Forest of Lions and Men: Human-Animal Relationships in the Gir Forest, India
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FOREST OF LIONS AND MEN: HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIPS IN THE GIR FOREST, INDIA Sheena Singh Marietta, GA MA Anthropology, University of Virginia 2008 BS International Affairs and Modern Languages, Georgia Institute of Technology 2005 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology University of Virginia August, 2020 Fred Damon (Chair) George Mentore Ira Bashkow Roy Wagner Hank Shugart DISSERTATION ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I document how interspecies relationships inform and co-constitute social identities in Western India. Informed by ethnographic research conducted in 2012 in the Gir Forest, Gujarat, this work addresses how two different human populations living or working alongside Asiatic lions in a wildlife sanctuary operationalize their ongoing relationships with the lions to construct both collective histories and individual possibilities. For the pastoral Maldhari community, lions occupy an essential role in a socioenvironmental order established during the time of Creation. The maintenance of that order necessitates a proximity to the lions that, if broken through state- or climate- based displacement, the Maldhari believe will result in the disappearance of the Gir lion population. For sanctuary employees, their physical closeness to the lions is alternatively foregrounded as a pathway to accessing a reimagined local social hierarchy that enables, or can possibly enable, temporal inversions of conventional power structures. Such inversions foster an understanding of social re-ordering that exposes an illusory quality, a frailty of social order in which they are oriented. When characterizing the human-lion relationship, both sanctuary employees and the Maldhari do not deny the existence of conflict but instead minimize the role it plays in defining that relationship. In this way, these communities are interpreting the ways of knowing a large predator as potentially comparable to and as complex as knowing another human. Ultimately, in Forest of Lions and Men, I argue the value of a multispecies ethnographic approach through an illustration of how nonhuman animals are taken seriously by peoples of the Gir Forest as actors in and co-constructors of the permanent and momentary social world(s) they inhabit. To Manohar Singh, Ravindra Singh, and Swadesh Rani Singh ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is the product of many years of building knowledge, gathering data, and weaving those strands to craft something coherent and meaningful. Throughout those years my worlds, both social and intellectual, have been enriched greatly by the people and places I have known. First and foremost, I am immeasurably indebted to my many informants at the Gir Forest for allowing me to enter their worlds. At the University of Virginia, the faculty, staff, and graduate students of the Department of Anthropology became my teachers, mentors, and friends. I am thankful for their support. In particular I would like to thank my committee members: Roy Wagner, for exposing me to what it is to think visually and play with ideas; Ira Bashkow, for not only the valuable scholarly counsel but also the active encouragement during these past few years that was critical to getting this manuscript finished; George Mentore, for always supporting my research and for his empathy; H. H. Shugart, for always being at the ready with a critique from the hard sciences and for just being a really nice guy. I must also mention former committee member Peter Metcalf, whose humor and intellectual insights inspired momentum during my doldrums. Finally, I am so very indebted to my committee chair, Frederick H. Damon. His steady support in all aspects of my life, education, and career has significantly shaped me both as an anthropologist and as a social being in this world. This dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support of Worldwide Friends, Inc., the University of Virginia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Virginia Department of Anthropology, and a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from the US Department of Education. I am grateful to institutional support of the Wildlife Institute of India during my fieldwork. Finally, I am so thankful for the support of my friends and family across these many years of graduate study, fieldwork, writing up, and everything in between. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 1 2. The Gir Forest 27 3. The Lions of the Gir Forest 74 4. Workers of Sasan Gir 112 5. The Maldhari of the Gir Forest 166 6. Conclusion 225 Bibliography 231 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation addresses environmental changes and challenges in South Asia, and the world at large, through the particular case of human-lion relationships at the Gir Forest in Gujarat, India. The Gir Forest has a dry tropical monsoon climate and the dry deciduous forest vegetation expected in this climate. These conditions support an abundance of herbivores for lions to eat, tracts of open savanna, and naturally occurring water sources. Territorial constraints have required some of the lion population to adapt to atypical environments far outside the periphery of the forest, including the coastal forests of the Arabian Sea, and even the island of Diu, where a lioness and her cubs were spotted in the mid-1990s. Others are scattered throughout the larger territory of the Greater Gir, but the majority remain within the area of the Gir Forest. The Gir Forest is a place and space coalescing a landscape, peoples, and wildlife. In my research I pursue the immaterial connectivity found only in cultural representations that at my fieldsite occur less in visual arts and imagery, but more through memory, cosmology, and possibility. The land, the lions, and the history of the local community (and its constituent subcommunities) work in particular ways as a localized expression of the variable formations of both Hindu cosmology and South Asian social organization. For the pastoral Maldhari community residing in and around the Gir Forest, animals largely occupy both the domestic and the immediately surrounding external forested landscape. In the Maldhari homestead, called nes but hereafter referred to using the anglicized 2 INSET Figure 1. Map of India with inset of Saurashtra peninsula. 3 “ness,” a tall protective fence of thorns and brambles secure the Maldhari and their livestock within the interior of the homestead. Outside the domestic border of the fence are many animals of a different kind, an assortment of wildlife that, rather than inhabiting a distant, human-less wilderness, are habituated to living with the Maldhari in a neighborly sense. Indigenous herbivores including nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus) and cheetal (Axis axis) share the same grazing lands as the domestic buffalo, all of which serve as prey for the forest’s largest carnivores. All occupants of the Gir Forest, human and non-human, are connected materially by their environment by moving through the same spaces, ingesting local waters and food from the same earth, the quotidien of hearing and seeing and smelling each other, sometimes even of tasting each other. Figure 2. Map indicating location of the village of Sasan within the context of the larger protected area. 4 The singularity of the Maldhari experience in the Gir Forest first drew me to my fieldsite, but upon arrival I recognized that they were not, in fact, the only people in the forest. My research revolves around two major bodies of subjects: lions and humans. My time in Gir brought me into contact with many categories of people and many overlapping categories. While each avenue of possible exploration is worthwhile, for the purposes of this dissertation my body of human subjects consists of the Maldhari, formerly nomadic pastoralists who maintain a semi-nomadic mode of living within (and around) the Protected Area (PA), and also the assortment of people employed by or in the Gir Forest who reside in the nearby village of Sasan. Through details of the relationships between these people and the lions, this dissertation is story about those relationships. The man who would become my research assistant worked as a tour guide for wildlife sightseeing expeditions. His brother was employed as a driver for the tours. On my daily journeys through the forest we would often stop in our jeep to greet whomever we came across (as long as it was not tourists on safari), and through these meetings I came to know about some of the other workers of the forest: lion trackers, forest guards, rangers. Although they did not sleep a homemade fence away from lions like the Maldhari, these men1 spent significant periods of their daily lives in pursuit or protection of the lions at Gir; for all the many animals living in its depths, their employment was predicated on the former, present, and continued occupation of the forest by lions. I became interested in hearing of their experiences in and knowledge of the forest as a 1 There are no female guides or drivers, but there is a very small number of female forest staff. 5 counterpart to what I was learning from the Maldhari, finding that those conversations more often than not quickly veered away from the forest to their personal histories and aspirations. These interactions greatly impacted my understanding of what precisely constitutes human-lion relationships at the Gir Forest, illuminating alternative models of what it is to live in the world with lions and how local peoples’ relationships to the land and animals is mediated by different kinds of knowledge and different exchanges of currency. While the Maldhari follow a model that incorporates lions into the social community, those men working in the forest employ a model that operates outside of the local community structure and instead incorporates the possibility of another social configuration in which they are not bound to the hierarchical limitations that have otherwise guided their lives.