“Being Stuck in Place and Out of Time”: Environmental Subjectivities, Fisher Practices, and Everyday Conservation in Mumbai’s Thane Creek

This paper focuses on the framing and everyday practice of conservation in Mumbai’s Thane Creek to examine how conservation value is selectively defined and contested when it is institutionalized into a Ramsar conservation-management regime. It draws on ethnographic and qualitative data to make two arguments. First, it shows how conservation frameworks derive their logics from older, extractive frameworks as well as recent changes in coastal policy and climate crisis discourse that make extraction – in the name of conservation and ecotourism – possible. Second, the paper focuses on the effect of conservation regimes on the Indigenous fishing community of Kolis that has hitherto received little attention. While conservation agendas recognize them as “traditional” fishers – its legal, cartographic, and identity categories render fishers as “stuck in place and out of time”. How fishers negotiate with the experience of “stuckness” demonstrates that they are not simply outside or against conservation agendas but actively shape and are shaped by them. Fisher communities render themselves legible to the state by adopting and exceeding available subject positions, deploying state categories, and sometimes reproducing its exclusions internally. Overall, the paper calls for rethinking official notions of protection and the positivist, colonial grounds on which conservation science rests.