Water and Historic Settlements

Book excerpt: 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.