The Rural in the Urban: Warli Women of Mumbai’s National Park

The Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai contains at least 12 padas or hamlets of the Warli tribe, and along with 27 more in the Aarey Colony, constitutes the highest concentration of an indigenous tribe within a metropolis anywhere in the world. The Warlis have cultivated and herded in this forest for generations, long before it was designated a protected area in 1950 and renamed a national park. This designation turned them, without consultation, into illegal occupants of their own land.

The article follows the women of Navapada as they contend with the erosion of their agrarian practices, the encroachment of the state, and the daily negotiation between urban Mumbai and their forest home. Through accounts of Warli women across generations—Shamu Barap, Sonal Barap, Mangli Vijay Barap, Sharda Babu Gawit, and Komal Barap—there emerges a picture of steady change secured largely by the older women, in favour of education, employment, and better nutrition for those who follow them. Their precarity, long induced by the state’s refusal to recognise their land rights, has been heightened by a recent government proposal to redevelop the park as a tourist attraction. This feature expands the archive in an important direction: these are indigenous women farmers and cultivators within a major Indian city, whose right to farm has been revoked by a conservation law, and who now try to sustain themselves simultaneously across two vastly different economies and labour landscapes.