Leopards in their labyrinths

Crooked Cats is a fascinating, and occasionally entertaining, micro-study of all aspects of the big-cat-human encounter

Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene

Author: Nayanika Mathur

Publisher:  HarperCollins

Pages: 208

Price: Rs 499

By some coincidence, Crooked Cats arrived for review just as the Residents’ Welfare Organisation circulated a WhatsApp warning to protect ourselves and our pet dogs because of a leopard sighting at a neighbouring sector that houses some of India’s most expensive real estate. The commentary that followed was predictable: That the cat had “strayed” from its habitat and the forest department should trap and release it back into the receding Aravalli jungles — as though animals have a developed notion of habitable boundaries set by humans. It is unclear whether the hundreds of temporary household helpers, construction workers and delivery boys, the cohort most exposed to the danger by the nature of their jobs, had been warned or had any opinions on the matter. 

The half-thrilled, half-panicky and exclusivist online urban chatter captured neatly the dilemmas expressed in the subtitle of the book: “Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene”. The title suggests that the book is about big cats that turn man-eaters – “crooked cats” or tedha bagh, to use local north Indian terminology. But it is much more than that. Nayanika Mathur, an anthropologist by training, has sought to present big cat-human encounters in their infinite variety in an era when human actions are profoundly reshaping the planet. This process is known as the Anthropocene age, a term coined by geologists to denote an epoch in which human action is, in effect, acting as a geological force. Non-experts would understand this as climate change, and the burden of the author’s argument is the urgent need for the public discourse “to locate climate change squarely in the middle of human-animal relations and ask how we might come to re-see and comprehend them in the light of the Anthropocene”. 

These are relevant issues given India’s unique position of being a densely populated nation that coexists with wildlife sanctuaries, where increasingly aspirational citizens seek to carve out their space from the natural world. Dr Mathur is well placed to examine these questions, having spent 15 years researching the relationship between humans and leopards principally in the upper reaches of Uttarakhand, in Mumbai and partly in Shimla. Her larger message is a critical one: That “human-big cat relations are seen as a derivative of human-human relations. The former are not about the leopard or the tiger per se but rather about human structures and discriminatory or violent policies”.

Dr Mathur started her research in Gopeshwar, a remote village in the Himalayas, where a man-eating female leopard unleashed a reign of terror until she is finally killed by licensed hunters. She locates the episode in her examination of the rigidities in the hunting licences and the inexact science of identifying the killer, which often results in the killing of an innocent (bekasoor) cat, and the weaknesses of relocation exercises since big cats have strong homing instincts. She also captures the curious and contradictory amalgam of affection, loathing, fear and acceptance, tradition, the ham-fisted nature of government bureaucratic intervention and local attitudinal pathologies.

The mostly poor residents of Gopeshwar, for instance, have a sneaking sympathy for the man-eating leopard even as she terrorises them; they display an inchoate understanding of the consequences of the animal’s shrinking habitat. This is leavened by a deep-seated traditional distrust that they, hapless pahadis (mountain people), were being discriminated against by the maidanis (people from the plains, in this case also government bureaucrats) who release leopards from overcrowded zoos into the mountains without regard for human life. This is not an institutional practice, but the author speaks of frequent translocations that take place under the radar to keep wildlife conservationists at bay and evade strict wildlife laws and regulations. During the 2012 Assembly elections, for instance, “many leopards were captured and taken away from bigger towns so that the incumbent political party would not be blamed for such sightings”. 

Why does Uttarakhand appear to have a more acute problem of leopard-human encounters than, say, Mumbai where an upscale colony flourishes cheek by jowl with a designated national park? Or Shimla, where locals and leopards appear to have established some sort of coexistence (there, it’s monkeys that are considered the menace)? Dr Mathur offers an interesting comparison of the differing approaches to the issue that unwittingly reveals the classed nature of the responses to big cat encounters and, not least, varying bureaucratic attitudes and interventions.

The striking point about Crooked Cats is that Dr Mathur avoids certitudes in favour of a nuanced narrative that allows for multiple alternative perspectives, conclusions and responses. This is a fascinating, and occasionally entertaining, micro-study that exhaustively covers all aspects of the big-cat-human encounter. It takes in rigorous field work, a deep study of colonial practices and traditions (a comparison of Jim Corbett and Rudyard Kipling figure here), the urban Indian attitude to wildlife and a scrutiny of wildlife red tape in modern India. One thing is certain: There are more big cats among us in urban India than we know.

Since the book was written last year, cheetahs find only passing mention. But much of what Dr Mathur writes would be relevant to the eight African cheetahs released with so much fanfare at Kuno national park last week. If those human cheerleaders of this highly questionable initiative had read this book they would know that, at the very least, it’s going to be a testing time for the cheetahs and the tribals they have displaced.