Awakened Waters: Rethinking Extraction and Enchantment in the Sundarbans

Divine and demonic powers play an important role in everyday life in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India, shaping how people relate to the delta’s multispecies ecologies and to each other. This paper considers changing relations with water beings under conditions of water privatization. In the Sundarbans, certain creeks, ponds, and lakes are recognized as “awakened” (jagroto), enlivened by the presence of beings that sometimes assume embodied form in aquatic animals like crocodiles and fish. With the enclosure of these waters as private fisheries, water beings have become a point of contestation. Many say that they have departed local waters, even as fishery owners continue to enact relations with water beings through prayer and ritual. I adopt a cosmopolitical ecology framework to understand how extraction in aqueous ecologies articulates with more-than-human relations, generating material and spiritual gains for some and disorienting losses for others.