Every living thing

The ecological messages in two recent poignant and thought-provoking films are unsettling and disturbing, but they also offer an alternative model to conservation

As India prepares to celebrate 50 years of Project Tiger, its feted flagship programme to protect the tiger, two movies that made it to the Oscars this year offer alternative models of conservation. In doing so, they also raise uncomfortable questions about Indian society. One is The Elephant Whisperers , a 41-minute gem that won the award for the Best Documentary Short. The second is the poignant and thought-provoking All That Breathes, which was nominated for, but sadly did not win, the award for best documentary feature.  

Most striking is the fact that the human protagonists in both films represent people who have been increasingly marginalised in India: Tribals and Muslims. That message is less explicit in The Elephant Whisperers, which, at one level, can be viewed as a heartwarming and uncomplicated story of a tribal couple called Bomman and Bellie who brought up two orphaned baby elephants in the Mudumalai National Park. Entrusted to their care by the park authorities, the two elephants, Raghu, and Ammakutty, are the only orphaned babies to have survived into adulthood in the park.

The film records the painstaking care that the couple lavish on first Raghu and later Ammakutty, capturing the uncanny rapport they built with their giant charges against the stunning beauty of the national park with its wealth of flora and fauna. Kartiki Gonsalves, in her directorial debut, chooses to relay the story through Bomman and Bellie and mostly leaves it up to the viewer to imbibe the multiple messages.

Note, for instance, that Bomman and Bellie are creatures of the jungle too, and like many others have partaken of its gifts and its perils (Bellie’s husband is killed by a tiger). But unlike thousands of tribals who were summarily displaced to make way for Project Tiger national parks — including Kuno, once cleared for lions but where African cheetahs now roam — they are active and positive participants, not victims, of the conservation story. It is Bomman, also head priest of his village, who talks about the need for human beings to show more consideration for animals. His is the voice-over against shots of tourists in the gas-guzzling SUVs that have come to symbolise all that is least attractive about rising middle class India.

In dramatic contrast to the natural beauty of Mudumalai in The Elephant Whisperers is the unlovely urban squalor of Delhi outside the upscale south that forms the unrelenting backdrop to All That Breathes. It is about two siblings, Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who give up their dreams of being body-builders to rescue and treat injured birds. They finance this activity by making and selling soap dispensers from the kind of grotty tenements on the edges of the city from which Delhiites prefer to avert their eyes. 

This story plays out on many levels. Saud and Shehzad and their assistant Salik Rehman focus on birds of prey, kites mostly but also vultures (sometimes owls), which urbanites shun as scavengers. The trio decides to set up their own operation after efforts to have a kite treated at a local bird hospital is rejected because, they are told, the facility doesn’t treat “non-vegetarian birds” (revealing a shocking ignorance, incidentally, since few birds can be described as “vegetarian”, surviving as they do on insects and reptiles).

The ecological messages in this beautifully understated film are unsettling and disturbing. As the camera scans shots of kites trying in vain to soar above factory chimneys spewing toxic smoke or dodging the tangles of electrical wires that bring electricity to squalid homes, and of pigs, insects, lizards and turtles wallowing in large puddles of effluent, sewage and garbage, you begin to understand that urban pollution is a great equaliser. As one of the brothers put it, whether humans, birds, insects, reptiles or animals, all living beings breathe the same air and struggle to adjust to the same hostile environment. All living beings also play a role in the environment. Without the despised scavengers, for instance, the garbage mountain of Gazipur created by humans would be much higher. 

Director Shaunak Sen insists his film has an ecological message not a political one but it is hard to ignore the latter. The despised birds of prey almost become a metaphor for their rescuers’ religion, increasingly disparaged by triumphant political majoritarianism. Saud, Shehzad and Rehman steadfastly ignore these tensions in the interest of rescuing as many birds as they can. But politics intrude in the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the riots that follow. As one of them says, communal hatred is not new; but once a community is likened to rats and cockroaches, it becomes a question of hygiene and the scope for reconciliation is near impossible.

And finally, there’s the question of hard cash. The brothers clearly struggle to raise money, but it’s to the West that they look for funding — no spoiler alerts here on their experiences with the FCRA. Yet, if more individual Indians chose to step up, there would be more ordinary people like Bomman, Bellie, Saud, Shehzad and Rehman to take the initiative to conserve India’s embarrassment of ecological riches —and two prime ministers wouldn’t be the only ones hogging the credit.