Paper short abstract:

Evolving relationship between climate anomalies and social adjustments are visible in the contested drought narratives in India. Memories of farmers describe droughts as irreversible adjustment to development, in drought policy, resolution rests on personal responsibility and technological miracles.

Paper long abstract:

Evolving relationship between climate anomalies and social adjustments that are forged through contested narration of droughts, are influential for social and institutional decision making. Framing of drought as a crisis of food, hunger and endemic nutritional deficit, centre agricultural production, entitlements of rural labour, individual distress and life course vulnerability (maternity, childhood or age). Droughts as a problem of measurement in recent framings, shifts to sophisticated remote measurements of weather anomalies and popular communication of the same through viral stories. Based on my anthropological research among central Indian upland communities and changes in drought policy manuals, I show how droughts are remembered, narrated and reported by differently situated social actors. Memories of east-central Indian tribal and women farmers, who experienced drought through the era of ‘agrarian improvement’, death, eviction and labour bondage, describe landscape and social transformation through stories of nostalgia, heroism, exploitation, sacrifice and irreversible adjustments. Discussions about recent droughts (2016-17, 2023-24) in policy, news, and social media, either decentre or instrumentalise rural distress by drawing attention to the inevitability of crisis, greater role of personal responsibility, jingoistic framing of culpability and technological miracles. Stories of planetary transformation generate expectations ‘to develop viable modes of living’ that may require engagement with diverse ecologies and social experiences. Here dominant drought policy narratives falter, as their theories and ideologies of crisis and resolution, submerge the textured memories, and yet to be uncovered histories of environmental collapse and response failures, that should be included in the evaluations and expectations of just futures.