Thinning forests and angry elephants: Looking at ‘ethic of solidarity’ to interpret the human–elephant relationship in a transforming forest ecology

Ajodhya Pahar Hill range in Eastern India has experienced rapid ecological changes since the colonial takeover of the Indigenous lands and forests. In recent years, rapid deforestation and fragmentation of habitat have led to intensification of human–animal conflicts all over Eastern India, with elephant raids on crop fields and villages, leading to many human and elephant casualties annually. The demarcation of forests undertaken to spatially segregate them as places for wildlife has led to any fluidity between forests and non-forest spaces being treated with contempt as transgression and encroachment. Based on my ethnographic studies in Ajodhya Pahar, I have argued that even with the rise in anger towards the elephants – whose ‘transgression’ into the villages has exponentially increased since the construction of the first pumped storage project in the region – many people tend to have empathy towards the elephants. While much of the popular anger is directed towards the Forest Department, many could relate that the elephants have been pushed out of their habitat, causing them to intrude into human spaces. Based on the feminist ‘ethic of solidarity’ and the standpoint of ‘collective concrete others’ as proposed by Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib, I have argued that in Ajodhya Pahar, there is a ‘moral solidarity’ between the humans and the elephants, who feature significantly in the cosmology of the Indigenous Santal people as a spiritual being. A combination of spirituality and empathy that arises out of shared hardship has led the Santal people to treat the elephants as a ‘moral’ person, capable of acting with intent. I have further argued that the forest rights movement in Ajodhya Pahar has used this shared sense of moral solidarity as a lens to interpret the behaviour of the elephants in a manner that fits the larger narrative of the resistance.