Water Beings and Capitalist Relations in India's Sundarbans Delta

This article explores entanglements between water cosmologies and capitalist transformation in the Sundarbans delta of West Bengal, India. It traces how “awakened” tidal creeks have been iteratively enclosed as private fisheries from the colonial period to the present, with particular focus on the expansion of commercial aquaculture over the past 30 years. I show that the consolidation of capitalist relations has produced striking cosmological divergences. Today, private fishery owners often engage water beings through ritual worship and sacrificial offerings, recruiting them into profit‐oriented production. In contrast, their dispossessed neighbors claim that water beings have abandoned local waterways. Considering such divergences, I argue that capitalist transformation has proceeded through the delta's water cosmologies. Rather than displacing or erasing emplaced cosmologies, these processes have reorganized relationships with water beings and produced new and uneven geographies of enchantment.