Perceptions of Climate Change from North India

An Ethnographic Account

Aase J. Kvanneid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000359046
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Perceptions of Climate Change from North India: An Ethnographic Account explores local perceptions of climate change through ethnographic encounters with the men and women who live at the front line of climate change in the lower Himalayas.

From data collected over the course of a year in a small village in an eco-sensitive zone in North India, this book presents an ethnographic account of local responses to climate change, resource management and indigenous environmental knowledge. Aase Kvanneid's observations cast light on the precarious reality of climate change in this region and bring to the fore issues such as access to water, NGO intervention and climate information for farmers. In doing so, she also explores classic topics in the study of rural India including ritual, gender, social hierarchy and political economy. Overall, this book shows how the cause and effect of climate change is perceived by those who have the most to lose and explores how the impact of climate change is being dealt with on a local and global scale.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the anthropology of climate change, environmental sociology and rural development.

1 Climate change expressions

Barsāt

The winds that carry with them the warm, moist air from the southwestern Indian Ocean are eagerly awaited in the village of Rani Mājri. The monsoon season of Barsāt usually makes its appearance with the onset of the month of Asāṛh and lasts through the month of Sāwan, which corresponds to mid-June until mid-August in the Gregorian calendar.

By mid-June, clouds had drifted tauntingly towards the Himalayan mountains for days, without shedding a drop of rain. The schoolteachers from city did not think the rain would appear any time soon, the news had reported possible onset dates later in June. Amongst farmers, however, there was talk that the rains were surely approaching. Bhagwati, Prakash’s aged mother, had said that a circle around the moon was a sign of rain to come the previous evening. The increased intensity of heat over the last few days had also made several women remark that the rains would be over us soon.

The next morning, someone in the village had decided there were enough indications and initiated preparations for the first rains. This brought hectic activity to the whole of Rani Mājri and demanded much from everyone able to work. But would rain fall?

It did.

The first few days, just a little fell, a teaser of what was to come. Knowing the right time for tilling and sowing to commence is crucial. In between the first showers, the soil stays moist for a very limited span. The longer heat and dry spells in between them bring the soil back to the dry and cracked surface of summer, impossible for any oxen to plough or human to dig. During this period, families work the fields from sunrise to sunset, immersed in work and sweat. The men of the landholding houses, the majority of Rani Mājri’s central village, plough and till their terraced land with a wooden plough drawn behind two bulls.

The women, and the children after school, carry two-year-old composted manure, now in the state of fertile soil, in baskets on their heads out on the fields. Emptying the baskets down on the newly tilled land, they mould the warm and airy manure into the soil by hand. There is far from enough manure to cover all the plots, however, so even the largest households will have to prioritise which fields will receive the organic fertiliser. In Rani Mājri, these fields are those irrigated by the kuhl, the small irrigation system that covers the land directly beneath the village. On a four-year rotational basis, the farmers always prioritise enriching the fields dedicated to that year’s ginger crop. The ginger, when dried into the marketable product of soṅṭh, is the main source of income for the largest landowners.

The largest landowners have bought the roots from Shimla through a joint effort (their home-grown ginger rots in the summer heat), and they have spent the last weeks before the rains indoors in the heat, preparing blue crates of ginger-roots, which are carefully sorted into piles depending on share. Entire households attend the planting, some digging ditches and troughs for water-flow, others placing roots in a systematic pattern with other vegetables (turmeric roots and colocasia variants of the taro plant, as well as coriander). The careful pattern is intended to provide just the right amounts of sun and shade, water and nutrients to the ginger. The roots, all laid out in a pattern, are then pressed into the earth with a pry-bar. Finally, rice-grass from the previous season and leaves from lopped trees are put on top, covering every little corner, to protect the crop from the sun that peers down between these early batches of rain.

After the ginger is sown, there are other fields to tend to, those uphill or lying beyond the controlled irrigation of the kuhl system, like the southern fields that, during the winter season, lie fallow. During the monsoon season, these fields usually receive enough rain to support a decent yield of pearl millet or maize, broadcasted on the ground and then ploughed into the soil.

