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Paper short abstract

Hindus in Bangladesh see rivers as deities who protect and care. Climate change disrupts rituals, wounding sacred bonds. Communities respond with ritual improvisation for access rights. This more-than-human view reveals fluvial worlds as living labs for the ethics and politics of dwelling.

Paper long abstract

In Hindu cosmology, rivers are sacred more-than-human beings integral to ritual practice. For Hindu followers in Bangladesh, rivers are not mere waterways, but sentient beings, deities, and kin deeply embedded in their ritual lives. Without the river's water, many rituals would not be possible; moreover, if the rivers were to dry up, the rituals associated with specific rivers may one day disappear. This paper offers a more-than-human human-centric analysis of key river-based rituals—Idol immersion, ritual bathing (snan), ancestral tarpan, daily ghat worship, marriage rituals, and lifecycle ceremonies—where rivers function as living interlocutors addressed through care, reverence, and negotiation

Based on ethnographic research in Bangladesh's riverine regions, I demonstrate how these rituals constitute the river simultaneously as a deity, a purifier, a moral witness, a well-wisher, and an unharmful neighbor. Climate change, embankment construction, pollution, and state regulation to close some areas, narrow immersion routes for deities, and address contaminated waters—these are experienced not merely as geographical changes but as ethical wounds to human-river relationships.

Communities respond through ritual improvisation, not allowing alternative rivers, rejecting modified offerings, or substituting waters, and through political claims framing river access as both religious rights and ecological care. This more-than-human human-centric perspective destabilizes nature vs society and religion vs secular environment binaries, positioning Bangladesh's Hindu River rituals as a living laboratory for the ethics and politics of dwelling in fluvial worlds.