Wonder and Terror in Climate Perception: Bhūdevī, Yama, and Thillaiammal in the Hindu Cosmological Imaginary and the Environmental Commons in southern India

This paper explores the multiple ways in which the aesthetic emotions of wonder and terror could help us understand critical aspects of the planetary climate that overlap with Hindu mythologies and cosmologies. Are there cultural and religious tools in the stories of the Hindu imaginary that could assist us in expanding these collective mythic imaginations? Closely investigating three mythic figures: Bhūdevī, the goddess of the earth in the sthala purāna of a village along the Kaveri River in Tamil Nadu; Yama, the god of death, in the Upanishads; and Thillaiammāl, the goddess of the mangroves in Chidambaram (a counter-balance to the well-known Shiva Natarajan, the god of dance), this paper uses methodologies from both ethnographic research and literary religious texts to reframe religious cosmologies as encounters with environmental commons. Three questions shape this paper: 1) How are the perception of climate “catastrophe” narratives framed in cosmologies?;  2)  How can the perception of these religious cosmological narratives be reframed as environmental commons?;  and 3) How are the aesthetic emotions of wonder and terror shaping our contemporary understandings of the climate “crisis” and “catastrophe” and our responses to it?  

  Climate events frame themselves in the emotion of both wonder and terror. Giant, running walls of fire are accompanied by streets lost to rising rivers and seas. Narrative itself seems to be under assault. Amitav Ghosh argues in his influential The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” (9) Ghosh hints that we need to urgently recover and reshape our human imagination and understanding of the larger powers of agency of the natural world.  

The deeper examination of the three selected mythic Hindu cosmological figures through the methodologies of ethnographic research and literary religious texts argues that they could be potential tools of expanding our collective, mythic imagination of what the earth as a semi-autonomous being could do as a parallel and interlaced axis of value to the scientific theory of Gaia. Would this reimagining of the earth as a goddess while simultaneously holding a scientific frame of understanding be capable of assisting humans to respond adequately to our human-induced climate pollution shaped by colonial and industrial forces? Would a reimagining of the specific local thillai-ammāl, the goddess of the mangroves in Chidambaram, help us see the coastal mangroves as a vital part of our being able to breathe in a climate “chaotic” world?  Would a reimagining of Yama, the Hindu god of death, serve not just as an imaginary of individual death, but expand to an imaginary of collective death to assist humans as a species to respond adequately to the climate “disasters”?   

Ghosh explains that our modern frame of mind centers around “a habit of mind that preceded by creating discontinuities; that is to say, they were trained to break problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (“externalities”) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable.” (56). Climate disasters, after all, are ultimately a problem of excessive waste, out of proportion to what can be “digested” by the earth processes surrounding us.  

Curiously, in a parallel fashion, Ramaswamy in her ground-breaking Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (University of Chicago Press: 2017: 284-291) explains that in the historical turn at the turn of the nineteenth century, the round, spherical body of the earth becomes fused with the ancient Hindu divine forces, a new kind of planetary consciousness is formed. She elaborates: “Puranic knowledge becomes useful for disseminating pedagogic modernity’s planetary consciousness. In turn, Hinduism’s ancient gods are ontologically transformed. Rather than freewheeling deities gadding about the uncharted cosmos or wandering around Bharatavarsha and Jambudvipa, they now come to be cartographed, their bodies hitched to the terrestrial globe, and pinned (down) to the outline map of “India”…. With the help of modern cartographic instruments, Hinduism’s ancient deities, rather than becoming irrelevant or redundant, are rejuvenated as members of the emergent nation’s geo-body, lending it their aura, their powers, and most importantly, their divinity.” (289)  

Interestingly, in the current temporal frame, we may deploy these divinities to a new environmental discourse, of an impending decade closing in of temperature rise and its concomitant increase in climate chaos across the globe. Ghosh, extending his argument, suggests: “We have entered…the age of hyperobjects,... .Nowhere is the awareness of nonhuman agency more evident than in traditions of narrative. In the Indian epics…there is a completely matter-of-fact acceptance of the agency of nonhuman beings of many kinds.” (2016: 64)  

This paper attempts to bring together Ghosh in conversation with Ramaswamy, as well as the climate “emergency” in dialogue with the ancient Vedic (Bhūdevī and Yama) cosmological forces and the medieval Tamil divinity (Thillaiammāl) rooted in the very specific place of Chidambaram. These dichotomies and paradoxes may help to illuminate some previously unimaginable, but necessary thorny intellectual cartographic spaces.