Entangled Waters: Seasonality and the Politics of Everyday Hydrosocial Relations on Sagar Island

Abstract (English)

On Sagar Island, the largest inhabited landmass in the Hooghly estuary of Bengal, the ebb and flow of water shapes both its material conditions and symbolic meanings. The ever-changing nature of water leads to dynamic patterns of access, authority, and claim over water on the island. The holy river Ganga, revered as a mother goddess in Indic traditions, meets the Bay of Bengal at the southernmost point on Sagar Island. The confluence serves as a place of pilgrimage for Hindu devotees and offers a critical setting for examining how ecological rhythms intersect with everyday hydrosocial life. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation across five regions on the island, the paper employs hydrosociality as an analytical tool to trace how shifting ecological conditions and water’s changing materialities (re-)shape everyday life and power relations. Contextualising water as a focal point of social contestation, this paper looks at three key aspects of hydrosocial life on Sagar Island. First, it examines how seasonal transformations in water’s materialities structure its availability and usability, thereby impacting livelihoods, everyday practices and negotiations. Second, it discusses how infrastructures such as embankments and sluice gates become contested sites where competing claims over water access and control are negotiated. Third, it investigates how the sacredness of the Ganga and its confluence is strategically invoked or muted to assert socio-political claims. This reveals how ritual practices are deeply entwined with struggles over land, legitimacy, and governance. By tracing how seasonal shifts in water spark negotiations around livelihoods, rituals, and governance, the paper argues that water politics must be grounded in place and context. By temporalising hydrosocial relations, the paper demonstrates how water’s changing materialities continuously co‑produce social hierarchies, collective identities, and competing claims. It offers a nuanced understanding of how estuarine communities live with and through the rhythms of shifting waters and presents a conceptual framework for understanding water as a dynamic agent of socio-political transformation in estuarine ecologies.