The rehabilitation zone: Living with lemons and elephants in Assam

Introduction

In Bodoland, an ethnic autonomous area in western Assam, non-governmental organizations, wildlife conservation agencies, and local government bodies have introduced commercial farming programs that encourage farmers to grow lemons, strawberries, ginger, and medicinal plants. These livelihood programs are aimed at tackling issues of large-scale unemployment, economic deprivation, and social inequalities that have come up due to the long decades of ethnic conflict in the area. Since 1993, ceasefire agreements between insurgent groups and the government of India in Northeast India have led to the laying out of various rehabilitation programs. These are predominantly economic initiatives that focus on restoring the livelihoods of individuals and communities that have witnessed long decades of armed conflict. As part of skill trainings and livelihood options, these initiatives train former insurgents, unemployed youth, and households in post-conflict societies, to take up commercial farming and market their produce. The situation in Bodoland resonates with conditions in other parts of the world, where societies emerging from conflicts are forced to live with difficult memories, while making efforts to rebuild lives and livelihoods, especially through agricultural initiatives (Kevers et al., 2016; Longley et al., 2016; Menz, 2018; Thibbotuwawa, 2019). New forms of social relations and powers have emerged in Bodoland, especially after the long-drawn conflicts that have involved the state and ethnic groups who live there. Thus, economic rehabilitation programs like farming lemons are transformative processes that draw villages and collectives who have experienced violence and loss. For villages around Manas National Park, the experience of the conflict also includes the disappearance and poaching of animals and birds inside the park. Manas’s geography is important in the sustenance of various ecosystems that include elephant corridors and grasslands. Our field site is a region that has witnessed violent ethnic conflicts since the 1980s and has been important for reimagining post-conflict futures in western Assam. The violence also affected Manas, destroying animal habitats as the conflict escalated. The initiative to re-open Manas National Park after the signing of a peace accord between the government and armed rebels in 2003 required the support of the villages surrounding the park and creating community conservation programs and initiatives.

In this article, we focus how villagers around Manas are involved in planting lemons to earn livelihood, and building fences with lemon plants to keep away elephants and find ways to coexist. ¹ Lemons invoke optimism, just as elephants appeal to human interest for their proverbial sociability and intelligence (Rangarajan et al., 2010). ² Lemons are emblematic of enhancing livelihood, opportunities and protection for local farmers and villagers who live here. Known as fence crops, lemons are planted as cash crops and demarcate the boundaries between the villages and the park. The thorns from the lemon plants keep elephants from entering the villages, while the fruits generate income for the households in the villages. Yet, as infrastructure around Manas and villages expand into elephant corridors, elephants find new routes or passages. Often, elephants end up on village roads and highways.

Planting lemons ³ serves a dual purpose of finding a viable economic solution and addressing new ways of engaging with the human–animal relationship in post-conflict societies. As such, we highlight that rehabilitation (of animals) and restoring peace (among communities) in post-conflict societies are inter-connected processes. Planting lemons in western Assam is subsumed within a dominant development discourse on rebuilding communities who have witnessed violence (Das et al., 2009). We aim to explore a different set of experiences here that draw on the ability of authoritarian regimes to refashion relationships between humans and nature for the cause of development and national interest (Ali, 2019). We argue that looking at farming initiatives in militarized regions like Northeast India solely through a framework of economic rehabilitation obfuscates the distinctive experiences and negotiations on the ground. ⁴ In villages around Manas, this economic model ties lemon farming communities to the market directly and severs their relationship to the land and animals like elephants who are constitutive of the social and ecological world. We attend to the ways communities on the ground involved in farming lemons address their experiences of cohabiting with elephants and thereby forging a shared future between communities and animals. By foregrounding these everyday experiences in post-conflict societies, we seek to develop a concept of integrative rehabilitation, a process grounded in the practices of communities who believe that animals like elephants are entangled with their lives and, therefore, find it necessary to think about ways to share the landscape with other beings. We take integrative rehabilitation as a practice emerging from grounded animal–human interactions where healing and restoration are considered as processes not solely focused on the self but in relation to other beings. ⁵ The notion of restoration in this sense involves engaging with intra-human politics that focus on political reconciliation, including psychosocial and economic rehabilitation, and on elephants who seek corridors and pathways that are free from violence and provide sustenance for herds.

