Book Launch: For Whom Do the Tigers Flourish?

Join us for the launch of For Whom Do the Tigers Flourish? - The Hidden Politics of Conservation in India by Dr Trishant Simlai.

​India’s tiger population has more than doubled since 2006, one of the most widely celebrated conservation successes of the last two decades. Drawing on years of fieldwork in four major tiger landscapes, Trishant Simlai examines what the recovery has required of the people who live in and around the reserves. He follows communities still marked by longstanding social stigma, pastoralist families displaced to create “inviolate” space for wildlife, daily-wage workers whose labour keeps the reserves running but who remain largely invisible in official accounts of success, and women whose limited freedom of movement in the forest is now monitored by camera traps.

​The book is also an account of the author’s own shift. Trained as a wildlife biologist, he spent years working inside a professional culture that treated people primarily as disturbance. Writing the book meant recognising that the categories he once used were never neutral, and that conservation decisions determine whose presence in a landscape is treated as legitimate. The recovery of the tiger is real. The question of who that recovery is for, and at whose expense, remains open.

For Whom Do the Tigers Flourish is published by Juggernaut.

Speaker Bio

Dr Trishant Simlai holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge and is now a faculty on the Masters in Conservation Leadership at the Department of Geography.

Registration:

Please register using this link.

You can attend either in-person or online. If attending online we will share the joining link closer to the event.

If you do not receive a confirmation email, please check your junk/spam folder as they sometimes can be delivered there.

If you have any questions please contact Jack Hayes, CCI Collaborations and Events Coordinator at j.hayes@jbs.cam.ac.uk