On Monsoons and Mythic Rivers
Scholars claim that the growth and decline of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was impacted by monsoonal rains and winds. According to right-wing Hindu ideologues, however, the Sindhu-Saraswati civilization, their name for the IVC, was founded along the banks of a mighty and perennial glacial-fed river, the Saraswati, a Vedic River, which “disappeared” six-thousand years ago due to tectonic disturbances in the earth’s surface. This paper examines India’s fascist turn by focusing on the BJP government’s discursive and material re-engineering, reclamation, and recovery of disappeared Vedic rivers. Narratives of Saraswati’s disappearance shape ongoing conversations on climate catastrophes, offering a reading of earth histories that reproduces Hinduism’s sacred and violent geographies.
Author Profile: Mona Bhan
Mona Bhan is a professor of Anthropology and the Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies at Syracuse University. She explores political and environmental anthropology with a focus on Kashmir, analyzing economic development’s role in counterinsurgency operations and resistance movements. Her work challenges modernist binaries between nature and humanity, offering a critical assessment of human and nonhuman entanglements in climatic assemblages. Co-founder of the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, she has edited several publications on Kashmir and served on editorial boards for cultural anthropology and disaster studies.