Thirst And Resistance: Water Scarcity and Survival in The Marginalised Urban Spaces In Imtiaz Dharker’s“Blessing”

Abstract

The water crisis is not a real environmental disaster; it is not only a disaster, but a deep social and humanitarian crisis, which is currently seen as the struggle of the 21st century of the world. Water scarcity is a systemic means of exclusion in the marginalized urban areas of the Global South where the sources of life, health, and dignity depend both on the availability of water. The paper will be a severe eco-critical and postcolonial interpretation of a masterpiece of Imtiaz Dharker, the poem of blessing. Placing the poem in context of the particular socio-geographic realities of Mumbai in the new informal settlements, this study explores how Dharker uses the senses as aesthetics, auditory, tactile, and visual imagery to describe the visceral reality of thirst. The paper builds on the theoretical frameworks of the article by Rob Nixon and Vandana Shiva in order to examine how the poem uses the failure of municipal infrastructure to develop the story of divinity and local resiliency. Moreover, the paper critiques the gendered facets of water labour in the prism of ecofeminism and analyses the literary image of the scarcity in the criteria of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6. The study finds that Blessing is an important eco-poetic text because it opposes the naturalization of water poverty and calls on re-considering the human right to natural resources during the period of high urbanization and climate disintegration.