The areas around Manas witnessed armed conflicts since the 1980s. The violence and militarization displaced villages and animals inside the park as well. ⁶ During this period of violence, people poached several species inside the park, while youth from villages joined the insurgency to fight for a separate Bodo state (Soud et al., 2013). Around Manas, communities remember the period of armed conflict as one that affected the villages around the park, as well as the animals within it. ⁷ Rebuilding the infrastructure around the park and in the neighboring villages began after Bodoland became an autonomous area in 2003. ⁸ Since then, programs to rehabilitate the wildlife population inside the park and development initiatives have come up simultaneously. Local organizations like Aaranyak, as well as established conservation and sustainable livelihood groups like Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & the Environment (ATREE), have focused on both restoring the habitat for both species. ⁹

Neither privileging a conservation-centric narrative that seeks to vilify human settlements as forest encroachers and asserts that the depletion of wildlife and forest as a consequence of “careless human actions” (Thapar, 1997: 24) nor seeking to theorize a notion of non-human agency where a planetary ecological crisis has given rise to environmental risks (Human Animal Research Network, 2015) we offer new ways of thinking about an inclusive rehabilitation in post-conflict societies, as has been outlined in the detailed report presented by the Elephant Task Force that was set up by the Ministry of Environment and Forests of the Government of India in 2010. ¹⁰ Both animals and humans experience violence and trauma in armed conflict situations. Therefore, we propose integrative rehabilitation as a heuristic tool that allows us to understand the non-violent alliances between both species as communities seek to restore peace and maintain the boundaries between the villages and the animals around Manas. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork conducted in villages around Manas between 2016 and 2019, we highlight accounts of community engagement where rebuilding lives and livelihood embrace the reality of cohabiting with (and among) animals. We specifically focus on the encounters between lemon farmers and elephants because both are subjects of human intervention in that they are seen to respond to the changes in the economic and geographical landscape in the region.

In the last decade, the elephants’ corridors have shrunk or disappeared due to the expansion of farming and human habitation leading to an increased encounter between elephants and humans. The lemon farmers in the area embody a constituency of subsistence agriculturalists on whose back policies of economic and behavioral rehabilitation are carried out. These conversations open the potential of thinking about forms of governance in post-conflict societies that breaks down the rigid demarcations of conservation (of animals) and governance (of communities). By recognizing animals and humans as collective survivors of the armed conflict in Assam, we join the conversation about human–elephant cohabitation in conflict and militarized sites beyond Assam and ways to situate relations between animals and humans as a transformative and restorative process in post-conflict societies (Bradshaw, 2009; Govindarajan, 2018; Lorimer, 2010). This article is structured in the following manner.

First, we theorize integrative rehabilitation. We do so by discussing how lemons as fence crop not only keep away elephants from the villages but also provide economic livelihood to the communities. We identify this as a grassroot effort to creatively draw boundaries between the park and the villages. Second, we trace how the idiom of rehabilitation is set in promoting eco-tourism and wildlife resorts. By privileging the language of rehabilitation, we trace how mainstream models of economic rehabilitation, such as focusing on poverty and unemployment, are entangled within a militarized framework of reinforcing power and authority in a post-conflict society. Here, economic rehabilitation and eco-tourism projects promote employment and economic prosperity for marginalized communities around Manas. Yet, these activities reify economic inequalities and disrupt community ownership of land by encouraging processes that enable a few to appropriate land and labor for creating resorts, leaving a vast majority to remain tied to subsistence agriculture. By tracing the idiom of rehabilitation of entrepreneurs, we explore the relationship between the communities and the tourist resorts. Here, we draw on research that looks at how bodies of animals become commodified products to aid the growth of wildlife tourism (Lorimer, 2010; Shukin, 2009). Finally, we present how integrative rehabilitation appears on the ground. Underlining voices of communities in villages, we emphasize that integrative rehabilitation is a community-led practice to restore relationship between humans and animals in post-conflict societies. This is a political project that requires state agencies, conservation programs, and local communities to classify animal and other biological species of economic value. In the conclusion, we highlight the significance of ethnographic research in militarized societies and how these sites are integral for us to reflect on key questions relating to restorative justice, citizenship, and the futures of integrative forms of governance for both elephants and humans and add to similar research elsewhere (Barbora, 2017; Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011; Kymlicka, 2018).

