Post-disaster memoryscapes: Communicating disaster risks and climate change after the Leh flash floods in 2010

Abstract

Drastic life events like that of a disaster are not easily forgotten. Various narratives emerge to keep alive the memory of a disaster, its precursors and its consequences in the minds of those who experience it. Therefore, disaster memories become an important source of information and learning, not only for the community but also for policy makers who can work towards identifying the precursors and reducing the consequences of a disaster. Discourses in Indian disaster studies have largely ignored the exploration and importance of memory and memorializing practices in communicating disaster risks and climate change. Ontologically speaking, most research in this area has continued to look at disaster as an external, materialistic and objective reality, which has resulted in the production of a large body of literature focused on different types of ‘assessment’ studies. However, disasters also have an ‘experiential’ reality, the memory of which results in the formation of memoryscapes with strong psychocultural consequences. Therefore, this article turns its attention to the experience of the disaster and uses the tool of ‘communicative memory’ to explore the ‘experiential’ world.

Introduction

Flash floods caused by cloudburst took place on the night of 4–5 August 2010 at Ney, Nimoo and Basgo, and on 5–6 night at Leh, Choglamsar, Saboo and Phyang areas of Ladakh (District Disaster Management Authority (DDMA, 2011). ¹ It affected 64 villages of the Leh District, killing 224 people and damaging 1447 houses. The flooding led to major mudslides which caused havoc and destroyed 660 hectares of cropped area. The DDMA report suggests that 9000 people were affected by the disaster; many lost their loved ones, land and source of livelihood. Thousands were displaced and rendered homeless. Indian government, local communities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), humanitarian aid agencies and Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) were all actively involved in the relief and rehabilitation measures after the disaster.

Through a narrative-ethnographic study (Hunt, Romero & Good, 2006) in the areas of Igu, Saboo, Phyang, Manetselding, Punsoling and Choglamsar in Leh District, this article argues that ‘certain memories’ allow for better communication of disaster risks and better preparedness for a future disaster. Memories of the disaster and the manner in which they have been preserved have been explored through storytelling and narrativization in a way that it privileges indigenous knowledge and community-based approaches to understand disaster readiness and resilience. These memories, which are recounted in narratives, materialized in artefacts, spatialized in places and embodied in rituals and in everyday social practices, are a result of selective remembering, forgetting and transformation over time. Communicative memory can be thought of as a private interpretation of a person’s own past (Assman, 2008), but these memories are furthermore differently distributed over various sections of society and scale of public life. An attempt has been made to examine post-disaster communicative memories to understand the role of various actors, spaces and narratives produced and reproduced. The article explores the varied kinds of memory works and memorializing practices adopted in a post-disaster context and the different temporal and spatial constructions of memoryscapes. By focusing on the everyday lived experiences of rehabilitation and memories of relief intervention, the study examines (a) the memory of the disaster, (b) the present world view and (c) future expectations from self, community and state.

Methodology

An event like a disaster is so drastic, sudden and tragic that it has the potential to reconfigure social relationships (Golec, 1983; Smith, 1979; Sweet, 1998). Carr (1932) was among the first few who contended that catastrophes influenced social patterns. This study looks at the manner and modality used by affected individuals to verbalize, rationalize and internalize changes in their everyday lived experiences. Narratives, in this study, become a mediating space for individuals to spell out their disaster experience and the changes that have come about in their lives and way of living. To garner a nuanced understanding of the disaster experience by the affected individuals, it became important to look at their everyday negotiations and how their present interactions are informed by the experience of the disaster and the events that followed.

