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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how conservation infrastructures and caste hierarchies co-constitute more-than-human worlds. Moving beyond empathetic accounts of coexistence, it traces how multispecies relations are materially enacted through dispossession and the "slow violence" of forest governance.

Paper long abstract

In the non-protected "margins" of Central India’s tiger reserves, multispecies entanglements are less an exercise in celebratory empathy and more a site of sedimented structural harm. This paper brings multispecies ethnography into dialogue with political ecology to examine how the Indian state's conservation infrastructure functions as a form of slow violence that unevenly impacts marginalized communities. Drawing on year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Madhya Pradesh, I analyze how the materiality of land ownership and social identity dictate the nature of dispossession. I argue that Dalit communities, often holding precarious or marginal land parcels, are frequently the first to accept compensation and relocate—a process of forced mobility driven by land-poverty. Conversely, I examine the Pal community’s struggle to maintain traditional livestock grazing. For them, the forest represents a site of autonomy and refusal against wage-labor dependence, even as conservation restrictions and predator presence render their future impossible. I trace the lives of Indian wolves and tigers alongside these divergent labor and livelihood struggles, to demonstrate that multispecies relations are inseparable from the political economies of caste. I attend to exhaustion as a material state shared by both human bodies and the landscape under the weight of restricted resource access. In this paper, I move after empathy to propose a politics of refusal, where "ecologies of the margins" rupture dominant environmental imaginaries. These gatherings offer possibilities for a more-than-human justice that accounts for the stark material realities of social hierarchy in a polarized world.