In this episode of Stories from the Subverse, we present our first Cataplisms audio story. The Cataplisms project examines our multispecies entanglements, critiques capitalism, and acknowledges the cataclysms at our doorstep, all through a feline lens. In this episode, we hear from someone personally and professionally invested in the fate of big cats and the forests they live in. Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer and wildlife historian, who focuses on East Central India.

His childhood in Jharkhand’s Palamu region, surrounded by the forest’s flora and fauna, including tigers and leopards, ignited his passion for protecting these cats, and his connection with forest landscapes. Kazmi illustrates how industrialization and capitalism have threatened India’s tigers and other wildlife. A web of mines, dams, and other infrastructure projects within forest areas and critical wildlife corridors pockmark the forests of East Central India. This has fragmented habitats and disrupted migration routes, disorienting animals like elephants and tigers and exacerbating human-wildlife conflict. Kazmi shares that the lack of charismatic wildlife makes it easier to divert forest areas for more mining projects. Both people and animals who depend on these forests are adversely affected.

He delves into the drastic decline of animals, including tigers and leopards, in Palamu due to hunting coupled with the expansion of industries, which has pushed these animals to the brink, crossing an ecological Rubicon, and making urgent conservation intervention critical. Kazmi also talks about the lack of charismatic wildlife, or animals with mass appeal like tigers and elephants, in the area and how that can make it easier to divert forests for more mining or urbanisation projects.

The destruction of these ecosystems thanks to expansion and hunting, has led to desperate circumstances. Raza shares the story of a male tiger’s five-year trek across multiple states in search of a mate. The tiger’s struggle underscores how capitalistic development has fragmented natural corridors, forcing wildlife to navigate human-dominated spaces rather than the jungles they belong in.

But not all hope is lost. Kazmi emphasizes the pivotal role that local communities play in conservation. They are essential for saving tigers and other wildlife from the destructive forces of industrialization. He believes that, “if the forests are there, there will always be the hope of the wildlife returning.”

About Raza Kazmi

Raza Kazmi is a conservationist, writer, wildlife historian, storyteller and researcher. His fields of expertise include India’s wildlife and forest administration history, conservation policy and conservation issues afflicting the insurgency-ridden east-central Indian landscape. His writings appear in national newspapers (The Hindu, The Indian Express), online media houses (The Wire, FiftyTwodotin, RoundGlass Sustain) as well as various magazines and journals (Frontline, Seminar, The India Forum, Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, Sanctuary Asia, Cheetal, etc.). He has also contributed essays to edited anthologies. A recipient of the New India Foundation Fellowship for 2021, he is currently writing a book tentatively titled To Whom Does the Forest Belong? The Fate of Green in the Land of Red. He works as a Conservation Communicator with the Wildlife Conservation Trust, and also teaches as a Guest Faculty for Wildlife Management at the Forest Guard Training Schools in Chaibasa and Ranchi in Jharkhand.

In this episode, we're discussing plants, their exuberant multispecies sexualities and what we can learn from them, how botany is always interlinked with its cultural and historic context including colonialism, and an interdisciplinary approach can make one a better scientist.

Host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Professor Banu Subramaniam, the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is most recently the author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. The book is about plant worlds and the legacies of colonialism. It focuses on three subfields: plant taxonomy, plant reproductive biology, and plant biogeography. Plant taxonomy is a critical node of colonial botany and its enduring afterlives. Plant reproductive biology chronicles how the imaginaries of gender and race under colonial sexuality were imposed on plants. Finally, understanding plant biogeography through invasion biology centres questions of what belongs, or doesn’t, when and where.

In the eighth episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to Pranay Lal, a
natural history writer and climate change advocate about the dearth of interest in publishing books on natural history, the climate crises, the need for natural history museums, how the story of climate is intertwined with all other histories, and more.

Pranay Lal is a natural history writer, public health expert, and climate change advocate. He is the author of two books on natural history. Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent (2016), his debut book, won the Tata Lit Fest Award and Delhi World Book Fair Award 2017. It was listed among Mint’s 50 most significant books about India since Independence. His second book, Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses (2021), also received multiple awards and was named among the 20 Best Non-fiction Books of 2021 by GQ and won the Green Lit Fest Award 2023. Both books have been translated into several languages.