Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how state interventions to conserve charismatic species imagine and enroll 'wild' life, death, and desire. It further examines how tiger conservation efforts in India rework and reproduce wild–life and a more-than-human politics of caste and gender.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how state interventions predicated on conserving charismatic species imagine and enroll 'wild' life, death, and desire. Taking the example of tiger conservation projects in India, it further examines how the effort to reproduce charismatic wild–life, and specifically the tiger, is wrapped up in a more-than-human politics of caste and gender. It considers particular life-, death-, and desire- dealing interventions carried out in the name of tiger conservation in India in recent years – set against the context of global conservation regimes that dehumanize people who live increasingly precarious lives alongside charismatic species, post-colonial regimes that differentially value certain animal lives over those of certain humans – often with death-dealing implications, and caste logics of protecting and reproducing purity. This paper argues that conservation imaginaries of and interventions into wild–life become manifest in landscapes marked as Tiger Reserves and in the bodies, mobilities, and relations of 'wild' tigers and the humans whose lives are "gathered with" theirs (Govindrajan, 2018). This in turn points to newer ways in which caste-based and gendered notions of life, death, and reproduction are reworked to sustain relations of power.