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Abstract

Entangled in the push for modernity and securing frontiers, the young and rising mountains of the Himalayas bear stark witness to the effects of climate change and anthropogenic activities. Much of these effects are evident in the register of disasters, which displays horrific events. While popular media have increased its focus on climate change in this region, especially Uttarakhand, the emphasis has heavily relied on a techno-managerial aspect. Valuable these approaches may seem, they render the emotive and affective dimensions of disaster an appendix to the explanation. Drawing on scholarship on grief, I argue that grief is a structuring affect in the Himalayas that can politicise the Anthropocene as a generative framework to reveal historical inequalities. I show how it is politically urgent to emphasise grief when framing the story of disaster, not merely as a footnote but as the core element for portraying the plot of human suffering in public remembrance. I propose that a turn to the political in grief should emerge in the form of public witnessing and grievability. In demonstrating these claims, the paper approaches an unsettling account of disaster in the Raini village of Uttarakhand (India). Through this, the article centres on a normative dimension of climate change that often characterises a disaster as an ‘eventful’ register – invisibilising the affective contours of loss.

Keywords

Himalayas environmental disasters climate change anthropogenic ecological grief

Introduction

In a changing climate world, where monumental shifts are creating new strata by making a diversity of changes, the place for grief often becomes an appendix (Sepkoski, 2020). At best, they feature illustrations and narratives to support claims foregrounded in solution-driven and scientific inquiry into climate change. These studies, while useful, are often crafted to serve a specific dimension of the problem that is useful in explaining the causal effect of the incidents. In other words, they demonstrate how we can ‘mitigate’ the effects of climate change (Nightingale et al., 2020). The popular portrayal of climate change through dramatic events represents the ‘loss’ as an inevitable consequence of climate change, where catastrophic displays of collapse and destruction eliminate any room for creative thinking (Ogden, 2021). On the other end of the spectrum is the popular representation of climate change through so-called ‘eventful’ incidents, where a ghastly display of collapse and ruin suspends any imaginative possibility (Ghosh, 2017). The sense of ‘chronic fear of environmental doom’ has pervaded into the popular imagination’ (Clayton, 2020: 68). The environmental narratives about the Himalayas reveal these frictions. In fact, when combined, these spectra represent the Himalayas as a ‘riskscape’, suspending the possibility of otherwise imagining a landscape so fraught (Hewitt and Mehta, 2012). These characterisations raise significant concerns regarding the idea of vulnerability and promises of new models of climate change mitigation. They seek to approach the natural environment through technical explanations or by recounting disaster events. This invariably excludes a huge sway of narratives of loss that fill our lives.

Emotions, not data, should be at the heart of climate change. This proposition extends if not moves, away from a powerful evocation recently noted by Chandrasekar in an editorial piece, where she claimed, ‘People, not carbon emission, should be at the heart of the West's climate action’ (Chandrasekhar, 2020). It accounts, as she claimed, for ongoing struggles led by those who sit at the bottom of systemic oppression. If the discussion on climate change is restricted to the confines of carbon and, for that matter, climate science, it becomes, as Rasmussen shows, a normative discourse (Mattias Borg, 2015). In the emergent iterations of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch where humans are at the heart of changing the entire ecosystem, data serve merely as the litany of loss in the Himalayas (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Himalayan Anthropocene make render this inequality of loss clear (Mathur, 2015). This article, therefore, delineates two specific perspectives to situate grief and disaster in the Himalayas.

Firstly, I argue that grief is a structuring affect in the Himalayas. By examining the interconnections of loss, environmental changes and the structural apathy towards labourers (often overlooked in the mainstream media), the article demonstrates how the disaster is often presented as an isolated incident rather than a result of the portrayal of the Himalayas as a place filled with ‘mystical environmental degradation’ (Ives, 2004). The article uses a case study of the recent glacial avalanche in Uttarakhand to demonstrate how the state and media frame the disaster as a technocratic failure caused by externalising it to uncertainties including climate change. It suggests rethinking the narrative of the disaster as more than just a technical failure, highlighting the emotional trauma and blurring the boundaries between factual reporting and personal experience. In other words, disasters are reported or televised on news items as a distant form of traumatic events. They seek refuge in their ‘remoteness’ – as a place – while always failing to register loss and memory (Mathur, 2015). Secondly, the article attempts to rethink how framing of the Himalayas as a ‘fragile’ or ‘frontier’ region is reductive and often legitimise colonial lens (Chakraborty, 2024). In doing so, it casts away climate change as incidental and not a primal repertoire of the crisis in the Himalayas. It weaves a story of environmental crises as an entangled problem emerging primarily from political decisions. It helps situate ‘normative political, embodied (in humans and non-humans) and ultimately contested processes of knowledge production’ (Nightingale et al., 2020: 345) to build new ways of thinking about disaster. It shows how a burgeoning body of scholarship demonstrates how the cultural ecology, frontier discourse, and affective contours of environmental changes are intertwined with anthropogenic activities in the Himalayas, enriching a corpus of writing on environmental geographies of emotion (Drew, 2017; Smith, 2020).

I show how crafting a narrative on disaster should account for, if not at least document, the forms of loss variedly distributed to the entire environment, creating an ecology of grief. Every bit of such narrative reconstruction is fraught with slippages, sometimes in the sway of emotional burials and at others, in the absence of voices. Most reports, in this process at best, do not account for the precarious forms of lives and their entanglements with the broader environment and are, hence, written as passive sites of observation (Mukherji et al., 2019). To foreground this claim, I propose to develop the conceptual work of grief in approaching disaster events to reframe ecological grief in the Himalayas (Willox, 2012). Therefore, this article is broadly a conceptual inquiry to project grief as a generative of environmental politics centred on the emotional lives of disaster.

