How many Kirulapana Canals are there in Colombo? Reading everyday imageries and imaginations using southern theory

Introduction

In south Colombo there are two main canals that snake through the city and join the Indian Ocean. One of them, called the Kirulapana Canal, focus of our study, is around 20–25 m wide and connects with the wider canal network that marks contemporary Colombo’s landscape. Kirulapana canal is currently maintained by Sri Lanka Land Reclamation & Development Corporation (SLLRDC) which is a technical body that plans, executes and maintains reclaimed land. SLLRDC takes Sri Lankan Navy’s help to operate motorboats for scooping floating waste, necessary due to canal’s width and high water-flow. During one such cleaning process which we participated in, the boat was floating next to an apartment complex and a plastic garbage bag was flung from the other side of the wall, straight into the Kirulapana Canal. Everyone in the boat was surprised. Of course, we knew people at times throw garbage in the canal, but for it to happen in front of us, from a higher income apartment complex was a surprise (Colombo generally has an efficient door-to-door solid waste collection system). The staff called out to see if the person was still there. The apartment guard meekly showed up and apologized from the other side of the wall. However, the navy officer driving the boat got emotional and started shouting: how he is ready to die for the country and how his fellow citizens will not even try to keep it clean. The security guard seemed extremely embarrassed at his action and kept apologizing. The navy officer looked at us and exclaimed ‘education!’ pointing out how the misinformed public pollutes the canal (at the same time demeaning the security guard). The apartment complex faces its back to the canal and residents cannot directly access the canal as they are hidden behind the boundary walls. The disconnect with the canal was not always so and not all buildings along the canal are hidden behind boundary walls.

Two imaginations of the canal and rationalities can be teased out from the above snippet. One that of the navy officer, for whom a canal is a national asset and thus need to be kept clean. The other is that of the security guard, for whom the canal is the backyard, thus acceptable to fling garbage into. More than the two rationalities, we would like to discuss the domination of one over the other. The security guard’s rationality permitted him to throw garbage into the canal. However, when confronted with navy officer’s rationality, the security guard seemingly gave legitimacy to the other rationality rather than his own. What makes one imagination of the canal more legitimate than the other? Or, what makes one way of knowing and being, dominate the other way of knowing and being? The educational background of the navy officer and the security guard could be similar. However, by adhering to a certain rationality, the navy officer was able to position himself as socioculturally superior. Certain rationalities and imaginations are not only hegemonic, but also provide a capital (in a Bourdieu sense of the term) by associating with them. It is this hegemony of certain ways of knowing and being that we investigate when we ask as to how many Kirulapana Canals are there in Colombo.

We may not know exactly how many Kirulapana Canals are there, but we are sure that there are many. This plurality of histories, imageries and conceptions, render a world, which is different from metropolitan ¹ ways of knowing and belonging. Broadening Perera and Tang’s ² argument of, ‘know[ing] the same (absolute) city in different ways’, we would demonstrate that any notion of ‘absolute’ city (or parts thereof) is in itself a manifestation of the dominant and hegemonic imagery. Consequently, we start the discussion by accepting multiple canals, relegating the usage of any absolute notion of the canal. Furthermore, as Rasnayake’s ³ and Nagaraj’s ⁴ work demonstrates, the hegemonic imageries and absolute notions in-turn serve the interest of the affluent class and their capital (in a Marxian sense of the term).

Building on the previous works highlighting social and conceptual nature of physical infrastructure, ⁵ we propose diversifying its reading via plural registers. By investigating multiple canals, in this article, we focus on the formation of knowledges (as to how different canals are socioculturally constructed) and the power dynamics therein (as to how certain constructs of the canal become hegemonic/universal).

In the next section, we will outline the theoretical underpinnings of what we understand by southern theory ⁶ reading of urban infrastructures. Thereafter we discuss the methodology. Subsequently, we present the case of Kirulapana Canal in three sections, outlining the different manners in which we as researchers counted Kirulapana Canals. These sections are written to illustrate the plurality of conceptions and we do not intend them as categories. These sections present the various canals, which are varied in how the time is divided to create plural histories, the archives from which these histories draw, and the relevance these have, to those associated with these histories.