Integrative rehabilitation

Drawing from our fieldwork on living with elephants and farming lemon in villages around Manas, integrative rehabilitation highlights connections and belonging in post-conflict societies that are established between humans and animals through cohabiting the land in the backdrop of new powers and authorities. Communities around Manas articulate and share their everyday experiences of working on the land as a pathway of restoring land and social relations with other beings within the park. Experience of lemon farming is a process of integrative restoration in villages around Manas. It emerges from experiences that are grounded in rebuilding lives and relations among communities and between humans and animals in the backdrop of challenging political conditions. As Pinsky (1980) notes, communities play an important role in mobilizing and working toward rehabilitating for a new life. Scholars working on community initiatives around growing food to address race violence and incarceration (Sbicca, 2016), indigenous food movements (Corntassel and Bryce, 2012), and politics of food sovereignty (Hoover, 2017) underline the significance of attending to social experiences to engage with rehabilitative practices.

Broadly, rehabilitation programs in Northeast India are all geared toward economic development and also draw in certain animals into the value chain, since they encourage tourism or are part of a larger political economy of conservation efforts. ¹¹ Given the violent history of militarization and armed conflict, rehabilitation connotes a clash between the Indian state that seeks to create a capitalist economic model on profit. This is disconnected from the ground reality of militarization and insurgency. Policy documents published by the North East Council present the region as a remote area that is economically backward and in need of state and market interventions for development. ¹² Besides applying to natural calamities and development-induced displacement, the term rehabilitation in Northeast India is focused on creating entrepreneurs, business operations, and commercial agriculture to transform traditional subsistence farming and practices of foraging (Fernandes and Bharali, 2011). Furthermore, the trope of economic rehabilitation calls for a competitive neoliberal logic where individual’s hard work and competitive spirit are rewarded by the market, a fact that is particularly relevant to our fieldwork area that has been predominantly kin-based agricultural farms. Based on our fieldwork around Manas, we see the community approach toward lemon farming as a process to “build transformative spaces” and a contribution toward “community economics” (Hosking and Palomino-Schalscha, 2016: 1250).

Northeast India is imagined as a peripheral area far from the Indian heartland where military surveillance and insurgency operations take place. Kikon (2009) highlights how the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA, 1958) produces the region as a homogenous zone that is “disturbed” to indicate danger and the absence of law and order. According to AFSPA, the security forces, if they are “of the opinion that it is necessary so to do for the maintenance of public order” can arrest, destroy, and “use force even to the causing of death” in these “disturbed” areas. The Indian army’s counter-insurgency operations, Operation Bluebird in Manipur (1987) and Operation Bajrang in Assam (1990–1991) culminated in a series of human rights violations (Amnesty International, 1990).

The perception of the region as a disturbed area influences government programs and policies. The reiteration of the region as isolated and away from mainland India relates to hate crimes and racist attacks on migrants from the region, ¹³ all the way to food habits that many mainland Indians find repugnant. ¹⁴ Decades of counter-insurgency activities reproduced these perceptions while ignoring the structural violence and trauma due to the armed conflict. Institutional support and rehabilitation to address trauma and consequences of a long-drawn armed conflict remain absent.

After a series of ceasefire agreements were signed with armed groups in 1997, the region has become a hub for launching economic rehabilitation programs such as soft skill programs (Haksar, 2016; Kikon and Karlsson, 2019), medicinal plant factories (Bhatia and Lasserter, 2017) and establishing new plantations like palm oil (Bose, 2018). State governments like Nagaland, Assam, and Meghalaya have prioritized on skill development and entrepreneurship programs to rehabilitate unemployed youth. ¹⁵ Yet, the region continues to be viewed as a sensitive geopolitical space where citizens cannot be trusted. These ongoing activities reiterates David Harvey’s point about demonized geographies that creates different kinds of ignorance about space and places (2000). Literature on the armed conflict situation in Northeast India have highlighted the violence and militarization of the region (Baruah, 1999; Hazarika, 1994; Kikon, 2009; Luithui and Haksar, 1984; Misra, 2014; Tarapot, 2003). State violence (Mandal and Sarkar, 2016; Roy, 1996) and decades of impunity have led to structural violence (Kikon, 2015) and post-traumatic stress disorder (Gill et al., 2013; Mushtaq et al., 2016).