An interlude: Writing of/about ecological grief

Grief is as an affective response of humans in processing loss and is now a widespread experience (Young, 2023). It can occur from various emotional triggers and is often characterised as the ‘shattering of core beliefs’ (Parkes, 1988). In some contexts, it takes the form of ‘nostalgia’ – making grief an instrumental tool in searching for the ‘return to home’ (Boym, 2007). Nostalgia, in turn, transforms grief into a pathological lack of home. Drawing on this form of ‘lack’ or ‘absence’, the term ‘solastalgia’ has emerged recently as an attempt at combining nostalgia (a form of homesickness) with the loss suffered due to changes in the environmental landscape. Studies have shown solastalgia, when applied to the analysis of circumstances where people have been hit by ‘natural disasters’, enables us to trace ‘losses and fears’ that ‘challenge people's established sense of place and identity and can lead to feelings of helplessness and depression’ (Warsini et al., 2014).

However, grief is not nostalgia or depression. Kessler, in his recent piece, writes, ‘Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed’ (Kessler, 2019). This is not to suggest grief is unidentifiable or impossible to capture. In fact, grief, because of loss, is often evident in long periods of sadness that emerge from the process of bereavement. In fact, grief is communicative. The absence of a person intensifies the love for them, removing the pathological lack thereof by making it communicative in nature (Higgins, 2013).

I insist on keeping grief primarily a question of political ethics to reimagine loss as a generative force for mobilisation. This is to rescue the ecological grief from being treated as apolitical – suspending the agentive power of public remembrance. Following Mihai and Thaler, who argue that the ‘politics of ecological commemoration would lend legitimacy to the already grieving, de-pathologising their painful experiences and overturning their status as “emotional outlaws”’ (Mihai and Thaler, 2023: 2). I turn to grief as structuring affect in the Himalayas to locate the culpability of industrial forces and business conglomerate that often ‘naturalise’ a disaster – casting away to technical fixes (Nightingale et al., 2020). The reportage on disaster legitimises these narratives as necessarily climate change events.

Most often, writings emerging from various disciplines tend to treat grief as ‘eventful’ or ‘episodic’, a rupture in the life of an individual or a society. But grief is not linear; it contains a sway of feelings. Didion, in her gripping memoir, The Years of Magical Thinking, portrays grief as ‘a different feeling’ with no distance, emerging in ‘waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life’ (Didion, 2007: 27). Grief takes various forms of ‘continuing bonds’ – an approach that construes grief as a continued form of love (Cholbi, 2019). Cholbi, for instance, in his philosophical work on grief inaugurates the most comprehensive pursual of this idea. Disputing grief as purely psychological, he considers that ‘they (grief) are instead ethical questions about why we should care about grief, whether we should be glad (rather than resentful) that we grieve, or whether grief is morally obligatory’ (Cholbi, 2021). By granting grief an ethical place, Cholbi capacitates the term, in effect, to acquire political potential too – a standpoint on which this paper is framed. Furthermore, he argues that ‘we grieve for those who come to play crucial roles in our aspirations and commitments – indeed, in how we understand ourselves and in what we find valuable or worthwhile in our lives’ (Cholbi, 2021: 16). Similarly, Millar and Lopez-Cantero argue that ‘certain key facets of paradigmatic loving relationships often do continue following the death of one of the parties, helping to explain the phenomenological and behavioral features of continuing bonds and of grief more broadly’ (Millar and Lopez-Cantero, 2022: 414).

These conceptualisations beg us, I believe, to imagine grief as a generative force for plural political futures. The potential of grievability in the work of Butler, for instance, as a political tool shows how certain bodies are rendered worthy of ‘mourning’ while others as disposable. These disposable bodies are essentially recognised by their marginal position, locked in a ‘state of deadness’ (Butler, 2004). Similarly, Consolo, in her recent work on ecological grief, by extending Butler's provocation of mourning to nonhumans, traces ‘mourning to nonhumans through a recognition of shared vulnerability and examines the ways in which constituting nonhumans as mournable expands climate change discourse, research, ethics, and politics’ (Willox, 2012: 137). Often, such recognition of grief experienced by humans as well as nonhumans triggered by climate-induced factors are ‘silenced in public climate change discourse’, a point that this article registers in the case of the Himalayas (Willox, 2012).

Grief, I argue, is a structuring affect, that could generate varied social and political imaginaries of loss suffered as a consequence of both climatic failure and political actions. Although mourning and grief are similar, there are subtle differences. Mourning is ‘ritualistic’ as it grieves death, and, in this sense, it extends the affective depth of grief to emerge as a binding thread towards a cause. Mourning faces outward, while grief is often that encloses feelings (The Recovery Village, 2022). Loss emerging from monumental collapse, such as glacial disaster or extinction of a species, is rarely memorialised. In his compelling work, Mourning in the Anthropocene, Barnett argues, ‘we cannot understand ecological grief without understanding loss. Under particular conditions, a loss may elicit grief because it leaves us feeling bereaved. Literally, to be bereaved means to be deprived of something significant – to find oneself lacking what one once took for granted’ (Barnett, 2022: 6). Drawing on Joshua's work along with Willox, I propose that mourning a loss, especially as a public act, renders grief visible. In other words, grief is capacious and takes a terrestrial form – making it seen, whether within popular portrayal or political mobilisation, enables grief to become a generative force.

