Dr Annu Jalais

Dr Annu Jalais specialises in South Asia, particularly West Bengal and Bangladesh. She carried out her doctoral fieldwork in the Sundarbans mangrove islands of deltaic Bengal. Her work explored the role tigers play in Sundarban islanders' views of social relations; it also deals with migration, the connection between Sufi saints and present-day tiger-charmers, shared Hindu-Muslim worship of forest deities, and the repercussions environmentalists' perceptions of the Sundarbans as "tiger-land" is having on state policies and, by extension, on the region's inhabitants. She addresses these issues through an engagement with the Sundarbans islanders' narratives and daily experiences of living "alongside tigers," and highlights the islanders' argument of being a marginalised collective in relation to the Partition of Bengal and wider Bengali society, and their bid for a greater space in the realm of state as well as global conservation politics.

Selected publications:

2008. ‘Unmasking the Cosmopolitan Tiger’ Nature and Culture, (vol. 3, issue no. 1, 2008).

2008. ‘Bonbibi: Bridging Worlds.’ Indian Folklore, serial no. 28, Jan 2008.

2007. ‘The Sundarbans: Whose World Heritage Site?’ Conservation and Society, (vol. 5, issue no. 4, 2007).

2006. Braving crocodiles with Kali: Being a prawn seed collector and woman in the twenty-first century Sundarbans. In Making a living: Imagination, identity, and globalisation in contemporary India, Akhil Gupta and Kriti Kapila (eds). Durham: Duke University Press.

2005. Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When tigers became "citizens." Economic and Political Weekly, April 23, pp. 1757-1762.

2004. Bengalis. In Encyclopaedia of the World's Minorities, Carl Skutsch (ed).  London: Routledge.

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