Mehtta, Megnaa; (2025) Intimate Antagonisms and Unlikely Friendships between State and Society in the Sundarbans Forests of India. Current Anthropology 10.1086/736420. (In press).

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Abstract

Forests worldwide are often implicated in histories of violence. The Sundarbans, straddling India and Bangladesh, infamous for its tigers and tiger demons and home to 5 million human residents, sharply expresses this global conflict between those who live alongside forests and the institutions that attempt to keep them out. The Forest Department, tasked with the responsibility of selectively protecting nonhuman life, is arguably one of the most maligned bureaucracies in India. Rights-based activists and Sundarbans fishers often emphasize the forms of dominance exercised by forest rangers, including surveillance, harassment, extortion, and arbitrary punishments. However, over the course of 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork, as I obtained access and began to spend days and nights patrolling the mangrove creeks with forest rangers, alongside their punitive power, I encountered a wide spectrum of associational behaviors, including co-option, conviviality, and mutual care. Building on these experiences, this article traces varying modes of intimacy among individuals classically characterized as political antagonists. I ask why and in what contexts do rangers inhabit and defy their vocational responsibilities through forms of sympathetic relatedness with forest-dwelling humans, demons, and deities. I also examine the processes and new technologies through which these forms of “compassion in repression” might be ruptured.

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