For instance, Cade, in her deeply unsettling account of disappearances of ecological biotic lives under the sea, construes grief as ‘navigating absences – the common experience of loss that came with funerals and memorials…But grief, the undermining upwelling of loss in response to ecosystem devastation, the failure of conservation’ remains harder to understand (Cade, 2021: 6). The grief emerging from these absences has the unique potential to transform ‘not only the lives of people who are grieving because of the changes, but also to value what is being altered, degraded, and harmed as something mournable’ (Willox, 2012: 141). Similarly, the dramatic changes in the environmental landscape have impacted scientists as well, with a group of them recently echoing the urgency of grief. In a letter published in the journal, Science, that gained huge traction, Gordon et al. stated that ‘grieving environmental scientists need support’ as they are witnessing a huge ‘loss of valued species, ecosystems, and landscapes’, which, in effect, ‘triggers strong grief responses in people with an emotional attachment to nature’ (Gordon et al., 2019: 193). They demanded that academics, especially environmental scientists, be allowed to ‘grieve well and thus emerge stronger from traumatic experiences to discover new insights about our rapidly changing world’ (Gordon et al., 2019). Therefore, grief, if made public through affective media can be a unifying force as well. Especially, when they are emerging from shared loss or something integral to one's self, (it) can be a powerful political motivator or unifier (Cunsolo and Landman, 2017: 13).

In contemporary times, mourning the loss of landscape such as glacier and lakes is a commonplace as the battering heat, periods of swollen rainfall and forest fires (Read, 2019). Speech, however, for explaining this loss is exclusive to a few, begging the question if all subjects mournable are equal. Does grief – one where concerns are focused on restoring the well-being of humans – help us imagine grief within geographies marked by historic injustices, colonial wounds and ongoing extractivism in the Himalayas? (Gergan, 2017)

Traces of the Himalayan grief

(Entry plaque memorialising Chipko movement at Raini. Author's photo)

धरती का जेवर है पेड़

देश विदेश के लोगों ने सीखा

और हम यहां नंगे हो गए (Down To Earth, 2024)

The song above reveals the storied lives of people and ecology in Raini, Uttarakhand – portraying loss (हम यहां नंगे हो गए) that pervades into the landscape, which was once a (जेवर) jewel. The grief of migrants who travel through a treacherous landscape of poverty contractually drives them to work on hydro-projects; the grief of women who illustrate the travails of married life – the songs of separation repletes the register of outmigration from the Himalayas, too. Similarly, the genres of songs such as pakharu as Narayan show how the life of women ‘would ebb away with grief at her husband's absence’, and these songs, while containing grief, also reflect the inner lives of women (Narayan, 1997: 31). Grief pervades into the wider social lives within the Himalayan town through many forms of tension. Simpson, through her compelling ethnography, sought how tension is a ‘ubiquitous category of distress by tracing the way it appears in networks of kinship, friendship and exchange’ (Simpson, 2021: 17). Grief is one of the manifestations of tension, which ‘was not just an internal state, but sometimes a voiced illocutionary claim or performance, other times an atmospheric state, a mood that emanated in domestic space or pooled musically in the landscape’ (Simpson, 2021: 17). Tension becomes a contour of grief. It is folded into the cultural code of social and political anxieties experienced by residents.

Varied translation of grief fills Himalayan lives. Mabel, in her gripping work, shows how the pain, sorrow, loss and, notably, grief are folded in the process of ‘othering’, the racialisation of Indigenous Himalayan residents. Through her research in the eastern Himalayas, she calls for ‘decolonising the Anthropocene’ to ‘move beyond the politics of urgency to examine the slow, historical processes of erasure under colonialism and imperialism’ (Gergan, 2017: 1). The considerations for developing any new framework must also insist us in recognising a somewhat more extended history of where these terms can be a recent iteration of environmental crisis (Gergan, 2017). Indigenous scholars have altered us to the need for ‘complex and paradoxical experiences of diverse people as humans-in-the world, including the ongoing damage of colonial and imperialist agendas, can be lost when the narrative is collapsed to a universalising species paradigm’ (Todd, 2015: 246). The Anthropocene – a geological epoch in which human actions are causing changes on the entire planet – must also confront the scale of widespread inequalities, where questions of caste, livelihood, land use, migration, action and changing climate are all enmeshed. Grief becomes a portal to explain this entangled story of the Himalayan Anthropocene.

Grief, grievance and movement

The localised anthropogenic interventions through large-scale projects render the Himalayan landscape with ‘anxious semiotics’, which conveys a sense of ‘human culpability in loss’ (Whitehouse, 2015). Wide-scale disasters often emerging from or at least triggered by such activities have dotted the Himalayan landscape. As Mathur argues, most people who are rendered collateral in the wake of climate crisis are also the ones who are not culpable (Mathur, 2021). Their loss, folded into the ecological collapse, is often simplified in the Anthropocene framework by removing the social histories and geographies of marginalisation that shape these communities (Gergan, 2017). A small instance of such grief steeped in grievances – reflecting the culpability of the hydro project – was evident in ‘Joshimath Bachao Sangarsh Samiti’ (save Joshimath movement). This movement, spearheaded by Atul Sati, a resident and long-term member of the CPI (Communist Party of India), has mobilised and steered it, seeking accountability from the hydro project that this article represents. In this case, grief and loss ‘act as a form of resistance to the pressures, forces and processes that are underpinning current practices of environmental destruction and commodification’, and often, in the Himalayas, environmental and social movements carry the reflection of that grief (Cunsolo and Landman, 2017). Movements often display longstanding grievances – framing the exclusion of residents from the political decisions that introduce newer forms of change; the hydro project is a case in point for this article.

