Ananda Siddhartha

This thesis examines the making and governance of elephant corridors in southern India as a lens through which to understand how contemporary conservation territorializes rural landscapes and agrarian livelihoods, while consolidating state power. The growing momentum to secure elephant corridors has been strongly influenced by two editions of the report Right of Passage: Elephant Corridors of India (Menon et al. 2005, 2017), the latter of which identifies 101 elephant corridors requiring protection to facilitate elephant movement. Despite methodological critiques, the report has intensified efforts to legally secure corridor lands, many of which overlap with agricultural fields and villages. While conservation biology frames corridors as technical solutions to habitat fragmentation, this thesis argues they are socio-political projects. Despite their problematic deployment as a flagship species, elephants mobilise funding, galvanise public sentiment, and consolidate institutional alliances, thereby reinforcing conservation authority. Set against post-liberalisation agrarian distress – marked by declining public investment, indebtedness, land commodification, and environmental uncertainty – the thesis shows how corridor-making intersects with rural precarity. I introduce the concept of the Conservation Agrarian Squeeze (CAS) to describe how agrarian decline and conservation expansion converge, placing dual pressures on farmers near protected areas. The study asks how corridors reconfigure territory and what this reveals about territorialisation and state power. Drawing on political ecology and agrarian political economy, corridors are analysed as techniques of spatial ordering that extend regulatory control beyond protected areas through mapping, law, and expert knowledge. While often reproducing exclusionary logics, corridors also open contested spaces for negotiation, including through the Forest Rights Act (2006). Elephant corridors thus emerge as key arenas where territory, knowledge, capital, and authority are assembled and contested in contemporary India.