1st Edition
Water and Historic Settlements The Making of a Cultural Landscape
This book explores the manner in which human societies understood and managed scarce water resources. Focusing on the arid, rain shadow region of Marathwada, it documents the panoramic history of this region’s most important resource – water. It shows how water delineates the establishment of political authority, marks the intersection of networks of trade and pilgrimage and is the bearer of identity through community memories.
The book foregrounds how, as a material as well as a ritual and symbolic element, water flows across the boundaries of caste, sect and religion, bringing communities together and linking the past with the present. It not only analyses textual and archaeological sources but also focuses on oral narratives and their potential to provide consensual as well as alternative narratives of the historical and cultural landscape of Ellora–Khuldabad–Daulatabad. It also shows how water has been framed in myriad forms in human history – as a ritual, allegorical element present in the myths and cosmology that order the sacred geography of pilgrimage centres, as a physical tangible presence manipulated through human technology to sustain the population and finally, as a subliminal driver for historic agency, its often hidden, underground presence underwriting the region’s vitality over the past millennium.
A nuanced history of water over millennia, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of environmental history, historical geography, South Asian studies, heritage studies and environmental studies.
Introduction: Foregrounding water within the cultural landscape of Ellora-Khuldabad-Daulatabad - A methodological approach
- The Geographical and Geological landscape
- Historical Overview
- Review of literature – formulating an approach
1. Water and Settlements – Historical development of the region vis-à-vis the political economy of the Deccan; networks of trade and patronage
- Daulatabad – a layered historical narrative
- Politics of Patronage – the water cisterns of Ellora caves
- Takaswami ashram – A modern reuse of an Ellora cave cistern
2. Water and Sacrality – Sacred geography and networks of pilgrimage
- Sacred geography and the inflow of people and ideas
- Water as the embodiment of fertility and healing powers
- Calling the monsoon – Panchami festival in Verul village
3. Water and Memory – community identities as the past remembered; memories as carriers of values, beliefs and practices
- Re-covering “Malik Ambar’s Pipeline” – Reconstructing the past through community memories
Conclusion. A Unique Cosmopolitanism
Biography
Yaaminey Mubayi is a historian who has worked in the area of cultural heritage and community development over the past 20 years. Her work includes studies of craft, local histories, community memories, traditional knowledge and indigenous ecologies. She has published widely in these areas, and her previous book, Altar of Power – The temple and the state in the land of Jagannatha, came out in 2005. She lives with her family in New Delhi, India, and, in recent years, has focused her energies on teaching, research and writing.
