In June 2013, several days of incessant and unusually heavy monsoon rains led to a devastating series of cloudbursts, floods, and landslides in India's Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. The Kedarnath complex, a popular pilgrimage destination, was particularly hard hit when a glacial lake that lay above it exploded after a reported cloudburst washed away a dam of natural debris. Although the main temple did not suffer major damage, the temple complex and surrounding hamlets—a key part of the tourist infrastructure—were destroyed. Official government figures put the death toll at close to a thousand, although unofficial estimates of the dead and missing were much higher. The apada (disaster) sparked urgent conversations about how unchecked “development” in the service of increasing pilgrimage tourism had produced the conditions for what many described as a “human-made” disaster. Many environmentalists held up Kedarnath as simply the most recent victim of an ecologically destructive trajectory of postcolonial development.
Locally, however, the events of June 2013, Luke Whitmore tells us in this powerful and moving book, were understood in terms of the distinct history, identity, and landscape of Kedarnath. Thus, one man he encountered at Kedarnath a year after the disaster described what had happened as prakriti ka tandav (nature's tandava dance), referring to the dance of destruction usually associated with Shiva, who “dances to destroy in order to make space for a new cycle of creation” (p. 180). The man's substitution of prakriti (nature) for Shiva, Whitmore tells us, is in keeping with local ideas and experiences of what he calls “eco-sociality,” that is, the inseparability of the natural, the religious, and the social in people's belief that Shiva is “enmeshed” with the Himalayan environment, that he is “both inside the temple and part of the Himalayan place itself” (p. 11).
People's experience of Kedarnath as a sacred place, Whitmore argues in Mountain, Water, Rock, God, is predicated upon their understanding of it as an emplaced more-than-human world that is shaped through the “material weave of other persons; objects; biological, social and economic processes; relations of power; symbols; ideas; life forms; and environments” (p. 27). In making this argument, Whitmore puts religious studies scholarship on sacred geographies into productive conversation with more recent literature on the more-than-human in the disciplines of geography and anthropology. “This way of thinking about religious experience,” Whitmore writes, “functionally rejects the idea of the sacred as a separate and immutable feature of the world and instead shows how the materiality of the world assembles in concert with the cultural and the biological in ways that become religiously powerful” (p. 27).
The chapters that compose the first part of the book trace how the eco-social world of Kedarnath was shaped by multiple and contingent forces over several centuries—the patronage of various kings who attempted to fuse secular and religious power; the incorporation of Kedarnath into a pan-regional, brahminical Hindu cosmology through early pilgrimages by key figures such as the philosopher Shankara; the growing power of local lay and monastic Shaiva groups; colonial extraction of natural resources; postcolonial neglect that led to the popular movement for statehood; and, finally, the changed political and economic alignments that accompanied the creation of the new state. Whitmore is a deft guide through this complex historical landscape, and he powerfully demonstrates how, through these varied trajectories, the “local” lifeworlds of Garhwal were “drawn into larger-scale political, economic, and ecological, and Puranic frameworks for thinking about the identity of the region,” a process that was not without its frictions (p. 86).
The second half of the book explores the effects of this history on everyday life in Kedarnath in the twenty-first century. A particularly captivating chapter, “The Season,” describes the different rhythms, obligations, and engagements with place that were activated by the visits of two very different actors—the Indian tourist/pilgrim and local Garhwali deities—during pilgrimage seasons in 2008 and 2009. Whitmore carefully teases out how intensely local, Garhwali concerns sometimes conflicted with “supraregional, Pan-Hindu” expectations about the relationship between nature, religion, and place in ways that foreshadowed “events and trends that, in post-2013 hindsight, were revealed as critical vectors” (p. 107). The anger and betrayal that so many paharis (people of the mountains) experienced in the wake of 2013, Whitmore asserts, can be understood in terms of this building tension between obligations and relationships engendered by the emplaced world of Kedarnath and twenty-first century efforts to remake and “develop” it for pan-Indian consumption. Garhwali Paharis, he writes, were resentful of a “set of socioeconomic conditions that had encouraged [them] . . . to invest, build, and act in ways that they themselves knew were a departure from traditional Garhwali lifeways” (p. 173). Thus, in addition to powerfully critiquing the state for putting them in this situation, they mourned their own (albeit inevitable) complicity in the processes that had led up to the disaster.
Ultimately, Whitmore hopes to provide more than a rich and textured account of shifting histories of the complex eco-social world of Kedarnath. What he hopes this account will demonstrate is the “heuristic utility of the category of ‘religion,’” which he understands as inextricably entangled with the secular, the magical, and the spiritual (p. 202). A better understanding of how religious worldviews are fundamental to more-than-human ecosystems, he suggests, will make it more likely that “particular forms of human action and environment-related policies of land use, consumption, investment, regulatory oversight, and more broadly ‘development’ will be genuinely sustainable in longer-term and relatively less harmful ways.”
Mountain, Water, Rock, God makes a compelling case for taking religious experiences of what Donna Haraway might call the “natureculture” of Kedarnath seriously. However, the emphasis on the positive role that religion might play in the pursuit of ecological and social justice pushes Whitmore into something of a corner when it comes to exploring the ways in which Kedarnath, and the Char Dhams more broadly, have been folded into a larger Hindu nationalist project. The brief discussions of the rivalry between the Congress and Bharatiya Janata parties in the state seem at a distance from the emplaced eco-social world of Kedarnath, even though Whitmore acknowledges the popularity that Narendra Modi enjoyed among paharis at the time of his research. While I am sympathetic to his assertion, drawing on the work of the scholar Daniela Berti, that the “mutual association between religion and ecology does not always take a Hindutva turn,” the book could have been further enriched by an examination of the growing, though by no means total, synergistic connections between pahari Hinduism and Hindutva over the last decade.
This critique aside, Mountain, Water, Rock, God is an excellent and important book that will appeal to scholars and students of religion, environment, South Asia, and disaster, as well as environmental activists who want to better understand the political possibilities of religious ecologies.
