Reinventing nature in Kaziranga National Park: a history of rhinoceros conservation in Assam, 1948–1974

A restrictive approach in managing Protected Areas (PA) is often attributed to 'Western' ideas of nature. This view claims that national elites embraced Western ideas of nature—which supposedly has no place for humans—to produce pristine wilderness in PAs by banning grazing, fishing, and foraging inside them. This article foregrounds cultural politics as an alternate driver of creating wilderness in the global south. The article explores the history of conservation of the Greater One-horned Rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis) in Kaziranga Wild Life Sanctuary (KWLS), the previous avatar of Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India. It shows that Assamese cultural politics pertaining to the rhino not only augmented the Assam Forest Department's (FD) enduring efforts to sanitise KWLS from human activities but also paved the way for the militarised protection of the rhino, which in turn, reinforced wilderness. By the late 1960s, when a larger debate about wildlife conservation surfaced in India, developments in KWLS subtly informed exclusionary conservation in other national parks and tiger reserves.