Valmik Thapar's final book distils half a century of tiger conservation

Valmik Thapar's final book celebrates India's tiger legacy, blending conservation insights, Ranthambore tales, and lyrical portraits of the majestic Royal Bengal Tiger

The Mysterious World of Tigers: A Book of Discovery

By Valmik Thapar 

Published by Aleph

116 pages  ₹399

 

This little book by Valmik Thapar, published just before his death on May 31 this year, distils the great tiger conservationist’s half century of writing and studying the big cat in one of its prime habitats in Ranthambore National Park. It is part of an Essential India Editions series that, according to the publishers, seeks to “explore a foundational aspect of the country in new and thought-provoking ways.” The Mysterious World of Tigers can be read as a celebration of Project Tiger, the 52-year-old programme to save India’s national animal, the Royal Bengal Tiger, from extinction. Thapar’s brusque and persistent advocacy in the corridors of power played no small part in its success. 

Credit must go to the publishers for recognising tiger conservation as a “foundational aspect” of the country. The fact that a land of India’s population density hosts the world’s largest tiger population in the wild must rank as one of the country’s foremost achievements, on a par, in terms of the immense collateral benefits of preserving biodiversity, with the Green Revolution and Operation Flood. 

From that perspective, Thapar, who has partly dedicated this book to his mentor and Project Tiger guru Fateh Singh Rathore, captures the achievements best in the last chapter  “The tiger in India has fared well,” he writes, … “India still has about 2,500 to 3,000 tigers in pockets of habitat across the land. Given that this same land has to support 1.4 billion people, whom tigers have to coexist with, this is a remarkable feat.” 

But far from being self-congratulatory, Thapar acknowledges, with characteristic bluntness, that “management strategies are shoddy most of the time”. Sadly, his beloved Ranthambore exemplifies these deficiencies, mainly on account of the mismanagement of tiger-human conflicts that claimed the lives of two human victims just this year. This is a tragic consequence of the strategy of providing tigers with live bait, making them semi-domesticated and over-familiar with humans. 

Thapar does not mention the reason for this decision, which contradicts all tenets of wildlife management. Tourism sustains our national parks but also damages them. Ranthambore is a good example. It has become a victim of its own success, where over-tourism is proving deleterious. Now infested with lodges and resorts offering “tiger safaris” on the cheap, tourists in 20-seat Canters and Jeeps careen around the park in noisy profusion, ignoring the park's stunning flora, fauna and landscape in the quest for the tiger. In most other parks, such rowdy behaviour would keep the tigers away. In Ranthambore, as a result of the live baiting strategy, tigers have acquired what a colleague once described as a “working relationship” with tourists, racking up a record as the park with the best tiger sightings. 

But to focus on these depressing temporal problems is to detract from the sheer wonder of a beast created by an “immortal hand or eye” that Thapar captures so evocatively in these pages. Half a century of putting in the long hours and exercising frustrating patience to observe tigers in the wild had not dimmed his passion. Familiar names from his earlier writing — Padmini, Broken Tooth, Genghis, Noon — parade through these pages. 

Padmini and her four cubs, born in 1977, offered early insights into tiger family life and the harsh realities of surviving in the wild. Of the five cubs –Akbar, Hamir, Babar, Laxmi and Begum – the youngest and weakest was doomed from the start. “Poor little Begum…. It was obvious that she was getting the smallest share of the meat after a kill and she was the shyest, eating last of all.” They feared for her and when she made no appearance after a buffaloe kill, they concluded that “nature had eased her out”. 

Then there is the beast who learnt to hunt around the waters of three lakes in Ranthambore, using the water as a hunting ground. “As a strategist he was unmatched — an innovator. We called him Genghis.” Thapar’s description of a sambar kill in water captures Genghis’ unique natural born killer instincts. “A slight movement stirred the tall grass on the far side of the lake where we knew Genghis lay hidden. He had moved right to the edge of the thicket and was peering out, studying the sambar with intense concentration. For several minutes he stood there, motionless like a statue… With incredible patience Genghis waited, measuring the distance separating him from the sambhar grazing peacefully in the water. And then he charged. In front of our furiously clicking cameras, he crashed through the few remaining metres of long grass and plunged into the water. The lake seemed to erupt in an explosion of spray.” Genghis went for a group of hinds and their fawns and then changed direction to attack a fawn that had got separated from its mother. He pounced, driving his victim under the surface and reappeared with the fawn in a killer grip. 

Watching Genghis over the years was, Thapar writes, was “like watching a tactical planner who had evolved an extraordinary way of hunting after assessing the lake in all its nuances”. He passed this technique to Noon, the tigress with whom Rathore confessed to falling in love with. Noon was the tigress who entertained Rajiv Gandhi and his family for a whole week, culminating in an attack on a sambar. Later, tracking her through the high grass (in a bullet-proof Jeep, on which Rajiv’s security detail insisted), they discovered her sitting watching from a distance as Broken Tooth, one of the two tigers with whom she mated, feasting on the carcass. The PM joked that like a traditional Indian woman providing a meal for her mate. 

Noon was special not just because she learnt Genghis’ water-hunting techniques but because of her intelligence in tracking other predators’ kills and purloining them — battling crocodiles for sambar and tracking the flight of low-flying vultures to other kills (help-mates she lost when vultures started dying out from feeding on chemically injected livestock carcasses). She developed a special bond with Thapar. “She was a tigress who filled my senses. …I know that whenever I arrived in her presence, there was a quick look of recognition and then, most of the time, it was just her and me.” 

Thapar’s descriptions are so vibrant that you do not feel the lack of colour photographs that are almost obligatory in books about tigers. The black and white line drawings at the start of each chapter do just as well. Equally vivid are Thapar's descriptions of the rare and awesome sighting of tigers mating. 

At just 116 pages, this book would be a useful addition in all rooms and tents in tiger reserves for its succinct description of tiger physiology and behaviour and lyrical descriptions of the jungle. Who knows, it may deter more tourists from hissing, barking or whistling at tigers they are privileged to spot in the wild and appreciate instead their unique majesty.