Infrastructure and southern theory

Discussing the multiple ways of reading infrastructure Simone, ⁷ has argued:

. . .infrastructure is not only material composition but a story or multiple stories proposing how things got to be the way they are, of how different aspects of urban regions are articulated, while at the same time generating differentiation in the very operations of that narrative . . . infrastructure marks the subsequent differentiations among the serviced, the un- or underserviced, the complete or incomplete, the workarounds, circumventions, gaps, and closures, and so forth. At the same time, infrastructure is more than representational or machinic.

Simone’s argument problematizes the notion of what we call infrastructure. Infrastructure as a category is imagined from material perspectives of services, with which (or around which) multiple rationalities and practices are constructed. ⁸ However, this imagination of infrastructure itself is a key marker of how imaginations of certain set of people (here engineers, state actors, planners, etc.) dominate, even when accepting the existence of other forms of imaginations. ⁹ That is, when analysing imaginations (or stories to use Simone’s phrasing), whose imagination, is an important factor. Embedded power relations normalizes certain stories or imaginations, as objective and universal. Thus, when we study the canal and its myriad conceptions, the canal (which is one of the myriad conceptions that is hegemonic) gains precedence. Contrarily, by starting the investigation via multiple canals, there is an ontological shift, in investigating all the conceptions of canals as equally/merely different constructions. Thereafter, it allows the possibility of investigating how certain conceptions become hegemonic and the dominant narrative of the canal. This domination of knowledge from/of certain sections of society is what southern theory investigates. ¹⁰ In this section, therefore, we will build what a southern theory reading of infrastructure could be and why it is needed.

Hegemonic imaginaries and imageries are discursively produced so that the ways of knowing and imaginations of a certain section of the society becomes normalized, as Nagaraj ¹¹ has argued, to assert ‘right over the city’ by the affluent. The hegemonic imagination of infrastructure as a common good, legitimizes the violence on humans and non-humans for infrastructure development and maintenance, even when it serves only a handful of the elite humans. ¹² Thus, to better understand the material and social aspects of infrastructure, we need to investigate the knowledge constructs and politics around the infrastructure’s conception, or what Legg ¹³ has called ‘power-knowledge relations’.

To unpack conception as discussed above, we could simply ask, why is Kirulapana Canal an infrastructure. The point here is not to discuss the legitimacy of the category called infrastructure, but the legitimization it offers. If we were to write an article on Kirulapana Canal and we refer to it as infrastructure, we (as authors) would likely not be asked to justify the choice. A canal as an infrastructure is a hegemonic conception and mobilizing the hegemonic imagination is a path of least resistance. This process aids the reproduction and propagation of hegemony through varying imaginations. A hegemonic conception also makes it difficult to investigate and articulate other imaginations: that is, the canal is primarily an infrastructure, which could also be a space, a reference point or even an object to tie other urban imageries. The difference between is and could be determines the key decisions. ¹⁴ This operationalization of knowledge hegemony is not restricted to the notion of infrastructure alone ¹⁵ or the access to services it offers ¹⁶ and its conceptualizations, ¹⁷ but could also be read in the wider acceptability of what is legal, ¹⁸ efficient, ¹⁹ political, ²⁰ informal ²¹ or moral ²² (to name a few).

As discussed above, hegemony operates through assimilation of differences, thus, for this article, merely listing different imageries will not be enough. Haniffa’s ²³ work has demonstrated that alternate imageries and stories draw from similar hegemonic constructs. Analysing the anti-Muslim campaigns and its response, Haniffa ²⁴ had shown how the opposing camps mobilize the same hegemonic gender constructs. That is, the stories being told by two politically opposing groups are different, but the construction of those stories replicate and reiterate the hegemonic constructs of the society (patriarchal and masculine constructs in this case). Thus, Haniffa’s work paves the way to shift the focus, more to understand the registers from which knowledge hegemony draws rather than illustrating the existence of plural imageries/stories. Consequently, the southern theory reading of infrastructure would be to deconstruct, the registers from which various imageries, imaginations and stories draw from. We use the terms stories and imagination as expression of one’s construct. The term imageries, on the other hand, refers to what we as researchers/authors draws/abstracts from stories and imaginations.

