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| May 8, 2000 | ||
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People
Lives, loves and idiosyncrasies of the men behind the effort to save the tiger By Joel Rai TIGER-WALLAHS
These are men who cannot ever be excluded from any discussion on tigers. Billy Arjan Singh, a reclusive farmer who called his house Tiger Haven after his elder brother, little knowing that it presaged a life with tigers; Fateh Singh Rathore, a ne'er-do-well feudal who was offered a forest ranger's work by an exasperated uncle and went on to become Ranthambhore's icon; Valmik Thapar, the city-bred son of intellectuals who dedicated his life to the jungle. And, of course, Jim Corbett. Corbett? Yes, the shikari who went about shooting tigers. But if he hadn't downed the predators, the toll of around 1,500 lives would only have risen. Corbett the hunter was also among the first to recognise that the tiger population was falling; he helped found two conservation societies, edited a wildlife journal, and created the country's first national park, Hailey Park, later to bear his name. There are other names, not lesser, only less publicised. Like Brijendra Singh, a member of the Kapurthala royal family and a celebrated hunter who became a conservation lobbyist. Ward, a biographer first and a tiger-wallah later, has knitted his art and his emotion into a successful attempt at humanising Project Tiger, and Tiger-Wallah engages readers without entangling them in conservation politics. At the end one recalls what the flinty Billy Arjan Singh had replied when Ward asked him why he chose to stay on in a forest shunned by civilisation: "Everyone comes. Everyone goes. But I remain." One wishes he had been referring to the regal Indian tiger. |
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After
felling the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, Jim Corbett noted with
regret that the animal's only crime had been against the laws of man, not
against the laws of nature. Indeed, when one reads Geoffrey Ward's Tiger-Wallahs,
this sentiment is paramount: that the Indian tiger -- one of the five
remaining sub-species of the original eight -- today exists perilously
close to extinction because man perceived it to be a killer. But what sets
Ward's book apart from the shelves of such books is the way in which the
tiger's tale -- no doubt, very important -- becomes only a subplot in a
bigger story that tells of men who considered the laws of nature in
understanding the beast.