As I read the horrendous accounts of what was unleashed upon Garhwal, I think of the men who gave me a hand in absolute darkness near Ghangria, the men with whom I had many cups of chai sitting around a fire, the taste of the meal at Bhojbasa, the hand that saved the life of a friend and refused money in exchange, the little shop in Harsil and that absolutely divine bun-makkhan. I also think of the deep, jerky and slightly nasal voices, the irresistibly seductive sun of Badrinath, and the distinctively sad young man in a Delhi office brimming with innocent joy when I told him I had been to the town nearest to his abandoned village – Srinagar. I can still feel the roar and the heavenly freshness of Alaknanda – soaking in its being and not being able to hold my hand in its waters for longer than a few seconds. I remember the look of the gigantic and mighty snow-clad mountains in the early hours of a late December morning from within a dark candle-lit chai shop, the super-juicy peaches of Uttarkashi, and the endless green meadows of Har ki Doon lit up with little yellow flowers. But I also remember the distant sound of the stone crushing crane up there as I lay on the banks of Ganges in Harsil – the sound of the imminent catastrophe. The jam on the road to Gangotri, another one just ahead of Joshimath. Buses and jeeps and cars, countless of them, filled with people frustrated at not being able to move. And now they’ve all been moved back in time. The more I read about the destruction in Garhwal, the more it hurts. The loss of lives, livelihoods, shelter, and tourism isn’t merely exceptional; they cannot hide the fact that the hills have been damaged irreversibly in just one decade. Countless people will never feel the same way about them from now on. A world has been destroyed. Once, it was possible to walk from one realm of time to another, one orientation of space to another. They were to be inhabited differently, on their own terms; they were to be feared as well as challenged. The travel between them was a negotiation between different ways of being in the world. The gravest crime of modernity is that it insults geography. The only way for geography to resist the carnage of the modern is to include the ecological costs into the exchange rates, give it very restricted access, and establish measures to redistribute the wealth locally. Garhwal is yet another example of the national betraying the regional because the Indian nation is the most uneducated about its geography. One way – a lot more useful way – of imagining the failure of India is to rethink it in terms of its geographical insensitivity. Not only do most of militant assaults upon Indian state have an ecological imperative, but they also take attention away from the caste-gender-class challenges within the mainstream national imaginary. The current tragedy, for me, is yet another reminder that India will remain a brutally unjust place as long as it doesn’t fail to hold together. Whether a fragmentation could be productive will most likely depend on the terms upon which it is instituted.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 11:39:40 +0000
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