Ecology of grief: Climatic events and disasters in the Himalaya

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.