Abstract

The Indian Sundarbans, the world's largest littoral mangrove stretch, draws attention in scientific discourses, being an ecosystem vulnerable to global climate change and a biodiversity hotspot governed under institutionalized protected area management. The Sundarbans are well-known as the world's only coastal mangrove habitat of the man-eating Royal Bengal Tigers. This UNESCO World Heritage Site often features in media coverage and popular discourse due to a surging number of human-tiger conflicts. Whenever such incidents happen, the popular narratives project them as an outcome of community intrusion and illegality, violating the norms of reserved and protected areas. Remedial measures often call for a stricter imposition of conservation rules. This article exposes the limits of such portrayals. Introducing the conceptual framework of riskscapes, it argues that to understand the human-tiger conflict, it is necessary to explore the comprehensive risk situation and the multiple risk entanglements in the Indian Sundarbans. Through ethnographic explorations on the Gosaba block, we present the human-tiger conflict as a node to assess multiple risk imaginaries and their production, development, and mutual entanglements. Further, we demonstrate the gradual marginalization of the community in the composite impact of these plural risk imaginaries. We suggest the necessity of localized livelihood generation informed by the existing risk ensemble and anchored to local community aspirations.

Keywords: Riskscapes, human-tiger conflict, Indian Sundarbans

How to Cite:

Pathak, S., Mukherjee, J., Sen, A. & Choudry, A., (2025) “Whose habitat? Exploring human-tiger conflict in the riskscapes of the Indian Sundarbans”, Journal of Political Ecology 32(1): 5111. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5111