‘This has not been done because it was not made any one's business to do it.’ Conserving Hyderabad city's Hussain Sagar tank in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

Abstract The ability to capture, store and distribute water safely is fundamental to the health of urban and rural settlements alike. This is true for Hyderabad city, located in India's semi-arid Deccan region. I argue that an exegesis of the nineteenth-century conservation plans for Hyderabad's large, built water reservoir, Hussain Sagar, reveal multiple hydrosocial processes at work: class structures related to proximity and use of the lake's water; health concerns triggered by the water's ebb and flow; and enforcement challenges related to issues of shared governance. This article shows how conservation of a scarce resource brought together princely and colonial officials (often parsed along historiographical lines) to address a shared concern within an urban context. Such urban environmental co-operation offers a new princely urban perspective on the binaries of princely–colonial and/or ruler–ruled.