Currently, government projects ranging from micro-credit initiatives to high-level entrepreneurship conclaves have centered on achieving economic progress. Central to these development models are military and security tactics to combat insurgents and monitor the movement of people and goods (Peer, 2014). The efforts to develop the region are built on a capitalistic and militaristic understanding of communities and relations that reinforce one another. This fails to capture the lived experiences of people and dismantles the “historical-geographical processes of place and community construction” (Harvey, 2000: 542). In the next section, we turn to accounts of rehabilitation to illuminate how conservation in Manas was contingent on engaging with the communities and the boundaries between the park and the villages, and how they became an integrative process of restoring life and peace.

Rehabilitation around Manas National Park

A series of investigations inside Manas National Park during the 1990s highlighted the devastating impact of the conflict on wildlife. In 2005, a UNESCO–IUCN report underlined the need to involve villagers to manage and rebuild the park. The park was added to the List of World Heritage in Danger in 1992 as the armed conflict escalated destroying infrastructure, lives, and property. Calling for a close coordination between the villagers and the park authorities, the report noted, “ …  the long insurgency appears to have had significant impacts on the forests and the wildlife population in the park” (UNESCO and IUCN, 2005).

Over the years, rehabilitation and restoration programs around Manas have adopted villagers including youth associations and women’s groups as guardians and partners in rebuilding the wildlife and ecology of the park. In addition, the rehabilitation program team members include former poachers, ex-insurgents, retired security forces, and students who are involved in caring and restoring the wildlife inside the park. Yet, these social relations go beyond the park. The social bonds among these divergent social and political groups have become networks of support where they undertake activities to restore themselves and create a community. The elephant plays a central role in bringing this disparate communities together. Either as kunkis (working elephants), or as part of non-domesticated herds, conservation and monitoring elephants and other animals in Manas defines the jurisdictional landscape of the park into distinct ranges, in this case Panbari, Bansbari, and Bhuyanpara, where both species cohabit in an environment that is fraught with pressure on resources. Within the park, there are 41 working elephants and the last unofficial census put the wild herd population at 1200. Each kunki has two mahouts allotted to them by the department. As a unit, they are used for a range of work—monitoring, keeping wild elephants away, and unwilling carriers in safaris—as employees. The wild herds use the west-east corridor that traverses the range—Panbari, Bansbari, and Bhuyanpara—with significant pockets of human habitation (villages, military garrisons, tea plantations, and resorts) and infrastructure developments (bridges, train tracks, and roads).

During our fieldwork in Manas, young conservationists working around the park underlined the significance of working with communities to develop a sustainable rehabilitation program. Brojo and Beauty, two young Bodo program coordinators who had MA degrees in sustainable development and worked with different non-governmental organizations, shared with us their accounts in aiding with rehabilitation programs around the park. They focused on connecting and supporting the communities in the area. Their extra-curricular activities outside their official duties of manning activities centered on wildlife ranged from helping women to set up small enterprise, working with teams of lemon farmers, and screening documentaries on wildlife and capacity building to villagers.

Beauty, when not involved in overseeing the logistics of constructing watch towers along the boundary of the park, participated in community projects in the villages. During our 2016 fieldwork, she was staying as a paying guest in a village adjacent to the park and worked in the vegetable gardens. Besides that, she was planning to set up a turmeric factory for the women folk around the park. These activities helped her to gain a layered understanding of community life in the area. For Brojo, his interest in photographing butterflies around the fringes of park led him to make friends with different nature clubs in the villages and hang out with the youth. It allowed him to encourage young people to cultivate creative pursuits that did not frequently appear in their school and college curricula. One of Brojo’s additional duties at work (for his NGO) was to carry out lemon planting programs, where he invited villagers to cultivate lemons and focus on the conservation and economic aspects of setting up fence crops in Manas.

