Conservation projects, like National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries, are significant in the developmental paradigm of a nation-state. These projects are based on fortress model of conservation, which displaces and dispossesses local communities through land acquisition and denial of access to natural resources. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of communities living in the periphery of Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve in Assam (India), who belong to different ethnicity, class, caste, and have varied histories and livelihood systems. It argues that the discourse of nature, through the idea of fortress conservation, shapes the lives of different people inhabiting that space in different ways. Conservation project does not necessarily benefit or pauperise everyone equally, and it has layers which are navigated by the people for survival. It acts through the existing vulnerabilities associated with local and global structures of inequality, of landholding, caste-class division, and religious marginality. The forces of conservation latch on to these existing hierarchies and acts through it, and reproduces it. This paper will attempt to understand these dynamics by placing the political economy of the space and the communities with the history of the park and the settlements around it.