Let us revisit the introductory snippet; navy officer’s claim that he would die for the country and the least his fellow citizens could do is to keep it clean. Here there are three registers through which his story is constructed. (We explain the three registers using only the introductory snippet, although, they resulted from our grounded analysis of primary field data.) The registers being; (i) mobilization of time, (ii) archive from which legitimacy is drawn and (iii) the relevance of the story itself. First, the act of dying voluntarily is posited somewhere in the unknown future. Second, the legitimacy of the future sacrificial act is drawn from the mere fact that he is a navy officer (irrespective of his post, duties or the possibility of Sri Lanka mobilizing its navy). Third, as the story involves nationalistic fervour, by default, all the parties are automatically involved. In the first register, mobilization of time is subjective and illustrates the important temporal anchors through which a story is constructed (important to those implicated in the story). Second, the archive which legitimizes the story divulges the knowledge hegemony (what those involved in the story considers legitimate/reliable). Third, the relevance, outlines the influence-zone of knowledge hegemony. Therefore, by the southern theory reading of infrastructure, we not only intend to investigate the hegemonic constructs of the infrastructure per se, but the larger landscape of its existence. As discussed in the following sections, imageries, imaginations and stories determine how the person or groups act with and construct the city (security guard and the navy officer being just a point in case). Hegemonic formation amongst these imageries, imaginations and stories, makes certain practices legitimate even if extremely violent.

The following sections, based on the broad classification of our primary data, are clustered around three key notions. First, the subjective canals, thereafter two forms of objective canals, one via othering and second via positioning a superior subject. Before that, in the next section we will discuss the methodological implications.

Methodology

The questions we ask in this article were derived from the fieldwork. The fieldwork was inductive, and we started without any key interrogations. As the work progressed, we started framing broad themes. These themes kept changing through the process of the fieldwork and were used to maximize the variation in our sampling. Our work initially started using transect walks and non-participant observations. Thereafter we conducted open-ended and semi-structured interviews, as well as participant observations.

The qualitative fieldwork was conducted within the Colombo municipal limits along the Kirulapana Canal, from November 2019 until February 2020, with around 40 interviews and participant observations. Participants either lived along or worked with/on the canal and represented a range of socio-economic groups. The narratives in this article are extracted from ethnographic data created using life stories. The texts quoted were originally transcribed from Sinhala, Tamil and English as field notes by the authors and a research assistant. At the time of research, the first author and the research assistant were living in Colombo and the second author was in the UK. We did fieldwork together and individually, comparing notes and collaborating ideas as we progressed.

The grounded analysis of the data, led to the broad classification of subjective canals, objective canals via othering and via subjective superiority, which we also use to structure this article (following three sections). This classification has been useful in clubbing the data for finer analysis and therefore we do not expect it to be formative. During the finer analysis of data, (i) the notion of how the time is mobilized, (ii) the archives from which the stories draw and (iii) the relevance that has for those involved, became prominent. The three registers were later reused for the subsequent round of analyses and for this article we use them as an analytical framework.

It is difficult to discuss the richness of the entire data. Therefore, we choose a writing style where we would use the quotes (12 numbers) and build our arguments through them. The selected quotes are illustrative of the data and they are presented together at the beginning of respective sections (taking significant location and word-count) for an initial comparative reading. As there is only one quote per person, instead of pseudonyms we use numbers. This also allows a certain ease for cross-referencing as well as permits greater focus on the hegemonic registers and not the positionality of the participants. The positionality of participants is important on how imaginaries are formed, yet, we refrain from discussing them in detail to highlight the everyday discursive formations of hegemonies.

Subjective canals

There are lots of fishes. They normally jump out of water in the morning and it is something very nice to see. In my opinion, it is good to have a canal even though there is not much use; at least it is cooler. Imagine the temperature these days in Colombo, but it is not very hot over here. [Quote 1]

But the thing is, Sri Lankans are not very good with water, though we are an island, most of us cannot swim, so they don’t like to interact with water bodies. I personally like this canal very much, I normally look at it in the evening. It is very quiet and relaxing. [Quote 2]

We used to play on the canal banks and also used to swim and wash clothes. At that time [when he was a child] canal used to be very clean, canal was a popular gathering place for everyone. In 1970s people used to gather in different spots along the canal and enjoy social life. Women used to gather around and crack jokes, even elephants were bathed near the bridge along the baseline road. Canal was a busy place when I was a kid. I remember how we used to swim in the canal with friends in the afternoons after school. [Quote 3]

I came to Colombo in 1967 or 1968 when I got married. Then the canal was a waste canal and the toilet waste went there. Coming from Kandy this looked like hell. My family would not visit here. My father had confirmed the marriage without visiting this place. When I came, the area was full of wooden houses [temporary and undesirable] and big drains. It was literally hell and when it rained in those days, water would come in along with the waste. [Quote 4]

Knowing is, of course, subjective. This subjective nature becomes problematic when we juxtapose Simone’s ²⁵ articulation of infrastructures as a set of stories and Haniffa’s ²⁶ highlighting of stories being expressed using similar hegemonic registers. That is, when infrastructures are expressed and understood as stories, do those stories follow the registers of hegemonic constructs of that context. In this sense, let us examine the subjective stories of Kirulapana Canals and their articulations.