Working with grief narratives of those afflicted by the disaster and its impression on movements humanises the question of loss. Within the Himalayan region, recovery from the disaster is often externalised – refusing agency to those impacted to imagine repair beyond ‘survival’ (Aijazi, 2015). Himalayan disasters also often entangle crises that are tied to socioeconomic, historical and political inequality, which requires a deepened understanding of the crisis. Amburgey et al., while reviewing the role of humanitarian and government agencies in disasters, show how ‘these actors often view local communities through a techno-managerial lens that tends to not recognise community agency, collective action, and local responses to disasters as separate from institutional-led processes, although these certainly interact and inform one another’ (Amburgey et al., 2023: 215).

As I argue in this article, an invitation to fully realise the impact of disaster also requires acceptance of loss – the impenetrable grief – through public mourning. Grief enables a language to foreground the interconnectedness of the complex processes of livelihood, migration and political decisions and, most importantly, the stories – a primal node of living as humans in the web of relationships, often buried in disaster reportage. It accounts for a framework, where recognition of vulnerability is sought through ‘recognition of differences’ to imagine the scale of the problem that far exceeds normative ideals of climate change discourse (Govindrajan, 2019). In effect, ‘grief and climate change are inextricably entwined’, which means that any analysis of the changing climate, whether in the form of disaster reportage or policy outline, must account for the myriad contradictions in human existence and their entanglement in the Anthropocene (Head, 2015).

Following from the rich body of work, I argue that making loss seen, evident and available through active forms of mourning and witnessing renders grief visible. Communicating loss makes grief imminent as a political tool, creating a value that capacitates humans to relate with another and beyond. In other words, I show that a turn to the political in grief emerges in the form of public witnessing and grievability to show continuing bonds that shape the relationship with people and landscape (Cholbi, 2019). Grief, therefore, is a structuring affect, which, once made public through mourning, can humanise the endurance of afflicted people. It becomes instrumental in transforming the landscape of loss into varied forms of mobilisation that would expose the consequences of political decisions, effects of development projects in sensitive ecologies and the concerted negligence towards local knowledge.

The context of the Himalayas is illustrative rather than exhaustive. The Himalayas represent a thick milieu of cultural, religious, ethnic, and political realities. Any attempt to represent it as a single whole is a gross misrepresentation. The article, therefore, uses a situated case study of an incident to illustrate how stories of ‘natural disasters’ are framed in the emergent climate change crisis.

Tapestry of pain: Grieving Himalayas

There is a longstanding colonial history of resource extraction in the Himalayas. Pathak shows that during the First World War, there was an intensified demand for timber, including 400,000 sleepers sent from Kumaon (Pathak, 2021). The environmental movements culminated in a century of protest against the state's expropriation of resources (Guha, 1991). Recent scholarships show how structural changes were brought about through infrastructural development and modes of colonial control (Ranjan, 2024). They remain significantly instrumental in shaping Uttarakhand's continued use of the environmental landscape. Many myths about the mountainous landscape, especially the trope of wonder and fragility, allowed for access to and the advent of the Himalayas (Rangan, 2000). The portrayal of the Himalayas is marked variously by magnificent tales of surprises and fear, as well as risks and ‘fragility’ (Hewitt and Mehta, 2012). Such portrayal often obfuscates the deeply entrenched caste system fundamental to land holdings and agricultural practices. Indigenous peoples, Dalits and marginalised groups bear a disproportionate environmental burden (Sharma, 2017). This is intertwined with the long history of racialisation (Rawat, 2024) and the socio-environmental boundary-making practices, often levering the state to define belonging in the region (Nightingale, 2018).

Importantly, for a long time, the ‘Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation’ has defined the Himalayas, as a chronicle of environmental collapse (Eckholm, 1975). The portrayal of environmental degradation is influenced by ‘scientific expertise’, which is sometimes inconsistent with lived realities of people from within the region. Chakraborty et al., in their work show how Kush Himalaya (HKH) Assessment report, for instance, deploys the ‘transformative’ as the glossary word to define the place-based changes brought in by external actors. They argue ‘transformative thinking emphasised in the report is absent in much of Himalayan climate knowledge production and mainstream adaptation strategies. These strategies remain rooted in environmental deterministic and techno-managerial renditions of exceptional precarity…’ (Chakraborty et al., 2023). Consequently, these scientific inquiries often reinforce ideas of vulnerabilities in people's lives, negating situated forms of knowledge. But the Himalayas are fraught. They invite emulsions and acknowledgement of varied ideas. Referred variously as the ‘third pole’ or ‘water tank’, the Himalayas offer a glance into the complex interplay of knowledge, cosmology and the enmeshing of human-nonhuman worlds (Bandyopadhyay, 2020).

(Road expansion project in Reni, Chamoli. The main highway to China border. Photo by author)

India's development trajectory, fuelled by the demand for electricity and fossil fuels and the need to secure its frontiers, is rapidly leading to a state of collapse, akin to a slow violence (Nixon, 2011). The proliferation of anthropogenic activities, notably the construction of dams, across the delicate landscape is becoming a source of ecological grief. These sites serve as stark reminders of the devastation caused by the failure of infrastructural projects (dams), often unearthing the remains of labourers and the destruction of ecology. These losses are exacerbated by the escalating construction of dams and the changing climate in the region, both of which are contributing to the harsh living conditions in the Himalayas.