For the purpose of this study, I conducted fieldwork for a period of 3 months in the areas of Igu, Saboo, Phyang, Manetselding, Punsoling and Choglamsar in Leh District. I collected oral histories of the affected people and conducted interviews with key government officials in the DDMA, army personnel and senior management officials in NGOs. These narratives were documented through field notes and journal entries. This study focuses on four key actors, namely, the disaster affected individuals, DDMA officials, the Indian army and the NGOs. The article collected those narratives which recalled the disaster experience at an individual as well as at a collective level. I did a close reading of the narratives and looked at them as master frames, that is, the narratives became both the object and the subject of my study. An individual’s understanding of their disaster experience, to a large extent, gets influenced by the way in which these narratives are transmitted among the affected people. I analysed these narratives to look at the major plot (Ricoeur, 1980), the actors and the spaces they occupy. The narratives people privilege are the stories they want to tell, the stories that they think are important enough to get a hearing or the stories that they think have gone untold. Their articulation of stories and their self-positioning vis-à-vis the government, the army, NGOs and/or the other affected members of their community were of special interest to me. People do not usually assume exclusive positions; rather they tend to identify themselves with different roles depending upon the time of narration, the place of narration and their interlocutors. They may assume the role of a victim, survivor, perpetrator, all or none in the same story. So, narrations are fluid and ever changing, with actors dawning different roles and responsibilities (Bamberg, 2012; Rosenthal, 2004). Narrative inquiry provides a way of gathering, investigating and analyzing stories of experiences and events (Riessman 2008; Clandinin, 2007; Noy 2007; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; Connelly & Clandinin 1990; Polkinghorne, 1988; Bruner, 1987). Experiences and their memory are fragmented and mediated by the current situation and the context in which these narrations take place (Alasuutari, 1997); therefore, a narrative-ethnographic research was conducted to understand the context in which these disaster narratives get formed and transmitted.

Out of the 71 affected villages in Leh District, convenience sampling was used to narrow down to three villages, namely, Phyang, Igu and Saboo. In Leh city, I visited three localities called Manetselding, Punsoling and Solar Colony, Choglamsar. The selection of these six locations provided a mix of rural and urban areas, displaced and non-displaced populations and access to both Buddhists and Muslims affected in the disaster. The village of Phyang Thang is located around 15 to 16 kilometres west of Leh city. It has a total of 450 households and is divided into nine mauhallas, namely, Murubok, Phulungs, Phyang, Stakma, Changma Chen, Gagon, Thangnak, Chusgo and Mankhang. It is estimated that around 60 houses were affected by the disaster in Phyang. ² Eighteen people had died and two houses were completely destroyed.

Igu was one of the poorest, worst affected villages due to the disaster. The village comprises six mauhallas, namely, Nagla, Intse, Gorgok, Kayro, Pura and Madh. Manetselding is a locality situated next to the old bus stop in Leh city. Some 40 houses were completely wiped out in the floods. Another 83 houses were partially destroyed and approximately 15 people had died (LAHDC, 2009). The affected families had been given the option of relocating to Choglamsar or Punsoling. Punsoling and Solar Colony (Choglamsar) were rehabilitation colonies set up in Leh. While Punsoling had close to 50 rehabilitation huts, they were all mostly abandoned as it had no provision for water, electricity, sanitation or waste disposal facility.

Once in these areas, I used snowball sampling to meet new people. With the help of the Sarpanch or the Lambardar, a spatial mapping of the village or the locality was first done. ³ The Sarpanch would then introduce I to a community member who would further introduce her to other members of the community. This study collects oral histories of 14 participants belonging to different age groups, gender categories and religious backgrounds. They had all been born and brought up in Ladakh and had a first-hand experience of the disaster. There were an equal number (seven) of male and female participants in this study. Among them, 12 were Buddhists and the rest (two) were Muslims. Phyang and Saboo were the only villages among the sample sites that had some Muslim residents. Igu, Manetselding, Punsoling and Choglamsar had Buddhist residents only. The youngest among the participants was the 24-year-old girl named Churul and the oldest person interviewed was Tashi Putti, a 78-year-old woman. Most participants were in the age group of 25 to 35 years. Agriculture was the most prominent occupation among this group of participants. Mostly those who came from the villages of Igu, Saboo and Phyang practised agriculture, while those from the urban localities in Leh city like Solar Colony (Choglamsar) and Punsoling engaged in business activities or were employed by government offices and the army. Most of the women participants of this research were also formally employed in government jobs.

