City on a Hill: Historical Spatiality of Water Scarcity in Shimla

Abstract

Water scarcity has become a permanent feature in Himalayan cities. Despite the recurrent events of the water crisis in Himalayan cities, the relationship between urban space and water scarcity has not received sufficient attention in the urban studies literature in India. Water scarcity is rooted both in the water infrastructure inherited during the precolonial and colonial periods meant for the population of that time and the resulting racial exclusionary practices. In the context of countries like India, or what we collectively call Southern Urbanisation, whenever there is a water crisis, the water infrastructure built during the colonial period is blamed solely for the crisis without considering the historicity of the production of these infrastructures within the urban space. Colonialism is a significant factor in understanding urbanisation in the Indian context, it is still prominent, even more so in the context of mountain urbanisation in India, where many new urban centers like Shimla, Darjeeling, and Murry emerged as the new centers of colonial domination in the second half of the nineteenth century. The urban space of the region is both a socio-temporal space produced through colonialism and a geographically contingent place. Therefore water scarcity needs to be analysed by combining these two factors. In this paper, I will contextualise water scarcity in the context of Himalayan urbanisation where the production of urban space is intertwined with the case of Shimla. The case study of the spatial development of Shimla shows how the urban space in Himalaya and its relationship with water scarcity require a separate field of inquiry within urban studies in the global south.