Tracing Landslides by Motorcycle

How does one study landscapes in motion? This essay develops a motorcycle-based methodology for researching landslides in Kerala's Western Ghats, arguing that embodied, motor-felt movement produces forms of knowledge that conventional observational methods cannot. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during monsoon seasons on mountain roads prone to collapse, it proposes the motorcycle as a research apparatus, not merely a vehicle for access, but an instrument that reconfigures what becomes knowable about unstable terrain. Engaging Karen Barad's concept of intra-action and Thomas Nail's theory of matter in motion, the essay situates riding as a practice of Anthropocene historiography, one attentive to how colonial road-building, postcolonial development, and intensifying climate events have accumulated in the slopes of the Western Ghats as present instability. The mountain, this essay argues, is not a static backdrop but an active archive, registering histories of intervention through tension cracks, exposed laterite, and rain-loosened clay. Knowledge here is not extracted from a safe analytical distance; it is ridden into being, through vibration, lean, and breath. The essay also confronts the ethical contradiction at the heart of this method: studying climate crisis through the very fossil fuel entanglements that produce it.