All the four quotes above are expressing subjective understandings and are also articulated as such. One common thread between all the four quotes is the use of the canal. If we were to read the canal as plural, then there are many ways in which the relationship with the canal could be constructed, and its use understood. However, we see that the hegemonic imagery of the canal as an infrastructure overpower these discussions. The first two quotes are quite directly articulated: the respondents know that there are fishes and enjoys looking at the canal. One of them lives slightly away from the canal and having a visual access, without being bothered by the occasional smell. The canal from the first two quotes could be read as a visual element (in the landscape) but clear articulation of it being useless is pertinent. The hegemonic rendering of Kirulapana Canal as an infrastructure requires it to be used as an infrastructure: to provide services like transport. Throughout our data, Kirulapana canal’s use as an infrastructure determined its usefulness, even though like in quote 1, subjective relationship with the canals were varied. Read alongside quote 4, we see that canal as a carrier of waste is pictured as disused infrastructure, an object which has not realized its potential. Thus, when talking about the use of the canal, the hegemonic construct of it being an infrastructure is articulated even when imagined otherwise.

The notion of time becomes important in discursively constructing the relationship with the respective subjective canals. ²⁷ Infrastructure is predominantly conceived as modern, ²⁸ so any other manner of conceptualizing Kirulapana Canal is subservient to this hegemonic construct. However, looking back in time evades this constraint. As evident from quote 3, we have had many respondents who romanticized about the past. There were many activities which were highlighted, either carried out on/in the canal or alongside it. All of these stories were articulated with the memory that the water was clean. Here we see a discursive shift in the way the different canals are constructed. First, in the past the canal was an active part of life, there was no embankment and activities (closely linked to the community) were carried out along or on/in the canal. A precursor to this imagery is the cleanness of water, which was articulated multiple times (in the quotes presented and in our data). However, now the canal water is not clean, and what makes it acceptable is the fact that it is not the same canal. It has been embanked and converted into an infrastructure. Once the canal is an infrastructure, its use is what is under question, not so much the cleanliness of the water. Although desirable, the cleanliness becomes a superficial quality when people were discussing the canal.

The canal is, of course, not the same for everyone and as Legg ²⁹ has argued via memories, is dependent on sociocultural configurations. The past romantic notion of the canal specially changes when one perceives oneself as an outsider in Colombo. The fault lines in the community and conceptions of people also affect the conception of the urban. Colombo as a city has developed due to colonialism. However, unlike any other erstwhile British colonial capital cities, Colombo never had cultural importance amongst the majority Sinhalese polity, as much as say Kandy ³⁰ has. Quote 4 articulates this distinction quite directly where the canal is an infrastructure which is improving as time progresses. Further the conditions around Kirulapana Canal were not objectively bad (during the time period as described in Quote 4), it is because the person has moved from Kandy (which is cleaner and better) that it becomes difficult to live around Kirulapana Canal, and that memory has remained significant. We see here the use of Kirulapana Canal to mobilize the hegemonic construct of Kandy being better than Colombo (at least culturally for the majority of the Sinhalese population).

In this section we saw the hegemony of the imagery, which renders Kirulapana Canal as an infrastructure. Any imagination which does not render the canal as an infrastructure, questions the utility of the canal, at times subverting one’s own imaginaries. Infrastructure as a technical object allows for a certain distance, making the canal’s disconnect with the community acceptable. At the same time, the past imagination is romanticized, with a significant interconnectedness between the canal and the community. The nature of Kirulapana Canal therefore depends on the time (past or present), the archive (personal histories) from which it draws and its relevance (with regard to how the canal is imagined). In this section we read the imageries without hierarchy, in the next section we will focus on how certain imaginations are rendered inferior or superior.

