1The immensity of Greater Mumbai Mumbai or Bombay: two current names for the same city. It was…, the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and economic capital of India, conceals the fact that the original site was a small set of islands, separated from the mainland before progressive reclamation of the surrounding marshland from the 18th century onwards. The city is located in what was a belt of tropical moist deciduous forest dominated by teak (Gaussen et al., 1966). From Gujarat to Maharashtra, these forested hills were historically a tribal-populated region (Skaria, 1999). Initially, therefore, the city was established in the heart of this heavily forested land. Even in the late 19th century, Thane district (Fig. 1) was still the most densely wooded district in the entire Bombay Presidency [2]The Bombay Presidency was one of the three provinces of India…, and sheltered a large minority of the Adivasi [3]Adivasi—this word is a neologism from the 1930s meaning…. Thane is now part of Greater Mumbai, but 3% of its area are still home to 20% of the tribal population of Maharashtra, even though these peoples make up only 9% of the state population. Nationwide, the Adivasi comprise 9.2% of the Indian population, but 90% of them still live in rural areas (Census, 2011). 2With more than 20 million inhabitants (Census, 2011), Greater Mumbai is the headquarters of most of the largest financial institutions, insurance and mutual fund companies of India. This megacity also encompasses a national park, which opened in 1983: the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), which is home to 1,795 Adivasi families in 43 padas Pada means “hamlet” in Marathi, the language of Maharashtra. that are scattered mainly along the edge of the Park (SGNP, 2011). Meanwhile, the process of urbanization has continued to move northward, thus surrounding lands that are now legally protected in the name of wildlife.3The creation of the SGNP has revived disagreements in Indian society over the place of the Adivasi. Drawing a boundary to create a protected area inevitably poses IDEOLOGICAL questions about the place of people already resident within that natural environment. The international context became more favorable to the idea of participatory management of protected areas after the Man and Biosphere (MAB) program was launched by UNESCO in 1971, and after legislation relevant to this new PARADIGM in India was drawn up in 1990. However, participatory management programs in India have targeted parks in rural areas, where the typical concentric organization involving a core, a buffer and a cooperation zone was a feasible option. In an urban national park, the buffer zone concept has neither legal existence nor operational value. As a result, the park authorities opt for management concepts that effectively treat the park as a fortress.4Many of the challenges faced by cities in the BRIC economies of today are much in evidence in Mumbai (McKinsey & Co., 2003), but the question of the tribal populations and the SGNP highlights an even harsher reality. The SGNP is a protected area of 104 km2, covering 1/6th of one of the world’s largest megacity. By studying this national park and the status of its Adivasi residents, this paper portrays the political ecology [5]Political ecology is currently not a clearly defined… of a “hybrid space” (Swyngedouw, 2004) caught between ideologies of nature, CULTURE and global economics, and where conflict over land use and land management has been exacerbated in UNPRECEDENTED proportions.