The physical strain of the labour is exhausting and time-consuming. In the glaring sunlight and high temperatures, sweat pours down and disturbs your vision. In the short breaks under a shadow of a lonely tree on the meticulously worked land, the high-caste landowners gather in the middle, with the landless and low caste daily labourers assisting them, sharing in the conversation from the sunny periphery. It is late night before the families return to their respective households for dinner. After a long day’s work, people wait a little for the sweat to dry before taking a highly irregular evening bath (normally, water is saved for the morning routine). Stomachs growling, people sit in darkness on roofs, stretching to reach the faint winds, hoping to cool sore muscles, whilst the women of the house prepare the evening food. Rice and lentils, sour milk to drink – again. Food is unvaried, and fresh vegetables have not been available for weeks due to the hot and dry season of summer behind them.

Days pass, with only taunting clouds drifting above the village. The days that passed in between these first monsoon showers are hot and humid, with temperatures circling 40° C. The halting fans caused by recurrent electricity outages in the middle of the night leave a dark, warm silence, mitigated only by the village’s altitude, which makes the night a few degrees cooler than in the cities of the plains. Then, finally, by mid-June, the intense heat is broken off by intense and heavy rain. The monsoon proper has arrived, and the month of Sāwan has begun. With that, a ritual was held for Khwaja Pīr, a deity of rain and water with significant powers. He is, when attended to, a benevolent protector for the village during the monsoon, and his benevolence is especially needed now. So is the goodwill from other deities, and men and women – unmarried and married – choose to work empty-bellied from sunrise to sunset on Mondays throughout Sāwan for Shiva and Krishna.

After a few days, the air is so thick with humidity and the surroundings so potent with growth, one feels like it is almost bursting. The fodder gets wet. The laundry gets wet. The floors become muddy. After a few days of intense showers, everything crawls with life – there are bugs everywhere, in the flour, in the bed, in the bathrooms, in the air. Frogs croak, flies hum, mosquitoes buzz, but the birds are quieter than ever. The absence of wind and the high temperatures in between the rains make the sweat pour; itching heat rashes are accompanied by frequent diarrhoea and vomiting, believed to come from working in the sun or at times from drinking the monsoon water from the kuhl. The rainwater’s movement through the ground is known to bring bacteria from the excrement of humans and animals further uphill, who defecate in the forest above. Also, the kuhl water is so interspersed with silt that, although in abundance, it would be difficult to drink. It was worse before, however: my old neighbour illustrated that she would have to filter the water for sand and debris through her teeth (which she was no longer in possession of). And the season’s extreme humidity coupled with extreme heat, fasting and waterborne diseases does certainly affect people’s moods. In Rani Mājri, girls who are in their first year of marriage now leave their new homes for the entire month, as Sāwan is a time when, in the first year of marriage, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law should not meet. Anger (gussa) is thought to easily arise, unnecessarily straining the new and important relationship.

The monsoon rain falls far from constantly but is marked by dramatic shifts and turns. So are work and travel. The increasingly heavy monsoon showers create distortions in communication, bordering havoc in the cities (The Tribune 2013). The streets overflow with rainwater, causing plugged sewers to brim, tarmac to collapse and trees to topple over in the strong wind. Electricity lines snap, traffic gets blocked. In the village too, work halts when heavy clouds release torrential rainfall, making water fall as if from buckets. Strong winds carry cool air and thunderclaps that make people hurry home or to shelter. There are frequent landslides too, smaller and larger, as porous soil gets heavy with lashes of rain. The showers are never that long, there is time to sit, to wait, to listen. When the rain halts again, people resume their tasks, attuned to the rhythm of the season.

As Sāwan comes to an end, the rain does too. Instead of dramatically falling in buckets, it now drizzles a little every day. After almost two months of humidity, the heat begins to let go, making the air feel almost pleasant, and the surroundings have become an explosion of green. There is even green where there should not be any, like on the walls, rooftops and telephone lines and electricity cables. The maize has grown from light to dark green, the chili plants are lush – the landscape is barely recognisable from its deserted state only a few months ago. In the late evenings, children flock to the mango-grove between the Scheduled Caste hamlet and Khot, with plastic bags. Nimble, they climb up the majestic trees, shaking the mangoes down to the youngest, who are left on the ground as a gathering crew, trying to outsmart the sullen cows who feast on the fallen fruits. Ripe mangoes are indulged in on the spot; unripe mangoes are carried home and used for the local chutney, intensely sweet and salty at the same time.

