• Lt. Dr. Aparna Tripathi
• Mr. Aditya Tripathi

The Anthropocene has become an important framework for understanding the growing impact of human activity on the Earth's ecological systems. Yet the Anthropocene is not experienced uniformly across the world. In India, environmental change is encountered through landscapes, histories, languages, and cultural forms: through disappearing forests, polluted rivers, unstable mountains, water shortages, floods, landslides, and increasingly crowded tourist destinations. This paper proposes the term “Hindi Anthropocene” as a critical, rather than geological, framework for examining how ecological crisis is imagined through Hindi-language cultural production. It brings together Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) and the Netflix Hindi-language series Kaala Paani (2023). Ghosh describes climate change as “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (9), arguing that contemporary forms of storytelling have struggled to represent environmental transformations whose scale exceeds ordinary human experience. Kaala Paani offers a productive popular-cultural text through which this problem can be examined. Set in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the series begins with a mysterious illness at a time when a large festival is bringing thousands of tourists to Port Blair. The narrative subsequently moves toward lockdown, institutional crisis, and the importance of local ecological knowledge. The paper then moves from the island to the Himalayas, examining Kedarnath, Joshimath, Shimla, and the wider Himalayan tourism landscape. It argues that tourism itself should not be treated as inherently destructive. Rather, mass tourism combined with infrastructure expansion in ecologically fragile environments can intensify vulnerability. Road cutting, slope modification, construction, water extraction, waste generation, and urban expansion are therefore examined as interconnected processes. Recent research in the Lesser Himalayas has found that almost half of the landslides mapped after an extreme rainfall event were associated with road cuts and building buffers, providing quantitative evidence of the relationship between anthropogenic modification and landslide activity (Kaushal et al.). The paper ultimately argues that the tourist landscape is also an Anthropocene landscape: a landscape increasingly reshaped to accommodate human movement and consumption. Mountain cutting becomes particularly significant because it represents the physical rewriting of geological space. The central challenge, therefore, is not to reject tourism but to imagine forms of tourism that respect ecological and geological limits.

Hindi Anthropocene, Amitav Ghosh, Kaala Paani, tourism, Himalayan ecology, mountain cutting, landslides, ecological vulnerability, overtourism, ecocriticism.

" Tourism and the Hindi Anthropocene: Landscapes, Vulnerability, and Ecological Crisis", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.13, Issue 9, page no.c461-c472, September-2026, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2609249.pdf

" Tourism and the Hindi Anthropocene: Landscapes, Vulnerability, and Ecological Crisis", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.13, Issue 9, page no. ppc461-c472, September-2026, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2609249.pdf