Several interconnected factors, such as market demand, poverty, cultural preferences for wild meat, governance effectiveness, remoteness, lack of employment opportunities, and cultural change, have been found to impact a community to hunt wildlife. The hunting discourse has widely focused on settled ‘indigenous’ communities who are known to use the traditional ecological knowledge to acquire and improve hunting skills developed through deep associations with the biophysical elements of specific geography over long periods of time. But what about the nomadic hunting communities who are known to move over large spaces and usually are not associated with any particular space over long periods to gather such deep ecological knowledge? And how do they cope up with explicit and implicit socio-political and economic pressures towards getting ‘settled’ including specific affirmative actions in order to align them with mainstream society and how would such dynamics affect their hunting-linked nomadic way of life? To understand the hunting-based livelihood of nomadic hunting communities that are subjected to the contemporary changes of mainstream society, I studied a nomadic hunting community in Puducherry and Tamil Nadu, called the Narikuravar. The study aimed at answering the specific research questions on how nomadic communities accumulate the Traditional Ecological Knowledge required for hunting. How do they navigate the risks and hazards associated with an illegal activity like hunting? How will the recent affirmative action potentially impact their hunting activities in the near future? The research has found through the socio-cultural resistance to the passive and active attempts of mainstreaming over the years the nomadic Narikuravar have their traditional knowledge of hunting and continue to practice hunting as a basis for their livelihood due to socio-economic backwardness. The community envisions uplifting their present socioeconomic status through the benefits of their recent inclusion into the Scheduled Tribe (ST) reservation policy. The key finding of the study suggests that in a scenario where socioeconomic upward mobility is achieved, hunting practices are likely to decrease in a predicted period of time.