Salt and emotions : Understanding the role of groundwater salinity in shaping bodily experiences and emotions in Lodhva, Gujarat

The present thesis aims at understanding how groundwater salinity shapes the bodily experiences and emotional geographies of people, which in turn shape their access and usage of the resource in the coastal region of Gujarat, in Lodhva. It also delves into investigating the underlying institutions arrangement and gender relations that tend to shape bodily experiences and emotions of the people in Lodhva situated in the coastal region of Gujarat. Groundwater is being exploited heavily throughout the world for various purposes, which tends to threaten its quality and quantity. Furthermore, places that are situated along the coastline face an additional risk of salinity and saline intrusion. (Prakash, 2005). Several scholars have suggested that such contamination of groundwater tends to impact the daily struggles of people to access and use the resource. As an entry point to unpack these resource struggles, Davidson et al, (2015) underscores the importance of studying emotions to understand the behaviour and responses of people to such resource struggles. However, there are very limited studies that have inquired such emotions and underlying gender and power relations pertaining to the access and use of saline groundwater. In this thesis, empirical attention is given to understand the impacts of groundwater salinity on access and on people, by dedicating importance to bodily experiences and emotions. In order to do so, Feminist Political Ecology was embraced as a conceptual framework that allowed the study of everyday dimensions of resource inequality that are ‘produced by and productive of gender, caste and other social power relation.’ Through the evidences and narratives delineated in the thesis, it can be said that power relations played a very important role in shaping the access and usage of groundwater. These power relations stemmed from various gendered and caste based norms prevalent in the village. Furthermore, the intersection of power with age, caste and gender has rendered it an amorphous quality (Allen, 2004) that tends to produce multiple subjectivities of emotions, in this case- harassment, shame, humiliation, burns, joy and sexual tensions. It was empirically evidenced that the bodily experiences largely influence the emotional experiences - of pain, joy, anger, hurt and disgust - of people at varying degrees and varied spaces which depended upon the intimacy and contact time of the water with people. The indicated that access to and usage of resource is not just beyond the materiality of water, rather it is deeply entangled with the materiality of water, of emotions and of bodies which are often under-valued in any water provision or development related works. Furthermore, the concept of emotional geographies shed light on how emotions are centred around the bodily experiences wherein body itself presents as a source of vulnerability, because it is through the body that one becomes vulnerable to the material environment-in this case to the salinity of water. The findings from this study attempts to invite policy makers and development practitioner to embrace a socio-natural perspective of understanding the nature of resource struggles by paying careful attention to emotional geographies and engage with of people at grassroots level to better understand the underlying power relations and bodily experiences that tend to shape the access and usage of resource