Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how the fluidity of memory narratives repositions Kashmir’s River Jhelum as a dynamic hydrosocial archive shaped by erasure, eco-social change, and lived experience, drawing on literary materials and fieldwork (in 2024) to map emergent riverhoods and shifting mnemonic ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

The River Jhelum in Kashmir is deeply embedded in the region's ecological and cultural fabric, yet often reduced to romanticized, monolithic narratives. Moving beyond this, memory narratives—through their fluid plurality—can potentially position the river as a dynamic archive of memory, identity and resilience, and critically reimagine it as a multiplicity informed by diverse determinants and lived experiences. These memories create a dialogic space for the interaction of riverhood strategies and eco-social interventions through repetition, spatial symbolism and sensory recollection, and serve to decenter fixed archives through emergent and affective forms of remembrance. Within this political ecology of river memory, this research maps the erasure of dominant mnemonic structures from the riverscape to interrogate the interaction between existing collective imaginaries of the river and the eco-social interventions that shape its political and ecological cartographies (like the displacement of Hanji houseboats and the degrading waters of the Jhelum) which together co-produce new rhetorics in river memory. It further examines how collective imaginaries confront ecological, infrastructural, and political interventions to shape emergent riverhoods created through these contesting forces.

Drawing on literary evidence—particularly select graphic novel panels and film scenes—and ethnographic mappings gathered during fieldwork in Kashmir (October-November, 2024), it critically locates how the Jhelum’s memories participate in a political ecology of resilience and retention using the framework of riverhood and eco-society (Escobar and Boelens). In doing so, the Jhelum becomes a critical site for examining how hydrosocial and mnemonic landscapes are continually reconfigured, shaping and shaped by the memory ecology into riverine futures.