After three hours of slow but steady cruise through the
network of meandering river channels, the research boat finally reached its
first destination of the day. The crew dropped the small anchor and prepared for the
temporary halt. By the time I disembarked from the boat, the tide had receded,
laying bare the brownish slope called mudflat. The low tide meant that I would
have to slog through knee deep muck for about 15 meters before I could reach
the relatively hard ground. As I crawled through the mud, the ubiquitous mud-skippers hopped around vigorously while the fiddler crabs in a distance scampered for
cover to their underground dwellings. Maintaining the precarious balance with
camera trap equipment in one hand and a stick in other, I had only occasionally
looked back.
Covered with sharp pneumatophores and buzzing with mosquitoes, the hard ground offered little respite, but the dark and dense mangroves a few meters ahead were mesmerizing. I was expecting my recently recruited field assistants to be on close pursuit, but when I finally felt at ease and looked back, they were still on the boat. It had taken a lot of convincing and coaxing to make them understand that a large part of work needs to be and will have to be done on foot and out of the relative safety of the boat. A few days ago, when I had told the curious locals at the small tea shop that I had come to conduct long term research on tigers, I was regaled with stories surrounding the life of people and tigers. The people were nice, chatty and friendly and conversation flowed effortlessly as did the several cups of lemon tea. After the light chatter, the conversation had drifted to man-eating behavior of tigers. I was unusually tense today. This was the first day in field and having heard just too many incidents of man eating, narrated vividly during the first few days I had spent in Sajnekhali, all my senses were working in overdrive mode.
 |
| Tiger pugmarks on a mudflat. |
As I looked imploringly towards the boat again, my assistants disembarked, a bit grudgingly and I let go a sigh of relief having some company eventually. I could understand their sentiment to some extent. For me it was an exciting opportunity to conduct research on tigers inhabiting a unique mangrove ecosystem and the chance to earn a PhD degree. I do not know if the prospect of earning a few thousand rupees in an unforgiving forest created an equal amount of excitement in their minds. We then walked towards the forest, slowly and cautiously, searched for tiger signs and were soon rewarded with plenty of pugmarks on the soft mud. The initial grudge of the field assistants seemed to be slowly diffusing away into the thick and humid mangrove air. We deployed our first camera trap and returned to the boat, washed the mud off our limbs and continued to our next destination. For that one moment in time, we shared our enthusiasm, excitement, fear and a sense of brotherhood and achievement.
MV ‘Maa Sumitra’, the boat assigned to me by the forest
department became my home and soon after Probash and Dileep babu, two
experienced and courageous forest guards started assisting me with the work. Having
had spent about six month with my boat crew and assistants, I had no doubt left
in the exceptional courage and hardworking nature of these people. But entering
the forest always brought an eerie tension and excitement. Probash and Dileep were experienced forest
guards, and would stand on guard with their old and rusted 303 rifles, while I
conducted the work at hand. The forest looked beautiful from the safety of the
boat, step inside the mangrove and the tension on every face was barely
concealed. I remembered my own nervousness on the first day when I had
disembarked from the boat. If a week of listening to a captivating storytelling
full of myths with the protagonist; a cunning tiger that could even change his
stripes at will had unnerved me, I wondered what effect it would carry on the
psyche of people who have been brought up in a tradition that views tiger as a
God requiring worship and complete subjugation to keep him happy and at bay. In
most of other forests of India, tigers might be looked at with awe and
admiration and as the vehicles of the Goddess Durga by the devout ones. But in
the mangrove forests of Sundarbans, the tigers were Gods in their own right. One
would expect people to hate the tigers, but on the contrary, in the tradition
and folklore in Sundarbans, tigers often shift roles from being greedy forest
Gods to that of being brothers who have shared their fate with people and with
whom one have to share the resources of the forest. Poorly thought about
conservation efforts have not only failed to capitalize on a rich tradition,
but have actually alienated the very people who could have been the best allies
for conservation.
Wildlife biologists depend heavily on local traditional
knowledge to successfully plan and execute their research. In the villages
across India, invariably there will be a few people who will have the intimate knowledge
of the jungle, a tradition fast disappearing now. Could I rely on this local
knowledge of tigers to inform my research? Was there an element of truth in the
local description of tigers? Unfortunately, we will never know unless we allow
science to work untethered and free from shackles of bureaucracy.
The Sundarban tigers have been made infamous due to
incessant propagation of their perceived mysterious and almost supernatural
capabilities. This has affected the psyche of the locals so much that some of
them were clearly annoyed when I tried drawing a comparison between the tigers
in Sundarbans and tigers in other forests of India. To them the Sundarban
tigers were superior to their counterparts elsewhere, even if the consequences
of that so called superiority were tragic to them. I was however bewildered when
a friend from Kolkata called me to find out if Sundarban tigers were really
smaller than their counterparts in Central India and elsewhere. She was furious
at the findings of a study that used the measurements of skulls of dead tigers to
conclude that tigers in Sundarbans were smaller.
 |
| A misty sunrise. The sunsets in Sundarbans are often enchantingly beautiful. |
Accounts of man eating incidents are told and retold many
times over, each account in turn getting laced with more and more of the orphic
abilities of tigers. An unfortunate and
probably unintended ramification of this self-propagating mysticism is the fact
that Sundarbans owes more of its fame to its “man-eaters” than its natural
beauty, the meandering river channels, the dense mangroves and a rich and
unique marine and terrestrial diversity. The hoopla created around tigers often
results in visitors being disappointed at not seeing the “Sundarban tigers”
touted as the embodiment of sheer power, guile and deceit, unlike its lazy,
harmless and almost domesticated counterpart in most of the terrestrial forests
of India. It seems as if we already know what we need to know about tigers and
man-eating is as natural a phenomenon as is the cycle of tides.