A big methodological limitation of this research was that the research site was inaccessible during 6 months in a year and that I had to partially rely on a translator as her Ladakhi speaking skills were inadequate. The translator of this study (Kunzis Dolma) was a 40-year old woman who had lost her sister in the floods and helped I during the interviews. The problem of having a translator is that a lot of important details are lost in translations and the data get devoid of their richness. Further on, some of the narratives were first translated from the Ladakhi to Hindi and then to English.

Disaster experience, memory and narratives

Remembering and telling are themselves events, not just mere descriptions of events. An event lived is finished, bound within experience, but an event remembered is boundless because it is the key to all that happened before and after the event (Tonkin, 1992). Therefore, memory and the process of remembering is an active process of meaning making through time. Remembering the past is different from remembering a traumatic past. Many scholars like Butalia (2000) and Kothari (2009) have explored the memory of traumatic events like the partition and have brought to light the individual experience of a traumatic event. Mukherjee’s (2010) work with the women survivors of the Bhopal Gas tragedy provides useful insights. ⁴ She has used oral histories and testimonials to understand the gendered contours of the post-disaster site. In the context of disaster, what cannot be ignored is the fact that the experience of an event like this is marked with a feeling of anxiety, loss and, in many cases, trauma. Drastic life events like that of a disaster are not easily forgotten. Various narratives emerge, to keep alive the memory of a disaster, its precursors and its consequences in the minds of those who experience it (Webb, 2006). The narrative paradigm as proposed by Fisher (1987), talks about how people experience and comprehend life as a sequence of ongoing narrative. Individuals, communities and societies tend to live in, through, and out of narratives. Memory processes and memory representations play a crucial role in most aspects of narrative understanding.

Remembering has a lot of significance, especially in its communal form. Remembering disasters, without romanticizing those memories, allows societies to better understand the present and contemplate the future. The memory of a historical event may be faded, modified, changed, reconstructed, and repositioned over time (Freeman, 1993; 2011). Reflection can take the form of individual accounts, works of art, and narratives. People who remember a tragic event are supposed to be more aware of risks than people who forget and know nothing about the event (Le Blanc, 2012). It is a process which includes mourning, recovery and also partial oblivion. It differs significantly from one person to another. The memories of people who have experienced a common event can never be identical (Funkenstein, 1989). While the disaster narratives are based on remembering the experience, the narratives also tend to shape the memories of a disaster. This study draws on Kirmayer’s (1996) analysis of the differences in (individual) remembering in the context of trauma and that trauma is not psychological but dependent upon the social context in which the remembering takes place.

Recent studies have been concerned with the possibility and meaning of memorializing traumatic events like Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Villa Grimaldi, among others. In India, places like Jallianwala Bagh ⁵ and Kalapani have been preserved and memorialized to remind people of the era of the British rule and the collective struggle during the freedom movement. A museum of conflict (conflictorium) has been set up in Ahmedabad to provide a space for people who experienced the Gujarat riots of 2002, to engage with those memories. The ‘sorry tree’ and the ‘memory box’ aim to capture the trauma narratives and help survivors resolve internal conflict. Similarly, a museum of memory, preserving the belongings and pictures of victims of the Bhopal Gas tragedy, was opened on the 30th anniversary of the industrial disaster in December 2014. This suggests a need for memory works and practices to cope with and manage the traumatic experience. These memories also act as a tool of resilience and community building and contribute to the collective preservation, healing and a sense of belonging.

These are some of the ways in which the state undertakes some memory work to preserve the memory of traumatic event mostly by territorializing it and dedicating a space which allows people to mourn together and collect and recollect their memories together. It also serves the purpose for the next generations who have not themselves experienced the disaster to understand and own their legacy of pain and trauma.