These initiatives by local conservationists like Beauty and Brojo became an essential lens for us to focus on integrative rehabilitation—a restorative practice for communities who have experienced trauma and conflict to foster relations that transforms lives. Grounded on lived experiences, then, integrative rehabilitation means understanding the animals and humans connections in post-conflict societies where community accounts recognize the presence of animals in their lives. The community’s relationship with wildlife in Manas reveals approaches to restorative practices. Particularly, rehabilitation programs of wildlife and the initiatives to integrate communities to restore the park reflect a movement that highlights, “ … desires to heal from trauma … and improve their economic position” (Sbicca, 2016).

Villagers and park officials believed that the damage to crops is not usually done by wild herds who stay inside the park’s vast grasslands where there is enough for them to eat. It is usually a few wild stray elephants aged between 20 and 25 years, who find their way outside the wired area that marks the southern border of the park and into the way of human habitation. During our visit field in 2019, the Forest Veterinary Officer told us that there are, “two elephant seasons: July to November is farm visit and December to March is house visit”. These coincide with the months where rice is growing in the fields and the post-harvest period when the produce is kept in granaries near individual homesteads. The Forest Department, working with other departments of the government, and conservation organizations have come up with a basic compensatory process for damage to houses and the rare loss of human life. Villagers get INR 10,000–12,000 for the destruction of a house (usually made of bamboo and mud). In the rare event of the death of a human by an elephant, the department pays the victim’s next of kin a sum of INR 400,000. Human casualties in elephant–human encounters have increased in Assam over the last few years, but this was not the case in the area where we did our fieldwork. ¹⁶ The Forest Department and villagers have come up with an informal arrangement over the past seven years where the former provide compensation for crop loss for one time, even though elephants might have visited the village twice. For officials and the villagers, this is a reasonable outcome of several years of negotiation. “We need to convince the raiz (society) to be equanimous to some loss – let the elephants also eat – it is their character” said the divisional forest officer, as he explained the contentious nature of compensation in Manas.

Livelihood practices in Manas are intertwined with the wildlife rehabilitation and protection programs. As such, practices of economically marginalized communities who grow lemons as a livelihood crop exemplifies “agency of the poor” (Hosking and Palomino-Schalscha, 2016: 1251). The lemon growing initiative was started by ATREE and taken up by other organizations working in the area, who had worked closely with local communities during the 1980s and 1990s, the worst periods of counter-insurgency operations in western Assam. As the violence abated in the early 2000s, many youths, who were politically active in the struggles for autonomy, collaborated with conservation groups to ensure local community support for such initiatives. For instance, nine men from different ethnic groups, in consultation with the conservation NGOs, built an ecologically friendly, budget campsite and resort beside the fringes of the park and the Beki river. The partners continued to do much of the work around the resort themselves, lending a communitarian air to the space. The resort continues to be a hub for tourists and conservationists alike. Similarly, conservation groups like Aaranyak were instrumental in securing community support for their pygmy hog conservation project that utilized the park as a release site for the endangered animal since 1996.

Across Northeast India, economic rehabilitation programs like planting cash crops have become a model of development, especially, after the region entered a period of ceasefire with numerous ethnic armed groups starting in 1997. In comparison, commercial lemon farming in Bodoland is recent. Along with tourism activities like rafting, fishing, and animal safari, lemon farming is aimed to alleviate poverty and help low-income families. Tourism occupied a visible position within the repertoire of post-conflict possibilities that allowed for the convergence of economic activities and conservation strategies. Currently, there are 13 registered resorts in Basbari Range and approximately five homestays in Manas. Barring the low-cost resort started by the local political activists, other resorts were owned by people from outside the neighborhood. Local political leaders linked to the Bodo Territorial Council (BTC) also had shares in the largest resort along the fringes of park. A former Indian army colonel also had a similar resort two miles to the east of the main gate. Here, he had tried to replant trees and shrubs that he felt had become extinct in the region. Hence, Manas reflects a wider global phenomenon where tourism is seen as a way out of poverty for societies emerging from conflicts driven by inequalities, where the outcomes are understandably inconclusive (Barbora, 2017; Craven, 2016; Devine and Odeja, 2017). All these developments assume greater significance as humans and elephants share the landscape. Across Manas, gun shots from forest guards scaring away elephants echo as night falls. As villages settle down for the night, fears of elephants entering the villages and resort areas grow. Foregrounding accounts of communities about everyday experiences with elephants, the following section focuses on an increasing community sense that cohabiting with elephants constitutes communicating and recognizing that elephants also belong to the land.

