Presentation short abstract

The paper analyses animal reintroduction through the new lens of federal power dynamics and post-colonial sovereignty. It argues that India’s rhino reintroduction programme (1979-1985) asserted centralised control over the nation’s wildlife and India’s coming of age in their management.

Presentation long abstract

The Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India is home to nearly the two-thirds of the 4,000 greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) surviving on the earth. The return of the rhino is considered a twentieth-century conservation marvel. From the late 1960s, American ecologists intensely lobbied the Government of India (GoI) to study the rhino in Kaziranga. However, the GoI barred them throughout the 1970s even as Indian ecological expertise was yet to emerge. Around 1980, the GoI initiated efforts to relocate a few rhinos from Kaziranga to the Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, where rhinos existed until the mid-nineteenth century. The stated objective was to create alternate home for the rhino and ease Kaziranga from congestion. The transfer of five rhinos was completed in 1984 despite vehement opposition from the Assamese nationalists, who viewed the rhino as a key symbol of their identity. By reviewing archival documents, newspapers and reports, this paper shows that the project veered away from the stated goal and science. Instead, it argues that the project became a lynchpin to assert centralised control over the nation’s wildlife and environment and to demonstrate India’s coming of age in wildlife management. The coercive rhino reintroduction reinforced Assam’s peripheral identity in the national imagination—that of a state posing a strategic and security challenge and requiring central authority to protect its valuable natural heritage. The paper contributes to the scholarship on animal reintroduction by analysing the practice through the new lens of federal power dynamics and post-colonial sovereignty.