Language, Landscape and Our World of Many Worlds
27/12/2020
A view of Svalbard from Earth orbit. Photo: Google Earth.
“In our faith there is no heaven or hell,” spoke Mayalmit Lepcha in the Janata Parliament – an Indian people’s parliament which happened online this year, on account of COVID-19. Her network is spotty. She’s in the mountains. I listen hard and try to piece together what she’s saying. Mayalmit is from the Lepcha tribe in North Sikkim, and she is among the people on the ground fighting the Teesta dam project in her state. In the virtual parliament she explains how the successive damming of her community’s waterways has displaced her people and decimated her forests.