In Uttarakhand's mountain areas, people have always shared information about the environment through oral cultural systems instead of through official groups. Pahadi hymns and folk songs are an important source of ecological knowledge, but most people don't pay attention to them. These hymns are not only cultural expressions; they also provide interpretive frameworks for how communities have historically understood land use, forest governance, water management, and climatic risk.
Uttarakhand is dealing with more landslides, flash floods, forest destruction, and water shortages. By looking at these hymns, we can see how local environmental knowledge has been pushed aside in favour of technocratic development models.
Pahadi hymns have rules for how people and the environment should interact. During the different seasons of farming, songs often talk about slope stability, monsoon behaviour, and how fragile the soil is. Hills falling apart, forests “withdrawing,” or rivers drying up are not random natural events; they are caused by too much cutting down of trees, changing slopes, or ignoring seasonal boundaries. From an analytical standpoint, these hymns serve as informal regulating systems. They define acceptable and unacceptable human behaviour toward nature, as current environmental policies seek to do. Instead of legal enforcement, conformity was achieved through social memory and communal engagement.
This implies that Pahadi cultures had an ingrained risk-awareness model that recognised the Himalayan ecology as fragile and reactive long before current hazard mapping or disaster risk assessments.
Women sing a lot of Pahadi songs, especially when they are gathering fodder and fuelwood. These songs often talk about how people have to hike farther and farther to find resources, how the woods are getting smaller, and how the water supply is getting smaller. In terms of analysis, this shows that women are the main people who notice slow environmental damage.
Formal environmental assessments often depend on collecting data at regular intervals, but women’s hymns are a form of ongoing environmental monitoring. The fact that themes like water scarcity and forest loss keep coming up suggests that there is long-term structural stress instead of short-term shocks.
Ignoring these stories has effects on policy. Historically, Uttarakhand’s development planning has not given enough weight to gendered environmental labour. This has led to infrastructure projects that make ecological strain worse instead of better.
Traditional hymns that talk about naulas and dharas, which are community-managed water sources, give us a look at how water is managed in a decentralised way. When songs talk about springs going quiet, they are talking about ecological damage upstream, which is often linked to deforestation or development. These songs function as early warning systems from an analytical standpoint. They record changes in the environment over many years, giving us long-term data that is deeply rooted in cultural memory. Because these oral traditions are being lost, communities are less able to diagnose problems and are more likely to have their environments fall apart quickly. People are leaving Uttarakhand’s hills, which has caused the group behaviours that helped protect the environment and keep the culture alive to stop working. People don’t sing hymns as much when villages disappear, which stops ecological knowledge from being passed down from one generation to the next.
This has an effect on the world. When there is no local control, abandoned terraced fields are more likely to erode, unmanaged trees mess up fire patterns, and ecosystems are more likely to die off. The decline in hymns is linked to a higher risk to the environment, not because songs stop disasters from happening, but because they keep people accountable as a group. Uttarakhand’s current environmental governance is mostly based on adapting to the environment through infrastructure, such as dams, highways, hydropower projects, and ways to deal with disasters. These methods are often very advanced, but they don’t always consider culture. People think of Pahadi hymns as historical artifacts rather than tools for analysis.
This is part of a larger epistemic hierarchy that says oral knowledge can’t be used to make decisions about policy. But the fact that ecological problems are still happening shows that only technocratic solutions won’t work in a place like the Himalayas, which is sensitive to the environment.
When you analyse Pahadi songs, you don’t have to romanticise the past or ignore modern science. Instead, it requires seeing these songs as environmental intelligence that depends on the situation. Recording, analysing, and combining this kind of information could help scientific models, especially when it comes to how people see risk, how they change their behaviour, and how they follow community rules.
Uttarakhand’s Pahadi hymns remind us that sustainability is both a technological and cultural issue in a time when the weather is getting more unpredictable. Not listening to these voices has led to both cultural loss and ecological instability.
In order for Himalayan environmental policy to be truly strong, it needs to change its ideas about what data is and who can make it.
Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher with experience in political analysis, ESG research, and energy policy
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.