Post-disaster memoryscapes

The term memoryscapes has been conceptualized as ‘the landscape of memory’ which is formed through a process of remembering, forgetting and commemorating. It is a terrain which constitutes the complex interplay of personal and collective memories. I draw on Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) ontology to understand the production of post-disaster spaces. His concept of spatiality looks at space as a social product, which incorporates the perceived (physicality), the conceived (ideality) and lived (experiential) aspects of space. The experience of space subsumes the perception and conception of space. At the same time, I borrow the concept of ‘temporality’ from Heidegger (1927/1967) who conceptualizes it as a transcendent, inferential condition for there to be sense-making and intelligibility or what he calls ‘care’. The cultural-historical past of an individual is his or her present and may project itself in the future. Therefore, each moment is made up of the past, present and future. Taking these conceptions in conjunction with memory literature, I have understood memoryscapes as being constituted in time and space simultaneously. Veena Das (1995) labels such temporal and spatial moments as ‘critical events’, by which she refers to situations that produce new modes of action and redefine existing social categories. Therefore, post-disaster memoryscapes refers to the spatial and temporal understanding of memory in a post-disaster context.

Recollection of a past event gives agency to the individual to choose from among different memories of the event. It is the choice of the participant to narrate some incidents while leaving others out. Some stories go untold but there are always some incidents which are etched in the mind of the participant and still hold relevance to the storyteller. Memories are alive and recollection is an active process. Not everything is remembered accurately and some memories are always more detailed than the others. Narrating a selected few stories or experiences, reserving some and forgetting some others is a characteristic feature of the memoryscapes. What is more interesting is how experience, memory and narratives (personal and cultural) relate to the concept of ‘time’. Portelli (2006) observed that time is a continuum but humans periodise it. On the basis of key events, which act as partition, narrators horizontally divide time. The disaster affected people of Leh partitioned their time as ‘before the disaster’ and ‘after the disaster’.

Present narratives are stories of some past experience which are remembered at a given time. To elaborate this idea further, I borrow from Heidegger (1927/1967, 1924/1992) and his idea of ‘temporality’. According to him, time cannot be reduced to the experience of time alone but has to be grasped in the unity of its three dimensions, namely, the past, present and the future. For Heidegger (1927/1967, 1924/1992), individuals are time and temporality is the key to interpreting the meaning of Being-in-the-world. Being can never be considered ‘out of time’. Narratives have a temporal reality; they have a beginning and an end. They tend to talk about the past from the vantage point of the present and also project the future. They help to make sense of experiences at a communal level. Tonkin (1992) has talked about narration as the incarnation of the oral text in a particular time. She calls it an incarnation because it fuses the narrator, narrative and the audience at this moment of time in a perspective on all those other moments. Narrators through their stories try to sequence and bring in some chronological order to their experience and the way they remember it:

Lives and experiences are not such simple and straight forward things that they lend themselves to easy representation; people do not give testimony that fits neatly into chronological or cosmological accounts. Instead they talk both about what happened to them and what they did about it, but they also use themselves as a medium by which to talk about other things. (White, 2001, p. 291)

The reality produced at the moment of storytelling cannot be recreated at some other different time or spatial setting. The stories of the disaster experience as narrated 3 years after the disaster are not the same as those told immediately after the disaster or those which may be narrated a decade after the event. These stories collected in at a particular time and in a particular context become a singular, stand-alone object and subject of enquiry. The narratives of the same disaster would sound very different on any other day. As time goes by, memories fade and distort; interpretations vary and details change. These changes are inherent to the process of storytelling and collecting oral histories.

The analysis begins with a simple observation of what people remembered: the immediacy of recall, the intensity of the recall and the sequence of events as remembered by the disaster affected individuals. Heidegger’s (1927/1967) explanation of temporality suggests that each event that makes up a ‘moment’ in Dasein’s (Being) existence must be unravelled using the three ‘temporal ecstases’ of the past, present and future. Dasein’s temporality which is constitutive of thrownness (past), projection (future) and falling/discourse (present) is significant for my study as this form of time is said to be ‘founding for space’. Each event is carried forward as a fleeting incident of ‘Being’ by co-realizing thrownness and projection along with a present. The present, future and the past are intertwined with one another and together they hold a lot of significance for us to understand the individual being or Dasein. The disaster is an event of the past, but the present and the future are meshed within the past, so the affected individuals cannot separate their present or their future from the experience of the disaster. This is what has been called as ‘historicality’ in Heidegger’s (1927/1967) work. The idea here is that the affected individuals are remembering the past and interpreting the present in order to bring in some changes in the future.