Climate change contributes to a variety of incidents that are manifested through landslides, among others. Landslides are frequent in the Himalayas (Gupta et al., 2019). A recent study has established that the ‘region is prone to 15% of the global rainfall-induced landslides’. This is believed to have shifted in the 20th century with changes in rainfall patterns during the summer monsoon. There has also been a rapid warming of the climate in the Himalayan regions since the 1980s, with considerably higher temperatures on the land surface (Dikshit et al., 2020: 711). This has coincided with the Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF), avalanches, landslides and more frequent cloud burst incidents. Besides, most of this region sits on an active seismic zone, making it vulnerable to earthquakes. Uttarakhand, a newly formed state, has historically witnessed several disasters that have claimed thousands of lives and collapsed the landscape (Dikshit et al., 2020). This article examines a recent avalanche caused by the break of a hanging glacier in Uttarakhand's Raini village to demonstrate the complex interplay of anthropogenic activities and climate change. It offers gripping strength to illustrate the conceptual premise of this article – grief.

Grieving loss: Raini village

It (hanging glacier) did not dislodge. It was a human error. Months of blasting and increased anthropogenic activities sent shocks to that hanging glacier. And it's not a glacier; it's the stones, the boulders that were on their way down to these projects (dams) that killed people. Watawaran koi kaaran nahin hai (climate change is not the reason), woh ek pravah hai (it is an effect). (Atul Sati, social activist and resident of Joshimath)

On February 7, 2021, residents of Raini village in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district woke up to the deafening noise of a collapse, bringing back memories of trauma from past climatic events in the Himalayan region. The sound of gushing waters, fizzing vapours, boulders crashing, and a continuous roar filled the residents with fear. Photographs, videos and reports began to flood social media. They described and showed an extremely swollen Rishiganga River (a tributary of the Ganga) as it gushed downstream through the steep and high valley of Raini village. The video, presented here seemingly encapsulates the popular image of a Himalayan Tsunami (catastrophic imagery depicting floods in the mountains), documented by witnesses. It painfully registers the affective closeness of the horror it brought upon the people and the ecology. The video is compressed with footage of the flood moving through the river basin, anchoring as it did the voices of witnesses who went live on Facebook to telecast it for people downstream. The initial geophysical reportage of the event seemed split between the type of climatic event, such as avalanches and cloud bursts (Nandi, 2021). Afterwards, it was determined that a series of factors contributed to the incident, triggered by the collapse of a hanging glacier located north of Ronti Peak, a steep Himalayan range at 5474 meters. This led to the formation of an avalanche. Shortly thereafter, the consequences of this event (rock and ice) were felt on the floor of Ronti Gad (Ronti rivulet) as debris poured into the river, destroying bridges, roads, the Hydel project, and, most importantly, claiming human lives. Many claimed that the debris contained vast amounts of the glacier, sediments, rocks and dust, which, as they descended rapidly, created a roaring sound and vapours (Meena et al., 2021). Several factors have been attributed to the detaching of the hanging glaciers, including, for instance, a landslide which triggered micro-tremors, which, in turn, created vibrations, leading to the ‘detachment of a large chunk of the glacier…causing massive loads of water to be dumped into the river channel’ (Meena et al., 2021: 711).

The powerful rush of water downstream met the Dhauliganga River, a tributary of the Ganges. Both rivers were the sites of two ongoing hydro project developments: the Rishiganga and Tapovan Hydropower projects on the Dhauliganga River. The Rishiganga project reportedly had 50 people on site, while the Tapovan project had over 150. Raini and Tapovan are located in the upper Himalayas and are close to the Nanda Devi biosphere. This biosphere was designated a national park in 1982 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988 due to its ecologically sensitive characteristics. Additionally, the glacial discharge in this region feeds major river basins downstream, making the region ecologically fragile and susceptible to glacial outbursts.

Official narratives of disaster

While many sources illustrate this event as a culmination of various factors, the National Disaster Management Authority, the Government of India's official report, provides how externalities, including climate change, may have influenced it. The report claims that ‘The observed increase in precipitation and land surface temperature since 2008, which peaked in 2016, may also have contributed to the increase in snow/ice melt in the release area and movement of the overlying glacier. The advancement of the central lobe of the hanging glacier next to the release area during 2005–2016 and its detachment in 2016 may be a precursor to the present event’ (National Disaster Management Authority, 2022: 7). Furthermore, the report is illustrative of how national discourse on ‘natural disaster’ is often tied to a global framework for environmental collapse. Notwithstanding the rising concerns of water security and biodiversity extinction due to climate change, this report highlights and privileges externalities as the key reason. It notes, ‘Climate change and global warming effect are evident in Himalayan glaciers and mountains’. Therefore, it is urgently needed to share and learn from the best practices available nationally and internationally to minimise the impact of future hazards and risks in the Indian Himalayan regions (National Disaster Management Authority, 2022: 10).

Subsequently, it posits that ‘The impact of rock and ice that crashed to the valley floor was so high that the pulverised rock mass and boulders have over-ridden on the mountain opposite the valley’ (National Disaster Management Authority, 2022: 35). Wherever featured, the ‘loss of human lives’, appeared as cursory about the key cause: the hydro project in the region, which had insufficient preparation for the disaster. While the report conceded that there was ‘no functional early warning and alert system for the specific event which took place on 7th February 2021’ and that these issues were not considered in the ‘Detailed Project Reports (DPRs) for these major projects’, the guilt of the project remains excused even after three years by now (National Disaster Management Authority, 2022: 48). A series of compensation package was released to quell the protest; the question of justice is far too fetched.

