Burning bright

At the turn of the twentieth century, more than than 50,000 wild tigers roamed the Indian subcontinent. At the end of it, there were fewer than 5,000.

The decline had been steady despite the mush­rooming of conservation groups and tiger conferences, and the millions of dollars that had been spent on saving the big cat.

The crisis of these decades, especially the latter half, gave birth to the tiger-wallahs, a new, evangelical species of scientist-conservationists whose raison d’etre was saving the tiger. The history of this species is inextricably entwined with that of its subject, and its vicissitudes are telling of the tiger conservation movement (and tigers).

Hemanta Mishra is one such tiger-wallah, and this book chronicles his efforts to save the tiger in Nepal. There are many autobiographical accounts by tiger-wallahs. But this book is different, set apart from others of the genre by its honesty and self-reflection — by Mishra’s admission that he ‘does not have the answer.’ That ‘like most of his peers’ he too has ‘shied away from meaningful dialogue with those who disagree with (his) professional judgement and moral outlook.’

Mishra started out a mid-level officer in Nepal’s forest department but became involved in Smithsonian’s Nepal Tiger Ecology Project (originally meant to be situated in India, but the Indian government rejected it). After some wrangling with other multinational agencies, the project finally took off in 1973.

This was the first time radio collars were being used to track tigers, providing valuable information on their movement in and around Chitwan national park. Between 1978 and 1982, Mishra’s team radio-collared nearly two dozen tigers. As man-animal conflicts increased, some of them turned man-eater. Mishra was tasked with capturing them and placating irate local populations.

These experiences taught him that “any effort to save Asia’s large wild mammals will fail unless the needs and aspirations of the people in tiger lands are integrated into our nature conservation programmes.”

The book has many riveting accounts of tiger cap­tures; it also digresses into the history of shikar. One of the most interesting chapters, which comes at the end, examines whether the ‘eat it to save it’ or free-market approach to tiger conservation epitomised by Chinese tiger farms is a solution.

 

Its openness makes Bones of the Tiger a window to the back-room workings of tiger conservation and its proponents, raising issues that need to be addressed to find a way forward.