Present world view and memories of the past

A world view can be defined as the overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. Before I get into a discussion of the present world view of the disaster affected individuals and how they articulate it, I need to clearly define the meaning of ‘present’. To do this, I borrow from Heidegger (1927/1967, 1924/1992) who criticized the idea of time as an unvarying, unilinear and countless succession of ‘now-points’. For him, the ‘present’ is not an endless sequence of ‘now points’ that flow by but something that can be seized and owned. This present world view comprises the past and the future. While the relief is an immediate response to the disaster, the rehabilitation processes take a longer time to complete. Even after 3 years of the floods, the individuals are still rehabilitating. Rehabilitation aims to bring life back to ‘normalcy’ or the pre-disaster state. This attempt to bring back the pre-disaster state is in itself a faulty approach because the sociocultural fabric that existed in the pre-disaster state allowed the disaster to happen in the first place.

The present state is a phase which symbolizes an acceptance of what has happened and the acknowledgement that life must move on. Individuals have to assume new roles and responsibilities, and negotiate with the new social structure that has emerged in a post-disaster state. Accepting new social and economic roles is not easy for most individuals:

Now, I have come to terms with the disaster and all that happened three years ago but I can never forget the details of that night. It was dreadful and every time I think about it I start shivering. I miss my sister a lot. Her two daughters are my responsibility now. I regularly send them money for their education. After my divorce, I have sent my son to Dehradun to study. I work and save money for all three of them. (Kunzis Dolma, female)

The kind of education they will get outside Ladakh is much better. For three years, I have not been able to rebuild my house properly. It is such a struggle to start from scratch and build a life that you had before. (Angchok Stubdar, male)

The present state is a reminder of the past and a peek into the future. Some individuals who were badly injured or handicapped in the disaster will always carry the mark of the disaster on their bodies. Their disability has become a constant reminder of the horrific incidents of the night and their inability to fight the force of the disaster. Their own bodies had turned into the site of the disaster, where bitter memories were evoked when they faced difficulty in performing day-to-day tasks or chores which they could easily perform before the disaster:

I was buried under rubble for a long time. When they took me out, I was in immense pain and I could not move my hip and leg. It was a fracture and I got a plaster but till date I need support to walk. It still pains a lot and I don’t know why but I can’t work for long. (Tsering Wangyal, male)

I miss my brother every day, whenever I sit down to eat my food, whenever I laugh, whenever I work in the fields. I long for his presence in my life. He was my friend and someone with whom I shared my life. (Shamsher Ali, male)

The loss of a family member or friend was again a reminder of the disaster and what it had taken away. The absence of the near and dear one was in itself a memory. In their absence, they were present in their memory.

At the same time, participants remembered the disaster whenever they faced situations like rainy or cloudy weather conditions, heard loud noises that resembled a thunder (like a pressure cooker). On days when it is cloudy, people just pack some of the essential items and move to a higher platform. It reminded them of the night of the floods and their unpreparedness for the same:

Whenever she hears the pressure cooker go off suddenly she gets scared. (Kunzis Stakmu, female)

We should be prepared and have a plan to tackle such situations (floods) in the future. There are certain lessons which we must learn from the past. It would be foolish to ignore our past and not act fast. (Afnan Khan, female)

The trauma of a disaster affected individual is evident from the fact that any sudden sound scares them. These are signs of post-traumatic stress and have to be dealt at an individual as well as at a communal level. Apart from this, there were some particular places in the city like an old bus stop and the Manney in Manetselding, the ruins of the Imam Bada in Phyang and the Gompa and Masjid (relief centres) in Phyang which had all turned into symbols that invoked memories of the disaster.

