The epoch of Anthropocene, brings to the fore narratives wrought in a sense of urgency and crisis. This generalization of entire humanity under the rubric of a common risk which needs a common agenda of mitigation is problematic. This is so because the newness of this epoch invisibilize the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Efforts to decolonize the Anthropocene, call for recognition of colonial legacies, both in research sites as well as in disciplinary traditions. It is in this context, this paper explores a research site situated in the Eastern Himalayan range of Arunachal Pradesh in Ziro, India. By engaging with the changing relationship of the indigenous community in Ziro, i.e. the Apatanis with their natural environment, this paper explores the shifting relationship between the Indian state and its Himalayan margins and how it shapes the subjectivities of the Apatani community in tandem to their traditional natural resource management. Further, I discuss how the intersection of state-making efforts through infrastructural expansion and its adverse impact on the environment have created anxieties for lay indigenous people of Ziro. Through their narratives of cosmological understandings to climate variability, I follow the recent call to decolonize the Anthropocene by moving beyond the politics of urgency and risk and examine the slow, historical erasure of indigenous life-worlds under the processes of colonialism and development. The ethnographic vignettes, highlighted in this paper argue for a holistic approach to understand the uneven impacts of climate variability on mountainous environments and its people.
