Tiger atmospheres and co-belonging in mangrove worlds

Situating subaltern animal stories

Critical geographical, urban as well as Indigenous scholarship in the western academy engages with the lived experiences of animals in ways that challenge an anthropocentric politics of belonging (Gibbs, 2020a; 2020b; Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2020; Hovorka, 2019; Lorimer et al., 2019; Morton et al., 2020; Philo and Wilbert, 2000; Simpson, 2017; Wolch and Emel, 1998). Within the context of global environmental change and the conservation of wildlife, this literature draws on diverse theoretical perspectives to unsettle the human-animal divide and species-based hierarchical relationships. The engagement with subaltern perspectives situated in South Asia, however, is just emerging, even though there are long histories of human-animal relationships (Alam et. al., 2020; Barua, 2014; de Silva and Srinivasan, 2019; Doubleday, 2020; Lorimer, 2010). Critical race, feminist, postcolonial, posthuman, Indigenous and Dalit scholars regret that these histories and ‘parallel genealogies’ (Jackson, 2013: 670) of thought in the Global South that unsettle hierarchical human-animal relationships were erased by western imperialism, Eurocentrism, caste privilege and neoliberal development narratives (Chen, 2012; de Silva and Srinivasan, 2019; Jalais, 2011; Sharma, 2017). This article responds to this erasure by centering subaltern worlds inhabited by Dalits, Adivasis (Indigenous peoples), Muslims and Christians in the Sundarbans, a transboundary environmental commons and major climatic hotspot in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta of India and Bangladesh that is home to the national animal, the Royal Bengal Tiger.

In subaltern worlds of India and Bangladesh shared by animals and impoverished peoples, academic literature (in particular scholarship situated in the western academy), policy documents and media reports on wildlife conservation, either focus on human-wildlife conflicts or alternatively grant individual animals personhood (de Silva and Srinivasan, 2019; Doubleday, 2017; 2020; Lahiri, 2020; NTCA, 2019). When animal sentience, intimacies and coexistence are explored, certain animals frequently appear in the academic literature – the elephant that is bound with the livelihoods, health and wellbeing of the rural poor (Barua, 2014; Jadhav and Barua, 2012), the lion/tiger who is commodified in the eco-tourism discourse of India (Barua, 2017; Vasan, 2018) and big cats such as leopards as well as tigers who must be efficiently managed, made killable or are alternatively animal celebrities (Doubleday, 2017: 33; Margulies, 2019a; Mathur, 2014). Margulies (2019b: 850) in an exploration of entanglements with wildlife in India, however, argues for decolonizing more-than-human geographies through theoretical and methodological interventions that attune to the presence of animals. Situated in the Bandipur National Park, Karnataka, the study engaged Indigenous peoples and used methods such as photovoice to draw attention to the affective nature of human-animal relations and illuminate how the violence of animal injustice and legacies of colonialism ‘across species divides’ (Margulies, 2019b: 850) might be addressed.

This article builds on calls for decolonisation by drawing attention to affective encounters informed by subaltern scholarship (in and beyond the western academy) as well as subaltern worlds in the Sundarbans. Scholarship by subaltern non-Hindu religious minorities, Dalit (low-caste Hindus classified in the Indian Census as Scheduled Castes [SC] and Other Backward Castes [OBC]) and Indigenous peoples (Adivasis or Scheduled Tribes [ST]) situated in India highlights ‘ambivalent’ relationships with wild animals (Rege et al., 2009; Sharma, 2017: 30; Shepherd, 2019). For example, Dalit scholarship by feminists Rege et al., (2009) as well as Sharma (2017: 30) show long histories of ‘cherish[ing]’ wild animals such as tigers celebrated in songs, stories, myths and poems, but also memories of ‘humiliating, back-breaking, and life-risking work in forests. Sharma (2017: 31) and Shepherd’s (2019) insights into the complexity of these human-animal relationships, however, are often overlooked within the western academy even though they illuminate eco-casteism or the dominance of high-caste Hindu (Brahminical) traditions that regulate environmental thought. Within this narrative of Brahminical supremacy, the complex intersections of caste, class, religion and gender that reproduce unequal worlds is rarely visible. More recently, ‘Hindu-Hindutva ideology’ or Hindu ultranationalism racialises Dalitbahujan Adivasis, Christians and Muslims who eat the flesh of wild animals, feed tigers with beef in city zoos and engage in the sacrifice of animals considered unfit for human consumption. (Borah, 2020; Sharma, 2017:31; Shepherd and Majumdar, 2019).

As minority authors situated in Australia, New Zealand and India, we think with Spivak (1994), aware that speculating about the sentience of the tiger in the ‘wild’ that is entangled with the agency of subaltern peoples, in particular women, both of whom have historically been muted, calls for careful intellectual work that includes unlearning our relative privilege. We argue that centering tiger atmospheres in mangrove worlds threatened by climate change and biodiversity loss, provides fresh insights into this sentience that is critical to exploring enactments of co-belonging and multispecies justice. Animal geographies, however, are just beginning to engage with the concept of atmospheres and atmospheric politics that could provide insights into a tiger’s milieu, affective intensities, affective labour, emotional experiences, shared place-based circumstances, familiar rhythms, habituated intensities and ‘sedimented remembrance’ of past encounters (Barua, 2019; Lorimer et al., 2019: 32). Emerging research on animal atmospheres that aims to be ethological and empathetic recognises the theoretical and methodological challenges but often relies on autobiographical accounts, experimental film-making and photo-essays (Lorimer, 2010; Lorimer et al., 2019; Margulies, 2019b). Our approach that highlights multi-sited subaltern stories of human-tiger co-belonging in deltaic worlds provides an opportunity to contribute theoretically and methodologically to this emerging literature that calls for justice beyond humanity.

