Tracing Landslides by Motorcycle

As a result of my PhD research proposal, I started wondering how to study landslides in ways that do justice to both their geological motion and their historical depth. My proposal asks what it means to write history at a time when climatic phenomena—rain, floods, landslides—can no longer be separated from human actions or aspirations.

The Western Ghats of Kerala, a long, forested mountain range running down India’s west coast, now sees monsoons that often swell into extreme rain events under a warming climate. Using the motorcycle as an instrument of movement and exposure, this essay develops an Anthropocene historiography attentive to the Global South, showing how climatic phenomena emerge not as isolated events but as accumulations of histories the land continues to hold.

As my research took shape, the question of how to inhabit this landscape became unavoidable. I realized I could neither walk these distances nor remain enclosed in a car, cut off from the sensory pulse of the terrain. I needed something that would let me move with the landscape, to see it and feel it. I needed a way to sense vulnerability from the ground itself. The motorcycle offered precisely that vantage, and it entered the story almost before I realized it had.

Riding the Ontological Terrain

For my fieldwork, I chose my Bajaj Avenger 220cc motorcycle, a cruiser not built for rugged trails but for long, steady rides. I wanted that upright posture, the 180-degree field of view and the horsepower to navigate the steep, meandering roads chiselled through the mountains. I wanted to ride without interruption, to let the journey itself become part of the inquiry.

The bike soon proved its worth. On my first day of fieldwork, riding a road carved into the mountainside toward a known landslide site, a few small rocks suddenly tumbled beside my front wheel, clattering sharply on the tarmac—nothing catastrophic, yet startlingly alive. The engine vibrated, my body leaned, and my awareness hovered between acceleration and slippage.

In the Western Ghats, one of India’s most landslide-prone regions, the earth is never still. Yet disaster studies often frame landslides as fixed “events,” isolated in time and space. My fieldwork unsettled this framing by riding through a terrain that is itself in motion, suggesting that knowledge does not emerge from observing from a distance.

From the motorcycle seat, knowledge is not an abstraction but a motor-felt truth, vibrating through the handlebar and rising with each shift of the terrain.

The Bike as an Apparatus

When I reach a landslide site, fieldwork does not end with arrival; it changes tempo. I stop the engine, walk the scar’s edge, trace the slip surface with my eyes, and look for the quiet indicators engineers often catalogue later: exposed laterite, snapped roots, tension cracks above the road. I photograph slope cuts, note drainage paths, speak briefly with residents who point to where the ground first gave way.

Unlike formal geomorphological surveys, my fieldwork does not stabilize the site into measurements alone. Many of these slope cuts trace back to colonial-era road alignments later widened under postcolonial development schemes. What appears as a “natural” failure often follows older lines of intervention—forest clearing, hill cutting, drainage redirection—whose histories are no longer visible in policy documents but remain active in the terrain. Fieldwork here becomes a way of reading how empire and development persist materially, not just administratively.

A few years ago, while researching among tribal communities in the hill districts of the Western Ghats, walking offered me a deeply immersive, slow ethnographic rhythm. Walking, as a method, allowed the body to learn the terrain step by step, to inhabit the pace of the hills. But as my research turned toward landslides, I was confronted by the sheer scale of the landscape. Dense vegetation, steep inclines and monsoon-fed streams made many sites reachable only through narrow, winding roads carved into the mountains. My motorcycle was not simply a means of reaching these places; it was how I stayed in proximity to them. More than granting access, it reshaped what access itself could mean.

One monsoon-filled afternoon in Idukki, the bike hesitated on clay-heavy bends; my wrists knew before my mind did. Small vibrations in the handlebar signaled a slope loosened by the night’s rain. In that brief moment, I understood that the land instructs in touch, inviting the body to read its shifting moods in motion.

Environmental humanities scholars argue that research tools are not neutral, but instead actively shape our understanding of phenomena. Karen Barad, for example, calls this iterative intra-action: Meaning and matter co-emerge through the entanglement of bodies, tools, and the world.

I understand what Karen Barad means when she argues that apparatuses do not simply record the world but configure what becomes knowable. On the motorcycle, I do not merely see the terrain; I am continually rearranged by it. Every bend demands that I lean into the mountain’s angle, loose soil instructs my wrists to adjust, and sudden dips recalibrate my breath. Gravity, friction, torque—these are not abstractions but sensations traveling through my spine before thought intervenes. The hillside acts upon me long before I name what I feel.

As a researcher, this altered my stance. I could no longer pretend to study landslides from a safe observational distance. My research was happening in motion, at the edge of collapse, inside the vulnerable infrastructures I sought to understand. What I learned, in other words, was inseparable from how I moved.

Movement as Knowledge

Academic writing often gives stability to what is inherently fluid. Landslides get mapped as polygons on a GIS screen: simplified, delineated and frozen. But a mountain in motion resists containment. Thomas Nail, a theorist of movement, reminds us that matter is never still, that landscapes are temporary pauses in larger currents of motion. Landscapes, in this sense, are not solid backdrops but evidence that the world is movement. In the Western Ghats, such cartographic stabilization echoes older colonial desires to render terrain governable—mapped, zoned, and disciplined. Riding unsettles this legacy by encountering instability not as anomaly, but as the afterlife of managed landscapes.