Living with lemons and elephants

“There are no banana plantations in Barangabari village”, Prabhuanan Das chuckled. The mere idea of planting bananas seemed absurd. Barangabari shares a boundary with the park. Apart from rhinos, wild buffaloes, golden langurs, and pygmy hogs, the park is a tiger and an elephant reserve as well. Among all the animals, the elephant most frequented the villages in search of food. The villagers, in consultation with the Forest Department and the NGOs, had come up with different kinds of boundaries and natural walls to keep animals from entering the cultivable fields and homes. For a visitor, the most pronounced one is an electric fence around the park. The fence gives off a light charge but is routinely rendered redundant by power cuts. Then, there is a gravel road for tourists and villagers that reinforces a strong spatial and ecological divide between the park and the villages.

Coming to elephants, residents described their relationship with the animal as special. This response was rooted in the sociable qualities of elephants that even the Government of India’s Elephant Task Force refers to (Rangarajan et al., 2010). In this section, we move away from a centralized conservation narrative that is often founded on a language of conflict when it comes to elephant and human relations. Instead, we focus on the sentiments of communities who cohabit with elephants and see their future as sharing the land with, irrespective of the challenges they face. Under such circumstances, we came across households who moved away from vilifying the elephants that came around the village and adopted a language of conviviality. Whenever accounts of elephants came up in our conversations, residents focused on the reasoning abilities and memory. Such narratives are reflected in existing literature on elephant and human relations (Hathaway, 2013) and elephants as ecological and cultural beings in human civilization (Sukumar, 2011).

Humans and elephants alike have experienced violence and displacement. In Assam, communities acknowledge that they have displaced elephants from their habitats. Therefore, when elephants enter the villages in search of food, residents say that animals were forced to do so because of their “hungry stomachs” and underline feelings like hunger and poverty as sufferings that humans and elephants alike experience (Jadhav and Barua, 2012: 1361). Piers Locke also invites us to pay attention to the, “ … mutual entanglements of their (human-elephants) social, historical, and ecological relations” (Locke, 2013: 79–80). For Locke, the behavioral patterns of humans and elephants influence social relationship and personalities as well. Similar to human beings, notes Locke, elephants are social beings and have the ability to recognize emotions and grieve when they lose friends and relations (Locke, 2013). This aspect is reiterated in the relationship between the mahouts and the kunkis in Manas. Officials in the park often complained about absenteeism of employees when they went home for leave. Those who had asked for a day or two would invariably stay home for longer periods. However, most mahouts returned before their leave time had lapsed because they worried about the elephant under their care. Were they being fed enough of the rationed menu of salt, paddy, lentils, and black salt? Did they receive their liver extract mixed with wheat and the deworming tablets during the lean winter season? Most mahouts in the Bansbari range said that such worries brought them back to their camp much to the outrage of their families in the villages.

The notion of “shared social complexity” (Locke, 2013: 79) resonates with the relationship between lemon farmers and elephants. During our fieldwork, animals in the park like the golden langurs, pygmy hogs, one-horned rhino, and the deer entered our conversation. Yet, community encounters with the elephants brought out the landscape of the park, village, and the boundary in detail. Agricultural seasons to types of crops and surveillance mechanisms were all discussed keeping in mind the movement of elephants around the villages and within the park. There were also elephant jokes about their inability to resist rice beer, fondness for potato chips, as well their antics when drunk. Thus, the language of sociality that is inclusive of elephants is an enduring one. ¹⁷ The belief among communities that the elephants have feelings and memories of good events have produced gestures and language thereby strengthening an affinity between the villagers and the elephants. Introduced as livelihood programs to address poverty, lemon planting and training workshops in Manas aim to promote sustainable community conservation practices. ¹⁸ Here, integrative rehabilitation in post-conflict societies offers broader political frameworks to understand everyday contestations and politics between various political actors on the ground as we highlighted in the previous section.

Visitors to Manas cannot miss the lemon plants. Village bazaars like the Gobardhana haat attract lemon traders from the neighboring towns. Traders go about officiously counting the lemons, stuffing them in jute sacks, and stitching the load before hauling it onto the truck. The Gobardhana haat is situated around 7 km from the main gate of Basbari range.

Lemon Rates, according to the farmers, range as follows:

100 individual pieces for 300 rupees.

