-solving water’s absence, which may include looking and waiting for water outside the home, as well as carrying water over long distances (in both rural and urban settings). In the case of water access in Saroj Bagh, part of women’s gendered household division of labor included problem-solving, and compensating for, fractured and sporadically flowing tubewells. Thus, gendered discourses relegating water as part of “women’s domestic work” were critical to the ways women’s labor, social networks, and bodies were put to work to enable tubewells to function in the neighborhood so that water would eventually reach household and community members.

Gendered labor, spatial constraints, and waiting for water

For (lower) middle class women living in the UC, their intersectional class and gender positions placed them with compounded hardships with regard to managing and accessing household water. ⁴ For example, some women were in a relatively privileged socio-economic position relative to poorer households, not needing to work outside the home to make ends meet (due to their husband’s occupying low-level salaried positions in either government or at the nearby airport). However, this group of lower middle-class women faced compounded gendered labor hardships due to their roles in staying home and managing fragmented water access, which often hijacked their daily routines and required hours a day to problem solve, including resorting to private water purchases as a stopgap. Working class women in the neighborhood, who had less financial resources and time to devote to water, had to balance their hours of paid labor (often as vegetable sellers, domestic cleaners, and cooks) with the pressures of household water management, which sometimes required sacrifices to their employment so they could be near to homes to capture and store tubewell water when it was flowing, or alternatively spend time finding additional water sources (such as water tanker deliveries or bottled water).

As the geographic positionality of any given home was unique in relation to state tubewells, the pressure and flow of water differed from house to house. Homes that were higher up on hills, or which recently had roads repaved, reported compromised pipes and pressures, requiring a number of embodied “compensation practices” (Zerah, 2000). These included using social networks, time, and physical labor to problem solve ongoing problems with the fragmented supply. Similar to Elyachar’s (2010) findings that Egyptian women in Cairo utilize the “phatic labor” of gossip and chatting with other women to eventually shore up economic infrastructures, in UCs women also turned to already-existing social networks of neighbors and friends to spontaneously gain information on local water sources, specifically regarding tubewells and tanker deliveries. For example, during a friendly chance encounter in the lane that included a more general chit-chat, a woman named Rani mentioned to her neighbor Vanita that she had talked to the water tanker driver the previous week regarding water delivery timings. Rani speculated when women of the lane should expect the next water delivery from the driver. Another woman, when visiting her friend Amita inside her home for tea, used the time to also mention that tubewell water stopped running to her house, asking for advice on water timings. These everyday social networks helped to inform women when to check for tubewell water running in their homes, when and where to look out for water tankers, which plumber to contact for tubewell-related water problems, and when to attend street gatherings to complain to the local politicians who walked the area’s lanes semi-regularly.

Women’s everyday labor in problem-solving the local tubewell supply included checking for water at odd hours of the early morning when either there was a report (from neighbors) that water was flowing, or a past experience of having accessed water during these timings. In this way and others, women’s bodies served as “appendages” (Peloso and Morinville, 2014) to the tubewell network. In order to capture sufficient water to maintain household water needs when tubewell water was flowing, women would quickly turn on installed motors in their homes, which would then suction water to multiple rooftop tanks that had the potential to store enough water to last several days. The extra step of being home (and awake) to turn on the water motor was especially critical given that tubewell water flows were so unreliable that it was critical to store as much water as possible during periods of flow so that the household could endure days of waterlessness. Thus, women’s social networks and infrastructural labor acted together as an appendage, bridge, and form of regular maintenance critical to the functioning of tubewell assemblages. Their everyday practices enabled water to be captured during the time of its flow, as well as stored and thus available for distribution to household members outside the hours of the tubewell running.

However, every woman I interviewed spatially constrained her activities in order to do this work: remaining home when water was predicted to flow, or when extra ad-hoc water needed to be purchased and delivered due to a tubewell’s chronic unreliability. Waiting for water, and arranging for alternate private deliveries, came at the expense of other life opportunities and women’s spatial mobility to leave their homes and neighborhood during the day. Emotional consequences also resulted from this, including stress, anger, and embarrassment. For example, one woman described having to suddenly leave visiting family and guests in her house in order to run after a nearby water tanker, since tubewell water had not come to her house in recent days (Resident Interview, 2012). Other women reported not being available to walk their children to or from school, because leaving the house would jeopardize their chances of capturing water when it was running (Resident Interviews, 2012). Hosting guests at one’s home, fetching children from school, and caring for elders in the house all came second to making sure that the household had sufficient water supplies for the day. Such strains became compounded when women sought out multiple alternate water sources in the wake of tubewell failures, discussed below.

