People and tigers: an anthropological study of the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India

This thesis examines how Sundarbans islanders living in the southern reclaimed islands of the Bengal delta both think about and 'interact with' the man-eating tigers of the region. The thesis classifies three broad occupational groups - forest workers, prawn collectors, and landowners - and discusses how they use different understandings of the tiger to draw distinctions between each other. It argues that the islanders' interactions with tigers articulate both social practices and understandings of the social, and that attitudes to the forest/land opposition divide people into the distinct groups of bhadralok and gramer lok. These interactions are discussed in connection with people's relation to their environment. The environment is understood both as a set of narratives - about humans and tigers sharing a cantankerous nature because of a harsh geography and of a common history of displacement - and as a practical experience - of working in the forest as crab, fish or honey collectors, especially by opposition to landowning cultivators. The thesis also looks at environmentalists' perceptions of the Sundarbans as 'tiger-land' and the repercussions of such an image on state policies for the region's people. This is undertaken through a discussion of how the portrayal of the Sundarbans as a wildlife area means that the Sundarbans inhabitants' demand for a more equal allocation of resources between them and tigers is not seen as legitimate by outsiders. Thus this thesis, by engaging with the Sundarbans islanders' narratives and daily experiences of living 'alongside tigers', addresses the Sundarbans islanders' social relations as well as ideas of the social not just in relation to themselves and each other, but also in relation to their position as a 'collective' and their place in the realm of the politics of global conservation

Braving Crocodiles with Kali: Being a Prawn Seed Collector and a Modern Woman in the 21st Century Sunderbans

Globalisation has undoubtedly shaped popular conceptions of gender and society in innumerable ways. This article studies one such instance - the plight of tiger-prawn collectors in Sundarbans. The discovery of tiger- prawns - the \u27living dollars of Sundarbans\u27 - has certainly transformed the lives of women in the region beyond imagination. These women however have had to face strenuous attacks from many spheres. Based on her anthropological fieldwork, the author portrays the struggle of women in the area against patriarchy, traditional modes of exploitation and even urban notions of femininity. Braving crocodiles and even changing their religious allegiances, these women have carved out a sphere of self-respect for themselves

The Human and the Nonhuman: ‘socio-environmental’ Ecotones and Deep Contradictions in the Bengali Heartland

Highlighting recent debates around environmentalism and its meanings and purposes in the context of South Asia, this paper reintroduces caste and religious marginality, to critically examine the different ways people have of apprehending their environment. The paper argues that the use and understanding of ‘nature’ in contemporary middle-class India contrasts with modes of engaged multi-species environmental ‘ecotones’ that have been experienced by the subaltern majority of Bengalis both in Bangladesh as well as in West Bengal. The paper does that by exploring some of the recent politicised use of the cow and contrasting it to how ‘ecotonal societies’ have lived with nonhuman animals to argue that these engagements are linked to ways of understanding our purpose within our environment. In a way, the politicised Hindutva middle class regulate, control, protect what they have come to see as ‘their world’ and this is distinct from a position where subaltern groups from ecotones see themselves as part of a whole collective, one not theirs to ‘regulate’, ‘control’, or ‘protect’ but one to experience and try make sense of

The cosmopolitan and the local: rethinking being a “universal” subject in the age of the Anthropocene

Postcolonial StudiesAlterglobal Politics: Postcolonial Theory in the Era of the Anthropocene and the NonhumanUnited Kingdo

The Human and the Nonhuman: 'socio-environmental' ecotones and deep contradictions in the Indian Heartland

Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean: Cultural and Literary Perspectives127-150FranceHorizons anglophones -Série PoCoPage

Unmasking the cosmopolitan tiger

The global ‘cosmopolitan’ tiger, as opposed to the local ‘Sundarbans tiger’, has become the rallying point for urbanites’ concerns for wildlife protection globally. In this piece, I look at two different representations of tigers in recent history, one colonial and the other national. This so as to highlight how representations, even of wild animals, are ultimately linked to power. This leads me to argue how today’s Western-dominated ideas about tigers (a view I call ‘cosmopolitan’) ultimately act to the detriment of ‘other’ tigers because these do not allow for an engagement with alternative ways of understanding animals and wildlife. Such images, I try to show using Descola’s arguments about nature and understandings of it, in turn perpetrates the coercive and unequal relationship between, in this case, those who partake of the ‘cosmopolitan’ tiger view versus those who live with ‘wild’ tigers

The Singapore “Garden City”: the death and life of nature in an Asian city of the Anthropocene

Death & Life of Nature in Asian CitiesHong Kon

Amidst the wreckage of Amphan, a heartwarming reminder from Sundarbans of what it means to be human

Sroll.i