Some places have turned into landmarks and become an integral part of their lives. They act as constant reminders of the floods. Their past stands in front of them whenever they encounter these landmarks. These memory cues are the same for people from the same village or locality. Delving further into the issue of memory cues, I understood that there were marked differences between those who were ‘displaced and rehabilitated’ and those who had ‘not been displaced’. Individuals who were displaced and resided in rehabilitated colonies lacked the reference system or the cues in their immediate surroundings. The symbolic markers which helped them remember the disaster were not something that they come in contact with in their day-to-day life. The new rehabilitated setting in which they lived seemed unnatural to them and for them the past was something that they have left behind and was ‘not in sight’. The loss of all their belongings, old clothes, family photographs and everything else had left them without any tangible object of remembrance with their old life. The second category of the ‘non-displaced people’ had been in a position to retrieve and scavenge the leftover pieces of their old life and rebuilt their house. The fact that they were able to find some of their belongings and did not have to relocate made them remember and deal with the issue of memory in a completely different manner. They would use spatial markers like ‘this is where we had our field’; ‘The water came from here’; ‘We lived in this Masjid for ten days, it acted like a relief centre’; ‘Can you see the Gompa, we rushed there after the disaster’. The displaced category found the rehabilitated colony culturally unfamiliar and had to adjust to the difference in special construction of the colony and consciously forget some things to adjust to this new way of living:

I lost everything in the floods. We had to come to Solar colony and settle here. Nothing was the same anymore. The toilets were the western style, the houses were smaller, the huts made of tin. (Sonam Phunchuk, male)

It must be understood that for displaced people presently living in rehabilitation, the concept of the ‘home’ is severely contested. The ‘home’ acts as a ‘significant type of space and place’ (Boano & Hunter, 2012, p. 4) which is not only a physical structure but also a social, cultural and emotive construct. The process of settling in was very difficult for the displaced people. They faced many challenges in getting used to the new environment and life at the rehabilitation site. Many found that the process was not participatory in nature and that they were not involved in the community building exercises. This lack of personal involvement had made them detached from each other and also their place of residence. They wanted to be consulted on the important construction and architectural decisions that had been made. The post-disaster reconstruction and the policy making depend on the dynamics between local governments, civil society and the international bodies; the relationship between the public and private parties; the quantity of financial support or funds available for relief and rehabilitation purposes; and the level of agency among individuals and communities to speak up about their specific needs. The independent voice of an individual in a community is of primary importance here because it is they who need to ‘feel at home’. Reconstruction and resettlement are the usual processes that take place in a post-disaster context, but many such measures have looked at a ‘house’ as just a building and ignored the social relations, everyday practices and material cultures that make up the household. The association between home and homelessness, as Kellet and Moore (2003) have argued, is quite intricate and their understanding cannot be limited to the mere existence or absence of a physical shelter. Furthermore, Kellet and Moore point out, disadvantaged groups who share a marginalized space in their communities yearn for a ‘home’ and strive for ‘home-making’ as a way to be included or belong to the community. For many people in Leh, ‘home’ simply meant their land, their ancestral house, a dwelling which provided them with a sense of belonging, a sense of ease and comfort and a context or familiarity with the place. Displacement or the loss of place affects an individual’s collective memory. The sense of loss of agency coupled with the feeling of being homeless and therefore at risk made people feel that they were not in control of their life after the disaster. This impression that they had lost autonomy and that they did not have the agency to take their own decisions has been described as ‘agency panic’ (Melley, 2000):

The time that we were living in the tents and then in those huts, we felt that we had lost our lives. Huddled in a small space we felt like animals. I just wanted my home to come back to me. I thought about it while I was awake and dreamt about it in my sleep. (Sonam Phunchuk, male)

Even after 3 years of living in rehabilitation, people were not comfortable with their life. They preferred struggling and rebuilding their life at the same place to relocating. Memory, be it materialized or immaterial, territorial or oral, and the multiple and complex links that it creates between people and their territory, might be the best way to overcome the disaster and re-establish the social structure and cultural materiality of the place.