This article attunes to feminist geographer Lahiri-Dutt’s (2014) call to move beyond land-based theories of justice in mangrove worlds of the Sundarbans. As authors writing across worlds, we strive to be more than ‘native informants for first-world intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other’ in the Global North (Spivak, 1994: 79). Our intention in illuminating tiger atmospheres is to avoid the injustices perpetuated by dominant western scientific approaches to conservation and argue for an intersectional multispecies justice built from subaltern human and animal perspectives. To situate subaltern stories in the Sundarbans or ‘beautiful forest’ (named after the Sundari tree) we draw on embodied observations, photographs, 31 interviews and two focus groups (in Bengali) with impoverished, racialised low-caste Hindus (Dalits/Scheduled Castes), Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) and Muslim forest-dwellers in India and Bangladesh. Participation was negotiated through established networks with local NGOs as well as women’s groups.

Data for this article stems from the authors’ longstanding ethnographic works in the Sundarbans region that was conducted in multiple stages over a span of seven years from December 2013 to May 2020. Villages include Jhalakahli and Nabu Bunia (Gabura Union/Island) south of Khulna (Bangladesh) and Beguyakhali, Satjelia, Kultali Teropatharpara and Kishorimohanpur, south of Kolkata (India). Author 1 took photographs and engaged in informal conversations in January 2016 in the Indian Sundarbans which was followed up with telephonic/email communication. She also reflects on photographs and stories of tigers from her childhood. Author 2 made two trips to the Bangladeshi Sundarbans and explored the impact of the devastating cyclone Aila (in 2009) on remote rural communities. He listened to stories of human-tiger encounters and forest rituals from residents including tiger-widows in two villages of the Gabura Union. During four trips over six months from October 2018 to March 2019, Author 3 and co-researchers encountered three events of tigers entering the village of Kishorimohanpur near the boundary of the reserve forest in the Indian Sundarbans. In November 2019, Author 3 conducted interviews in villages of the Indian Sundarbans following the arrival of the unseasonal Cyclone Bulbul. Many of these villages were washed away when super cyclone Amphan arrived in May 2020 with wind speeds of over 180km/hr. This pre-monsoon cyclone that arrived during the Covid-19 pandemic caused widespread devastation.

The images, interviews, focus groups and diary entries were thematically explored to draw attention to the affective nature of real and imagined tiger encounters. Rather than speak for the tiger or engage in anthropomorphism by providing the tiger with a voice, embodied observations, images and stories provided the opportunity to speak with the tiger (Morton et al., 2020). There were some difficulties negotiating participation by women, in particular widows but as Bengali-speaking researchers from deltaic Bengal, trust was built over several phases of fieldwork. We also engaged in embodied observations, as a diasporic Indian-Christian woman in Australia, diasporic Bangladeshi-Muslim man in New Zealand and Hindu woman in India. Our intergenerational cultural memories of racism, trauma and loss that emerge from the inhabitation of subaltern worlds within and beyond the western academy provides personal insights into hierarchies of belonging driven by religion, caste, gender and geopolitical border tensions that frame human and animal bodies as ‘out of place’ in India and Bangladesh.

The article has three main sections. In the first section, we situate the Royal Bengal Tiger within the mangrove habitat of the Sundarbans and wildlife conservation programs. In the second section, we develop a conceptual understanding of tiger atmospheres that make a modest contribution to calls for justice that centre animal cognition, sentience, exclusion, intrinsic value and wellbeing (Despret, 2016; Garner, 2013; Giraud, 2019; Nussbaum, 2018). Centering the tiger in the Sundarbans, we acknowledge the difficulties in answering philosopher Vinciane Despret (2016) who asks ‘What would animals say if we asked the right questions?’. In her book, an abecedary, J stands for Justice and asks whether justice can be reinvented with animals through a focus on cohabitation rather than moral principles. The third section highlights how tiger atmospheres that are more-than-representational provide a nuanced understanding of cohabitation in a major climatic hotspot.

Situating tiger worlds in the Sundarbans

The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest in the world, a UNESCO heritage listed biosphere reserve, Ramsar wetland as well as transboundary environmental commons in India and Bangladesh that nourishes multispecies worlds. The endangered Royal Bengal Tiger inhabits this ‘largest remaining natural habitat’ (Jalais, 2011: 2) marketed as ‘Tigerland’ by tourist operators, resort owners and national governments keen to lure domestic and international tourists. This watery commons is shared with wading migratory birds, pelicans, the Oliver Ridley Turtle, the Gangetic Dolphin, the Irrawaddy Dolphin, River Terrapin (Batagur baska), langurs, otters, civets and the saltwater crocodile who face the Sixth Mass Extinction event, but lack the charisma of the tiger who symbolises national pride. Biodiversity loss in this ‘major climatic hotspot’ that is affected by sea level rise, erratic rainfall, floods and tropical cyclones is governed by western frameworks of nature and wildlife conservation practices with a fixed agenda advanced by urban elites, the World Bank, UNESCO, the World Wildlife Fund, local NGOs, the Ministry of Local and Rural Development, Bangladesh and the Sundarban Development Board, India (Ghosh et al., 2018:1; Government of Bangladesh, 2017; Government of India, 2002). International non-government organisations (INGOs) and nation states take pride in coordinating tiger conservation programs and highlight the ‘problem’ of climate change in the largest mangrove delta in the world, but they rarely focus on everyday effects such as increasing salinity that affects the availability of fresh drinking water crucial for tiger and human survival. Instead, conservation programs using a linear trajectory of cause-and-effect interactions, invert species hierarchies and reduce local residents to second-class citizens (Barua, 2014; Jalais, 2011; NTCA, 2020).

