Competing meanings of flood in the chars of Assam, India

In the chars or the river islands of Assam, India, flood has more than one meaning. They are products of the two competing temporal frameworks existing in the regions. One of them is a relational framework, where flood is an everyday process. It is built around the social practices central to char inhabitants, who rely on the three interrelated seasonal river processes of inundation, erosion, and accretion. The second is an episodic framework, where a flood is seen as a single and sudden river process. The state projects this disaster discourse through the various flood-management infrastructures, which include high-yielding variety (HYV) rice, mud embankments, and raised platforms. Further, while these two temporal frameworks may seem like extremes I show that they exist dialectically. I also caution against considering char inhabitants’ relationship to the floods and ecology as intrinsically more relational. The relationship between the two frameworks is complex. This has consequences for the overall understanding of flooding and the river islands of the Brahmaputra. Overall, this paper has two goals: (a) to outline the two competing meanings of flood in the chars of Assam, and (b) to critique the episodic understanding of flood in Assam.