12:00 p.m., 406 Prospect Street, Miller Hall
The Institute of Sacred Music Fellows Lunch Talk presents
Lav Kanoi, PhD, Anthropology and Environment, Yale University:
“Nourishing the City: Ways of Water in India’s Thirsty National Capital Region.”
India’s Capital City, Delhi, is amongst the world’s largest urban settlements, and it is rapidly growing. Even as the city is expanding, it continues to battle issues in water supply and water security, amongst other serious environmental concerns (like air pollution, housing congestion and so on). In general, as some of the most difficult environmental- and climate-related challenges are arising in urban environments in India and South Asia, as other parts of the world, what social forms and moral and cultural imperatives come together to animate and inspire individual and collective action towards public good and private welfare? In particular, in Delhi, how are water and waterbodies being managed, or not, to service the city’s biophysical needs as well as to nourish its socio-cultural aspirations? In this talk, I offer a brief overview of Delhi’s contested water histories, and draw ethnographic attention to how Delhi residents are coalescing drop-by-drop, by way of public enterprise or private initiative, often by drawing on longstanding indigenous cultural tradition, towards making their contemporary city a more water-sensitive one. Thus, this talk offers a glimpse into how the state and citizens, in context of past and present challenges, are making and inspiring changes at different scales to the environment in which they live in their quest for urban sustainability, and individual and communal well-being.
Lav Kanoi is interested in the social-environmental dimensions of cities and urban development. Kanoi’s research has appeared in various notable journals and in book collections such as Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability and The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences among others. Kanoi is also a literary translator working between classical and contemporary Indian and European languages. He has previously published book translations of Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea from English to Hindi, Sukumar Ray’s Pagla Dashu stories from Bengali to Hindi, and the First Book of Virgil’s Aeneid from Latin to English.