Water, Faith, Climate Change, and Development at Nepal's Chār Dhām

Climate-induced changes in temperature and precipitation are occurring more rapidly in South Asia than the global average and Nepal’s complex geography makes it especially vulnerable to these climate-related environmental changes.  Water resources are the lifeblood of Nepal, sustaining farming, fishing, livelihoods, and cultural traditions, but as a result of climate change, the country is regularly experiencing devastating floods and landslides during the monsoon season and droughts during the hot, dry pre-monsoon period.  These climate-related challenges to Nepal’s biodiversity and water resources are being exacerbated by development-related activities such as construction of hydropower dams, river-linking projects, pollution, and sand-gravel mining in riverbeds. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork from 2023-2025 at Nepal’s four holiest Hindu sites, or chār dhām, to explore varied responses among Nepali Hindus to the environmental changes brought about by climate change and development. 

Each of these four sacred centers – Pashupatinath in Kathmandu, Muktinath in the mountains of Mustang, Barahakshetra in southeastern Nepal, and Ruru (Ridi) Dham in the hills of Palpa – lies on or near a major river in Nepal.  This paper focuses on how Nepali Hindus understand and relate to the rivers at these sites, and investigates their reactions to changes in river water flow (including seasonal drought and flooding) and quality in these rivers due to climate change and the effects of hydropower dams, sand mining, tourism, and urban pollution. Exploring how Nepal’s chār dhām have been affected by these anthropogenic environmental changes offers a four-site case study in the contradictions and complexities of everyday Hindu religious life in the Anthropocene age.  In particular, I examine how Hindu beliefs, values and practices regarding the sacred rivers at these Hindu pilgrimage sites exist in a tense and ambiguous relationship with, on one hand, (a) conservation efforts aimed at preserving Nepal’s biodiversity and freshwater resources, and on the other hand, (b) development initiatives that may sacrifice environmental concerns to bring economic and quality-of-life benefits to Nepalis.

The field of Religion & Ecology has demonstrated how religious worldviews often provide a foundational conceptual framework with which people comprehend and respond to the events of climate change.  Recent work has emphasized how anthropogenic environmental changes are a cultural phenomenon as much as a scientific one.  The biophysical realities of human-induced environmental degradation are available to us only in and through specific matrices of cultural practice. To understand and better deal with the anxiety, loss, and despair around human-induced environmental change in a particular place, we must understand the local culture.  This paper contributes to and furthers this work in a specifically Nepali cultural context, with focused attention on rivers. 

For millennia, all over the world, rivers have been worshipped as sacred entities but “river worship is a more prominent feature of [Hindu] culture than of any other culture in the world today” (Haberman 2006, 1). Nevertheless, as Vinay Lal notes, “If the personification of rivers as goddesses was at all intended to secure their purity and longevity, then such an ingenious form of environmental conservatism has proven to be, at least under conditions of industrial modernity, a dramatic failure” (Lal 2015, 398). This paper explores this apparent paradox in the context of rivers deeply sacred to the Hindus of Nepal.  In the distinct context of the Nepali Anthropocene, how—through what sources and relations—are Hindus imagining and experiencing the natural world and the anthropogenic environmental changes happening around them?  

Reflecting upon observations of and conversations with Hindu devotees at Pashupatinath, Muktinath, Ruru (Ridi) Dham, and Barahakshetra in Nepal, this papers asks: Has scholarship in the fields of “religion and ecology” and “religion and climate change” unjustly privileged “religion” as a key driver of human behavior in and toward the natural world?  David Haberman has argued that religion can provide the principled support needed for environmental action since people typically are willing to take extraordinary measures to protect what they regard as supremely valuable or sacred (Haberman 2021, 4), while Tulasi Srinivas stresses that “Hinduism does provide resources to grapple with climate change.” (Srinivas 2025, 290). While a great deal of ink has been spilled in efforts to “mine” religious traditions for “resources” and “principled support” that may help us deal with and respond to climate change, my paper suggests that much of this work has been skewed by the persistence of long-critiqued, Protestant-biased analytical assumptions in which ideas and beliefs are understood as the primary drivers of human behavior and human-nonhuman relationships, rather than active, sensuous relations and material conditions. 

It is, of course, not just the burning of fossil fuels and the spewing of toxins into our soil and water that have driven climate change, but also particular conceptions of the self and world.  Yet those very conceptions of self and world today seem grounded far less in religious sensibilities than in the material realities of a modern scientized, secularized, neoliberal capitalist world order.  In other words, when it comes to the everyday, on-the-ground life of religion in the Anthropocene age, traditional religious beliefs, values, and practices often find themselves subordinated to the hegemonic systems (attitudes, motivations, and material conditions) of global neoliberal capitalism. At Nepal’s chār dhām, Hindu devotees have powerful affective experiences and express sincere feelings of reverence toward rivers, but for most devotees, visits to these sacred sites and contact with these sacred waters seems to be but a compartmentalized moment, motivated primarily by personal/familial benefit, in a mode of life whose active, material relations inspire neither appreciation of human dependence on and embeddedness in the natural world nor genuine care for that nonhuman world. 

Haberman, David. River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

______________. “Introduction: Multiple Perspectives on an Increasingly Uncertain World.” In Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021.

Lal, Vinay. “Climate Change: Insights from Hinduism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83.2 (2015): 388-406. 

Srinivas, Tulasi. “Toward a Riparian Theo-Ecology: A Meditation on Hinduism and Climate Change.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 92 (2025): 276-296.