In Bangladesh, the habitat of the tiger is protected through the demarcation of the Sundarban Reserve Forests (SRF) and in India through the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve Program (Bushra, 2019; Ghosh et al., 2018). Through conservation practices including the electronic tracking of tiger mobilities, 202 tigers were estimated to be inhabiting the Sundarbans in 2019, of which 114 were in Bangladesh and 88 in India (Khan, 2020; NTCA, 2019). In India, the Sundarban Tiger Reserve covers an area of 2585 sq km, governed by Project Tiger launched in 1973 under the 1972 Wildlife Protection Act and administered by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), a statutory body under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. On Global Tiger Day, 29 July 2019, a press release and book launch by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrated the 33% increase in tigers since 2014 (NTCA, 2020), but the multisensory lives of these animals could not be captured by the total count of 2967 tigers.

In this article we decentre western scientific frameworks that focuses on tiger habitat, tiger mobilities and tiger-human conflict through a ‘conceptual orientation’ (Giraud, 2019: 2) as well as methods that focus on tiger atmospheres, co-belonging and intersectional multispecies justice. Our analysis of photographs and stories of encounters is more-than-representational and centres the tiger as a feeling, seeing, thinking body. We show that animal bodies and human bodies learn to attune in ways that illuminate reciprocal relationships and embodied communication that sometimes escape words, but ‘undo and redo each other’ (Despret, 2013: 51). Feminist STS scholar Haraway (2018), however, cautions us that it is hard to acquire a serious and deep understanding of what animals (including companion animals) feel, but ‘mutually felt and lived connection’ through speculative research provides some insights amid ignorance. Haraway (2016; 2018: 68) adopts a feminist approach to speculate about ‘naturalcultural flourishing’ that might unfold through human and non-human ‘generations of earthly kith and kin’. This approach urges us to think of future generations of tigers with whom we are entangled as kin, not in terms of the intimacy and care we might have for animals we see, touch and cuddle. Instead, tigers are like Haraway’s (2018: 88) ‘oddkin’ or Ginn’s (2014) garden slugs that might be distant or produce detachment, but nevertheless entangle us in webs of response-ability for ‘multispecies reproductive justice’. Such justice is necessary when animals seem to disappear or become extinct through human intrusion, evident when Nishi, a woman from Bangladesh who lives in Jhalakahli says, ‘Bagh (the tiger) seldom comes to the village. It is us, we are the intruders, we cross the canal first to enter the forest’.

We hold on to these understandings of justice as we explore tiger atmospheres inflected by ancient histories of Brahminical supremacy, postcolonial state violence/racism and more recent Hindu/Muslim ultranationalism that continue to dehumanise minority bodies in India and Bangladesh (Sengupta, 2018; Sharma, 2020). In this article, encounters and stories privilege those identified as inferior in colour (nimnoborno), caste (nimnonborgo) and religion including displaced and dispossessed Dalits (former untouchables), Adivasis (Indigenous peoples such as Oraons, Mundas and Midnapuris), low-caste Hindus, Muslims and Christians. We seek to move beyond frames that continue to emphasise their low literacy level, position below the poverty line and limited access to basic infrastructure such as sanitation, electricity and water (Ghosh et al., 2018; Bushra, 2019). Their ecological intimacies with mangrove worlds and their heightened attunement to the tiger as a sentient subject can be valued in ways that might provide more than precarious employment in state tourism and forest departments. For example, young men whose low caste and/or religion are identifiable by their surnames (such as Gayen and Mondal) or phenotype, use their sharpened senses to sight and track tigers, wild boar, deer and langurs that move swiftly through thick mangroves, as well as saltwater crocodiles (kumir) that bask on muddy river-banks soaking up the winter sun. Their storytelling is an ethical practice or a ‘lively ethography’ that give ‘vitality, presence’ and ‘thickness’ to multispecies worlds (van Dooren and Rose, 2016: 85). In the next section, we explore these stories that centre the tiger as a sentient subject who thinks and feels, through a focus on atmospheres.

Tiger atmospheres

We conceptualise tiger atmospheres in terms of affective intensities that centre the lifeworlds of the animal. These atmospheres provide an insight into their lived bodily experience, the connectedness of their bodies and the situational nature of ethics (Massumi, 2002). Although there are no stable definitions of affect, for the purpose of this article, our conceptualisation focuses on the capacity for activity and responsiveness (Haraway, 2016). Affect, therefore, connects and circulates between bodies in space–time and involves passing of a threshold by bodies in their capacity to affect and be affected (Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2004). Such a change in capacity can result in an ‘excess’, a ‘perpetual bodily remainder’ (Massumi, 2002: 215) that escapes conscious thought and reflection, but has the potential to contribute to ethical human animal connections.

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, however, triggered anxious interventions about declining tiger numbers by state as well INGOs, rather than ethical connections. Administrative states began to regularly monitor the health of tigers (dry cough, laboured breathing) after a tiger contracted Covid-19 at the Bronx Zoo in New York, one of the most humane American zoos with a ‘rich diverse natural habitat’ (Nussbaum, 2018: 1). The NTCA is also holding regular teleconferences to review the protection of tigers and human-wildlife conflict. Conservation programs that focus on the tiger’s milieu and its affective intensities centre nonhuman charisma and lively capital through an atmospheric politics that intervenes in the animal’s lifeworlds (Barua, 2019; Lorimer et al., 2019). Further, claims that tiger sightings have increased resonate with the global ‘nature’s comeback’ or ‘nature healing’ narrative amid the Covid-19 pandemic that produces ambivalent affective responses (Bosworth, 2020: 11; Gardner, 2020). Indrani, a 25-year old Dalit woman from Satjelia, however, takes Author 3 on a walk to show her the pug marks (Figure 1) of a hunting tiger in the deep, sticky mud. Rather than anxiety, Indrani highlights ‘spatial thinking’ and spatial mastery that exceeds humans and enables tigers to ‘navigate through tremendous environmental complexities’ (Nussbaum, 2018: 5) in search for dwindling supplies of food and fresh water.

