Carrying Mountains on Their Shoulders: Gendered Labor and the Climate Crisis in the Indian Himalayas

• In Event: 30607 - Climate Change Unfolding: Power, Privilege and Diverse Experiences of Impacts and Responses

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection of climate change, gendered labor, and state-led developmental interventions in Joshimath, a region in the Garhwal Himalayas of Uttarakhand, India. Through ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with 60 rural Himalayan women, this study conceptualizes their labor as an embodiment of the climate crisis. While prevailing discourses on climate change in Joshimath emphasize its biophysical transformations—landslides, land subsidence, erratic weather, and glacial floods, this paper foregrounds the often overlooked labor of rural women, whose daily struggles reveal the deep social inequalities embedded in environmental change.

Women in these higher Himalayan villages have historically shouldered the burdens of agrarian labor under a patriarchal social order. However, worsening climatic conditions—marked by rising temperatures, untimely frosts, erratic rainfall, and declining soil fertility—have exacerbated their labor intensification, making their work increasingly precarious and unsustainable. Drawing on a historical-environmental materialist framework, this study situates women's labor within broader socio-ecological transformations, linking their struggles to the contradictions of state-led capitalist development in an unstable seismic zone.

This paper critiques dominant techno-managerial approaches to climate adaptation, which obscure the structural realities of gendered labor and its entanglements with social reproduction. By tracing rural Himalayan women’s lived experiences, it argues that their labor is not only shaped by climate change but also constitutes a central site through which environmental and social crises materialize. Ultimately, this study moves beyond flattening narratives of climate vulnerability to highlight the dialectical relationship between gendered labor and ecological transformation. In doing so, it calls for a more nuanced understanding of climate change that accounts for social differentiation, historical labor processes, and the embodied experiences of those at the forefront of environmental change.

Author

• Surabhi Pant, SUNY-Buffalo