Protecting India’s tigers and wolves through art, collaboration and conservation

Integrative conservation starts with a paintbrush and glides its way between India’s tiger reserves and its indigenous communities. 

Amit Kaushik, a PhD student in the Integrative Conservation and anthropology, is working on tiger conservation in India. He presented his work earlier this month at an Arts Collaborative Conversation at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, "The Gond Art and the Tiger: A Dialogue on Conservation, Displacement, and Environmental Justice."

Kaushik examines how Indigenous peoples and local communities respond to tiger reintroduction, discerning how these communities interact with wildlife and how they negotiate and adapt to displacement. Key elements of his doctoral research work include developing collaborations and long-term engagement with state and non-state actors and finding ways to reach broader audiences from a variety of backgrounds. He has partnered with Gond Adivasis artists, an indigenous group who are part of India's largest tribal group, to explore how art can inspire and create a dialogue between indigenous communities, policymakers, and forest managers.  

Kaushik has worked with renowned Gond artist Bhajju Shyam to represent the Gond communities’ view of the tiger and their relation to the forest. 

"The paintings exemplify how local communities not only express their artistic heritage but also provide critical commentary on their perceptions of wildlife,” Kaushik said. The tiger has long been represented in different forms and Shyam created two paintings that depict the tiger and its connection to the forest and people. One painting depicts the tiger as the protector of the forest, while the other shows the tiger as a powerful actor that displaces forest-dwelling communities from their ancestral land. Kaushik hopes to be able to display these paintings in person in India in order to start conversations about including Indigenous ecological knowledge in tiger conservation.  

Understanding and uplifting indigenous ecological knowledge and their cosmologies can create new opportunities to further the field of conservation. 

“These communities have shared forested landscapes with wildlife for centuries, and examining their knowledge, their worldviews, and their art can provide alternative perspectives on wildlife, conservation, and evolving belief systems alongside academic publications,” he said. “My aim is to bridge the gap between ecological conservation and local perspectives, ensuring that marginalized voices are part of broader conservation conversations.” 

Many Indigenous communities have been uprooted from their lands and placed in urban environments as manual laborers, which creates disturbances in the knowledge about local forests. The artworks serve as a way to learn about how displacement affects both humans and animals. 

“Art serves as a unique lens through which these communities articulate their relationships with the more-than-human world, reflecting both their cultural heritage and the lived realities of ongoing displacement,” Kaushik said.

In addition to tiger conservation and local perspectives on tiger reintroduction, Kaushik aas recently awarded a National Geographic Society Grant for his work on wolf conservation in India titled, “Wolves, Drylands, and People: Identifying Potentials of Community-Based Wolf Conservation in India’s Non-protected Areas.” The grant will enable him to conduct in-depth ecological and ethnographic fieldwork on the lesser-known Indian wolves, some of whom live in tiger reserves. He will focus on wolf distribution and their interaction with humans and explore the potential for the local community to monitor the wolves they co-inhabit spaces with human. In India, wolves lack conservation protection despite being the world’s most endangered and distinct wolf species. Kaushik’s research on multispecies interactions combines science, technology, and social science to improve wildlife conservation and human well-being.

Kaushik has fieldwork planned the summer of 2025. In 2013, he started a platform to share awareness about Indian wolves at the Wolf Conservation Initiative.

Image:Amit Kaushik (Right) with Bhajju Shyam