Future expectations from self, community and state

The future is not something which is detached from the present; it is very much a part of the everyday lived reality. The ‘future is not later than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the present’ (Heidegger, 1927/1967, p. 401). In anticipating our future, we release our ‘having-been’ or our past into our present action/non-action, that is, humans are always projected towards the future and not restricted to the present. For Heidegger (1927/1967), we are time and he places an ontological emphasis on temporality. Temporalizing does not signify that past, present and future come in a ‘succession’. When evoked or recalled, disastrous floods were remembered as extraordinary events of the past, bound to happen again in the future:

The future depends on our actions today. I anticipate more disasters in the years to come. This is solely because we have changed as people and so has the environment around us. If we pollute our land, try to extract everything out of it, you can expect nature to act in unpredictable ways. (Stobgis, male)

This interpretation of the disaster brings out the ‘act of humans’ paradigm. It talks about how individuals and their action/non-action are responsible for creating vulnerabilities and leading to situation/conditions which make a disaster possible. It also suggests that until individuals, communities or societies stop their exploitative activities, disasters will continue to take place and wreak havoc. For some individuals, the only expectation from self is to reflect on their actions and restrain from indulging in any activity that harms their land or nature in any way. This self-reflexivity is interesting to see as it suggests that individuals are being critical of their own selves and taking responsibility for an event which has termed as a natural disaster by the state.

I can see the changes in Ladakh. How the people have changed, the food we eat, the way we dress and these changes in lifestyle have come about with tourism. The changes in the climatic conditions in Ladakh cannot be reversed but steps must be taken to reduce the impact of these changes. I hope as a Ladakhi people we will be less greedy and we must not meddle with nature because it will retaliate and then no one will be able to save us. The government should be better prepared to tackle such disasters; they seemed clueless and confused. (Tashi Motup, male)

Through my conversations with the disaster affected individuals, I understood that they were independent and self-reliant. They had very little expectations from those whom they considered ‘others’. This lack of expectation from the state was what had made them extremely grateful to the intervention agencies on receiving any form of aid. They expressed their gratitude in many ways. Some also talked about the corruption in the delivery system and that they would expect that they would get whatever was promised to them:

The only problem with the government was that they did not know how to help us. They were constantly giving us things which were of no use to us. They could have simply asked us. (Tsering Wangyal, male)

Yes, there may be another flood but what can the flood take away from me now. It has taken everything I had. My family and all my assets are gone now. I had a three-storey house here and a shop and had a comfortable living, but now everything is gone, so why fear. What is there to fear now? I have got a hut in Punsoling and 2 lakh rupees from the government and that is enough. How much should the government do? It is then up to us to do something with the money and resources that they have given us. I am very happy with the efforts of the government and how they looked after us in the relief camps. I stayed there for 3 months with my son. The government efforts exceeded my expectations. (Angchok Stubdar, male)

Their biggest strength during the disaster was their togetherness. Unknown people helped others, pulled them out of the rubble, offered each other water, gave them clothes and food, and sometimes rushed them to the relief camp or the hospital. These acts of kindness from random people were something that every individual who was saved remembered. Some of them mentioned that they have never seen those people again after that night but remember their faces. Some who did not have the chance to thank them regretted it terribly. Despite the changes in the society, the Ladakhi community is still collective in nature. Muslims helped Buddhists and vice versa. Children saved animals. These lived experiences of togetherness had increased their social solidarity in a post-disaster context.

For some, the future holds no relevance now. They believe that the past has marred their hope for any future. The loss of loved ones has been the loss of the possibility of a happy future. It suggests that people who had lost their entire family considered their future to be a useless entity without a purpose. Their whole attitude towards life had changed. They no longer believed in saving money or building assets as they felt that all material possessions can be lost in one fleeting moment:

I don’t see the point of saving anything for the future, whatever we had is gone now. If we start saving now, there is no guarantee that another such event will not take away all of our life-long hard work. Earn now and spend now, live here and now and don’t worry about what is going to happen next. If another disaster strikes, there is nothing that it can take from us. Everything valuable is lost already. There is nothing to look forward to. (Sonam Phunchuk, male)

The other category of people comprised of those who were extremely concerned about their future. They feared everything, the recurrence of a disaster, the idea that they may not be able to survive it this time, the thought that they have not catered for their progeny, the everyday economic and social struggle of living in rehabilitation:

What will happen when our daughter grows up and gets married, we have to cater for her and her family. We cannot forever bank on my masi ⁶ and my daughter cannot have a family at my masi’s place. We have to plan for our daughter’s future. She needs to have a house of her own. I hope that in the years to come I would be able to set aside enough money for her wedding and at least she can have a home which I can never have now … but I would want her to settle down in Delhi or Chandigarh, not here. There is nothing left in Ladakh. … I have no future but she should have one. All mothers think like this. … I am not the only one. (Sonam Chondol, female)

