The Nilgiris is a famous tourist destination, widely recognised for the Neelakurinji bloom that occurs once every 12 years. This event gains both public and media attention, prompting the state to make efforts to ease tourist access to the sites where the Neelakurinji spectacle unfolds. However, this is not the only event that makes the Nilgiris notable. The region consists of more than 24 hills, with hundreds of tribal hamlets nestled within its folds. The mountains share their boundaries with both Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Conflicts, negotiations, and bureaucratic entanglements, all of these occur alongside everyday life in the Nilgiris. One recurring event in these hills is what locals refer to as “the coming down of the elephant.” But where is the elephant coming down from? The dense forests atop the hills to the cultivated lowlands? Beyond its geographical movement, the elephant’s arrival becomes a site of intense human-animal interaction, one that attracts media as well as public attention.Amidst these recurring events, there exist Adivasi communities, primarily Paniya, Kattunaicka and Betta Kurumba groups, that experience these interactions on a day-to-day basis. It becomes crucial to ask: how are these so-called environmental “disruptions” understood, endured, and negotiated by those who are structurally excluded from both conservation policymaking and mainstream representations? Climate change and ecological shifts have material consequences, but they do not affect all social groups equally. What does it mean for Adivasis to experience the coming down of the elephant as an intimate, often violent reality? How are their lives rendered visible only in the aftermath of attacks, as "victims," tallied in death data? And is this experience of dislocation, fear, and exclusion not also shaped by the unequal burdens of climate change?
To Live In Fear
Historically locating the ecological predicaments of the Wayanad district in Kerala, with which the Nilgiri plateau shares its flora and fauna, the district has largely been imagined through two primary binaries. One imagines it as an “empty” space, a settler colonial framing, where the entrepreneurial manoeuvres of upper-caste Syrian Christians and other migrant settlers could take place, often disregarding the long-standing presence of Adivasi communities. The other imagination is of Wayanad as a resource frontier, a frontier of wildness and of “savage accumulation.” This dual framing has rendered the district exotic, attracting real estate investments in heritage tourism projects that have significantly transformed the landscape. Such projects do not emerge solely by designating tourist hotspots; they also involve infrastructural intrusions like parking zones in the hills and recreational arenas for visitors seeking to “experience the wild.”While tourism has, on one hand, provided certain economic avenues for local communities, it often does so by commodifying and fetishizing Adivasi ways of living for external consumption. This process of cultural appropriation is not benign; it actively shapes how Adivasi identities are perceived, performed, and constrained in the public eye. Tourism also reshapes everyday life in more insidious and complex ways. Consider the case of an Adivasi woman with a disability who had received a government-issued scooter, a model with side wheels, stable enough not to require a stand. One day, while travelling along a forest road, an elephant suddenly emerged. It lifted her with its trunk and flung both her and the scooter into a nearby drainage canal, wide enough to crush the vehicle. She survived with minor injuries, but the scooter was destroyed. The road had been lined with tourist vehicles. Visitors had parked to take photographs, and their cars blocked her view of the approaching elephant. But even if she had seen it, what real choices were available to her in that moment on a scooter meant for navigating roads? Tourism not only alters landscapes but introduces layered vulnerabilities, often borne disproportionately by the most marginalized. This instance is an example of the contradictions inherent in neoliberal environmental governance, where discourses of empowerment are frequently entangled with practices of exploitation.A visit to Ambalamoola, a village in Wayanad, reveals that tribal hamlets in the area turn off the small lights in their houses by evening, fearing elephant attacks at night if the area is illuminated. The chemically treated farmlands nearby are fenced with electric cables, and this has led elephants to be redirected toward the Adivasi settlements. Migrant settler farmers have begun using these electric fences to deflect attacks, effectively steering the elephants away from their own lands and toward the hamlets of the Adivasis. Conversations with Adivasi communities in the region, particularly with members of an older generation who lived before the recent intensification of human-wildlife conflict, reveal an absence of animosity toward wildlife species. They possessed practical knowledge and cultural frameworks that enabled peaceful coexistence with animals, without the need for rigidly demarcated conflict zones. However, among the current generation, there is a growing sense of fear, an ecology of fear that now permeates daily life in these communities. There are limited proper roads connecting Adivasi settlements to healthcare facilities; however, numerous “aana iranghiya vazhy” (paths through which elephants have descended) exist, which Adivasis often use for travel. Most of the tribal communities in the region, who are officially resettled in state-constructed concrete houses, often prefer to stay in lower-lying houses or temporary shelters due to fear of elephant attacks. When an elephant strays into the ‘mainland’ or human settlements, Adivasi individuals are frequently called upon by forest department officials to assist in managing the situation, based on the essentialist assumption that “these kinds of people know how to deal with the wilderness.” Ironically, this instrumentalisation of Indigenous knowledge occurs alongside the routine neglect of Adivasi needs and rights in matters concerning their everyday survival and well-being.Importantly, this fear is not simply a product of changing attitudes but of constrained possibilities. The communities are increasingly unable to exercise the very strategies of coexistence that once allowed them to navigate wildlife presence. These methods, informed by traditional ecological knowledge, have been rendered unviable by state-imposed restrictions, forest department regulations, and the physical transformation of the landscape through tourism, fencing, and infrastructure projects. As a result, their lives are being restructured under conditions of chronic risk, violence, and environmental insecurity.
Conservation as Dispossession
The conservation strategies currently in place often fail because they overlook the complexity of interactions between wildlife, in this case elephants, and human communities. These relationships are not linear or uniform; they range from reverence and sacredness, particularly among the older generation of Adivasi communities, to fear and anxiety stemming from the recent intensification of conflict. It is essential to recognize that communities can simultaneously hold traditional reverence for elephants and suffer immense hardship due to their presence. However, prevailing conservation policies tend to flatten these complexities into simplistic binaries such as harmony or conflict, victimhood or reverence.In many contemporary conservation projects, animals, particularly megafauna such as elephants and tigers, are privileged over people. This often results in exclusionary spaces where marginalized communities especially Adivasis, face eviction, movement restrictions, or punitive action while forests and corridors are designated exclusively for wildlife. The issue is not merely the presence of animals in forests, but the manner in which top-down conservation strategies have produced severe disruptions in Adivasi lives, particularly by privileging wildlife protection over human habitation and by denying Adivasi communities access to and control over the traditional forest lands.Rather than favouring empowerment or participatory inclusion, these models often reproduce colonial dynamics in which powerful external actors manage lands and lives in the name of “nature.” In Wayanad, Adivasi encounters with elephants are frequently portrayed as examples of passive resilience or idealised cultural harmony. In reality, these interactions are shaped by fear, injury, displacement, and deeply embedded forms of relational knowledge. The state’s failure to engage with this complexity and its reliance on solutions such as monetary compensation or symbolic valorization, perpetuates a conservation logic that renders Adivasis hyper-visible as victims, yet invisible as ecological agents and knowledge-holders.
