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Paper short abstract

Through a documentary in Himachal Pradesh, I trace how households live with landslides, flash floods and subsidence, and how uneven access to small-scale capital, sociopolitical networks, faith and public services shapes coping, mental wellbeing, recovery and transformation.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on a multi-sited documentary ethnography filmed in Himachal Pradesh (Indian Himalayan Region) following flash floods, landslides and land subsidence. Using the documentary After the Deluge as both data and analytic device, I examine how households experience climate-exacerbated extremes not only as “disaster”, but as an ongoing condition that reorganises livelihoods, care and mental wellbeing. The film braids five voices: a remote-sensing scientist interpreting geomorphological risk and changing rainfall; a young tourism entrepreneur whose restaurant and camping site were badly hit and whose family now lives in an officially unsafe house; a single mother and an elderly farmer living with cracked, tilting homes; an environmental activist linking hazards to hydropower and road building; and a mental health specialist contextualising distress, stigma and care gaps.

Across Parashar, Sainj Valley, Tirthan and Lower Badal, I analyse differential crisis responsiveness. Households vary in their ability to mobilise small-scale capital (repairs, rebuilding, restarting work), social capital (peer support, kinship and faith-based protection through local devta), and sociopolitical networks that shape access to relief, drainage works and safer land. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and work distinguishing resilience from transformation (Adger, 2003; Pelling, 2011), I show that the same networks that sustain coping can also reproduce exclusion when access to mitigation funds or relocation is filtered through local power and bureaucratic distance.

Methodologically, the paper advances audio-visual analysis for tracing how infrastructures and emotions co-produce pathways towards, or away from, transformative futures grounded in inclusion, dignity and psychosocial security.