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Figure 1.

Pug marks along a brick path in the mangrove forest. Source: Author 3.

This extreme attentiveness embodied by local people witnesses and describes, rather than analyses and explains - it is more-than-representational (Despret, 2016; Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2011; van Dooren and Rose, 2016). The focus is on affects that bodies such as animals (in this case the tiger) might be capable of or how they might hold on to their existence through connections of ‘embodied empathy’, which resonates with themes in the emerging research on animal atmospheres (Despret, 2013: 51; Despret, and Meuret, 2016; Lorimer et al., 2019).

In conceptualising animal atmospheres, Lorimer et al., (2019) draw on western intellectual traditions within more-than-representational geography, in particular, the work of Anderson (2009) and Bissell (2018) as well as philosophers Bohme, Spinoza, Deleuze and Massumi. Bohme (1993) describes atmospheres as having different tones and feelings – a haze that fills space. Anderson (2009: 79; 2014) argues that atmospheres ‘are perpetually forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing as bodies enter into relation with one another’. For Bissell (2018), such relations produce major as well as minor atmospheres that are fleeting, coexist and register as affective intensities in a particular place. These atmospheres are hard to categorise or name, except when they change the way encounters unfold; they become palpable through bubbling up, curdling and slicing atmospheres that acquire stability during encounters (Bissell, 2018).

In the Sundarbans atmospheres are palpable and envelop both human and tigers in ways that dissolve their fixed bodily boundaries - bodies (both human and more-than-human) are produced and subtly transformed through what is happening around. Human and tiger bodies emerge through their different tendencies and capacities to perform actions and register sensations. Inspired by these conceptual understandings of porous bodies and dynamic atmospheres within more-than-representational Geography that highlight events, actions, feelings and emotions, Lorimer et al., (2019: 27) argue for more attention to animals as ‘subjects or receptors of atmospheres’. In other words, the coexistence of tigers and humans in the Sundarbans produce atmospheres that have ‘a particular feel’, are spatial and have affective intensities that are hard to pin down; they are sensed as vague, diffuse, ephemeral and constantly changing.

In this article, thinking with atmospheres enables us to move away from reducing the tiger body to its representation as a national animal who has historically symbolised power, prestige and royalty – the tiger is a thinking-feeling subject with agency. Therefore, while tiger hunting was a princely as well as colonial sport that made the animal killable (Burton and Mawani, 2020; Sramek, 2006), the atmospheres sensed when we ascribe qualities of ferocity, savagery, cunning, silence, stealth and beauty are yet unknown. It is possible that the endangered tiger who is managed through bureaucratic conservation programs is trapped in an atmospheric politics that centres the animal as lively capital that produces nonhuman charisma (Barua, 2019) or a necropolitics that positions it as an unruly subject that is killable (Margulies, 2019a; Mathur, 2014). The stories that follow, however, provide possibilities for listening and attuning to the lived experience of tigers in the Anthropocene, an era that has arrived due to the vengeance of humanism and ‘extractionist, exterminationist colonialism and capitalism’ (Haraway, 2018: 69). In the following sections, an atmospheric politics that attunes to real and imagined encounters with tigers though subaltern stories produce novel insights into exploring co-belonging and multispecies justice in mangrove worlds.

Atmospheres of empathy (karuna), respect (srodhya), fear (bhaya), greed (lobh)

Male forest rangers the authors met sight, track and follow the tiger (bagh) who treads silently on liquid mud, swims swiftly across turbulent tidal creeks and crosses sovereign borders. Local and international ecotourists follow the tiger too by boarding boats - noukas, dinghies, and motorboats (bhootbhooties). As Author 1 and tourists from the Sundarban Tiger Camp in India board a boat at Waxpol Ghat, Dayapur and sail slowly along the rippling Gosaba river as well as narrow tidal inlets on a wintry January morning in 2016, Kalyan a tourist guide who grew up in the Sundarbans narrated many stories. Stories of crocodiles and tigers, spiritual beings as well as Sir Daniel Mckinnon, a Scottish settler and activist who aimed to establish a utopia that focused on equality and justice (Ghosh et al., 2018).

As they alight on the muddy banks of the Sudhanyakali Mangrove Park, Kalyan points to the Forest Department signboard that monitors tiger mobility– the presence of tigers is evoked through changing numbers rather than the corporeal, visible animal body (Figure 2). The tiger had not been sighted for more than three months, but they climb the Sudhanyakali watchtower and stay hopeful. Kalyan is eager to make the trip to the Sundarbans worthwhile, particularly when it is quite common for visitors to question each other at the ghat (river-bank) saying ‘bagh dekhecho’ (have you seen a tiger) and the answer is always ‘na’ or no. This sensing of the absence of the tiger that circulates disappointment changes with the sudden appearance of the tiger body and an encounter that circulates atmospheres of empathy.

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Figure 2.

Tiger numbers, Sudhanyakali Mangrove Park. Source: Author 1.

Atmospheres of empathy (karuna) slice the event

The foggy wintry atmosphere is sliced by human-tiger encounters that unfold along interlaced tidal creeks among those considered lucky by forest rangers. In the winter of 2019, Amy and Daniel, senior citizens and Christians from western India who had worked for several years to empower Dalits and Adivasis were delighted to see a tiger on their holiday in the Sundarbans.

