Theorising water, shifting scales: The space of the Himalayan Anthropocene

Surveying the water towers of Asia—glaciers, lakes, rivers—and population in the greater Himalayas-Hindu Kush-Tien Shan-Tibet region today pushes one to consider the looming water crisis in the face of massive climate change. I argue that it not just a problem confined to the Third Pole of the Himalayan space which divides South Asia and China but demands a shifting of scales in the planetary rethinking of connected issues. ‘Water’ must be viewed as a special object and resource that moves beyond a politics of scale and tightly defined compartments; it involves cognising that the Anthropocene is simultaneously unrolling on a planetary as well as a local scale. Positions of societal capacity-building do not effectively frame the future contexts of both sustainable development and international governance, or present alternative viewpoints of the future trajectory and management of the Anthropocene world. Water use in the Anthropocene clearly entail issues of equity of water supply, water security, aquatic ecosystems, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Irrigation and food production, river and groundwater pollution, and hydroelectricity production, are also salient. These competing water uses, as scholars repeatedly point out, may not always be compatible. Many others claim that the water crisis can be resolved by proper governance. What I offer in this chapter is not so much a meditation on questions relating to sustainability and governance in the Himalayas, but, an analysis of imaginative fiction dealing with water, while drawing from Morton's concept (2014), addressing the very nature and flow of water as not just an ordinary object that we are so conscious of at an everyday level but water's manifestation as a special kind of ‘hyperobject’.