Additionally, women’s gendered experiences and infrastructural labor were also shaped by the materiality of groundwater. Specifically, the poor quality and high salinity of tubewell water produced a set of embodied responses and consequences that compounded the time, psychological stress, and money that women spent in relation to problem-solving water issues throughout the day. For example, women reported that their morning routines of bathing themselves and their children with untreated groundwater water would result in skin conditions, rashes, and hair loss that subsequently had to be problem-solved, sometimes through costly medical visits and treatments, other times through efforts to procure limited amounts of potable water for baths (through bottled water or tanker deliveries). In addition, everyday activities such as washing clothes became particularly cumbersome with saline water, requiring creative and complex work-arounds that were physically and emotionally taxing. For example, one woman named Kamla describes how she strategized to use salty water in combination with purchased bottles of potable water in order to accomplish household work. She stated:

[DJB tubewell water] becomes so salty you cannot wash your clothes, and you have to first wash in salty water and then rinse in normal water to get them clean (Resident Interview, 2012).

State tanker deliveries: Gendered bodies as infrastructure

Apart from tubewells, the other fractured, and supplemental, water source provided by the state in Saroj Bagh was tanker deliveries. DJB tankers arrived only once per week in pre-designated lanes (usually determined by negotiations between certain residents, the DJB, and the local MLA). Weekly tanker deliveries provided treated water for residents, but also required the labor of competing for and extracting the water from the tanker, filling containers, and transporting the water back to homes (which were often a non-trivial distance away). Here, women’s bodies substituted for pipes: they became the infrastructure by which water was secured and moved between the tanker and one’s home, often entailing a long and cumbersome walk causing back and shoulder problems and pain (Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022). Tanker deliveries were also notoriously unpredictable on the day of delivery, causing women to stay home for the entire day of the scheduled delivery or risk losing a week’s worth of drinking water for their families. For example, a woman named Shweta describes the physical and emotional stress that women experienced as they waited for water and gave up other activities and work:

We have to run after the tanker as soon as it is here. Otherwise we will miss out. We have to get ready early in the morning waiting for the tanker. We can’t go out throughout the day. It’s always there at the back of our minds (Resident Interview, 2012)

Openings and closures for new gender and political subjectivities

While liminal and fragmented infrastructures served to deepen forms of gendered marginality and differentiation, women’s gendered infrastructural practices also presented openings for altering subject positions and broader social relations through contesting the normative gender roles associated with household water management and social reproduction. Such contestations often happened through small, everyday gestures, rather than more visible organized resistance. In this dialogue between myself and two female neighbors who live across from each other in the same lane, we see women’s creative ability to circumvent the strain of accessing tanker water through attempts to shift gendered relations, labor and cultural norms. Jayatri, who “wears jeans” and is considered quite “urbanized” by her neighbors in everyday chitchat explains that she refuses to carry heavy containers of water, and rather asks her husband or other “gents” in the settlement to help carry burdensome buckets of tanker water after she fills them, a practice that was deemed very unusual and contrary to prevailing gender norms and divisions of labor. Her neighbor across the lane, Rani, who comes from a more conservative family from rural Uttar Pradesh, states that she would never be as bold as to ask men to carry water.

Rani: Four months back, I got sick because of the water. It is not possible to lift the buckets [after filling tanker water] … We do it in multiple trips.

Jayatri: That is why I first fill up the water and then find somebody, preferably gents, to carry the water for us.

Rani: [Jayatri] does it pretty well [asking men to carry water]. She is from the city. But I am from the village. I cannot be so straightforward to people (Group Discussion, July 2012).

Women’s gendered roles in co-producing and enabling the functioning of socio-technical assemblages in UCs also opened up new spaces and experiences of the urban political. Street gatherings, often led by women household water managers, were a spontaneous and common occurrence during my research visits, in which women would gather to voice complaints to local political actors. These included the local MLA, DJB officials, and private tanker drivers. Here, women linked their experiences of everyday water struggles and politics to rippling hardships and broader patterns of exclusion in the city. For example, one woman named Smita articulated the snow-balling effects of her household water problems on the lives and bodies of children. This included children missing school either because of a lack of water for bathing, or children suffering from rashes and scalp problems due to the high salinity of water. In addition, because their mothers had to juggle reproductive household labor, particularly waiting for water deliveries during the morning hours, some children could not be taken to school on time, or at all. Voicing frustrations with these experiences one morning during a spontaneous street gathering to confront the MLA who was walking through the neighborhood, Smita angrily shouted at him, “Should we educate our kids, or should we fill water?” (street observation, 2012).

