This week I’m in conversation with the thoughtful and deeply grounded partnership of Devaki Nair and Manikandan R, part of the 2023 cohort of the Coexistence Fellowship.

Manikandan, or Mani, is from Gudalur in Tamil Nadu, and brings with him a rich, lived understanding of the landscape—its people, histories, and more-than-human worlds. Having worked closely with local communities over the years, his knowledge is rooted in relationships, shaped by everyday engagements with forests, livelihoods, and shifting ecological realities.

Devaki, on the other hand, is trained in the social sciences, with a keen interest in people-nature relationships and the ways in which knowledge, culture, and ecology intersect. Her work brings a reflective and analytical lens to the lived experiences of coexistence, grounding them in broader questions of conservation and community.

Together, their work centres on the Paniya community in Gudalur, tracing how coexistence is practiced through everyday life—through mapping villages, documenting sacred spaces, and engaging with traditional livelihoods like basket weaving.

Their project moved beyond conventional conservation narratives, drawing attention to the nuanced, often overlooked ways in which people and forests are entangled in relationships of care, memory, and mutual shaping.

In this episode, they opened up a space to listen more closely to stories that challenge, complicate, and ultimately enrich our understanding of what it means to coexist.

This week I'm in conversation with the deep, strong and heartwarming partnership of Amir Chhetri and Priyanka Das, both part of the 2022 cohort of the Coexistence Fellowship.

Amir hails from a forest village in northern West Bengal, and his indigenous knowledge on the biodiversity of the landscape and skills in community engagement are unparalleled. From a young age, Amir has worked with the Forest Department and as a safari guide for tourists, and later, has also worked with a range of research and conservation projects.

On the other hand, Priyanka is trained in ecology and conservation science and has completed her M.Sc. from the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History in Coimbatore. Besides working for various short-term projects in different capacities across India, she has been associated with their current project landscape since 2016.

Together, they have worked on a series of projects for about a decade leading up to this Fellowship, and their is a partnership that inspires and keeps giving. Their present project addresses the underlying drivers of human-elephant negative interaction in northern West Bengal by providing technical assistance to the local forest department and monitoring ecological restoration in the degraded forest patches to ensure availability of forage species for elephants, unveiling further nuances of the coexistence world.

Here it is now, The Thing About Old Bonds and Elephants with Priyanka and Amir from the Coexistence Fellowship.

This week I'm in conversation with the unlikely but effective partnership of Sunil Harsana and Nitesh Kaushik, both part of the 2022 cohort of the Coexistence Fellowship.

Sunil is a homegrown conservationist from Mangar Bani who has spent over a decade of his life preserving the floral and faunal diversity in the (NCR)-Aravallis region, the last remaining natural forest of this landscape. He has also worked extensively to spread awareness among the Mangar Bani community and, during his work, has even unearthed evidence of a pre-historic civilisation in this area! He has a burning, deep focus with his work, where there has never been a distinction between the personal and professional - it is all just his life.

Nitesh, complementarily, is a young and upcoming conservationist with big dreams who completed her Master's in Biodiversity and Conservation from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, kickstarting her career by contributing to a baseline study of flora through ethnobotanical tools in the Damdama Biodiversity Park, in Haryana. Her main interests lie in understanding the relationship between humans and nature, which further found its footing through the Fellowship.

Sunil and Nitesh are now working in the Aravallis of south Haryana, an important leopard corridor, between the Sariska Wildlife Sanctuary, in Rajasthan, and the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, in Delhi. Their project focused on understanding mammal diversity and their ecologies in this landscape, and enhancing human-leopard coexistence in the area. After some rocky beginnings, that you will hear more about in this episode, they are now thick as thieves and continue to collaborate towards common conservation goals in this landscape.

Here it is now, The Thing About Finding Common Ground with Sunil and Nitesh from the Coexistence Fellowship.