Mridutpal is pursuing a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne and is a recipient of a DAAD PhD Scholarship. He also received the Hungarian State Scholarship for Language and Culture Summer Courses in 2020. He is working in South Asia with interests in Political ecology of conservation, Environmental anthropology, Environmental governance, Multispecies Studies, and Environmental history. Mridutpal has a Bachelor's in Economics from the University of Calcutta (2019) and graduated in 2021 with an M.A. in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (IIT Guwahati), India. He is currently based at the Global South Studies Center (GSSC) in Cologne, Germany.

Being a part of the GSSC has stimulated new ideas, and thoughts within me and has given me a unique opportunity to trade perspectives and get expert advice from scholars across the globe, coming from varied disciplines. I hope this will sharpen my intellectual capacity, which will eventually make a better researcher. I can’t express through my words how privileged I am.

This is an environmental anthropological project that aspires to work on the intricate history and presence of human - environment relations in (and around) the ‘Manas National Park’, a UNESCO Natural World Heritage site in Assam, India. This project will also partly work on the intricate Environmental history (Colonial and pre-colonial) of Assam and NE-India in general and Manas National Park in particular. The Manas NP is a conservation area that (a) has a long and conflictive colonial and post-colonial history, (b) has still an astounding degree of biodiversity. In the 1980s and 1990s, wildlife had been decimated in the conservation area during a period of violent conflict between a liberation movement and the state. Nowadays, major refaunation programmes are run in the park area. Nowadays, the region is famous – nationally and internationally - for its picturesque landscapes. This research project is a unique attempt to grasp changing socio-ecological relations among humans and other species (special focus on rhino and golden langur) in and around Manas National Park (MNP). As a religious society, but a secular country, India offers unique perspectives on links between environmental, sociological, theological, and political dynamics. I intend to collect data through archival surveys, informal discussions, informal interviews, and conversations. Interviews with the key actors will have a qualitative and open-ended character. Semi-structured interviews and
questionnaires will be conducted along with a socio-political and ethnographic exploration and survey of the study areas. For the accomplishment of this study, an amalgamation of qualitative methods will be used to capture the socio-ecological dynamics. I will enrich the comprehension of the fundamental components of the system by focusing on indigenous perspectives and multispecies relationships in the region.