EPILOGUE
HISTORY AND MEMORY AT THE WATER’S EDGE
“THERE IS THE SCIENTIFIC AND IDEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE FOR WHAT IS happening to the weather,” writes novelist Zadie Smith, “but there are hardly any intimate words,” no words that capture the sense of loss that climate change brings with it. “The weather has changed, is changing,” Smith writes, “and with it so many seemingly small things… are being lost.”1 Faced with the forbidding scale of climate change, many responses are profoundly local. Indian farmers, deeply attuned to the tenor of the skies, are changing when they plant their seeds.2 But changes in the weather also bring a sense of disorientation—a loss of one’s bearings. Everywhere I traveled over the eight years I have been working on this book, I heard stories about the weather—stories of how it is not what it used to be. In many cases, these stories were prompted by a particular landscape that was familiar once, and is now unrecognizable. “Look there,” I was told by a longtime resident of Thanjavur on a trip through Tamil Nadu in 2012, “when I was young, the river ran full, now it is completely dry.”
There are many other kinds of loss that climate change threatens us with. A changing monsoon affects every form of life that depends on it. From the Gurukula botanical sanctuary in Wayanad, northern Kerala, Suprabha Seshan and her colleagues cultivate endangered plants native to the ecosystem of the Western Ghats, the western Indian mountain range that receives some of the most intensive rainfall during the summer monsoon. “We refer to these plants as refugees,” she writes; many have been rescued from areas where forests have already been cut down. “The weather features regularly in our speech,” she writes. The gardeners’ work depends on an intuitive knowledge of the weather. But these patterns are changing. Seshan observes that “ever since I have been here, about 24 years now, I have heard people talking about how the monsoon has gone awry, that it is no longer what it used to be. We also know this from scientific data, but crucially for us, we know this from the behaviour of the plants and animals in our sanctuary.” Here, meteorological research and local perceptions match. Everyone is sure that the southwest monsoon has weakened—and has become more unpredictable. Local species are “confused,” Seshan writes, by the weather’s signals. Temperatures are too high for some mountain species to thrive, and rising temperatures bring new diseases. “I worry,” Seshan concludes, “that the monsoon, with its moods and savage powers, might altogether cease.”3
ALONG THE COAST OF SOUTHEASTERN INDIA, TOO, ARE MANY SIGNS of irreversible change. In a small village near Pondicherry, earlier this decade, I met Mr. Rathnam, a fisherman in his fifties whose family have been fishers in the area for generations. On both sides of the narrow strip of beach on which we sat were granite sea walls. “If not for these walls,” he said, “the sea would have taken this settlement long ago.” The beach has been eaten away over the past twenty years, most noticeably by the construction of a large new port in Pondicherry, a few minutes down the coast. The Pondicherry port marked the beginning of an explosion in port construction in India, with dozens of ports currently planned for India’s eastern and western seaboards. They eye the newly flourishing commercial opportunities of the Indian Ocean’s littoral, which is vibrant again after falling into decline for the second half of the twentieth century. The ports cause enormous upheaval to the coastline. “Where these boats are now,” Mr. Rathnam said, pointing to the beach, “those were all houses. Look, you can see the remains of the floors of houses.” I saw little fragments jutting out from the soil, a small archive of coastal environmental history.
The remains of a house: an archive on the landscape of coastal erosion. CREDIT: Sunil Amrith
He is convinced that the sea is changing in ways beyond what is visible to the eye, beyond the visibly changing shape and extent of the beach. The weather is “unpredictable,” he said; “the seasons seem to mean nothing now.” He was convinced the monsoons are shifting, and in his narrative the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 was the moment when “everything changed.” The tsunami was a geological phenomenon, caused by an undersea earthquake, but to Mr. Rathnam it seemed a portent of fundamental change. He paused his story. “I don’t understand the sea anymore,” he said, suddenly: the sea that he has known, intimately and instinctively, for a lifetime. I asked him what does the future holds. “Nothing,” he said; “there will be no fish left to catch.”
Climate change is not the most obvious or proximate cause of his distress. Here, as elsewhere in Asia, the effects of climate change compound a crisis already far advanced—a product of reckless development and galloping inequality. Mr. Rathnam’s livelihood has been threatened by the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of highly capitalized owners of large trawlers. There are fewer fish to catch because of what a recent report calls “an uncontrolled addition of fishing boats between 1965 and 1998.” The size of the catch has collapsed, and its composition has changed: fewer large predators, fewer fish that command high prices on the market. The dramatic fall in their incomes has pushed many small fishers ever deeper into debt. Development along the large highway down the coast from Chennai has led to a spike in property speculation, fueling a construction boom that flouts coastal zone regulations. A tidal wave of plastic, and effluent from factories and power plants, floats out to sea. Compounding each of those challenges, climate change is also now making itself felt. Rising sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal have exceeded the boundaries that can sustain many forms of aquatic life.4
One of the questions I asked Mr. Rathnam that day on the beach, was, “What happened to the family that lived in this house, and others like them?” One part of the answer, I expected—there had been a large movement of younger people to the growing cities, and to Chennai in particular.
But there was another part of the answer that I did not expect. In light of the work I had spent the previous decade doing on migration across the Indian Ocean, I had the feeling of a very familiar map of migration being drawn before my eyes. All but the very poorest households in the village, Mr. Rathnam told me, has at least one family member overseas. A similar story emerged in the neighboring hamlet. Older routes of migration have been reinvigorated—plenty of sons and nephews in the village were in Singapore and Malaysia, working in construction. Others had taken more recent paths. Many work on fishing fleets in the Persian Gulf. Colonial connections, too, continue to shape people’s trajectories in Pondicherry, which was a French-ruled enclave within British India—one older fisher turned to his memories of the “French time,” and then enumerated his family members now living in Paris. Old geographies still matter. In this part of South India, people experience and imagine climate change at home in relation to a constellation of distant places; family histories of mobility are reactivated as a means of support or insurance. But borders are harder than ever to cross. Every day, South Indian fishermen, struggling to make a living, stray into Sri Lankan territorial waters in search of fish; many have been arrested and detained by the Sri Lankan coast guard.
People experience climate change in space as well as in time. They mark change in terms of their memories of the seasons as they used to be, or of epochal storms that now seem portents of the future. But they also mark it through traces on the landscape, through memories of old houses and old neighbors. Traces of those earlier times lie embedded as debris at the water’s edge.