Objective canals by othering

People used to use the canal for bathing and washing clothes. But they do not do that anymore. This is not because of the water quality [she insisted] this canal is not for waste water, so it is not bad, but because the canal became dangerous. The dredging made it deep and the crocodiles are dangerous. I think the crocodiles were brought in by the government to stop LTTE fighters ³¹ from swimming to the parliament. [Quote 5]

The fishes from the canal are caught and eaten by a few Muslim families but no one else eats them. The people who eat them think they come from the sea so it is OK, but people who do not eat them do not believe that. . .the three-wheeler drivers are not wealthy and so they do this. I get my fish from the public market in Kirulapana. [Quote 6]

The canal was there since the early Kotte Kingdom [15^th century] and later the Dutch [mid-17^th to the late 18^th century] developed it as the main canal in Colombo. My grandfather has told me that they used this for transportation. The problem now we have with the canal is that it is not very hygienic. In particular, it is very smelly. There are toilet pipes connected to the canal specially from the people who live along the railway lines. There is a lot of garbage floating, the Navy comes to clean but what is the point of cleaning every day without eliminating the source of pollution. . .all the garbage flows into the sea and pollutes it. [Quote 7]

Before, the canal did not have concrete banks and there were plenty of trees along the banks. People bathed here, but they had wells for drinking water. People stopped bathing in the canal 15 or 20 years ago, as drains from the new houses and the higher population made the canals dirty. When I was small none of these buildings were here. All these buildings are only 10 or 15 years old. Before this area was all woods and paddy fields. . .before this land was inept, now everyone is interested in it commercially. The change began to happen 20 or 30 years ago, but about 15 years ago they widened the road and that led to population increase here. [Quote 8]

In the previous section, we discussed the imagination of the canal via its use and the hegemonic constructs that it imports. Beyond the hegemonic imagery of the canal as an infrastructure, all other uses which are subservient to it are also graded. We have already seen in the introduction how the security guard’s imagination is laid as subservient to that of the navy officer. That is, whose imagination and who is being imagined are important factors to uncover the hegemonic registers from which everyday constructs draw.

From the previous section, we have seen that the canals’s hegemonic imaginary is that of an infrastructure (modern), but, could also be romanticized by shifting the time (as imagined in/from the past). However, when this structure is broken, we need an other for justification. At times the justification is sought in blaming the other, for example, in quote 5 the LTTE is blamed for the rupture between people and the canal. At other times, the certain canal imageries are linked to certain people, and as those people are marginalized, their practices too are rendered in that fashion, for example, in quote 6 a specific community and profession (which are not the same) are imagined as those who fish in the canal. During our interviews, we realized the connotation of poverty associated with those who fish. However, later analysis revealed the construction of this narrative as framed to implicate specific marginalized ³² communities. ³³ Direct Islamophobic phrases, diminishes one’s cultural capital in Colombo. However, indirect societal constructs, not only get pictured as reality (e.g. only Muslims fishing and they as being economically poor), they also allow to position oneself as superior (e.g. quote 6).

The other is usually constructed along class and religious lines in Colombo. In quotes 7 and 8, we see a clearer othering based on economic status. Quote 7 imagines the canal as an infrastructure, however, the contemporary canal is not functioning as well as it used to in the past. Quote 8 hinges on the time when the canal shifted from being entrenched in the community to being an infrastructure (although inefficient). In both the quotes, first, an inefficient infrastructure is constructed and thereafter specific groups are blamed for its inefficiency. They also replicate the nationalist imagery of the state (another hegemonic construct in most countries). Post-independence nation-building process and the later Sinhala ethnonationalism, ³⁴ tried to build the Sri Lankan identity on the advancement of its pre-colonial kingdoms, that were all agrarian economies (with extensive irrigation systems). The consequential imagination of authenticity of rural and the corruption of urban, became evident in many of our interactions. This rural-urban conflict of conception is also (like everything else) not universal. ³⁵ Most notably the rural past is romanticized, but the rural polity is undesirable. Thus, those who settled recently (mostly imagined as rural migrants) are clubbed as an other to attribute for infrastructural inefficiency or its degradation. The hegemonic imagery that inherently links dirt (or unhygienic habits) and poverty, were mobilized during many of our interactions.

We would like to emphasize here again that any direct discrimination against the newly settled communities would diminish cultural capital in Colombo. However, the discursive construct allowing for the othering of marginalized populations, helps garnering the economic capital of the privileged. We can also extrapolate this analysis to the wider practice of city building, which in the name of betterment displaces and marginalizes certain communities. No one wants to harm people, and everyone wants a clean city. However, by discursively linking poverty to dirt (or unhygienic practices), city building could undertake expulsion of its own citizens for the benefit of the elite, without much political opposition. ³⁶ Herein, however, we would like to highlight how these discourses of othering operates through everyday imageries and practices (rather than state’s practices).