90 individual pieces for 200 rupees

80 individual pieces for 120 rupees

In Guwahati—the region’s biggest city—three lemons sell for 20 rupees.

A visit to a lemon farm belonging to Sobam Wari and Badeb Wari generated conversations about communicating with elephants. Many residents acknowledged how elephants destroy their crops, but also identified ways of cohabiting with them. This point was stressed when a local conservationist said that villagers were kind and generous to animals including wild elephants who passed by the village. They allowed them to eat from their fields and left them alone. Yet, whenever researchers and conservation experts came and asked questions about “human–elephant conflict”, this brought back unpleasant memories. The villagers began to be upset and angry with the Forest Department and demanded that the state authorities take responsibility for the elephants. Framing the experiences of humans with elephants predominately as one of conflict obliterated the efforts of communities on the ground who recognized and respected the elephant as belonging to the land irrespective of the challenges. It appeared as through the phrase “man–elephant conflict” operated as a trigger for trauma and anger against authorities (Jadhav and Barua, 2012).

What kinds of conversations took place when we recognized the elephant as member of the Manas landscape? Sobam Wari and Badeb Wari, the lemon farmers taught us what it meant to live with lemons and elephants. Badeb talked to the elephants who entered her farm. “Ja baba ja!” (Go my dear go) she told them and said, “Which beings do not understand one another? ²⁰ They do not attack. They come out of the game (the wildlife park) and enter the village to eat their favorite food.” And then she gave us a list of items that elephants loved to eat and ignore:

Food elephants love: bamboo, jackfruit, pineapple, coconut, banana, pumpkin, rice, sugarcane (only the juicy ones), outenga/elephant apples, sweet peas, maize (the whole plant), lentils (Mati daal or Soido in Bodo).

The admiration of the fence crop which regulated the entry of the elephants to the villages, irrespective of the fact that elephants now used the roads to visit the villages, conveyed how communities were integrating practices to cohabitation. Added to this was the persistent advocacy that conservation NGOs had undertaken to ensure that farmers received a just compensation for the paddy crop that was damaged by elephants. Although it was an unequal relationship where humans had the power to take over vast tracks of elephant corridors and build new resorts and plantations, communities on the ground negotiated with the presence of elephants in their lives. Today, much of the work carried out by local conservationists in Manas are focused on creating avenues such as compensation for communities who lose their crops to elephants or develop projects like lemon planting workshops and other kinds of micro-credit activities. This highlights how living with lemons and elephants has brought different actors in Manas—local conservationists, retired officials, surrendered insurgents, and farmers—together on the ground to find ways to coexist in the Manas landscape.

Conclusion

Restoring lives and land in post-conflict societies requires an attempt to develop a theoretical framework that offers reconstructing lives and healing as an integrative process. Accounts of attachment to place and connecting with the land are practices not limited to human societies alone. Living with elephants and lemons highlights how communities on the ground—humans and animals alike—participate and experience place-making and belonging. As instances of human–animal encounters lead to higher casualties for both species, significant changes in agricultural use and evolution of compensatory mechanisms for loss of incomes have emerged.

For the state, however, rehabilitating communities subjected to decades of armed conflict in Northeast India is through economic initiatives connected to the market alone. Thus, the state’s portrayal of Northeast India as an underdeveloped region is also a contentiously selective narrative that erases the experiences of armed conflict since India’s independence. The visibility of surrendered insurgents as contractors, businessman, and entrepreneurs, reiterates our assertions about economic development under militarized conditions.

Villagers around Manas plant lemons to demarcate the boundaries between the park and the village and create a livable landscape. Rehabilitation on post-conflict societies from South Asia is dominated by psychosocial approaches and rehabilitation of armed combatants to re-enter communities. Lemon farming and living with elephants allow us to ground collective experiences and the interdependence of human–animal relationship as integral to rehabilitation. Moving away from a militaristic-centric approach where elephants in Assam are framed through a prism of human–elephant conflict, integrative rehabilitation allows us to challenge a counter-insurgency framework to understand communities and animals relationships in post-conflict societies. Integrative rehabilitation as a theoretical framework, we believe, allows to adopt the ethics and ethos of human–animal cohabitation in Northeast India.

Highlights

Integrative rehabilitation