A comprehensive account of the event was produced through a massive collaboration shows that the ‘intersection of the hazard cascade with down valley infrastructure resulted in a disaster’ (Shugar et al., 2021). There is generally a cascading effect of a glacial collapse, avalanche and cloud outburst in higher altitudes, but it becomes brutal in circumstances where disaster preparedness is poor’; there is a spurt of tourism and there, undoubtedly, is the mushrooming of infrastructural projects (especially dams). ‘The February 7 rock and ice avalanche was a very large event with an extraordinarily high fall height that resulted in a disaster because of its extreme mobility and the presence of downstream infrastructure’ (Shugar et al., 2021: 302).

Infrastructure at a higher altitude defined by steep slopes transforms the effects of any disaster. The fall of this hanging ice was bound to generate immense pressure in the rivers flowing downstream. Hydro projects aggravated the ‘high loss of human life’, the result of damaged infrastructure that contained project waste alongside rock and ice avalanches (Shugar et al., 2021). The authors contended, however, that ‘not all large, high mountain rock and ice avalanches transform into highly mobile debris flows that cause destruction far from their source’ (Shugar et al., 2021). This shows the possibilities of mitigating the effects of environmental fragility by reducing the scale of infrastructural development at higher altitudes. But dams are mushrooming across the Himalayas.

Atul Sati, when pointing to a strand of disaster, make it very clear that this is not an external agent – the climate crisis alone. It is a specific culmination of longstanding and localised intervention through infrastructural projects, namely, large-scale hydro projects that overlook socio-ecological concerns as merely ‘geological surprise’. Vaishnava and Baka identify these ‘geological surprises’ as a ‘kind of geological risk that cannot be known despite the detailed investigations undertaken by the experts and project developers. It turns project geology from a matter of proper prior investigation to something that needs to be managed, a technical challenge’ (Vaishnava and Baka, 2022: 1134). However, Raini village is part of environmental lore, having given birth to what is now world-famous, whereby people have historically led protests and confronted encroachment of their environmental rights. In his extensive research, Pathak shows how ‘village forest rights that had existed for centuries were curtailed while resin and timber were extracted and sent to distant places’ (Pathak, 2021: 38).

Raini is a microcosm of anthropogenic activities across this mountain system. The Himalayas are battered by the unmeasurable scale of tourism combined with comprehensive urban planning and climate change, which, in turn, combine this into a disaster. Often, however, labourers and residents who work tirelessly are rendered disposable. As I show below, their litany of loss is often featured as disposable in portraying environmental destruction, seeking us to ask whose grief it is and why it must become a public mourning.

Fluvial violence: dam(n)ing the ecologies

(Sandmining in the upper stretch of Alaknanda river, Badrinath. Author's copy)

When I see the map of India and I look at the Himalayas range – I like the Himalayas myself; I like mountains and all that – I think of the vast power concentrated there which is not being used … It is an amazing source of power, probably the biggest source anywhere in the world – this Himalayan range, with its rivers, minerals and other resources. Therefore, I attach more importance to the development of these big river valley schemes, dams and reservoirs, hydro-electric and thermal power and so forth, which, once released, will simply drive you forward (GOI, 1949: 100).

Historically, hydropower projects have been portrayed as a symbol of modernity in India. Nehru's primal promise as the first Prime Minister of independent India sought this claim. Galvanising power generation from flowing rivers as a resource for self-dependence and harnessing the postcolonial aspirations of the people, dams have also become the cornerstone of political mobilisation in India. India is the 6th largest hydro-harnessing country. According to the Central Water Commission (2022), 5264 large dams and about 437 are already under construction/planned (Central Water Commission, 2022). Having had various sustained social movements against the construction of hydropower projects, dams are indisputably, I believe, the subject of political ecology – an approach that informs us about ‘environmental issues through the lens of power relations’ (Vandergeest and Roth, 2017: 82). Dam construction in the Himalayas has left a huge footprint of anthropogenic activities – intertwining the serious effects of climate change with infrastructural development (Manshi, 2022). It reconfigures not only the possibility of ‘mitigating’ the effects of climate change featured in this epoch of the Anthropocene but also makes disasters appear as ‘just’ a natural phenomenon (Hewitt and Mehta, 2012). Dams drastically intensify the chain of events that cause severe distress to human lives and the ecology, creating various forms of ‘riskscapes through hydropower schemes, forestry and mineral exploitation, roads and tourism’ (Hewitt and Mehta, 2012: 2).

There are about 13 functional hydropower projects in tributaries, that is, Alaknanda and Bhagirathi, that are amongst two main tributary that form the Ganges River (Theophilus, 2014: 65). Additionally, there are 14 projects under construction and 43 at different stages of materialisation (Theophilus, 2014). These projects undercut the main geography of aquatic life (especially fish) alongside human social settlements. The chronicle of dams and the burgeoning spectre of hydro projects become abundantly clear as the road from Haridwar, where the Ganges falls on the surface area, leads up to the upper Himalayan terrain.

(Dam construction site after a year of disaster. Author's copy)

The Chamoli incident highlighted the specific danger posed by the construction of dams and a disregard for the precautionary measures emphasised by the Uttarakhand High Court in its 2019 order about the use of explosives specifically on the Rishiganga site, where it had also raised the issue of ‘illegal mining in the name of dam construction’ (Upadhyay, 2021). Upadhyay argues that this construction leads to deforestation, because compensatory afforestation, which should be the norm, is often not followed. ‘The construction material that is supposed to be dumped on separate land is often dumped into the rivers. It would be naïve to assume that a disaster in Uttarakhand that involves dams was “natural”’ (Upadhyay, 2021).

