Water carries the imprint of human activities, sociological impulses, and movements. Water bodies and waterways make and unmake social worlds. In South Asia, water has always been a contested entity, and control over it, evidence of structural power. The profound imbalance in access to water reflects how fundamentally unequal access to natural resources is within a caste-stratified society. While luxury housing societies are able to buy tankers of water for an ample, full-day supply through their taps and in their swimming pools, the working majority of the country walks several kilometres and waits in long lines for water to drink, wash, and cook with. Access to water is visibly dictated by graded hierarchies of caste, class and gender. 

Historically, water bodies — including rivers, lakes, and groundwater — have been monopolised by dominant castes and used as a means of socio-political control. On a symbolic level, dominant castes have always seen water as a substance that can become pure or impure through touch. In Untouchability and Lawlessness (BAWS Vol.5), Dr. Ambedkar writes of several reported instances of Dalits being systematically restricted from accessing water in public wells, and attacked violently if they did. In a number of incidents, Dalit men and women were reported sitting next to wells with their arms outstretched, waiting for someone to pour them water. They were forbidden from building their own pakka brick wells, even if they had the money to do so.

Brahmanical cosmogony imbues water with metaphysical force. Ergo, metaphors around flow of substances, porosity, and ritualization are abundantly crucial to the protocol of enforcing caste corporeally and spatially. Water is a medium through which caste relations are produced and contested. In 1927, Babasaheb Ambedkar led several thousand Dalits to Mahad, where they marched to the Chavdar tank and drank from it. This act was a critical milestone, asserting that access to water must no longer be a matter of ritual control, but a fundamental civic right.

At the moment of writing this open call, a water crisis unfolds across India, as the monsoons arrive with considerable delay. Year after year, water shortages affect most major cities, including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai, exposing the growing precarity of access to one of life’s most essential resources. Beyond the country’s urban centres however, the crisis rarely makes the news. Severe water scarcity hits rural regions of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Telangana every summer. Amidst this worsening crisis, announcements of a new AI data centre in Visakhapatnam, primarily on land avarna communities fought hard to avail, exposes the government’s disregard for people, and the water burdens being borne locally in order to sustain global capitalist expansion. 

In this issue, we seek to explore water as a site of inquiry into caste dynamics, ecological asymmetries, and everyday negotiations of power. We invite pitches that look at water from various perspectives — as a life-giving substance, a contested resource, and a living measure and mirror to human relations.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Ethnographies of water and waterways

• Urban water management and caste

• Water, borders and conflict

• Drought, famine, floods: asymmetry and climate vulnerability

• Fishing, erosion, coastal communities

• Structure of a village, caste-based access to water sources

• Symbolism and ritualisation of water in caste

• Global capitalism, water and extraction

• Water ecologies, human-water relationships

• Indigenous knowledge systems and practices around water

What are we looking for?

• Ethnographic writing, articles, photo essays, personal essays, and other forms of non-fiction that speak to the theme from different perspectives, geographies and disciplines. We also welcome multimedia submissions, writing that uses previously collected data to write a new piece, or previously unreleased work that you think fits the topic.

• The final piece should be 1500-2500 words long.

• We prefer previously unreleased work, but are also open to accepting previously released work as long as the authors own the copyright and provide appropriate attribution.

How to pitch

• Send your pitch as a Microsoft Word file in an attachment to fourteenthemagazine@gmail.com

• Text should be in a readable 12 point font (such as Arial/Times New Roman/Calibri/Georgia) with 1.5 - double spacing.

• Emails should be titled “Issue 02 pitch - Your Name”.

• Please tell us a little about yourself in the body of the email, along with your background and what led you to write this essay.

• Two writing samples, preferably in the same category of non-fiction writing or using similar methodology.

What to include in your pitch

Your pitch should be up to 300 words long, and include the following:

• Background/context on the topic chosen

• What will you be exploring within the topic

• What is the methodology you will use and what form will the final piece take

• What perspective do you bring to this topic that is especially important

Remuneration

We pay selected contributors between INR 10,000 - 15,000 depending on the form and length of the piece.

Deadline for submitting pitches is 11th July 2026

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Artwork by Shrujana N Shridhar