Corbett Festival’s Nature Writing: Elite Conservation Narratives vs. Grassroots Survival in India’s Biodiversity Crisis
Original framing: “Entertainment News | Corbett Literature Festival Concludes with Conversations on Conservation, Coexistence and Nature Writing” — bing news
The festival’s panels feature urban environmentalists and foreign authors but exclude voices like those of the *Bastar Dikus* (outsider settlers) evicted for tiger reserves or the *Dongria Kondh*, who resisted Vedanta’s mining. Marginalized groups, such as Dalit and Adivasi women, who bear the brunt of conservation enforcement (e.g., being fined for collecting firewood), are absent. Even the festival’s ‘conservation’ discussions ignore the 2019 *Business Standard* report that 80% of wildlife crimes in India are committed by corporate actors, not rural poor.
The Corbett Literature Festival’s framing of conservation as a cultural and literary endeavor serves to legitimize elite-led, state-sanctioned biodiversity policies that systematically displace Indigenous and rural communities.
By centering ‘nature writing’ over land rights, the festival obscures the historical continuity of colonial forest laws, the corporate capture of wildlife governance, and the marginalization of voices like the Tharu or Dongria Kondh, whose knowledge systems have sustained biodiversity for generations. The trickster here is the festival’s own premise: that ‘conversations’ can resolve conflicts created by land enclosure, when the real solution lies in restoring Indigenous stewardship and holding corporations accountable for wildlife crimes. Historical precedents—from the 1878 Forest Act to the 2013 Niyamgiri victory—show that legal and grassroots resistance can reshape conservation, but only if festivals like Corbett stop serving as platforms for urban elites and instead amplify the voices of those whose lands and lives are at stake.