After spending nearly four decades wandering through India’s forests, wetlands, grasslands and mountains with a camera slung over my shoulder, I have come to believe that every landscape tells two stories. One belongs to the animals that have lived there for millennia and the other belongs to humans who increasingly lay claim to the same space. Somewhere between these parallel narratives lies the growing phenomenon we call human-wildlife conflict.
I have read ample books that examine this conflict through the lenses of ecology, wildlife biology, conservation policy and protected area management. Interspecies Negotiations: Human–Wildlife Conflict in Indian Literature, edited by Susan Haris and Anu Pande, takes a remarkably different path. Instead of asking how wildlife behaves, it asks how humans have imagined wildlife through literature. The result is a stimulating, beautifully conceived anthology that reminds us that before conservation becomes science, it is first a matter of culture, ethics and imagination.
From the very first chapter, I realised this was no ordinary academic volume. Rather than drowning the reader in statistics, casualty figures or management prescriptions. The essays invite us into a rich literary landscape where elephants, tigers, birds, wolves and other creatures emerge not as symbols or metaphors but as living beings with agency, memory and purpose. The contributors challenge the comfortable belief that humans alone occupy the centre of every story. Instead, they gently but convincingly reposition wildlife as fellow inhabitants sharing an increasingly fragmented homeland.
That idea resonated deeply with me. Over the years, while photographing leopards in Rajasthan, elephants in the Nilgiris, Cranes in North India and countless birds in rapidly shrinking wetlands, I have often ruminated. Whether the Human-Wildlife conflict we witness is less about animals entering human spaces than about humans steadily erasing theirs. This anthology repeatedly returns to that uncomfortable truth. Ample photographs or illustrations would have give greater punch to the narration, which is missing in the book.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its extraordinary geographical and cultural sweep. The essays travel effortlessly from the elephant lore of Kerala to the forests of Northeast India, from the mystical mangroves of the Sundarbans to the stark landscapes of Ladakh and the pastoral traditions of Kashmir. Every chapter demonstrates that coexistence has never been uniform across India. It has always been shaped by local beliefs, folklore, language and history. The diversity of voices makes the volume as much a celebration of India’s cultural landscapes as its ecological nuances.
What impressed me equally was the editors’ success in bringing together scholars from literature, ecology, environmental humanities and cultural studies. Such interdisciplinarity enriches every chapter without making the book lose its central focus. The message becomes increasingly clear that conservation is not merely about saving species or protecting habitats. It is equally about preserving the stories that teach societies how to live with the natural world.
Several chapters reminded me of conversations I have had with forest dwellers, shepherds, fishermen and village elders across the country. Many continue to view wildlife with a mixture of caution, reverence and acceptance despite the hardships they endure. Modern conservation debates often overlook these nuanced relationships, reducing conflict to numbers. How many people killed, livestock lost or crops damaged. Literature restores the missing emotional landscape. It captures fear without abandoning empathy, loss without surrendering hope.
The anthology also dismantles one of the most persistent myths surrounding human-wildlife conflict that it is a straightforward battle between humans and animals. Instead, it convincingly portrays conflict as the inevitable consequence of shrinking forests, fragmented habitats, expanding infrastructure and changing economies. Wildlife becomes neither villain nor victim alone. Humans too are shown struggling within systems that often leave little room for coexistence. This balanced perspective is perhaps the book’s greatest achievement.
I particularly appreciated the inclusion of both celebrated authors and lesser-known regional voices. The essays reveal how fiction, folklore, oral traditions and indigenous knowledge often anticipate ecological insights. This modern conservation science is only now beginning to acknowledge. Literature, after all, has always recognised that landscapes possess memory and that animals are more than biological specimens using the common terrains.
Admittedly, a few chapters demand careful reading. The language occasionally leans towards literary theory, which may discourage readers unfamiliar with academic discourse. Yet even these passages reward patience, for beneath the scholarship lies an urgent and profoundly humane message that the environmental crisis is also a crisis of perception. We cannot hope to protect what we have ceased to imagine with empathy.
When I finally closed the book, I realised I had not merely finished another volume on conservation. I had completed a journey through India’s literary conscience. Susan Haris and Anu Pande deserve credit for assembling a work that successfully bridges literature, ecology and ethics. At a time when newspaper headlines are dominated by stories of Elephant attacks, Leopard intrusions and vanishing habitats. But this anthology quietly reminds us that coexistence begins long before wildlife corridors or management plans are drawn. It begins in the stories we tell ourselves about the living world.
For me, Interspecies Negotiations is far more than an academic anthology. It is a compelling reminder that forests are not simply ecosystems, animals are not merely species, and conflict is rarely just a biological event. Every encounter between humans and wildlife is also an encounter between histories, cultures and imaginations. This remarkable book deserves to be read not only by literary scholars but by conservationists, wildlife managers, students, policymakers and every reader who believes that India’s future will depend as much on empathy as on ecology.
In the end, I came away with one enduring thought that if science teaches us how to conserve wildlife, literature teaches us why it matters. And that may be the most important lesson this remarkable book has to offer.
– N. Shiva Kumar
Interspecies Negotiations :
Human–Wildlife Conflict in Indian Literature
Bloomsbury Academic
Pages 300 Price: Rs.1599