This is also the right time for planting the final monsoon crop, the rice grass (dhān). Once again whole families gather on the fields. The women fold their trousers (shalwar) to their knees, tie their tunics (qamīz) above the hips into a knot and tie the shawl (chunni) around their heads. The sandals are kicked off, their feet make squelchy sounds in the knee-deep water, swapping place with water and mud. Plop-plop: the rice grass goes into the wet soil below the water surface – not too deep, or it would not grow. Sposh-splosh – not too shallow, or it will not root. The light breeze adds a playful tint to the labour. Periods of quiet concentration are broken with periods of cheerful songs (gīt). During a tea-break, an “uncle” makes a tiny “windmill” from a stick and a mango leaf for a small boy, who whizzes about with it, making it go around and around. A few boys attempt to use the kuhl as a waterslide. Finally, there is rest in sight, and everyone gathers for dinner. These days the vegetable dishes are enriched somewhat with the ripening bottle gourd and freshly made mango chutney. Autumn is arriving.

………..

Figure 1.1 Drawing of the village.

Source: Author.

A hand-drawn map of the village indicating the size and approximate location of houses.

In Rani Mājri, on the outskirts of the alluvial plains of northern Haryana, subsistence farmers, shopkeepers, auto-rickshaw drivers, factory workers, sweepers and day-to-day labourers, and here, they dwell in a neat collection of houses. The village settlement is small, even in a hill village context, with just about 50 joint and nuclear households. These are organised roughly according to caste patterns, of which there are two in the main village, and one in a separate settlement (I will return briefly to caste and what it entails later on). Most households in the central village are small landholders, utilizing less than 1 hectare (800m² or 1 bighe, the local standard for land measurement). Some were landless, working other families land, and a few landholders occupied 2 hectares of land or above, which classified as a small landholder according to the Indian Agricultural census (Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare 2019), but a large landholder in the local context. In this village, landholders and landless, farmers and factory workers alike, shared one thing. A lifestyle where their well-being hinged upon the environment being rather predicable and benevolent, and the large landowners’ crops to yield bounty. As such, the daily life of Rani Mājri revolved around the Agricultural year, as it had done for as long as anyone could remember. Survival had never been effortless. The steep slopes of the terrain, the sandy quality of the soil and the amount of arable land has for centuries made it difficult to meet the demands of subsistence here. In these hills, as in the rest of India, the monsoon is an important ally. So decisive is the monsoon’s effect on the national economy that a former finance minister and president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, allegedly called the Indian monsoon the true finance minister of the country (Narain 2014; Shira 2015). In the village of Rani Mājri too, the rain falling at the end of the hot and dry summer season provides relief from the intense summer heat, kickstarting the local Agricultural production, power generation and construction work. Since the early 21^st century, however, the strength and pace of the monsoon had been more erratic than remembered by the living generation, and this has intensified a problem that has been an issue in these hills as long as anyone can remember: soil erosion. Every year, I.I.S.W.C. reports state, enormous masses of silt (150–650 tons per hectare per year) are being moved through these hills with water from rain and melting glaciers from the Himalayan mountains (Yadav et al. 2008). The movement cause landslides and soil depletion, as silt and nutrients of the soil move with the water in rivers and seasonal streams, down the deforested slopes of the Shivalik Hills, and are eventually carried on to the plains and into the sea. If the current projections of climate change effects in the Shivalik Hills are correct, the hot season of summer will be hotter, the dry season drier, and the monsoon rain will be more intense and falling at other times than expected. With unpredictable skies above their heads and the ground shifting below their feet, the dwellers of Rani Mājri has to adjust quickly, not only to a changing environment and a changing climate; but to a changing society too.

Life and how to go about it have changed more for the farmers here in one generation than is imaginable. In one generation, Rani Mājri went from no health or education services, no road connection, no electricity and no landline telephones to become subjects for sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Climate change expressions
• 2 Waterworn
• 3 Governing awareness
• 4 Divine jurisdictions
• 5 Climate identities
• 6 A dance of global warming
• Index