Abdul Aijaz

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the convergence of history, geography, and literary studies, with particular attention to the entanglements of environmental crisis and the politics of environmental commons—with a focus on water commons. My research centers on questions of water scarcity and environmental precarity in the canal colonies of Punjab within Pakistan’s Indus Basin.

Methodologically, I weave together ethnographic fieldwork, archival inquiry, and literary analysis to trace the entwined transformations of socio-ecological landscapes and their narrative representations. Theoretically, my work interrogates the presumed opposition between fact and fiction, insisting instead on the ontological implications of our world-making stories.

My engagement with the politics of water is deeply rooted in the landscape of my own formation. As rivers were disciplined and rechanneled into modern canal systems, the region’s pastoralists—including my own grandfather’s family of pastoral camel-herders—were compelled to settle as peasant-proprietors in newly established canal colony villages. Today, some of these communities find themselves mobilizing their pastoral inheritances anew, responding to the dual pressures of uneven distribution of the natural commons and escalating environmental crisis.