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Written By: Niharika Singh

Edited By: Japleen

Graphic Design By: Vedant Gunda

Disturbance seldom introduces itself as an ending; rather, it ushers in a drawn-out and uneven process of becoming something else.

The home is very often much more than mere space, something well worth noting instead of accepting it as an empty metaphor. It is a language that runs across many generations. It is a pattern which shapes the contours of a day. It is a series of connections strong enough to make a place one’s own rather than just another piece of territory. When such a pattern is interrupted — whether by an earthquake, a diagnosis, a new border, or a software application that transforms how a community argues or grieves — the impact of the disruption does not usually remain confined to that single instant in time but extends outwards through memory and identity and everyday struggles for livelihood and faith.

It is not surprising, but also somewhat limiting, that disturbance is used to describe events like earthquakes, wars, and pandemics. However, there are plenty of disturbances in our lives that are not as flashy, but just as important. A disturbance to one’s mental state could completely disrupt one’s understanding of one’s own mind just as effectively as flooding would disrupt the relationship between a village and its river, even though nothing has fallen apart physically. A disturbance in the language being spoken around the dinner table could leave a grandmother speechless when talking to her grandkids without the house collapsing into anything.

The connection between all of these disturbances is that something that had been taken for granted was suddenly disrupted, and the resulting effect is a need for reorientation of the people affected. The key question here is what happens to someone’s life when they no longer have the support systems they are used to relying on.

Consider, for instance, an example of a mental crisis. In contrast to a cyclone, this kind of event may leave no traces in the landscape; nevertheless, experiencing it may be equally disorienting. The familiar structures in one’s world – the sense of time stability, a healthy connection between a person and their perceptions, trust in their judgments – may become unreliable. People may need to readjust their relationships. Working becomes increasingly difficult, even impossible temporarily. Moreover, the event affects people beyond the boundaries of an individual: families need to rearrange their daily activities, friends need to worry about them, employers have to find out how to assist a person, often ineptly.

Here, recovery is likely not to be connected with restoring something that existed before, which would be a mistake to assume. It will rather be connected with the creation of a new equilibrium, sometimes with the help of psychotherapy or some medications, sometimes with the help of a new pace of living with a lower tolerance for stressful situations. A stabilized existence after a crisis is not a restored one but a new existence assembled with awareness of its vulnerability.

Displacement, then, is not the only way in which a language is dismantled. Other forces are at play, including urbanization, migrations for work, and, slowly but surely, the overwhelming of local languages by national and global ones in schools and through the media. It may be possible that a child understands a grandparent’s language completely, yet cannot reply in it. It is possible that an entire generation hears a language without understanding it completely, without using it, thinking and dreaming in another language.

This kind of disturbance does not tend to make headlines, mainly because no particular day marks the disappearance of a language. Instead, what takes place is an act of displacement – a certain set of words will disappear from the table, certain songs will fall silent at weddings, a set of stories will no longer be told in a language. And once this process is done, it is too late, although the process of disappearance is gradual, a result of cumulative choices. In this regard, a language disturbance is hard to write about because of the absence of a visible shift.

While floods and cyclones wreak havoc on the physical landscape, digital media has been reshaping the social landscape in a similar way. What was once a gathering of a community in a square or in a market is now done in a comment thread or a group chat. News that was once carried through trusted channels is now carried through an algorithmically determined feed that shows little to no connection with geography.

Disturbance, in this case, does not occur in specific instances, but rather, in the constant accumulation of changes that include the transformation from embodied communication to mediated communication, and the shift from local authorities to far-off ranking systems and recommendation algorithms. However, it is important to point out that these same technologies have been preserving what they are disrupting, as a diaspora community communicates through the oceans, an elderly person records his or her tales and does not lose them in time, a dying dialect gets preserved somehow where it could be found again.

Nothing here distributes itself evenly, and it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge this fact. A community that has economic stability, working structures, and social capital usually possesses a greater capacity to withstand any kind of shock, regardless of what this shock may be. A community that lacks these assets will find itself subject to the same disturbance under the pressure of approaching collapse.

And herein lies the point when disturbance ceases being individual and becomes, inevitably, political. Whose speech enjoys institutional support, and whose does not? Whose mental illness receives the necessary assistance, and whose is ignored and even stigmatized? Whose culture manages to be fully represented in the virtual environment and whose remains completely unrecognized by the processes that now shape public interest? Such outcomes are never random. They usually depend on the hierarchies that were there before the disturbance occurred – hierarchies that disturbance only reveals rather than establishes. The question of who is most vulnerable thus cannot be detached from that of who will be heard in its aftermath.

Nothing about any of this is intended to suggest that disturbance is simply the tale of destruction, for that would be no less reductive than ignoring its destructive impact entirely. People adjust, frequently doing so quite creatively. Displaced fishermen establish a new connection with their livelihoods. Someone in the aftermath of a crisis constructs a life that is better able to recognize its limitations than ever before. An endangered language is reawakened through conscientious, sometimes difficult instruction. Fragmented online publics nevertheless discover methods to come together, even when imperfect.

The idea of a home being lost in such a situation becomes, then, as likely to consist of the loss of a relationship with one’s own thoughts as of the loss of a building, coastline, or livelihood. And disturbance, no matter how it may manifest, does not merely ask that people reconstruct what once existed but rather what, amid all sorts of pressures, should survive into whatever comes next.