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Between Ceasefires and Cloudbursts

December 20, 2025

The shelling had been so fierce that families fled with what they could carry, huddling in basements as mortars fell. Days later in May, it was not a military commander or an official on either side who told the world it had stopped. It was U.S. President Donald Trump who claimed he had brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan. For audiences far away, it was another chapter in high diplomacy. For those who live along this border, the Line of Control, it was a reminder that even when guns fall silent, the structures that keep conflict alive rarely shift. And what people cling to most tightly in these intervals is culture: memory of the past, rituals of survival, stories that tell them who they are when everything else is made fragile.

In mid-August, the silence returned for another reason. Cloudbursts and flash floods tore through Jammu and Kashmir, drowning roads, sweeping away bridges, and severing phone lines. In Kishtwar, my mother’s home, the death toll climbed to at least sixty as entire slopes gave way in minutes. Across the Pir Panjal mountains and into Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, the pattern repeated: rivers rising, villages marooned, families running with whatever remained. Here, as during bombardment, culture became the first line of resilience: neighbours sheltering each other, livestock moved together, elders guiding escape routes based on oral histories of earlier floods. These were not romantic fragments of tradition. They were cultural technologies of endurance, carried from one generation to the next.

Ceasefires can quiet guns, but they do not quiet the risks that keep people vulnerable. In Kashmir’s borderlands, climate shocks expose the same hierarchies and absences that war does, and culture becomes the language of resilience, a reminder of continuity when institutions fail. Songs, oral histories, and rituals offer a compass when systems abandon us.

My home terrain, the Pir Panjal in Poonch district, sits in the lower Himalayas, at once central to conflict and peripheral to its telling. In India’s security vocabulary, it is a “border zone.” In Kashmiri politics, it is often treated as less than “real” Kashmir. Yet for centuries, these ridgelines were part of the Silk Road, a geography of connection. Partition in 1947 cut those ties overnight. Families like mine fractured across a border that had not existed a season earlier, some crossing into what is now Pakistan-administered Kashmir and leaving homes, graves, and collective memory behind. What endured was culture: folk songs that carried across valleys, tribal customs of hospitality, oral archives of displacement that neither bombardment nor flood could erase.

When ceasefires take hold, guns may fall silent, but the failures that shape everyday life remain. They are about the basic things that fail to arrive: a clinic too far for night evacuations, a road that dissolves into mud every monsoon, a mobile signal that vanishes when a warning matters most. These absences, too, are cultural scars, shaping how people narrate their own lives through poems about distance, lullabies about separation, and rituals of waiting. A ceasefire announcement can circle the globe in minutes. Its promises can take years, if they arrive at all.

Climate now overlays its own script on this neglect. The monsoon no longer trickles; it breaks open in furious hours. Cloudbursts tear through slopes already cut for military roads. Glacial lakes swell until a wall gives way, and valleys below become rivers. In the Pir Panjal, many villages are poised on what geologists call the “angle of repose,” where one hard rain is enough to test the ground’s ability to hold. When the guns fire, families shelter in basements. When the rains fall as they do now, they scatter. Two emergencies converge on the same ground, leaving culture, rituals of trust and inherited practices of survival, as the only anchor.

Politics here rarely helps people hold the ground beneath their feet. Tribal identities have been turned into electoral tools, dividing communities that for generations shared pasture, marriages, and festivals. In recent elections, Scheduled Tribe status was extended to the Pahari tribal community, igniting resentment among the Gujjar tribal community who had held the designation for decades. But in flood or shelling season, politics does not feed you. Culture does. The custom of sharing rations, the memory of which slope holds longer, the authority of elders who have seen the river rise before, all these remain the bonds that keep people alive when governments arrive late or not at all.

Militarisation complicates even the most ordinary forms of care. A checkpoint can become a choke point when the river swells. A curfew designed for security can delay a rescue. A border that divides armies also divides cell coverage, weather alerts, and road repairs. On maps, the abbreviations change. In lived culture, disasters echo. And still, people adapt: drivers remember which bends collapse first. Shepherds shift their flocks by the color of the grass. Households build rituals of collective warning when the sky turns a certain shade.

Grief here also carries cultural form. Elders who survived earlier wars still flinch at sudden sounds; younger cousins inherit that alertness as an unspoken curriculum. When a neighboring family lost their twin children to recent cross-border shelling, the grief was not theirs alone, it was carried by the entire community, cutting across every divide. Each calamity writes itself into oral history and folk memory, becoming another verse in a culture of endurance.

I grew up with elders who counted days between confrontations the way others count days between storms. The pauses mattered, but so did what returned after them. In a warming Himalaya, the storms are now part of the story of war. And yet this is not just a Himalayan story. In the Amazon, I hear the same refrain from river guardians: the rain arrives wrong, the river takes the house and the vote. It is no longer trustworthy. The season has forgotten itself. Two geographies, different histories, the same frontline of survival.

In that same landscape, COP30 unfolded last month in Belém, where culture and Indigenous leadership briefly caught the world’s attention, even as the larger forces shaping the negotiations stayed unchanged and fossil fuels remained outside the final text. COP30 has now passed, carrying with it moments where culture managed to enter the global climate conversation, even as the deeper structures of power remained intact. From places like the Himalayan Pir Panjal, it matters whether culture appears in the final policy text so that the knowledge, care, and continuity it represents are taken seriously on the ground.

If there is any future for regions like this, it will not come only from summits or speeches. It will come from the quiet work that border communities have always done: reading the land, warning each other, remembering together. In the way they survive between ceasefires and cloudbursts, they are already living the realities the rest of the world is only beginning to confront.

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About the author:

Syed Jazib Ali is the founder of Mudland, an environmental justice advocate and media practitioner based in the Netherlands. His work sits at the intersection of culture, climate, and conflict, shaped by lived experience and long-term engagement with the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Call to action

This essay aligns with the We Make Tomorrow global campaign, which brings together civil society, cultural practitioners, and institutions to advocate for placing culture at the heart of climate action. The author is a campaign champion and supports its call for recognising cultural knowledge, care, and continuity as essential climate infrastructure.
Learn more or sign the Global Call at https://www.wemaketomorrow.global

Between Ceasefires and Cloudbursts

Call to action

Further reading and context