Assam, a state in India struggles to come to terms with the devastating effects of climate change, with unseasonal heat waves and changing rain patterns effecting crop cycles, day to day life and an increase in natural disasters. This comes in the wake of several years of political turmoil that included insurgency, Government repression and citizenship tests that sought to exclude communities.
For people in the region, like elsewhere, climate change poses a challenge: on the one hand, there is an aspiration towards the benefits of ‘development’ through development projects, piped water, electricity, air conditioning and consumerism. On the other hand, there is concern about dwindling natural resources and environmental problems. Within this situation, people experience both terror (of climate change borne natural disasters, crop failures ) and desire ( for amenities, malls, air conditioning, development projects ), and to reconcile this, we see the emergence of a new set of ‘beliefs’. These beliefs are being constructed by political figures in their rhetoric, and supported and amplified by media that are often biased towards those in power, leading to what I term as a form of divisive and dangerous myths and folklore. The politician and public figures take on the role of the ‘trickster’ figure of the old folklore, part buffoon, part powerful controller of destiny who uses his bag of ‘tricks’ to outwit not those in power ( as they would in the old stories) but the dissenters and those who question or protest the status quo of destructive environmental policies and corruption. These proclamations from political leaders often work by using tropes of environment protection ( ‘fertilizer jihad’) or development ( urban garbage problem as a sign of development) to veer attention away from systemic problems. This rhetoric fulfils a range of functions: from evoking a romanticized pastoral/ natural state of the past when people had simpler desires ( sitting under a tree) ; to that of demonizing minority communities for environmental degradation ( ‘fertilizer jihad’). I will also look at how this political rhetoric becomes a perversion of the way older myths have been used in other texts in the context of climate change such as Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama.

This paper will look at the public rhetoric of political leaders in the state of Assam to map out a new constellation of urban beliefs that weaponizes environmental concerns to target communities, and create conditions for further destructive development projects. The questions this paper will ask are: are we seeing the development of a new set of folklore for our disturbed era of ecological and political crisis? And if so, is there an antidote in other alternative stories?