ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes that a true understanding of law comes from its historical and cultural location. The author highlights the cultural context from some of the oldest cultural manuscripts of the world to understand disaster law as a prerequisite of good and ethical governance. The author explores the term ‘disaster’ from some of the oldest Indian literature which describes the survivability of races, history of migration and trade links among kingdoms to understand how people during those eras perceived disasters and found ways to address its impact either through preparedness or through framing policies of public accountability of administrators or prohibiting certain practices which brought disasters. Since kingdoms were demarcated with rivers and mountains as boundaries, cultural cooperation was considered indispensable for disaster management. It is most likely that this phenomenal spread of ‘disasters’ across sovereign boundaries requires a holistic legal framework as identified in the Hyogo and Sendai perceptions.
