Pranav Menon

This project investigates the nomadic, socio-religious and non-human relationalities of Van Gujjar pastoralists as they negotiate their identity amid legal assemblages. The Van Gujjars are semi-nomadic, backward-caste, Muslim pastoral peoples, who seasonally move with their indigenous Gojri buffaloes in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, India. Discourses of wildlife protection continue to inhibit their mobility, restrict pastoral work and provoke sedentarization. As the Hindu nationalist state mobilizes a ‘biopolitics of care’ towards the environment, it generates an exclusionary logic of encroachment against these pastoralists. Against these terms, the Van Gujjars call upon the grammar of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 to cultivate an ethic of everyday legalism to access, use and move across forests. These pastoralists along with their companion species, make places and foster commoning within forests. Through an emphasis on the singularity of their place-making, mobility and non-human relationalities, this ethnographic study shows how the life-worlds of Van Gujjars present a challenge to statist categorizations such as Scheduled Tribes in India. My project focuses on Van Gujjar nomadism, pastoralism and practices of Islam within the forests to illustrate how an itinerant, place-based relationality, allows theorization about identity formation beyond state-based recognition schemas.