Ethnographic account of flooding in North-Western Himalayas: a study of Kashmir Valley
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Ethnographic account of flooding in North-Western Himalayas: a study of Kashmir Valley Ishfaq Hussain Malik
. S. Najmul Islam Hashmi
Accepted: 16 September 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Narratives, human experiences, life histories and stories are powerful tools to understand a social phenomenon. Different kinds of pandemics and disasters create different types of stories and experiences. The human response to disasters seems to be generating or at least permitting an increase in property losses, especially in societies where economic growth is rapid and modern technology is spreading fast. Some hazards are created by persistent inhabitance of dangerous areas or by alteration of land or water, while others are exacerbated by efforts to reduce the risk. The disasters adversely affect societies but also give rise to heroic stories of survival and resilience. The North-Western Himalayan region is prone to several kinds of disasters like floods, earthquakes, landslides etc. One of the most disaster prone regions in North-Western Himalayas is Kashmir Valley. Kashmir Valley has witnessed several disastrous floods in the last century but the most disastrous flood in the recent history of the Union Territory is the September 2014 flood which affected all the aspects of life and resulted into death of 277 people. It also I. H. Malik (&) Department of Geography, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara, Punjab, India e-mail: [email protected] S. Najmul Islam Hashmi Department of Geography, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India e-mail: [email protected]
witnessed floods in 2015, 2017 and most recently in 2019 but they were not as devastating as the 2014 flood. The present study gives the ethnographic account of the recent floods in Kashmir Valley with special focus on 2014 flood. It gives account of the devastating loss and suffering of people due to the floods. The present ethnographic study goes deeper into understanding narratives of people, their experiences of the floods, account of several survival stories, the politics involved in relief and rescue, history of the people of Kashmir, the meaning behind the narratives and the meaning of belonging and communitarianism. It also provides insight into vulnerability of different classes of people to floods. Keywords Ethnography Flooding Vulnerability Politics Narratives Communitarianism
Introduction ‘‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.’’—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). These opening lines of the novel of Charles Dickens capture the climate of social crisis and the
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sense of belonging and selflessness but they also capture the picture of selfishness and political rupture in times of crisis. They capture the picture
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