A Landscape that has Never Existed: Temporalities of Control and Disaster-Making in the Terai

Abstract

In the plains of Nepal’s Terai, the monsoon has historically shaped a fluid terrain of ebbing and flowing wetness. Until the mid-twentieth century, tall grasslands, dense forests, and meandering gravel channels characterized this northernmost reach of the Gangetic Plain. Thick layers of sediments deposited centuries ago dictate the movements of water through soil—water increasingly important to farmers who rely on tube well irrigation in declining dry season rainfall. As surface waters return to channels cut during previous monsoons, they cover ground now claimed for rice paddies and village settlement. Annual agricultural cycles and patterns of plant growth are intertwined with festival seasons and the multiyear calendars of electoral politics. These plural temporal formations are what Mark Rifkin calls temporalities: “patterns of consistency and transformation that emerge immanently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute those formations and out of the interactions among those formations.”1 The Terai is a landscape made of and by many temporalities across past, present, and future.