In this section, we discussed how an other is created and mobilized using the existing hegemonic constructs. The mobilization of the discursive other as subservient to the superior self is carried out through the imaginations of Kirulapana Canal. These hegemonic constructs let the larger values of inclusion intact in the society, while at the same time discursively marginalize certain sections via everyday practices. The mobilization of hegemony through everyday imageries is important to understand for countering the violence of urbanization. The othering of certain sections of the society goes along with the creation of the superior self. In the next section, we will investigate the universalization of the imageries of the superior self.

Objective canals by subjective superiority

Colombo is a wetland and we need canals to take water out. Our office looks at South Colombo [administrative boundary], where all the canals have been widened and channelled to its full capacity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now all the banks have been cleared of unauthorized encroachments. The Kirulapana Canal is mainly to control the floods. The water comes from the Parliament side and around 60% or more of it goes to Kirulapana Canal and the rest to Dehiwala Canal which is narrow and shallow. [Quote 9]

In the earlier times when there was less mud [in the canal] and there were no crocodiles. People in the community used to place huge lotus shaped lanterns on the canal for Vesak [Buddhist festival to commemorate Gautam Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death]. [Quote 10]

This is the canal which we used to jump in and swim, it had very clean water, we used to bathe cattle in this place. Right next to this bridge there was a thotupala [boat jetty]. When we were children, there was no concrete bridge. It was just a wooden bridge, no buses or carts could go over that bridge. This was 40-50 years ago. . . Later on in the President Premadasa’s time they built the canal in a proper way, especially they widened the canal and built the banks with cement and stones. [Quote 11]

I do not know exactly why there are canals in Colombo, they have been there since ancient times. When I was young, their purpose was to water the paddy. At present the canals have no purpose. Even the fishes are not there, no animals live there, nor use them anymore. They are useless. However, they still need to be there so the water can flow and floods are avoided. [Quote 12]

In the previous section, we have seen how the imageries of Kirulapana Canal, constructed and marginalized an other. In this section, we will read the opposite, using the imageries to construct a superior self. Articulating Southern Theory, Connell ³⁷ has outlined how in the global landscape of knowledge production, the imageries of the dominant group (Europe and North America) was rendered universal and became hegemonic. This section we broaden this argument by illustrating, first, that the universalization process follows the mobilization of imageries as objective (thus as objective truth), and second, that the imageries of the others are understood as mere subjective understandings (thus mere stories).

Quote 9, is from the engineer in-charge of the canal. What is interesting is her articulation of the canal as an infrastructure for drainage. This service of drainage is not passive, but the canal needs to be actively managed for it to be able to perform this role. The statal organization, for which she works, is responsible for maintaining the canal so that it can help drain the water, especially during the heavy monsoon rains. The engineer, of course, takes the dominant image of the canal as an infrastructure. During our interviews, the residents argued that the canal is an infrastructure which needs to provide services (a wide range was discussed); however, drainage was considered as inherent to the canal and not a service in itself. This imagination becomes starkly visible in quote 12, where the canal is imagined as useless except for its passive functioning to drain excess water.

During our conversations with the engineer in-charge, the canal was objectively and singularly rendered as part of the larger drainage infrastructure of Colombo. The framings (as in quote 9) always uses technical terms making the canal a singular object and that singular object being the same for everyone, leading to the superiority of a subjective imagery. There are similarities here with other contexts, for example, Chitra’s ³⁸ work on Mumbai waters has also highlighted technological articulation of nature to render it governable. This also reflects on the work engagement of the engineer with the canal, which is to maintain it and enable the safe drainage. Plans are made and calculations are done to understand when to dredge, how often to scoop waste, where to put barriers (to stop solid waste from flowing in with rainwater to the canal) and even when to de-weed the embankments. This technical understanding of the canal is, of course, necessary for the engineer and her office to work, however, the superiority of this imagery is of interest to us. Numbers (water-flow quantitates, financial allocations for rational maintenance, meteorological observations, etc.) is one way to read the canal, but since numbers seem objective, this image of the canal remains universal (thus also garners state patronage). Alongside, as in the previous section, we can see the use of time to allow for an aberration to the image of the canal as an infrastructure. In quote 11, we see how the romantic past is mobilized, but the building of the embankment and disconnecting the canal from the community is not imagined in a negative light, rather the person referred to it as the ‘proper way’, universalizing the notion of the canal as an infrastructure (thus the need for embankments). During our interviews, we saw an astounding resonance to engineering and mathematical rendering of the canal as universal, even when it ideologically and materially conflicted with the respondent’s ways of knowing and being.