This voicing of public complaints in street gatherings reveals ordinary spaces of the urban political in which women engaged in small and ordinary acts of resistance by vocalizing their lived experiences, making claims to the city through regularly targeting and engaging local political actors. Here, we also see how gendered infrastructural space gives women a unique voice and vantage point to articulate and engage in the everyday politics of water. Smita’s multiple complaints to the MLA eventually resulted in him shifting the tanker driver’s hours and delivery location to be more convenient for women in her lane, a scenario that (in this case) unfortunately did not last beyond a few months, when the tanker driver reverted back to his unpredictable delivery times. However, these everyday small political practices demonstrate how “the in-betweenness embodied by people living at the margins … [open] possibilities for new forms of political subjectification” (Aedo, 2019: 14). In particular, women used the openings offered through gendered liminal space, particularly engaging key political actors such as MLAs and Municipal Councilors in the streets and in their local offices, as an opening to (slowly) transform their gender and political subjectivities, furthering claims-making in their homes, neighborhoods, and city at large in incremental, and slowly accruing, ways. During my research, I witnessed women regularly visiting the local MLA’s office, as well as approaching MLA and tanker drivers in the streets of the neighborhood to openly express anger at the lack of reliable water access to their homes, including mentioning the trade-offs women were forced to make in order to access water, such as keeping kids back from school, or not having sufficient water for drinking, baths, and cleaning.

Conclusion

This article examines how residents navigate the liminal infrastructures and space of UCs in Delhi, including the complexity of social and material relations that shape the uneven experience of urban liminality. Infrastructural networks and fragments are tied to how residents negotiate and remake space, and in the process transform their subjectivities and experience of urban inequality. Specifically, I trace how gender is intimately tied to the production and uneven experience of urban liminality (see also Parikh, 2019) and fragmented infrastructures. I show that gendered discourses, practices and labor are critical to piecing together fragmented water infrastructures such as tubewells and tankers, producing gendered infrastructural assemblages in which women’s labor and bodies become critical to the functioning of fractured water access beyond the network. In this case, gendered social relations and labor are critical to ultimately making liminal space livable and resources accessible to households, families, and neighborhoods. However, the gendered nature of everyday water infrastructures in these colonies remains invisible in dominant narratives regarding how water supplies are accessed, transported, circulated, and maintained. As a consequence, women’s experience of disproportionate embodied hardships and sacrifices to make water flow in UCs is also invisible within prevailing discourses of how Delhi’s UC residents access water.

By conceptualizing fragmented and fractured water infrastructures beyond the network as gendered infrastructures and socio-technical assemblages, this paper contributes to a feminist and embodied urban political ecology of urban infrastructure that both situates and differentiates the uneven lived experiences of liminal space and infrastructural assemblages in cities of the global South. This analysis gives particular attention to how processes of infrastructure fragmentation, malfunction, and maintenance are produced through, and constitutive of, particular configurations of social relations, which in turn produce unequal embodied effects. In particular, gendered discourses that place women with the primary responsibility for water management and the labor of negotiating fragmented components of water infrastructure (such as defunct pipes, unreliable tankers, and contaminated and diminishing wells) consequently alter subjectivities, embodied inequalities, and possibilities for social relations and urban claims-making. While the gendered discourses, practices and labor that undergird water infrastructures critically aide in producing water’s circulation to an “in-between” population that constitute the urban majority in Delhi, these gendered infrastructures ultimately risk deepening forms of gendered marginality. As such, the gendered dimensions of tubewells and water tankers expose both the potential and limits of city-making practices within liminal urban spaces. In other words, the urban in-roads made at the neighborhood scale, including residents’ gaining limited water access to state-run tubewells, and formalizing state relationships though paying water bills to the public utility, must be analyzed in tandem with the uneven consequences of such “in-between” infrastructures on particular social groups within the neighborhoods of UCs. As women’s bodies and labor ultimately compensate for state neglect, malfunction, and disrepair, the transcendent possibilities embedded within liminal spaces are often literally carried on the backs of women who transform the hardships of life at the margins into claiming and remaking resources and infrastructures for entire neighborhoods. Within ongoing neighborhood negotiations and governance of water in the everyday, there remains an assumption that women’s infrastructural work is a resource that can be relied upon without being fully acknowledged or valued. At the same time, the inordinate gendered performance of accessing and managing fractured infrastructures reveals how the struggle for water persists on a daily basis in these liminal spaces, with water security never fully arriving for households and coming at a significant sacrifice of particular residents and bodies.

Thus, as gendered bodies act as infrastructure, hauling, transporting, and maintaining water flows, such practices necessitate scholars to take seriously not only how liminal space and peripheries are made through economic, land-use, and legal-juridical margins, but gendered margins in which gendered bodies experience particularly unequal ramifications of socio-natural and socio-material processes in the city. Future analyses are needed to further understand how liminal and fragmented infrastructural space – increasingly a norm rather than exception in cities of the global South – can shape social differentiation and urban inequality within communities, neighborhoods, and households, not just between them. At the same time, attention to the gendered and embodied dimensions of infrastructure reveals new possibilities for transforming gender and political subjectivities through the exercise of incremental practices and emergent forms of agency and political claims-making.