In recent decades, the Anthropocene—the proposed geological epoch defined by the rise of the “human” as a geophysical agent capable of causing large scale shifts in climate patterns—has emerged as a frontier for humans, non-humans, and the humanities. How might the study of Hinduism contribute to ongoing debates about the Anthropocene? Can thinking from the edges of the Anthropocene—polluted rivers, oceans and oil spills, drought-prone deserts—and rethinking mythological tales of collective death and transformation provide new ways of understanding Hindu concepts and communities in a world shaped by climate crises, conspiracy theories, extraction, and development? This panel offers ethnographic analyses of Hindu communities’ relationships with and responses to climate crises and conservation efforts in Nepal, Guyana, and New York, anthropological engagement with the emergence of conspiracy theories about climate change in India, and textual explorations of extinction, collective death, and epochal consciousness in the Upanishads and the Mahābhārata.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2023-2025 at Nepal’s four holiest Hindu sites, or chār dhām—each located by a sacred river—this paper explores varied Hindu responses to rapid and ongoing environmental changes brought about by climate change and development. It asks: How have Nepal’s chār dhām been affected by anthropogenic environmental changes? How do Nepali Hindus understand and relate to the rivers at these sites, and what are their reactions to changes in water flow and quality in these rivers? The paper investigates how Hindu beliefs, values and practices regarding the sacred rivers at these sites exist in a tense and complex relationship with, on one hand, conservation efforts, and on the other, development initiatives intended to bring economic and quality-of-life benefits.
After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, South Asians were shipped to plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. The system of indentured labor produced the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. The Madrasis are a religious minority within this diaspora. They cohere around the south Indian goddess Mariamman and practice drumming and spirit possession rituals. Since the 1980s, Madrasis have been migrating to the United States. In New York and Guyana, Madrasis live on the coastal edges of climate change, oil spills, and water pollution. Drawing on ethnographic work in Guyana and New York, this paper examines how Madrasis invoke their history of indentured labor and the language of karma and kaliyuga to criticize ExxonMobil’s expansion along the coastline of Guyana and water pollution in Jamaica Bay, New York. The paper places the Madrasis’ terminological experiments in conversation with recent debates about the terminology and dating of the Anthropocene.
The Anoop Mandal is a century old anti-Jain Hindu religious sect centered throughout the arid and drought-prone districts surrounding the border between Rajasthan and Gujarat. According to devotees (bhāviks), the Jain merchant castes, baniyas, control all the world’s governments, the economy, and even the weather; they are the source of the current climate crisis. Critics contend that this is evidence of the backwards status of the group’s members, who are mostly low-caste, and the underdevelopment of the region. This paper argues that the Anoop Mandal’s beliefs represent not a pre-modern prejudice, but a form of Hindu theorizing which connects anthropogenic climate change with the demands of a specific economy; it is a theory of the Capitalocene. Why, this paper asks, do the causes of ecological devastation become conceptualized as personal rather than systematic? How does religion facilitate this process? And why is the target of this theory an ethnoreligious group?
This paper explores Hindu conceptualizations of death through three stories involving Yama, the God of Death in Hinduism and Bhūdevi, the Earth Goddess. The first story, in the Katha Upanishads, is of Nachiketa, a sixteen year old boy whose dialogue with Yama illustrates the apotheosis of an individual soul’s desire. The second story, in the Mahābhārata, is of princess Sāvitri, her chosen husband, Satyavan, and Sāvitri outwitting Yama on her husband’s survival. The third story centers on the goddess Bhūdevi’s call for help, resulting in the the third avatar of Vishnu, Varāha. These three Hindu stories are analyzed through prisms of mythic transformations of self, desire, and evil and expanded from the lone individual’s dealing with impending death to the imagination of a collective human species dealing with the possibility of death and extinction.