Subaltern Politics in Subaltern Political Ecology: Understanding Human-Wildlife Conflicts in India

Conservation discourses on human-elephant conflicts in India and elsewhere often reduce local communities to a victim/perpetrator binary. Even seemingly divergent models- fortress conservation, co-existence, and rights-based approaches- reproduce this framing. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s evocative question- ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’- and insights from subaltern political ecology, this paper argues that both perpetrator and victimhood theses encourage silencing and misrepresentation of the subaltern communities who interact with the wildlife on an everyday basis. Based on qualitative research with the Adivasi and other traditional forest dwelling communities in Odisha, this paper illustrates how these communities resist such portrayals. Through practices of adaptation, narrative resistance, and land-rights claims, they construct their own agency and frame human-elephant relations as political negotiations between co-subalterns. This framing moves beyond dominant conservation paradigms and breaks the victim/perpetrator binaries for subaltern communities in conservation discourse.