Paper Short Abstract:

This paper will adopt the methodological tools of the newly-found discourse of Environmental Humanities to look at the rituals and rain around environmental narratives, cultural practices and creative negotiations to understand the complex roles of climate, monsoon, and its variables in morphing the more-than-human histories in pre-modern Assam, India in the eastern Himalayan foothills.

Paper Abstract:

Humans in pre-modern Assam (located in the Eastern Himalayan foothills) co-existed with timely, untimely erratic waves of torrents, and annual inundations which are integral parts from their everyday conversations to their cultural memories. Evidently, humans, non-humans, land, and water are inherently braided into an ecological rhythm from a long geological time. Assam’s fluid, unruly landscape with recurrent physiographical and geomorphologic transformations, heavy rainfall for 8 months with annual inundation are the major co-designer of the lives herein. Water, monsoon, and rainfall have been found in playful, romantic, spiritual and ritualistic mentions in the varied literary and cultural expressions. In the hour of war monsoon turned into a weapon in these foothills taking charge of the might in the battlegrounds. Apparently, monsoon has been looked at as a timely guest here who formed its distinct more-than-human history. Testified by historical records, it is inferred that pre-modern Assam did not experience any major rainfall crisis, dreadful droughts, and tornadoes although it was a hotspot of monsoon. However, the rituals of frog weddings (bhekuli biya), Hudumdeu Puja, and aphorisms to mitigate the rainfall crisis tell a different story. Recent discoveries of the carbonate and oxygen isotope records from Meghalaya, India indicate climate oscillation and uneven monsoon precipitations in the 17th-18th centuries. This paper proposes to discuss time, how far the humans of Assam in the eastern Himalayan foothills negotiated with the timeliness and untimeliness of rain through a myriad of rituals through visual, performative traditions, both written and oral productions during this period.