Elephant taking the lion's share: Political ecology of elephant conservation and human-elephant conflict in Eastern India

Abstract

This article explores the more-than-human political ecology of human-elephant conflict in North Bengal, India, by emphasizing Asian elephants' (Elephas maximus) agency within a complex conservation landscape. Through a combination of ethnographic fieldwork, environmental history analysis, and camera traps, this article examines the dynamic and often contentious relationships between elephants and humans throughout precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods to comprehend the current complexities. We challenge the dominant conservation narratives that represent elephants as mere victims or as symbolic species, and instead frame them as political actors who adapt to, co-create, and subvert the socio-ecological realities of this shared space. Elephants in North Bengal intentionally adapt to human activities of 'weak' retaliation, modify local agricultural practices, and strategically breach electric fences to access better nutrition—behaviors reflecting cultural learning, adaptive intelligence, and interspecies negotiation. Their heightened status under the contemporary conservation regime has contributed to uneven political geographies, wherein the less-than-human local communities experience increased crop depredation, property damage, and human fatalities, frequented with unfair compensation or poor representation in decision-making. This article highlights the historical intertwining and mutual constitution of elephant and human agencies, shaped by their shared experiences of subordination, displacement, resistance, and protection. It advocates for a shift in the conservation framework—from human exceptionalism and spatial binaries to models that balance power asymmetries, relational ontologies, and multispecies justice. Recognizing the elephant's subjective agency is crucial for developing more empathetic human-elephant conflict strategies and for restoring socio-ecological balance in a landscape that is becoming increasingly politicized against the local residents.