Fractured Ecologies: Caste, Indigeneity and Nature in India

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai, an anthropologist studying wildlife conservation with an interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation. Her monograph Tigers are our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published in 2021. She has written extensively on issues of caste and indigeneity in the environmental sciences and academia in India.

Ambika completed a PhD thesis in Anthropology from the National University of Singapore in 2016, and currently teaches at IIT, Gandhinagar in India.

Susan and Ambika speak of how social hierarchies impact what ‘earth’ means to its various inhabitants. For some a safe haven, for others a dangerous, hostile place. In the Indian context, this is evidenced by the deliberate invisibility of caste in environmental studies and in Indian academia. The exploitation of nature and the perpetuation of caste hierarchies are inextricably linked, with purity and pollution playing significant roles in determining access and exclusion. The lives and livelihoods of people of marginalised communities are often entwined—in a daily connection or a daily struggle—with the fabric of nature itself. Caste and class determine access to land, water, forest, pasture land.

The ‘environment’ is conceptualised as apolitical and asocial, like a kind of a local terra nullius. The social is absent from environmental studies and discourse. Nature is seen as separate from, and devoid of, humans. Indigenous worldviews, like that of the Mishmi in Arunachal Pradesh, where Ambika has worked, challenge this dichotomy, seeing instead a continuum of human, non-human, and spirit worlds. However, for a long time, wildlife conservation research and practice has ignored these communities and their knowledge.

The conservation model of ‘protected areas’ is offshoot of the dominant ‘development’ practices. The state and scientists view the forest as a place to be measured and mapped, assigning it economic value. Both protected areas and infrastructure like dams and highways cut through geographies inhabited by indigenous peoples, making them ecological refugees. 

The same notions of purity and pollution lead to the idea that people need to be evicted in order to conserve, a dark history of our national parks in our country.
In finding answers to how we can approach repair and reparation in these academic and other conflict zones, Ambika speaks about the need to shift power structures, change our classrooms, to push for diversity among students, teachers and practitioner, to revamp our syllabi and be active in frontline activism.

Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai is trained in natural and social sciences with masters’ degrees in Wildlife Sciences from Wildlife Institute of India and Anthropology, Environment and Development from University College London funded by Ford Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship. She has two co-edited volumes, Ecological Entanglements: Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care (2023) and More Than Just Footnotes: Field Assistants in Wildlife Research and Conservation (2023). She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IITGN.

The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.