Subalterns in India's wildlife conservation

Abstract

Conservation policies aimed at endangered species and threatened ecosystems often marginalise the voices of Adivasis and Dalits subjecting them to displacement, including resource dispossession. The practical implications of wildlife conservation in a resource-rich and heavily populated country such as India emerge from the discipline of ecological sciences and wildlife biology that borrows heavily on the “Western” conservation approach that prioritises the separation of humans and nonhumans. This has resulted in the Protected Area model, forcing forest dwellers to make way for certain “charismatic” mammals such as tigers and rhinoceros and creating a “new” subaltern in post-colonial India due to stringent wildlife conservation laws. This form of conservation, this chapter argues, is a discrete form of dispossession that enhances the precarity of these vulnerable groups. The displacement of forest dwellers as a dark history of conservation is yet to be thoroughly examined in the Global South. Increasingly influenced by capital and markets intensifying wildlife protection, wildlife conservation has made the lives of Dalits and Adivasis, especially women, more precarious. This chapter highlights the making of subalterns in wildlife conservation as “conservation refugees” and, sometimes, co-opted as “partners” in wildlife conservation.