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Paper short abstract:

The estuarine regions of the coastal state of Kerala, India are living with a quiet, insidious form of shifting waters—that of tidal floods. Focussing on Kochi city, this paper examines how these arrhythms of waters affect lives and livelihoods, and yet remain absent in climate conversations.

Paper long abstract:

The state of Kerala, along monsoonal India’s southern-western coast encountered its worst floods in a century in 2018. Every year since, Kerala’s routine annual encounter with kaalavarsham or the southwest monsoons, has been marked with uncharacteristic floods and cyclonic activity. This paper focuses on another set of less spectacular, planetary phenomena that have since begun to make itself felt along its estuarine regions: that of accelerated, but much quieter – and more insidious, tidal floods. This paper focusses on the estuarine region on the northern frontier of Kochi city, Kerala’s commercial capital, where, for centuries, communities have lived off seasonal cyclical cultivation of shrimp and the indigenous, saline-tolerant pokkali paddy varietal. In what is a highly engineered wetscape, this cyclical practice offered a mode of living and working that engages with, and manages annual monsoonal and oceanic tidal patterns. In short, this wetscape worked with a series of interconnected temporalities of moving waters. Where networks of streams, farms and lagoons would absorb seasonal rises and withdrawals, today, brackish waters enter homes unannounced. More importantly, they refuse to leave. These newer forms of floodings affect more than 20,000 households in this one district alone. And yet, it has found no mention in the state’s climate change policies. Drawing on an ongoing ethnographically informed examination of this region, this paper reports on the ways that these shifting patterns have radically altered life. Second, this paper opens up existing frameworks of “disaster,” its affordances and its limits, in the context of climate change.