Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands

Abstract

The Indian Himalayan Region, a climate change hotspot, is witnessing a massive surge in hydropower development alongside a dramatic rise in natural hazard events. This article explores indigenous people’s response to this intersection of concerns around hazards and contentious development beyond more legible instances of social movements or resistance. Through an ethnographic case study located in the Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, the site of a 6.9 magnitude earthquake, controversial hydropower projects, and an indigenous antidam protest, I show how people’s relationship with a sacred, animate landscape is not easily translatable into the clear goals of environmental politics. Antidam activists and environmentalists link growing ecological precarity in Sikkim to state-led hydropower construction, but for many lay indigenous people, these earthquakes raise deeper cultural anxieties. I demonstrate how these anxieties are grounded in a longer history of the contested relationship between marginalized peoples and hegemonic state and nonstate powers, a relationship that continues in the fraught relationship of the Himalayan margins to the Indian state. I argue that critical engagements with indigenous environmentalism must be in dialogue with diverse interpretations and registers of loss and erasure. In this I follow recent calls to decolonize the Anthropocene that demand that we move beyond a politics of urgency to examine the slow, historical processes of erasure under colonialism and imperialism. I highlight these narratives to argue for a more holistic approach to the uneven impacts of climate change on mountainous environments and their inhabitants.

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