Disasters structure the affective relationship between the human world with the environment in the Himalayas. Aggrieved locals or project workers often stage their protest using ‘temporal tactics’. These ‘temporally-oriented tactics’, as Lord et al. show ‘slow or interrupt the progress of projects – ranging from roadblocks and labor strikes to sit-ins and hunger strikes – forcing companies to recognise their demands and negotiate’ (Lord et al., 2020). But as seen in Chamoli, any collapse often causes tremendous loss, pain and trauma that either remain unreported or are invisibilised when other forms of destruction are being described.

In the silhouette of grief: chronicling the afterlife of disaster

(Manji recounting the incident. Photo by author)

Almost a year after he, unfortunately, lost his brother to this disaster, Manji, a resident of Chamoli, found himself chronicling, what seemed like a deepening of loss. As we stood beside the edge of the road overlooking the river flowing down the gorge, he sank into a heavy silence and then recoiled as he remembered a recent rain shower. ‘Even though it was a minor spell of rain a week ago, the sound of the thundering clouds and gushing river brought back memories of February's horror. I took all that I could and ran up the hill. I stayed there nearly a week until the grass dried up, the rain went away, and fear subsided’, said Balram, who lost his brother in the February disaster. Manji was one of many residents in Chamoli's Raini village who lost a member of their family. His anger surfaces at various points during the conversation as I dig into specific forms of support that he has received from the government. While he has received compensation, a rare and quick response, the trauma he suffers due to the incident, he opines, is now ‘asli kaaran, a structuring force’ – to think about leaving the village. The loss of his brother did not merely emerge as the posthumous rendering of loss but also ‘a kind of emotionally driven attention’ that may steer him and his family to find a safe place outside (Cholbi, 2021: 17). Trauma from the February incident collided with the relentless fear that has gripped the landscape for a long time ago.

Memories of the disaster loom large in Uttarakhand. Climatic events marked by large-scale destruction of both human and nonhuman produces a plethora of memories. Uttarakhand also hosts several religious temples, attracting huge numbers of pilgrims. For instance, the Kedarnath Temple, a Hindu shrine located close to the Mandakini River, built on a valley floor and surrounded by the Himalayan peaks, draws a sea of humanity every year.

In 2013, Kedarnath witnessed massive floods and landslides, causing large-scale death and destruction. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 7000. It also emerged as a site of memory, enveloped in trauma, pain, and loss. In his fascinating book on Kedarnath in the 20th century, Whitmore offers an insightful view into place-making, disaster and religious ecology. Referring to the 2013 disaster, he writes:

Yet much of the trauma could have been avoided, for the impact of the flooding was multiplied by the lack of a well-developed disaster relief plan…lack of sufficient understanding about how human-built dams affect what happens to a river during floods that bring increased water volume and, more significantly, debris flow and much; and the short-sighted widening of roads built in landslide-prone areas (Whitmore, 2018: 8).

In both Chamoli and Kedarnath, much of the problem is tied to a combination of factors, including anthropogenic activities. The Kedarnath incident occupies an interstitial space for the narration of any disaster in the contemporary landscape of Uttarakhand. The incident in Chamoli far from being just a ‘natural’ disaster, was in fact, aggravated by the construction of dams. The dams acted as the multiplier for the scale of destruction. Kedarnath resulted from a cloudburst combined with the unprepared state of the relief and rescue system. Invariably, both cases point to the region's fragility, not only of natural conditions but also as a result of large-scale human interventions.

However, reports of these incidents have all hidden the human and nonhuman stories of loss, trauma and grief. This grief mirrors the precariat drawn from certain parts of the country, now responsible for being the foot soldiers of industrial growth, shouldering the burden of doing the most dangerous work with the most diminutive safeguards. These internal politics of labour and migration are also ‘stories get shifted and intertwined with the infrastructure’ (Bhutia, 2022: 248). Since the grief experienced by bodies is often removed from the land where the events are produced. There is a floating rootless quality to this grief, and for families of labourers, usually, there is no absolution. As pointed out by Gergan, the ‘fractured nature of postcolonial experiences heightened in the Anthropocene demands attention to the narratives of little cultures whose historians have undergone multiple iterations of erasure’ (Gergan, 2017: 492).

This calls for an ethical rendering of the stories, narratives and reportage on the disasters – a need for presenting stories of entanglements of livelihoods, histories and culture and the changing nature of climate that these anthropogenic activities bring.

Ecological grief and human bodies

The environmental disasters in the Himalayas often act as a flattening force for inequalities – concealing realities of the lived experiences of residents and labourers. In fact, contrary to the portrayal of pain and grief, the reporting and, more broadly, the discussion on climate change in the Himalayas is often premised on causal effect explanations – casting away any embodied knowledge as ‘uncertainties’ (Nightingale et al., 2020). It provides, for instance, a universal reality of a warming climate, which is undeniable, but it obfuscates the localised experiences of ‘change’ steeped in the long history of colonial wounds and violence (Gergan, 2017: 492).

The story of Chamoli conceals the details of the lives of those buried, thawed by the cascading boulders and trapped in the deep tunnels of hydro projects. Their bodies emerge only as counts of those reportedly dead. They are reduced to bodies that do not find worthy memorials. In the February incident, the victims were mostly labourers, overwhelmingly from far-flung and poorer states such as Bihar and Jharkhand, among others. The incident reportedly claimed 200 lives while several remain missing (Amos, 2021). These missing persons can be said to have been stripped of their humanity and emerge as deviants to the deaths that are reported. They have even been denied a burial on account of being categorised as missing. Their absence is an act of willful forgetting. The labourers who were declared dead were primarily from outside the state. Their stories are erased, if not forcefully forgotten.

