Between Containment and Flow: The Making of Hydraulic Sovereignty in Jodhpur, ca. 1459–1562

This paper explores the political ecologies of hydraulic sovereignty in Jodhpur, the Rathore dynasty’s capital city situated at the periphery of India’s Thar desert. By controlling where meagre rainwater fell and flowed, how it was contained, and who had access to it, the Rathores assumed a hydraulic monopoly which governed spatial hierarchies and state-subject relationships. Between the mid-fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, Jodhpur’s earliest water system was designed to dam the bulk of rainwater flowing down the surrounding hills in two lakes: first, the royal Ranisar lake inside the city’s Mehrangarh Fort which, when full, spilled beyond the fort wall and into the adjacent Padamsar lake for the exclusive use of the upper-caste Brahmins. Using a hydrogeologic analysis, this paper traces how groundwater seepage from these lakes moved, by sheer force of gravity and gradient, further down into the city through underground rock fissures. Brahmins tapped this groundwater through wells and stepwells. How did other subjects access water? Indeed, the state granted conditional denial and access to water which, in turn, sustained social hierarchies between caste groups such as the Brahmins vis-à-vis, for instance, the Bhishtis or the water-carriers. Even as the Bhishtis provided water to upper caste communities, their neighborhood was outside the walls of the city, indicating their exclusion from aqueous spaces and structures to source water for personal use. The state’s intimate environmental knowledge informed the strategic making of architectural punctuations such as embankments, overspill pathways, wells, stepwells, fort and city walls to consolidate and express political power.