The ‘Gujarat’ earthquake and the political economy of nostalgia

Abstract

This article is an ethnographic exploration of the rise and fall of nostalgia as a form of collective narrative among survivors of the 2001 ‘Gujarat’ earthquake. In the social sciences, nostalgia is commonly regarded as an inevitable consequence of alienation from natural and social worlds in both space and time. My data is presented here as a way of scrutinising the complex series of social relationships that create the misleading appearance of cause (alienation) and effect (nostalgia).