Trading my Health for your Water”: Faustian Bargains and Power differentials in the afterlife of toxicity

Abstract (English)

Responding to calls for “emic” perspectives on water justice, this paper examines the eco-health dilemmas confronting Adivasi (indigenous) communities in the Chotanagpur Plateau of Jharkhand, India. Their hydro-social landscape—now marked by virulent diseases such as jaundice, typhoid, and kala-azar caused by coal mining pollution and by droughts driven by deforestation—has become a site of intense contestation. Yet dominant narratives of water scarcity, often framed through the lens of climate change, obscure rather than illuminate these lived realities.
Everyday struggles over water access are rooted in colonial and postcolonial cartographies that imposed rigid and hierarchical ecological and social classifications. These categorisations – spanning humans and non-humans – altered delicate hydro-ecological balances while discrediting indigenous sacred geographies of water. Postcolonial developmental regimes, including dam construction, chemical-intensive agriculture and mining, have further entrenched hydro-social relations.
Water access has thus become a site of perverse trade-offs, where marginally positioned tribal groups exchange long-term term security and health to meet immediate subsistence needs. For example, the relatively water-secure downhill Santhals, who can maintain a balance between air, water, and place in their health practices, negotiate water access with the upland, water-scarce Paharias and other Santhals—often at the cost of the latter’s long-term well-being, by securing unrestricted access to timber from Paharia forests.
These daily negotiations – over government-sponsored and community-owned tubewells, wells, streams and forests become Faustian bargains, exchanging long-term health for short-term survival. In a context, fraught with historical accountability for desertification and toxicity, we argue that hydro-social landscapes emerge as terrains of compromise and trade-offs. Drawing on historically informed ethnography from Kathikund in Dumka district, this paper explores what water justice might mean in landscapes where geographical location, access and water-borne socialities are deeply entangled with histories of identity, difference and power struggles.