In an intriguing article titled “Why not the best? How science failed the florida panther” author Liza Gross questioned the quality of science used by United
States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to evaluate the Panther habitat
requirement which had consequences for Panther survival and land use policy. While
the world is debating the quality of science determining the fate of a
carnivore, we have not yet even started grappling with the basics with all
sincerity.
The biggest tragedy of Sundarbans is people viewing the
deaths of the common masses as something inevitable and the natural consequence
of living off a hostile forest. Annu Jalias notes in her very well researched
book the wry remark of an inhabitant of Sundarbans “For the civilized and rich
of the Kolkata, we are but tiger food”. A journey from Canning port to inside
Sundarbans will remove any doubts that a person might have in this statement.
Not even fifty kilometers as the crow flies, the Sundarbans feels like some
ancient, undiscovered world hidden right under the nose of the uber metropolitan
Kolkata. Marked by abject poverty, lack of the most basic amenities and a non-existent health service, the region is a testimony to the hypocrisy of
those singing the success stories of India’s economic might.
During a regular research foray inside the Sajnekhali, the
wireless set of range officer Shankar Dutta accompanying us crackled and from conversation
that ensued in Bengali, I could make out that someone had been killed by a
tiger somewhere. Shankar directed the boatman to change course and then told me
that a fisherman had been killed by a tiger the previous day and he needs to go
and inspect the spot. There was hardly any conversation in the boat for next
two hours. Once we reached the spot, a small forest boat and the dinghy with a
few fishermen on it was already there. A fisherman pointed towards the forest,
but there was nothing that could be seen inside the thick and dense mangroves.
Scanning the edge of the forest, my eyes fell on a pugmark trail and as my gaze
followed the trail, a brown woolen cap stuck on a branch caught my
eye. The fishermen from the dinghy boarded our larger boat and an animated
conversation between them and Shankar followed. Shankar later told me that they
were the blood relatives of the person who had been killed on the mudflat and
then dragged inside the mangrove by the tiger while they were searching for
crabs. The morose cap stuck on a protruding branch was the only sign left of a
man who was up and alive just a day before. The relatives were unwilling to try
and retrieve the body, even when the forest staff offered help. When I asked
one of the men why wouldn’t they want to at least retrieve the body, he looked straight
in my eyes and remarked “do you want to sacrifice some more at the altar of the
tiger”.
 |
| A tiger photographed using a camera trap. |
Lack of scientific studies has not helped the issue and even when a few studies have been conducted, the problem of man-eating has been mostly overlooked and has not received the rigorous treatment that science demands. A dilettante approach has not only hampered the formulation of a practical solution, but has served to further mystify, romanticize and in some instances glorify the problem. The very people entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring the well-being of people and the forests shy away from any serious attempts to find a solution. In a paper published in Oryx in1976, Seidensticker and colleagues lament the lack of scientific knowledge while they grapple with the relocation of a problem tiger. The ground realities have not changed much since then. A recent book by Sudipt Dutta titled ‘Conservation by murder’ debunks the ‘man-eater’ myth drawing data from a myriad of sources and highlights the need to use a rational and science based approach to conservation.
Unless hard research is used, we will always struggle for
answers to such questions. Attempts at research are mostly met with red tape and sheer apathy. Instead of coming together
to deal with the crucial conservation issues, we find our bureaucrats and
scientists locking horns over tiger numbers. Tiger are caught in a funny battle, with bureaucrats, scientists and conservationists fighting for an exclusive
right to be their custodians. The local communities who share the
habitat with tigers are often nowhere in this equation. The problems facing
Sundarbans are not just conservation problems; it is almost a humanitarian
crisis. When the only choice of livelihood takes one straight into the jaws of
tigers, I guess the inevitable consequence is a high human toll. Despite that
it is surprising to see that the tradition and folklore of Sundarbans weaves a
brotherhood between people and tigers, finding common roots in a shared history
and use of natural resources.
Both people and tigers are a victim of an apathy that has
plagued and hindered the resolution of some of the most basic and fundamental issues
in this landscape, the very issues that concern the life and future of its
denizens.
Shouldn’t we take a few leaves from the existing (and free)
wisdom and ensure that our science does not fail the tigers, the people and the
unique mangrove ecosystem that entwines them all together.
All photographs except the tiger image are by I.P. Bopanna
An edited version of this article appeared in Down to Earth
