Paper short abstract

This ethnographic study examines how older women's narratives in North Indian rural communities reveal vanishing zero-waste practices and environmental knowledge, exposing gendered dimensions of sustainability transmission and resistance to plastic modernity.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how older women's narratives in North Indian rural communities embody profound entanglements between gender, environmental knowledge, and cultural transmission. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how grandmothers' storytelling practices reveal a vanishing world of zero-waste living, handcraft traditions, and intimate relationships with the natural environment. These women's narratives not only document sustainable practices, from transforming plant waste into handwoven rugs to creating ritual objects like daliya (ceremonial buckets) but also expose the gendered dimensions of environmental knowledge preservation and loss.

The research investigates how these maternal narratives construct notions of "the natural" in opposition to plastic modernity, positioning traditional women's work as inherently connected to environmental stewardship. However, the reluctance of younger daughters and daughters-in-law to engage with these practices reveals how capitalist penetration reshapes both gender relations and nature-culture assemblages. As handwoven winter sweaters give way to nylon alternatives, and factory-made items replace handcrafted ritual objects, older women's stories become sites of resistance against environmental and cultural degradation.

This analysis contributes to understanding how folk narratives function as repositories of gendered environmental knowledge while simultaneously revealing the patriarchal structures that both preserve and constrain women's ecological wisdom. The paper argues that these disappearing narratives offer critical insights into alternative relationships with nature that challenge contemporary sustainability discourses by centering women's embodied knowledge and intergenerational transmission practices.