The erasure remains despite the depth of research explaining what led to this disaster. At one level, the erasure is folded in the inequality that shapes the lives of those who work in these fragile ecologies and are, then, declared collateral in a disaster. At another level, the erasure emerges from not recognising the grief that envelopes the families that have lost their loved ones. Reportage of disasters, as Kramarz writes, ‘masks the causal chain of issues underpinning the devastating impact of a disaster and privileges the visibility of tipping points’ (Kramarz, 2022). Any response to a disaster is either imagined in the compensatory framework (often monetary) or as an assessment of the incidents to develop new guidelines. Resilience to recover from a disaster is presumed, absolving the authority from any responsibility towards the existing social life of human relationships conditioned by historical, political and economic processes (Kramarz, 2022: 3).

So, how do we imagine a thickened place of dwelling where the climate is wreaking havoc, with frequent hydro disasters, making them archives of loss and varied forms of ‘entanglements in the wake of Anthropocene’ emerging on the surface of our writing? (Mathur, 2021). Climate change has become a key tool in the globalising narrative of crisis tied to funding – otherwise, what Dewan calls ‘climate change as spice’ (Dewan, 2022). It removes the deeply fraught terrain of changes that emerge not just from climate but localised anthropogenic activities folded in visceral inequality and painful migration stories. With its due urgency, climate change has acquired a singular face in telling the story of an environment fraught with lived experiences.

Memorialising the guilt? Postscript of grief in climate change

(Memorial at the NTPC hydropower project in Raini. Photo by author)

Over two years after the Raini (Chamoli) incident, a memorial now stands at the hydro project site. The memorial is a torch-shaped engraved with the names of those who died in the disaster. Painfully ironic as it may appear, but as I was surveying the site, I was drawn to a song that was playing in a non-native language. I glanced around and found a few labourers working at the site. In my conversation with them, it became clear that they belonged to another region of the country. One of them said it was ‘funny’ that ‘we are working on a memorial that remembers our brothers from our own home state’, while another, perhaps in his early 20s, said, ‘I have heard they are still stuck inside the tunnel. Although they must be “khatam” (perished) by now’. So gripping was his tone that all of us paused, seemingly stranded in the moment. Haunting spectre of loss arrested the air in silence. Ogden, in her work, considers loss ‘not an event of absences – of something or someone now gone’. Instead, she alludes to loss as an ongoing process and argues that ‘loss is lived by bodies that exists in relation to other beings and things. loss can rupture or reconfigure those relations’ (Ogden, 2021: 6). Similarly, the loss of lives – of bodies that were never recovered created a haunting sense of loss that defines both the lived realities of people gripped with haunting memories and anticipatory grief in this region.

A memorial, then, is not merely an index of remembrance but ‘in effect, produces and distributes the memory of the past’ (Ranjan, 2023: 15). It stands as an object with the capacity to disarm the temporality of the landscape by presenting a narrative of the past. It also saturates the limits of engagement by ossifying into an inanimate object, often incapable of provocation. Memorials must be imaginative and participatory. Processual narratives of the bereaved are shaped by ‘legacies of and memories about the deceased’ (Ranjan, 2023: 17). As Simpson and Alwis write, ‘the memorial flattens the extremes of individual memory – replacing it, and, therefore, in a sense, denying it or suppressing it with something altogether more palatable, if not anodyne. This is perhaps one of the fundamental functions of a memorial’ (Simpson and de Alwis, 2008: 7). In the process of building this memorial, families, many of whom never recovered the bodies trapped in the tunnel, stand in the shadow of grief – some having received compensation for the loss, while others are in fear, unattended and denied any semblance of justice.

Numerous petitions have been filed, and influential experts have written letters to halt the construction of the proposed dam in the paraglacial regions of the Himalayas. Concurrently, instances of climatic events have been on the rise (The Wire Staff, 2022). Reflecting on his role as a survivor of the calamity and a petitioner in the court, Sangram Singh expressed uncertainty regarding the government's responsiveness, referring to it as ‘Sarkari Chetna’ (government's consciousness). He elaborated on the challenges faced by the affected residents, tracing their historical grievances from the Chipko movement to the present, characterised by a recurring narrative of loss – ‘dukh ke liye jagah nahin hai, nyay toh dur hai’ (there is barely any space of witnessing pain, let alone asking for justice). These incidents are typically labelled as ‘natural disasters’ in mainstream media, thereby downplaying the underlying issues of livelihood, unemployment, and the profound impact on human and non-human elements. While many families await justice, others have resigned themselves to hopelessness. Notably, media coverage of the Chamoli tragedy often overlooks the individual stories of the deceased. As such, grief becomes political, encapsulating lives and their intricate entanglements. It emerges as a persistent force necessitating a pause, reframing catastrophic events as a collective narrative of systemic harm. Grief thus transforms into a political instrument for acknowledging deep-seated grievances and historical injustices, serving as a form of resistance that extends beyond the mere commemoration of loss to encompass a collective experience of grieving.

Footnotes

Highlights: key arguments and findings in bullet points

The article shifts from techno-managerial to affective dimension of climate change in the Himalayas. Highlights the use of grief as a structuring affect core in understanding environmental disaster. Examines the Raini village case study in Uttarakhand,India to illustrate anthropogenic climate change. Demonstrates that grief can serve as a catalyst for new political possibilities in addressing environmental crises.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd.

ORCID iD

Rahul Ranjan

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