The individuals who were affected by the disaster reminisced about the past and used retrospection to analyse their response to the disaster. They took a temporal approach to understand their relationship with their land and the changing contours of their lifestyle, their role in community life. The newness in food, clothing, health care, family structures and so on, is something that they all notice. They look at the disaster as one another change, a result of their changing relationship with nature:

Since childhood we have never heard of such disasters. Even our parents were witnessing it for the first time. In the past people were more attached to their land and shared a close relationship to it. We all were land people and worked in the field but now there are so many other things that people do. Our relationship to our land has changed drastically. (Tashi Putti, female)

Death is always something that makes individuals nervous and people avoid talking about it. They evade the subject and even a discussion of death makes people uneasy. Ladakhis also exhibited inhibitions while talking about death and bereavement even though they are known to look at death as a natural process of life. It is the idea of untimely and sudden death which made people so uneasy. Most people understood ‘death’ as a concept, but they did not associate with it personally. Existentialist philosophers – like Sartre (1943/2011) – have talked about how people look at death as always something that happens to other people. Most people find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that they are mortal and vulnerable. Seeing near and dear ones go is not just a traumatic experience but also helps people acknowledge the fragility of life and that they can die anytime. With this acknowledgement comes the conscious drive to prevent one’s death through similar events in the future. Therefore, the experience of a disaster is a life altering event that has the potential to change notions of death and the preparedness for future disasters.

Conclusion

This case study brings evidence that communicative memories of natural disasters overlap with those about climate change. Most people remember and make meaning of the disaster as ‘one data point’ in the series of environmental and climatic changes that they have observed in their lives. Pollution caused by ‘acts of humans’, their ‘greed’ and ‘consumerist mind-set’ with disregard of environmental consequences was a major theme which emerged from the communicative memories of communities in Leh, during the research. Such memories were more pronounced in middle-aged and older people who very vividly described the environmental and lifestyle changes that they have observed and experienced since their childhood. In their schema of interlinkages, climate change was broadly attributed to loss of ‘traditional ways of living’, ‘unplanned urbanization’ and ‘pollution’, and this was directly connected to the flash floods. This article argues that oral narratives and communicative memory of the 2010 Leh flash flood have created flood preparedness and helped devise mitigation strategies among the affected community for future disasters.

Certain visual markers evoked memories of culturally insensitive approaches adopted by intervention agencies towards communities and their indigenous practices. The construction of Western toilets in communities with traditional ablution practices and building brick houses and tin huts in place of mud houses (which are more suited to the cold, dry, desert-like conditions in Leh, Ladakh) ignored local knowledge of the community with respect to nature. These houses and toilets were abandoned by the communities as being artificial and unnatural.

Through communicative memory, affected individuals dissuaded each other from rebuilding their houses very near the stream of water. Village elders advised most people to run out of their houses, towards the hill top or a highland, in case of heavy rain. Such insights about local disaster management have come through prior experience of living through a disaster and interpreting the events in a manner that could help prevent vulnerability and possible hazards in the future. This interpretation of past events, in the present, to better manage disasters and communicate mitigation strategies for the future, gives a temporal construction of the post-disaster memoryscapes.

The process of remembering, forgetting, commemorating, filtering of truth, emphasis, recalling and sense-making are all part of the memoryscapes. These carefully constructed memoryscapes help affected individuals rationalize, normalize, cope with and work around the disaster experience and the external interventions initiated by state actors and other non-governmental bodies. A feeling of loss of place, time, people and resources marks the understanding of a ‘disaster affected individual’ and this ‘loss’ occupies a prominent position in the post-disaster memoryscapes. The memories of ‘loss’ lead to a critical reflection of the risks in the society, but those which emphasize pure nostalgia are unable to create this effect. Therefore, this article gives insights into role of memory and meaning making in communicating disaster risks and vulnerability among communities.