session 1

Dushkaal: Reframing time and futurity in the climate crisis

Friday, 10 July 2026,
5 pm to 7 pm

VENUE
School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

or join virtually via YouTube Live

From their vantage point on the frontlines of disaster, Indigenous Koli fishers from Maharashtra frame the fishing crisis they sense unfolding as also a climate crisis, one that’s long in the making. They articulate this slow disaster as matsya dushkaal (fish drought). By blurring the line between the everyday and the eventful disaster, dushkaal conceptually contests the reductive, event-based, crisis-planning approach of the government and makes claims to reframe the temporality of the climate crisis. The time of dushkaal, or long dyings that fishers live in intimate relation with, also foregrounds a loss that’s rarely acknowledged: that of ‘home’ and a mode or inhabitation, even while they continue to reside in place. In the everyday of dushkaal, fishers both anticipate a future but also insist on the need for other possible futures.

Dushkaal is one of a set of 8 entries in a forthcoming Climate Glossary that contributes to think from and with emic terms encountered in urban environments that provide a new grammar for reading and inhabiting time and space in already climate changed cities.


discussants

Lalitha Kamath
(Social scientiest and Urbanist)
Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist working at the intersection of urban infrastructure, urban planning and governance, urban informality and the environment. She is interested in reimagining planning practice by storytelling and drawing from fisher knowledge and the liquidities of the ocean. She teaches in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.


moderated by
Prasad Khanolkar
(SEA)


This lecture series is partially supported by Urban Centre Mumbai and is free and open to public.