Socio-Cultural Anxieties Linked with Declining Cardamon Cultivation in the Eastern Himalayas

• In Event: Religion, Climate Change and People on the Move: Latin America and South Asia

Abstract

Since 2007, Dzongu, the indigenous Lepcha reserve in the tiny Himalayan state of Sikkim, India, has been in the spotlight for its controversial hydropower projects and successful anti-dam movement. Predictably these projects resulted in growing rifts within the community. This paper focuses on an often overlooked site of contention, the declining productivity of the large cardamom cash crop, an important source of income within the reserve. In the past decade, changes in temperature and rainfall patterns along with a mysterious blight have led to a rapid decline in cardamom’s agricultural yield. For years, large swathes of land where cardamom was cultivated, lay abandoned since reserve land cannot be sold to outsiders. Hydropower developers offered lucrative cash compensation to landowners, presenting the perfect opportunity to liquefy an unproductive resource. Due to these cash compensations, many believe the decline in cardamom productivity was a blessing in disguise that also eventually pushed farmers to diversify their crops. However many also expressed growing spiritual and cultural anxieties around climate change and what that meant for the future of the tribe. Drawing on interviews with cardamom farmers, local government officials, Lepcha shamans, and anti-dam activists, I focus on the intersection of religious, economic, and scientific concerns tied to declining cardamom productivity, concerns that serve as the backdrop to these contentious development projects. I draw attention to the spatial and material dimensions of declining cardamom productivity, the attendant cultural and spiritual anxieties, and how these processes are shaping indigenous political subjectivities.

Author

• Mabel D Gergan