2025 Bharati Memorial Awardee Presentations

In “Pānī Ontologies: Counter-Hegemonic Ontologies of Water in the Narratives of Mumbai’s Water Rights Campaign,” Argade examines three counter hegemonic ontologies of water based on my fieldwork with Mumbai’s Water Rights Campaign, a collective that has been striving for inclusive municipal water access in the city’s informal settlements. Argade thinks through what it would mean to recognize ontological politics of water mobilizing across difference(s) in urban western India. Multilingual, anti-caste (Dalit-Bahujan), and left-progressive approaches shape the core of non-dominant pānī ontologies. Argade analyzes how water ontologies emerge in tussles with and against the state and make it possible for different waters to exist. 

In “Smart City Kashmir: Implications of Urban Development and Infrastructural Transformations in the Contested City of Srinagar,” Singh adopts a spatiotemporal approach to analyze the smart city project in Srinagar. Singh examines the smart city project in Kashmir by focusing on two main themes: first, the aim to modernize the city, driven by a unilineal model of development operating under the dominant temporal framework of the state, which overlooks the multiplicity of time and temporalities; and, second, the threat posed to traditional Kashmiri spaces and places of memory, as well as the impact on how Kashmiris experience these transformed spaces and the stories that evolve alongside these changes. Singh critically reviews India’s model of development (especially smart city project) to highlight how this project overlooks non-dominant articulations of time and temporalities in Kashmir.