Kanha, Baiga Chak & Elwin: Attempts to Save Endangered Tribal Cultures in a “sort of National Park” in Central India

Abstract

Most histories of indigenous peoples in national parks have focused on the creation of human-free wilderness through dispossession. However, there has long been a competing and similarly problematic conception of national parks as places for preserving ‘tribal’ peoples and their cultures – a vision that has often been paternalistic, romanticist, and primitivist. In my current book project, People Parks: Histories of Protecting Indigenous-Inhabited Wilderness, I explore several historical case studies where colonial powers sought to create national parks with the goal of saving tribal cultures. A famous example of this ‘tribal preservation’ approach in India can be found in the area that is now Kanha National Park and Baiga Chak (Baiga Reservation) in Madhya Pradesh. In 1939, anthropologist Verrier Elwin proposed a plan to establish ‘a sort of National Park, in which not only the Baiga, but the thousands of simple Gond in their neighbourhood might take refuge’. According to Elwin: ‘it was a question of keeping them alive, saving them from oppression and exploitation’. Still today, many activists claim that what is ‘endangered’ in Kanha National Park is ‘not just tigers, but also indigenous communities’. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history fieldwork in and around Kanha and Baiga Chak, this talk will explore discourses of Gond and Baiga Adivasi endangerment in central India and the ways in which ideas of human and wildlife endangerment are often intertwined in protected areas.