My dissertation focuses on the severe flooding and massive riverine erosion in the island of Majuli, Assam. For over a century, Majuli has been losing an average of 3.1 square kilometers of land to the waters of the surrounding river, the Brahmaputra. In the past 20 years, the island has lost up to 8.5 square kilometers of land in certain years (Lahiri and Sinha 2014). Last year was particularly bad for the village of Sitadhar where I conducted most of my field work in 2017 and 2018. In early June, the rising waters of the Brahmaputra overflowed into fields and homes, causing much damage. In late May and early June this year, my interlocutors in Majuli brought my attention to areas that had been severely hit by floods in 2017. On the worst days, entire villages had to be evacuated. Several residents had suffered significant losses: homes had to be repaired, farms had to be restored, and cow sheds and pig sties had to be rebuilt. The Mishing temple dedicated to the deities of the animist religion Donyi Polo had collapsed and had to be reconstructed. As they went about their harvest in June, my interlocutors also spent time reinforcing their stilt-houses and repairing their boats, all the while hoping that the rains would not be as fierce this year.

But it is not simply a question of the rains. Geologists and political scientists attribute the ferocious attack of the Brahmaputra to three geological and anthropogenic factors: seismic activity beneath the riverbed (Lahiri and Sinha 2014), poorly coordinated hydraulic and embankment projects along the river’s course (Saikia 2011), and global climate change (Wilson et al. 2017). As these geological and anthropogenic factors come together, it is hard to ignore the fact that Majuli is a microcosm of a problem that is global.

Even as I went about my fieldwork, I could not help but become attentive to the floods in Delhi and Kerala. I was in Delhi in late July and August, when stories of floods around the Yamuna began to break on the daily news. As I brought it up during breakfast at the home where I was a paid house-guest for the entire duration of my stay, Raju, one of the men working for the family,  told me that the Yamuna had not quite overflown its banks. The water levels had merely risen, but this was enough to flood the homes of those who lived by the river—on the embankments and sometimes in the dry riverbed. In the summer months, when the river ran dry, families that migrated to the city settled on the riverbeds. During the monsoons, as the water levels began to rise, these families were the most vulnerable. The problem, Raju stated, was not because of the environment alone. It was because of poor urban planning and the failure of the welfare state to take care of the city’s impoverished migrant laborers.

All summer news of severe rains and floods in Kerala have also been breaking on all news channels. With three months of incessant rain, several rivers have overflowed along the Malabar coast, and are now affecting families living not only in Kerala but in Tamil Nadu, the neighboring state into which the rivers flow. As I write this post, the death toll in Kerala has risen to 167. In early August, my aunt who lives in north Malabar called us to talk about a cartoon she had seen in a Malayalam newspaper. The cartoon showed a river feeling flummoxed by the construction projects that had taken over its banks, leaving no room for the river to overflow during the monsoons. As areas surrounding rivers become sites for building roads, resorts, and housing projects, or conversely the only places left for impoverished citizens to settle, the overflowing waters destroy either what is valued both by the state and by private owners as “property,” and causes damage to already vulnerable populations.

Poor planning was also blamed in the Chennai floods of 2015. As the coastal city, which was once part swamp, turned into a site for massive development projects run by corporates as well as the government, the grounds that once absorbed and harnessed the rain water disappeared beneath tons of concrete. The waters instead flooded residential areas causing displacement, destruction and death.

Several of these floods and disasters are beyond the control of human agency alone. It is true that Majuli sits on a tectonic plate, and that the south-east monsoons have been particularly harsh this year and that the waters of the Yamuna will rise every monsoon. However, as the desire to become “developed” sweeps across India, the landscape is being taken over by haphazard and poorly coordinated construction projects. These projects also displace the city’s most impoverished citizens and force them to settle in the most vulnerable zones.

As Amitav Ghosh notes in his recent book, The Great Derangement (2016), disaster of this magnitude has been banished to the realm of fiction for so long that it takes us a while to become attuned to the new reality we face: global environmental precarity. When faced with these events we are more likely to feel shocked and numbed than become convinced that there is an urgent need to rethink “development.” As Anna Tsing (2015) notes, precarity and vulnerability are not simply problems of people of one class, gender or race. While some groups are selectively more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, global warming truly does affect everyone. The flooding waters of the Brahmaputra are more likely to first hit those who have been reduced to making their homes on the embankments, but the floods also affect others who may harbor a false sense of security and consider themselves out of harm’s way because of the privilege of class.

There is a need then to wake up to this reality and to act tactically. Felman, in her book Governing Gaza (2016), draws attention to a form of governance she calls tactical governance, “a means of governing that shifts in response to crisis, that often works without long-term planning, and that presumes little stability in governing conditions” (2008:165). Tactical governance might be one solution to the large scale environmental precarity that the planet faces. Additionally, there is a need to simultaneously study how local communities work to produce local knowledge that may have particular salience in particular environments. What worries me as I wind up my summer is that the Indian government is very far from developing tactics to overcome precarity. On August 15th, when India celebrated its 71st Independence Day, the prime minister thought it a fine time to announce that India was getting ready for a manned mission to space in 2022. That too, of course, calls for tactics. But it also draws away resources from a more dire problem here and now.

 

By Shweta Krishnan, Sigur Center Field Research Grant Recipient for Summer 2018. Shweta is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the George Washington University. Krishnan examines religion, environment, and transnational connections in Majuli, a river island in the Indian state of Assam, which is subject to massive erosion by the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. Her research examines how geological transformations on this island shape the memories of transnational migrations, the practice of religion, and the ethics of subject formation.

 

References:

Feldman, Ilana. 2008. Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967. Durham: Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Lahiri, Siddharth and Rajiv Sinha. 2014. “Morphotectonic Evolution of the Majuli Island in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, India Inferred from Geomorphic and Geophysical Analysis.” Geomorphology 227(2014): 101-111.

Saikia, Arupjyoti. 2011. Forest and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wilson, Alana M., Sierra Gladfelter, Mark W. Williams, Sonika Shahi, Prashant Baral, Richard Armstrong, and Adina Racoviteanu. 2017. “High Asia: The International Dynamics of Climate Change and Water Security.” Journal of Asian Studies 76(2):457-480.