You are here

Home

Hinduism and Climate Change

Submitted to Program Units
1: Hinduism Unit
2: Religion and Ecology Unit

Vijaya Nagarajan, University of San Francisco, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This panel seeks to explore how Hindu practices, stories, and discursive worlds articulate with climate change, both as an idea and as a set of material-physical processes impacting South Asia at present. Specific inquiries in the session range from the interplay of caste, race, sexuality, and gender with the natural and mythological worlds of the Sundarbans and Tamil Nadu to Ayurvedic perspectives on moral texture to the responses of Himalayan religious tourism to shifting weather patterns. The goal of the panel is to invite conversations about how Hindu traditions can help to think about issues of scale (microcosm, macrocosm), relationality, and human/nonhuman agency in a moment of cascading ecological crises that often intensify pre-existing forms of structural violence. 

Papers

  • Vijaya Nagarajan, University of San Francisco

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

    Abstract

    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, this paper uses methodologies from both ethnographic research and literary religious texts to reframe religious cosmologies as encounters with environmental commons. 

  • Calynn Dowler, Vanderbilt University

    Staging Survival: Popular Performance and Hindu Climate Ethics in the Sundarbans

    Abstract

    This paper considers religious responses to climate change among Hindus in the Sundarbans islands of West Bengal, India. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper focuses on creative approaches to climate change activism, including theatrical performances. The performances connect climate change with theological notions of spiritual pollution, vices such as greed and desire, and negative emotions like anger. Alternatively, the drama promotes virtuous behavior, interreligious harmony, and collective social action as keys to ameliorating climate change. Paradoxically, the drama uses mythological figures to center human agency, and in this way, it also articulates new ideas about human responsibility in moral and material worlds. I argue that this case not only provides insight into Hindu framings of climate change, but also how modernizing Hindu visions encounter and transform existing frameworks of divine and human agency. 

  • Matthew Robertson, Murray State University

    Bearing the Gods in Mind: Psychogenic Climate Change in Early Ayurveda

    Abstract

    This paper examines a theory of anthropogenic climate change from the early works of Ayurveda. Building on scholarship that highlights the fundamental interrelation of humans and their environments in Ayurvedic theory, I show how Ayurveda develops medicalized theories of karma, yoga, dharma, and a psychological approach to divinity to argue that faults of human awareness are the root cause of climate crises. To this end, I analyze the etiology and symptomatology of “faulty awareness” (prajñāparādha), which Ayurveda treats as one of the basic causes of all disease. The category of “faulty awareness,” I show, overlaps conceptually with discourses on the decline of the yugas and the disappearance of the gods from the world. Echoing coeval sources like the Mahābhārata, Arthaśāstra, and Aśoka’s edicts, Ayurveda forges an understanding of climate crises that posits a fundamental and necessary interrelation between the fields of medicine, religion, ethics and politics. 

  • Luke Whitmore, University of Wisconsin, Steven's Point

    The Land of the Gods is Not Sustainable: Religion and Climate Change in the Uttarakhand Himalaya

    Abstract

    In this paper I will argue that the abundant reservoir of religious ecological beliefs and practices found in the Garhwal region (located within the Indian state of Uttarakhand) at present demonstrate insufficient power to support major forms of climate change adaptation and mitigation because the power of these resources is outweighed by the economic logic of religious tourism in the state. I make this argument with reference to years of fieldwork in the Kedarnath valley, one of the most significant contexts for religious tourism in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. 

Responding
Tulasi Srinivas, Emerson College
Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Play Audio from Laptop Computer
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

90 Minutes

Schedule Preference

Sunday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Schedule Preference Other

Saturday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Schedule Info

Monday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

Tags

#ecology
#southasia
#india
#hinduism
#ClimateChange

Session Identifier

A25-411