In the central Mahabharat Range, when a hill collapses, we call it a landslide. When a river sweeps a field, we call it a flood. When a Chepang, Tamang or Magar family loses their harvest, livestock, and home, we call it a natural disaster.
But the reality is these labels hide the truth. There is nothing purely natural about a disaster. Yes, rain is natural, gravity is natural. A river rising after the monsoon is natural. But a community being forced to live for generations on unstable slopes is purely political. A family having no secure land title is historical. A mother waiting days for relief while officials speak of preparedness is institutional. A village knowing how to read clouds, insects, soil and forests, yet being excluded from disaster planning, is epistemic injustice. The disaster then becomes a social order that decides who must live beneath it, not merely a landslide.
The Chepang people of Makwanpur, Dhading and Chitwan reveal this uncomfortable truth. They are written off as vulnerable by virtue of living in the remote hills, which is a convenient way of putting it. It is not that they do not comprehend nature. They have coexisted with the slope and the monsoon for as long as anyone can remember. Their vulnerability comes from the state and the markets and our development systems failing to come to terms with them.
Since their existence, the Chepang have lived with the forest, the slope and the monsoon. Their knowledge is not written in policy manuals, but in practice: planting Amriso and bamboo to hold soil, watching cracks in the earth, listening to insects before rain, reading animal behavior, storing food, helping relatives, moving carefully through a landscape that outsiders see only as backward or risky.
Then along comes modern disaster management with its committees, forms and maps. They have rules for compensation and they can tell you how many houses and bridges and rupees are involved. What they cannot count is hunger. They do not put a number on the fear of sleeping through a hard rain, or the debt left by a bad maize crop, or the quiet of a mother who goes without food so her children don’t have to. The government sees damage where the community feels a rupture.
This is the central anthropological argument: disasters do not simply destroy society; they reveal it.
A flood shows who has land and who does not. A landslide shows whose village has roads and whose village has foot trails. Relief distribution shows who has political connections and who remains invisible. Reconstruction grants show how equal money can produce unequal recovery. Three lakh rupees in an accessible town and three lakh rupees in a remote hill settlement are not the same amount. Geography changes the value of money.
The Chepang case also challenges the arrogance of modern knowledge. Development agencies often speak of “bio-engineering” as if they discovered the idea of using plants to stabilize slopes. But Chepang communities were already doing it through Amriso, bamboo, banana and Chuiri. What experts rename as innovation, indigenous people have long practiced as survival.
This is not romanticism. Indigenous knowledge is not magic. It cannot stop climate change, rebuild roads, or replace health posts. The Chepang community faces poverty, food insecurity, migration, religious change, environmental degradation and declining access to traditional resources. But dismissing their knowledge as primitive is not science. It is power pretending to be science.
The modern state often makes the same mistake: it treats people as victims after disasters, but not as thinkers before disasters. That is why disaster governance remains shallow. It asks, “How do we respond after the hill falls?” But it avoids the harder question: “Why were these people living under the most dangerous hill in the first place?” The answer lies in history. The Chepang did not randomly choose marginal land. Their settlement patterns are tied to exclusion from fertile land, limited political representation, insecure tenure and long-term poverty. Their risk is not an accident of geography. It is the geography of inequality.
In this sense, every landslide in mid-hills has two causes. One is rainfall. The other is history. The first cause is visible. The second is buried. That buried cause is what anthropology brings to the surface. It shows that vulnerability and resilience are not opposites. The same Chepang family can be deeply vulnerable and deeply knowledgeable. The same community can be neglected by institutions and still hold sophisticated ecological wisdom. The same household can suffer from hunger and still participate in networks of mutual care.
Resilience, therefore, should not be used as a comfortable word by outsiders. It is often praised only because it is cheaper than justice. If a marginalized community keeps surviving, the state can applaud its strength while avoiding the question of why survival is so difficult. Chepang does not need to be celebrated for enduring disaster. Their endurance should disturb us. Because the real story of Chepang is not that an indigenous community is vulnerable to nature. The real story is that nature exposes the violence already built into society. A landslide does not ask for caste, ethnicity, income or land documents. But its consequences do.
That is why the term “natural disaster” must be used carefully. It makes politics appear natural. It makes historical injustice look like bad weather. It turns human decisions into acts of God. The hills are not only collapsing because of rain. They are collapsing under the weight of neglect, unequal development and ignored knowledge.
The landslide is not natural. It is society, sliding.