Ride through the Ghats in the June rain, and this becomes unmistakable. The hillside sweats; streams return to places forgotten since last year. Entire stretches of road close overnight, expecting the slump. Barricades rise where tarmac turns into forces of watery mud.

Only the motorcycle allows me to move along these trembling edges of the monsoon landscape. Wrapped in a rain-soaked coat, I learned to read the terrain with my own body. I felt where a slope had loosened after a night of rain, how the bike hesitated on muddy bends and how a leaking hillside whispered its instability through small vibrations on the handlebar. Sometimes I stopped and turned off the engine, listening to the soft crumble of saturated earth, unsure whether the road beneath me would hold. Other times, I rode with a mix of fear and attentiveness, recognizing that the mountain was teaching me its thresholds, one slippery meter at a time.

On a bike, motion is embodied and exposed. Wind slaps skin; mist erases distance; your body becomes the first barometer of risk. This kind of movement thinks. It reveals the world as process rather than backdrop.

Knowledge here is not extracted; it is ridden into being.

The Ethics of Entanglement

But this movement comes with a cost: Every kilometer produces carbon. Every refill deepens my tie to global energy networks.

The irony is sharp: To study the Anthropocene’s climate crises, I burn the very hydrocarbons driving them. Yet fossil fuels are not villains, they are part of the entanglement. They built these roads; they intensified slope-cutting; they made hillsides fragile. The petrol I consume is materially connected to the collapse I study. Knowledge and injury are braided.

This raises a difficult methodological question: What does responsible fieldwork look like when the method participates in the crisis?

There are no clean answers, only practices of acknowledgment: slowing down the ride when possible, choosing routes that minimize risk to slopes, recording the intimate cost of motion rather than hiding it beneath scientific neutrality.

To ride ethically in the Anthropocene is not to avoid entanglement; it is to make it visible.

Why the Bike Matters

Could these insights have emerged by car or on foot? Unlikely. Inside a vehicle, the body is insulated from the ground’s textures; on foot, attention turns hyperlocal and slow. The motorcycle, by contrast, stitches places together, revealing gradients of risk along a route, how one landslide reshapes the vulnerability of the next curve. It affords a spatial, temporal, and sensorial relation that neither walking nor car can provide.

The bike is therefore not a mere intermediary; it participates in the world’s becoming. It configures landslides as mobile phenomena, shifting assemblages encountered in motion.

Thus, a simple question—how do landslides happen?—transforms into a deeper one: How do humans live with ground that moves? Riding through the Ghats, this is not metaphor but method; the question is asked with the whole body and the machine.

Motor-Felt Truths on the Edge of Collapse

Environmental humanities push us beyond extractive ways of knowing, beyond observing environmental crisis from a safe analytical distance. On the mountain roads of the Western Ghats, such distance quickly dissolves. Rupture is not abstract or remote; it is close, sometimes immediate.

Following the climatic histories of these hills—from ancient geology to colonial reshaping and postcolonial development projects—I have come to recognize how earlier interventions persist as present instability rather than past error. These histories are not only archived in reports or maps; they are registered in motion. They appear in the way a slope trembles after prolonged rain, in the exposed roots that briefly hold a hillside together, and in the hairline fractures that spread across a road long before anyone names them a disaster.

My motorcycle, an unlikely methodological companion, has taught me this: The Anthropocene is not only known through data or retrospection, but through movement. Landslides are not just geological accidents; they are ongoing conversations between earth and society, infrastructure and rainfall, desire and danger. They are archives of past decisions, made legible when the monsoon arrives. Riding through these terrains, I feel how history persists materially, how interventions linger, how development sedimented decades ago resurfaces as present instability, and how the mountain remembers.

Karen Barad reminds us that apparatuses do not merely measure the world; they participate in its becoming. On these roads, this insight becomes palpable. My research is not external to the phenomena I study. Body, machine, slope, and rain are entangled in the production of knowledge, each shaping what can be sensed, felt, and understood. The field site is never fixed. It shifts with weather, erosion, traffic, and time.

So too must the researcher. The ride is uneven, sometimes precarious. But perhaps method should be as well. To study landscapes in motion, we must be willing to move with them—attentive to vibration, alert to instability, learning to balance on ground that never fully settles.

---

Featured Image: Mohammed Labeeb’s bike, a co-creator in his landslide research. Photo by author, 2023.

Mohammed Labeeb is a doctoral researcher at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Mumbai, whose work explores how climatic phenomena-rain, floods, landslides-take shape in the Western Ghats through long histories of geology, empire and development. Combining ethnography, archival research and new-materialist theory, he studies how landscapes remember interventions and reveal them in moments of collapse. His broader interests include Anthropocene historiography, environmental humanities and the politics of method in a warming world. Gravatar. Contact.