Endangered cobras and conservation politics: Exploring multispecies encounters in agrarian landscapes of West Bengal

This article challenges dominant conservation discourses that frame nature as pristine and separate from humans, critiquing the wilderness paradigm informing Third World environmental planning. While scientific discourses promote holistic planetary visions, they overlook how environmental politics is entangled with human cultural practices and identities. Drawing on ethnographic research in Musharu, a village in East Bardhaman, West Bengal, India, the article locates the role of culture in shaping environmental struggles and identity politics rooted in Third World ecological concerns. Musharu is known for its unique coexistence with poisonous cobras, revered as manifestations of the village deity. This multispecies relationship is increasingly threatened by recent monsoonal irregularities disrupting snake habitats. This climate vulnerability creates discrepancies among national environmental bodies, local conservationists, and village inhabitants with conflicting narratives about their non-human neighbors. Conservationists advocate scientific protection of these snakes through formal protection and spatial segregation, while inhabitants who see them as protective figures reject such interventionist techniques. For them, conservation premised on the idea of wilderness as an autonomous domain devoid of human involvement impinges on their ways of organic relatedness with these divine snakes. The article concludes that viewing human living as distinct from wildlife conservation may lead to misrecognition of the environmental problem.