Amy said: ‘the tiger emerged from the forest wandered and waddled on a large sandbar, immersed its body in the narrow creek and waited’ (personal/email communication). Perhaps pleasurable atmospheres of awe and wonder expressed by Amy mingled with animal atmospheres of threat sensed by the tiger that can be traced to sedimented memories of sport hunting and more recent practices of poaching (Figure 3). Photographing endangered wildlife in the Sundarbans has replaced sport hunting, but has positive outcomes if the tiger is more than an ‘object of wonder’ but also a ‘subject of justice’ (Nussbaum, 2018: 13) who ‘lingers in the minds of her beholders’ (Doubleday, 2017: 33). The tiger lingered in Amy and Daniel’s memory.

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Figure 3.

A tiger emerges from the thick mangrove forest, January 2019. Source: Photo by Amy.

Lingering atmospheres that centre the tiger are familiar to Rani, an Indigenous woman in Kishorimohanpur village in the Indian Sundarbans who developed partial affinities with hungry tigers whose food sources such as deer, wild boar and monkey had dwindled. She told stories of how in the search for food, older tigers who were unable to hunt chewed and tore nylon nets along the forest edge, swam across tidal creeks and entered villages looking for cattle. Did this tiger stray because he/she was disoriented, old, injured, diseased, hungry, a vulnerable victim, or just engaging in play?.

In exploring tigers, animal play and animal politics, Massumi (2014: 76, 78) argues that the ‘spectacle is not monolithic’ but a distributed and relational field of activity that is situational and produces sympathy-sym which is ‘together’ and ‘pathy’ to be affected. Inspired by Ruyer, he argues that sympathy unfolds as ‘transindividual immediacy’ (Massumi, 2014: 77) triggered by an event that dissolves subject/subject or subject/object boundaries. What is produced through the event are atmospheres of excess, or intensities of enthusiasm of the tiger body that are situational and relational. When translated into categorical human emotions this intensity is contained, devitalised, politicised and becomes ‘faded empathy’ (Massumi, 2014: 81).

Despret (2013) distances her understandings of embodied empathy from faded or romantic affinities with animals. She argues that the meaning of empathy shifts in different situations and is enacted through ‘embodied choreography’ (Despret, 2013:59) that shows partial affinities. Rather than victimise or deanimate animals, Despret (2016: 80) calls for moving beyond normative understandings of justice by attuning to practices such as animal play that enact principles of ‘justice with the grace of joy’. Rather than anthromorphism that polices the boundary between animal and humans, the atmospheres produced through unpredictable tiger play as suggested by Amy and Daniel is an event of metamorphosis that draws attention to ‘empathy without pathos’ and the changing nature of what it is to be ‘animated’ (Despret, 2013: 59; Latour, 2016: 10).

Co-existing major and minor atmospheres of respect (srodhya), fear (bhaya), greed (lobh)

Dalits and low-caste Hindu women in the Indian Sundarbans rarely refer to the tiger by its generic term which is Bagh (Bengali for tiger) but show respect by referring to the animal as ‘mama’ or maternal uncle – a colloquialism for a ‘not-too-close yet not-too-far relative’ (interview). They would never ‘dream’ of harming the animal or the kind-hearted Mama given their familiarity with Bagh Mama, a character in Bengali children’s stories. Therefore, when Reena’s husband ventures into the forest to collect honey, she tells her toddlers that the tiger is her brother as well as their caring ‘Mama’ (uncle) and would therefore not harm their father. Ajay, a 10-year old boy spends his free time drawing images of the tiger. Meera, his 35-year old mother who lives in Kultali near the Tiger Reserve and considered an ‘outsider’ in the Sundarbans (she grew up in suburban Kolkata), finds it hard to understand why tigers are described as ‘godly’, ‘blessed’ and ‘highly respected’. Among Muslim women in Bangladesh like Aleya, who know the ‘marks of the tiger well’, it is hope rather than respect and fear that is circulated by the tiger subject. She said:

Before when the Tiger would take our people, we didn't get the dead body and there was a hope that some day they might come back, but now if they are taken by this man-tiger you just wait at the bend of canals, the dead bodies will float back.

As a Muslim whose family had converted from Hinduism decades ago, Aleya is perceived as low-caste or ‘abadi’, but is outspoken about the circulation of fear through greed or interventionist conservation practices by ‘man-tigers’ or pirates, poachers and cruel forest officials who devastate lively forest atmospheres sensed by tigers.

Women in Sundarbans (Indian and Bangladesh) seldom use the colonial, masculinist trope of the fierce ‘man-eater’ evident in contemporary media representations as well as Jim Corbett’s best-selling book Man-eaters of the Kumaon written in 1944 (Crown and Doubleday, 2017). Instead, women like Indrani and Rani who ‘do the jungle’ and engage in risky work are familiar with the figure of ‘Ma Durga’, the powerful Hindu goddess who rides rather than hunts ferocious wild animals such as the lion or tiger, as well as her avatar Kali (Burton and Mawani, 2020; Jalais, 2011). Hunting the tiger, however, was a princely sport and symbolised state power and masculinity among Indian Mughal emperors and Sultans (Burton and Mawani, 2020). Burton and Mawani (2020: 6) argue that while animals were prominent in Mughal, Qing and Egyptian dynasties, during the Victorian period, the British used wild animals such as the tiger to extend their empires and advance imperial fantasies of ‘racial, cultural and species supremacy’.

