Communities in a ‘Protected’ Urban Space and Conservation Politics in Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park

Abstract

Rapid but uncontrolled economic growth, unstructured working class neighbourhood, unplanned policies of the government, etc., have changed the contours of the emergent city life and its inhabitants in the recent decades. The urban elite interest of a pristine neighbourhood, which is fused with that of the state, has often tried to ‘conserve’ environment with the help of ‘legitimate’ tools like Public Interest Litigation (PIL). Through an ethnographic study, the paper manifests conditions under which the politics of conserving Protected Areas (PAs) operates not only in the village forests but also in cities, in highly inequitable and fabricated ways. It also examines how, in the absence of any established land rights in the cities, due to lack of any particular generational roots of cultural identity, the marginalized population structure within the PAs in Mumbai constitute and establish themselves as a ‘community’ in itself to prevent themselves from getting confined or trapped within discourses of indigenous novelty and cultural belongingness.