Living in the shadow of floods: women, survival and everyday life in Dhemaji, Assam, India

This paper seeks to explore women’s everyday survival with floods by interrogating how flooding operates not merely as an episodic rupture but as an enduring condition of disaster that continuously shapes and reshapes the everyday life of women in Dhemaji, Assam, India. Using the metaphor of ‘shadow’, it shows that floods persist beyond their physical occurrence through enduring fear and anxiety, which render them ever-present in everyday life. Drawing on long-term qualitative fieldwork, the paper examines how women negotiate not only floods but also its enduring fear and anxiety across the spaces of the home and the community in order to maintain everyday continuity. It argues that the work of maintaining continuity is neither neutral nor evenly distributed. Rather, it is deeply gendered, embedded in everyday moralities of care that place a disproportionate physical, emotional, and moral burden on women to sustain the functions of daily life in conditions where the lingering shadow of floods render continuity fragile.