Images of the tiger as a majestic animal stalked and killed on shikars (hunts) by privileged men echo in the postcolonial present. For example, in the tea plantations of Assam (eastern India) where Author 1’s father worked, stories of the tiger moving stealthily at dark and attacking vulnerable women as well as children who slept outdoors were quite common. Atmospheres of joy and festivity were evident when British hunters assisted by Indigenous trackers more attuned to the tiger’s movements killed the ferocious ‘man-eater’. Co-existing atmospheres of fear but also courage and triumph in encounters with ‘wild’ animals materialised through trophies such as tiger heads and pelts that adorned the walls of bungalows as well as the officers’ clubhouse. Author 1, Lobo (2020) has memories of looking through the family photo album – a dead tiger encircled by British tea-estate managers, shikaris (often Indigenous or low-caste Hindu trackers), Indian officers, plantation workers and children (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

A ‘man-eater’ killed, Assam. Source: Author 1 family album.

Through the practice of tiger hunting, white settlers and entrepreneurs from a distant land, emerged as benevolent colonial heroes as they engaged in ‘protecting’ vulnerable brown men, women and children. But these privileged men also contributed to building the profits of large international companies that focused on resource extraction, reduced the habitat of the tiger and its capacity to hunt for food (Burton and Mawani, 2020). Burton and Mawani (2020) argue that in spite of the 1981 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the bones, blood and body parts of tiger valued for its medicinal properties continue to produce economic and environmental pressures.

Rani, a young Indigenous woman in the Indian Sundarbans is perhaps not aware of these colonial stories as she ventures into the forest, or moves skilfully on the slippery, sticky muddy banks along the riverside to fish or collect crabs and prawn seedlings or tiny young prawns. This risky and hard work in hot, humid or rainy conditions provides high monetary returns for women in Kishorimohanpur, a village well connected by roads to Kolkata where the demand for crabs is high, but the risk is tiger attack. Women like Zeenat who engage in crab collection in Bangladesh provide clues to the lived experiences of tigers when they joke about fear:

We' re not scared of the tiger anymore because there are not many tigers left. I don't believe that there is any Tiger because of all these people.

Tiger-widows in the Indian Sundarbans live in Bidhobapara or tiger-widow neighbourhoods. In the village Terotharpara, women focused on atmospheres of fear sensed by tigers due to ‘thousands of trawlers’ or commercial ventures that ply the narrow tidal creeks –the mangrove ecosystem no longer had God’s blessings (Ghosh et al., 2018: 18). They highlighted how the catch of small fish in the shallow water of inland ponds and creeks had decreased. Mumtaz Begum a Muslim woman and Shoma, a Hindu woman are tiger widows who moved to Beguyakhali and Satjelia village to care for their extended families - they spoke of the decrease in honey and fruits in the buffer zone of the Tiger Reserve. During the honey collection season from April to June, their husbands were forced to wander deeper into the forest beyond the state-imposed buffer zone to make a living. Tigers from the reserve forest also transgress the Buffer Zone when they wander into villages hoping to find food. These dual transgressions destabilise the postcolonial state’s forest conservation policies that rely on western scientific understandings of wildlife and border politics.

Aleya, a tiger widow from Nabu Bunia village of Gabura Union draws attention to the fear sensed by tigers as well as other animals and birds. She attributes this to dwindling food and freshwater sources and is nostalgic about atmospheres of mutual empathy and respect. She said:

In the past, the Tiger and men walked side by side. There was a saying that the fauna, the men, the birds they used to drink water from the same bank. But now that mutuality is gone…engine boats, new fishermen, tourists, there is so much noise – everybody out there, the animals, the birds, all are now scared. There are deer hunters who are eating the Tiger’s food, so that mutuality has been long gone. Before we had faith in each other. We heard, in the past, when a group of honey gatherers (moualis) came across the Tiger on their way, the group would stop, the leader would look at the eyes of the Tiger to greet and let it go on its way first. Don't know how much of it is true, but there was something, now lost in the forest.

In the past islanders who entered the buffer zone of the forest to earn a living, would show respect by never using the name of the tiger and performing rituals of celebration to ensure good luck. Nafisa, a young Muslim woman from Bangladesh said:

Fifteen years ago, my father and his brother would have a week-long preparation before entering the forest. You have to bathe in the river to cleanse yourself to enter the forest – you never know if it is your last visit, last journey (sesh jyatra). You can't eat fish, you have to rub your body with clay so that you smell like the forest, you have to tie ribbons on trees on your way to the forest.

These rituals keep alive the multiple personalities of individual tigers and provide insights to the animal’s keen sense of smell. In other words, tigers can discern between the clayey smell of the forest and the strong smell of fish. When men who are fishers, wood collectors, leaf collectors, and honey collectors fail to return from the forest, the ribbons on trees enable villagers to trace the path taken. But their widows, describe them as killed by poverty or ‘taken by the forest - a forest that feeds them, has a stomach and takes back’ (interview) when hungry. Mamta, a 28-year old woman who lived in Sajnekhali (Indian Sundarbans) narrated how the balance in animal-mangrove-human relational worlds had been disturbed and the tiger sensed fear or felt threatened because younger men failed to show respect for ‘wild’ animals. Ayesha, a 20-year old Muslim woman who has a son, dependent ill parents and a brother-in-law whose leg was amputated after an attack said, ‘those who are killed by tiger are blessed as they can go away without disease or old age’. The tiger saves them from the suffering and poverty in human worlds.