Beyond the technical rendering of the canal, the practice and imageries of predominant communities are also rendered universal to garner superiority. In quote 10, a festive event is emblematic of this. Our list of interviewees and participant observations highlights the diversity of the community living along the Kirulapana Canal, both in terms of class, religion and linguistic affiliations. However, as we have seen previously (quote 6, 7, 8) practices of minority groups were rendered undesirable (or problematic). Contrarily, the practices of majority are not rendered superior directly but via universalizing it (quote 3, 9, 10). Marginalized groups (religious, linguistic and economic) are imagined as practising group-specific practices, however, that of the majority is universalized and represented as practised by everyone. This positioning reinforcing the hegemony of the dominant group without direct assertion.

In the first section, we read how the imagination of the canal is subjectively constructed, alongside the mobilization of hegemonic imagery. In the second section, we saw how the mobilization of hegemonic image was facilitated by creating an other, whose imageries are rendered as undesirable/inferior. In this section, we focused on the imageries of the dominant group and how they are articulated for it to be read as universal. Universalization of the dominant imagery (or imageries of the dominant group) allows for a hegemony, which veils the subjectivity of those imageries, therefore also diminishing the possibility of countering them.

Conclusion

Citing the popular television series Gomottah, Simone ³⁹ discusses:

. . . infrastructures are appropriated to assemble a system of illicit distribution, laundering, and storage. These infrastructures become an essential “character” of the show and point to the ways in which the metropolitan is made through a process of suturing and maneuvering across distinct types of spaces, of folding in different temporalities and rhythms of production into a totalizing machinic operation.

In this paper we had slightly altered Simone’s rendering of infrastructure being the essential character, to it being one of the many, yet becoming important and a universal imagery. This paper thus, has been a call to challenge the notion where the use, ownership and infrastructure itself are seen as uni-versal via the hegemonic construction of the world. We understand this process as the southern theory reading of infrastructure. It should, however, be noted that south in southern theory is not always geographic. South in southern theory also represent the long knowledge hegemony, which in many disciplines were perpetrated via creating an other, most notably the south. Thus, south represents a political position to resist the hegemony garnered by othering and marginalization. Broadening this discussion, the article illustrated the formation of knowledge hegemonies and their mobilization at an everyday scale (beyond the global North-South distinction).

The above three sections discussed, how the knowledge hegemony is mobilized in subjective imageries of the infrastructure. Taking cues from Haniffa’s ⁴⁰ work, we explored the hegemonic registers on which everyday imageries are based. First, we discussed how the hegemonic imagery is mobilized in subjective understanding of the Canal via discussing the notion of use. Second, we analysed how through everyday imageries, an other is co-constructed and marginalized. Finally, we discussed how the superiority of certain subjective imageries are garnered by universalizing them. Using the three threads of discussion, we outlined in the article that hegemony operates and survives by embedding itself in everyday imageries, which at the outset may not seem oppressive. Any measure to erase fault lines within a society and resist legitimization of (state) violence, first will need to counter the everyday realm, which nurtures hegemonic imageries. Herein we focused on the hegemony that exists in the everyday aspects of the city and its imaginations, that is, in southern theory terms, locating metropolis within the cities. This is not to say that certain cities are not hegemonic in our understanding of the urban, but we aim to develop similar discussions within the city (or urban imageries) itself.

Going back to the snippet in the introduction, the navy officer was in charge of only driving the boat. However, a certain hegemonic imagination of the Kirulapana Canal, legitimized his transgression from assigned work and made acceptable the violence he imparted on the security guard. The imagination of a clean canal is first made universal (as everyone’s imagery) and consequently legitimized violence, which outside this context would be unacceptable in Colombo. The snippet here is limited to few actors and verbal/emotive spontaneous violence, but the same pattern can be seen when neighbourhoods are destroyed, or certain livelihoods are delegitimized, or when the democratic state spends on the luxuries of the affluent class while at the same time marginalizing struggles for basic necessities. Imaginations, imageries and stories are not only subjective ways of being and knowing the world, but their graded positioning and hegemony dictate our actions and their legitimizations.