Mainstream western/national media and documentary photographers represent women whose husbands are killed by tigers in particular ways - they are tiger widows (Bagh-bidhoba) or impoverished victims who lead lonely and miserable lives (Dhar, 2017; Gomes, 2014). Tiger widows were often excluded from village life, considered ‘evil’ ‘witches’ or ‘unlucky’ and sometimes committed suicide. They were reluctant to talk, and responded in an indignant manner to newspaper reporters, forest officers and researchers keen to hear their stories about the effects of climate change. After cyclone Aila (in 2009) hit Bangladesh, Author 2 visited Nabu Bunia village (Gabura) popularly known as ‘tiger widow village’ because of the large number of tiger widows who live there and asked why their husbands had ventured into the forest. Nafisa, a young Muslim woman disrupted familiar stereotypes of tiger widows when she was outspoken about the forest that nourishes both tigers and humans. She said:

Do we have anything to talk about with you, literate people from towns? You won't even understand. Our men, if they cannot go to the jungle for a month, they look mad, you cannot look at their eyes, their eyes become lifeless, like unnatural, they look drunk, seems like they are possessed. My sister in law’s man went to the town for work, after a few months, he returned half-mad. Some tell that the forest calls them…

When a tiger enters the village of Kishorimohanpur near the boundary of the reserve forest in the Indian Sundarbans, Author 3 wrote about how she was sheltered by local people such as Udit, a young crab collector, Horen a 55-year-old boat-maker and Tara, a young woman who identified as Scheduled Caste (Dalit). She said:

We were rushed into the islanders’ homes and stayed indoors for 5-6 hours while the Forest Department officials tracked the tiger, incapacitated the animal, took her away and released her into the forest. We spent the hours of our own captivity in talking to Udit, Horen and Tara at length about their lives and man-animal conflicts. Udit showed his wounds and described himself as the ‘lucky one’ in contrast to three women and two men who lost their lives (Author 3 Diary, 2019).

Author 3 and the research team who had arrived from Kolkata took shelter and huddled together in the small house for several hours while the tiger roamed nearby. They highlighted that the tiger was hungry and looking for cattle often kept in outdoor sheds. Doubleday (2017) in her research on Machli, an ageing tigress who was dying of starvation in the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan, India argues that the tiger’s presence stirred ethical debates on relationships of care and empathy. As a wild animal who had featured in many documentaries, Machli had a celebrity status and was fed, unlike tigers that are the focus of this article. Such relationships with individual tigers/tigresses were not evident among forest dwellers we interviewed. In fact, as this tiger event unfolded, the islanders alerted Forest Department officials who usually respond by tracking down and tranquilising the tiger. Forest dwellers in Kishorimohanpur were aware of what would eventually happen to this particular tiger even though they had not seen the animal, did not know the name or sex; the tiger would be tranquilised, examined and released into the forest after the insertion of a Radio or Global Positioning System (GPS). de Silva and Srinivasan (2019) in their exploration of human-wildlife conflict in Sri Lanka, argue for more-than-human approaches that might reframe such encounters in terms of habitat loss as well as coexistence. Atmospheres of empathy, respect and fear sensed by tigers and highlighted in in-depth interviews provide different perspectives to co-belonging and possibilities for multispecies justice.

Cultural myths: bubbling atmospheres of trust (biswas) and humility (nomrota)

Mangrove worlds of the Sundarbans inspire climate-fiction or cli-fi by novelists such as Amitava Ghosh (2011) that entangle Bengali legends and cultural myths (Dasgupta, 2020). Aleya, a Muslim woman in Bangladesh is nostalgic about folk theatre (jatra pala) that performs these Bengali cultural myths and multispecies stories. She said:

Before, in our villages we used to have jatra-pala (theatre) on the stories of the forest, the tiger and the Bonbibi; that was not only recreation, but that was how you used to teach the young people about the forest, the customs that you maintain with the forest, its stories, but now these are rare.

The story of a deer, Bonbibi, Goddess and guardian of the forest and Dokhin Rai a hybrid tiger and Brahmin sage (highest Hindu caste who are priests by virtue of their birth) focuses on atmospheres of greed (lobh) that dissipate when trust (biswas) and humility (nomrota) bubble up. The story written in Bonbibi Johuranamah (Chronicles of Bon Bibi’s Greatness), a 19th-century text by Abdur Rahman using the Urdu style of writing from right to left which is different from the Bengali style, is illustrated on the exhibition walls at the Sundarban Tiger Reserve (Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary) visited by Author 1, but there are several interpretations of this cultural myth.

Bonbibi was nurtured by a deer in the forest, after her mother Gulalbibi remarried and made the choice to care for her male twin Shah Jongoli. At that time the country (desh) was ruled by Dokhin Rai who destroyed multispecies trust by preying on tigers and humans. He emerged as a master/rakkhosh (demon) of the Sundarban or badabon with its spirits and living things; his greed and anger spread terror. It was then that Allah asked Bonbibi to be the guardian of the forest Therefore, later when Bonbibi’s father Ibrahim searched the forest for his first wife and children, Bonbibi called out to her brother Shah Jongoli to accompany her to Mecca and Medina. They received the blessings of Fatima and brought back holy earth to the ‘land of the eighteen tides’ (athero bhatir desh) (Jalais, 2011), curdling major atmospheres of multispecies greed in the Sundarbans. But atmospheres of humility (nomrota) bubble up when Dukhe, a young boy and a honey collector in the forest was rescued by Bonbibi. He promised to always enter the forest with a pobitro mon (pure heart) and khali hate (empty handed) (Jalais, 2011). This cultural myth is central to ethical thought and action that focuses on animals including tigers as recipients of justice (Nussbaum, 2018).

Moualis (honey collectors), bawalis (wood collectors), golpatakar (gol leaf collectors) who are Hindus and Muslims pray at the shrine of Bonbibi and the ‘Tiger-God’ Dokhin Rai. The tiger’s mouth is wide open, sharp teeth are exposed and the animal has a ferocious expression and muscular body (Participant observation, Figure 5). Many islanders in the transboundary environmental commons know this story well. As Author 1 travelled by boat along the tidal creeks of the Indian Sundarbans, Kalyan the tourist guide told stories (golpos) of these humananimal beings. This golpo is a multispecies cultural myth that intersects with caste, class and religion and creates interference patterns that unsettle greed, arrogance and superiority. Jalais (2011, p. 65) argues that these stories show that ‘saltwater is thicker than blood’ and that forest dwellers are matir manush (people of the mud/earth). Tourists and diasporic visitors (including Author 1) who live in tourist huts on the edges of the Reserve Forests attune to the cultural myth when Bon Bibi’r Palagaan (narrative folk ballad) is performed by 30 troupes on several islands, particularly during the peak tourist season of September to March (Nath, 2020). Local people eagerly watch these performances on makeshift stages near Bonbibi temples. Anita, a Dalit woman who plays Bonbibi in these musical dramas survived the cyclone Amphan by hiding under the bed (charpai), holding on to her ‘precious belongings’ and praying to the forest deity. Like Anita, generations of performers who are socio-economically disadvantaged or racialised by virtue of their class, caste and religion illuminate atmospheres of multispecies trust and humility (Nath, 2020).

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Figure 5.

Shrine to Bonbibi, Indian Sundarbans. Source: Author 1.

While western intellectual traditions draw attention to the Anthropocene as a new era where ‘man’ has emerged as a geologic force, within Hindu traditions this is the Age of Strife or Kaliyuga (Lobo, 2018; 2019). Rather than establishing some truth, the multispecies relations embedded in the golpo (story) in fragile tidal environments threatened by climate change unsettles human-animal hierarchies that frame everyday practices. A jatra performer focuses on the world of animals where it is necessary to provide tigers space; to be killed is to be chosen.

When we go into the forest, we think, ‘Ja hober hober, sheta porey bhaba jaabey. Jodi phiri toh bhalo, na phiri toh ki kora jabey?’ (Whatever has to happen will happen. If I return home, it would be good. If I don’t, nothing can be done about it). When you see a wild animal, you should not fight but move out of its way. If a tiger has chosen you, only Ma Bonbibi can save you.

Atmospheres of multispecies trust, however, are churned when there are climate disasters. But the figure of the animal threatened by starvation lives on in dramas based on cultural myths in major cities as well as villages (Nath, 2020). Author 1 witnessed these dramas performed at night by Adivasis (Oraons and Mundas) men and women at the Sundarban Tiger Camp, India.

Tiger atmospheres, co-belonging and justice

The watery worlds of the Sundarbans situate our grounded exploration of tiger atmospheres that inform the possibilities for co-belonging and multispecies justice. Recent devastating events such as bushfires and cyclones as well as the slower imperceptible impacts of climate change have sparked thoughts once again on the necessity to rethink justice beyond the human (Celermajer et al., 2020). Inspired by feminist political theorist Iris Marion Young (1990: 170) who develops a pluralist conception of justice, Celenmajer et al., (2020) call for multispecies justice that decentres humans and is more than extensionist in including animals. The emerging literature on interspecies and multispecies entanglements has drawn attention to intimate ethical engagements and relational understandings that decentre human mastery (Celermajer et al., 2020; Despret, 2016; Haraway, 2016; Kirksey, 2012). These thoughts on mastery that question liberal understandings of the humanist subject are yet to engage with subaltern stories and animal atmospheres in explorations of co-belonging and multispecies justice.

This article builds on land-based theories of justice and highlights the importance of subaltern stories and the work of subaltern academics in the western academy. Stories from the more-than-urban Sundarbans advance the flow and morphing of thinking on ‘wet theory’ developed by Appadurai and Breckenridge (2009) that focused on hybrid land and water city environments of Mumbai. In such watery environments, ‘the ruthless tyranny of context’ makes footing uncertain and humble; facts are always open to negotiation (Appadurai and Breckenridge, 2009: ix). This article with its focus on subaltern storytelling with animal worlds amid disasters driven by anthropogenic climate change shows that water/land binaries as well as human/non-human divides noted by Lahiri-Dutt (2014) that are kept in place by western scientific frameworks momentarily dissolve in tidal worlds. Therefore, while scientists learn about the biogeographies of animals through interventionist conservation practices that include tranquilization, electronic tagging and drone surveillance, this article highlights storytelling in blurred contact zones where local people speak with, are entangled with and belong together with tigers in mangrove worlds. As subaltern peoples differentiated by virtue of gender, religion, caste, age (including widows) and nation, their stories of everyday human-animal enactments in tidal worlds illuminate justice as a composing, ‘gathering concern’ (Haraway, 2018: 68) amid the shared urgencies of climate change.

Our theoretical and empirical exploration of tiger atmospheres provide insights into ambivalent connections of co-belonging in watery worlds. Atmospheres of fear (bhaya) and greed (lobh) co-exist with atmospheres of humility (nomrota), compassion (karuna), respect (srodhya) and trust (biswas) in mangrove worlds. This focus on major and minor atmospheres with diverse tones and feelings that fill space and become palpable advances contemporary theoretical understandings of animal atmospheres. Following Lorimer et al., (2019) we agree that the attention to the social, ecological and material umwelt of animals together with practices of attunement and evocation of tiger atmospheres provides possibilities for novel theoretical and empirical engagements. But in exploring postcolonial futures and decolonial ontologies, Asher (2017) cautions us about marginalised knowledges from the Global South that might produce more just conversations on human/nature entanglements, but risks making simplistic claims or representations that fail to be attentive to power relations. While intimacies with individual wild animals that are ageing, injured, caged, trapped or unruly might highlight an atmospheric politics that calls for care or alternatively makes them killable, these differentiated tiger bodies that cohere and solidify as kin or ‘oddkin’ (Haraway, 2018: 88) are subjects of justice even though they were rarely visible to islanders in the Sundarbans. This justice that emerges from co-belonging in mangrove worlds threatened by climate change and biodiversity loss is relational, but also affective, performative and immersive.

Highlights