Pitch black curtains drop from the ceiling, beyond the sunlit cafe of OddBird Theatre, Delhi, drawing viewers to discover the forests in an enclosed large room. An eerie silence hovers in the dark night-like background, as if one has just stepped into its unknown and unpredictable world. Wildlife photographer and conservationist Dicky Singh’s photograph captures a group of grey langurs on a balmy afternoon. It shows weeks-old infants at the edge of a lake jumping from one female to another. “All these female monkeys look after the young. It reminds me of an extended Indian family where everybody looks after everybody else,” says curator Laura Williams, of Singh’s solo exhibition of over 40 photographs, many of which have appeared in national newspapers and conservation reports. Based on the outskirts of the Ranthambhore National Park, Singh has captured generations of tigers in the last two decades. There is a life-size frame of India’s most famous tigress Machali looking into her mirror image in the lake. She passed away two years ago at the age of 19. Singh, who photographed her as a cub didn’t realise that she would be the muse for tourists for 10 consecutive years, earning the country $10 million a year in tourism. She even won the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Travel Operators for Tigers in 2009. A major highlight of the show is a 2008 photograph of Machali’s daughter, Sundari. Photographed seated under a stone canopy at a small temple of Lord Shiva in Ranthambhore, it is one of the few places where wild animals can be found. “Since 2008, no one has seen a tiger there again,” says Singh. His caption reads: “If you want to get such an image then try visiting Ranthambhore in 2028 and stay for a few months.” The major challenge, he says, is that wildlife photography is “unpredictable and the subjects do not really cooperate”. In another photograph, the tiger Sultan looks with fiery suspicion at the viewer. But how does he differentiate one tiger from the other? “All tigers are pretty easy to recognise. Much like our fingerprints, their strips are different. For instance, Sultan got his name because there are impressions that look like two feathers near his right eyebrow. Machali was actually named after her mother, because on her left cheek she had this mark that looked like the outline of a fish. In the exhibition, there is a photo of another tiger named Arrowhead, which has two marks on its body in the shape of an arrowhead,” says 51-year-old Singh. Singh’s photos from Kenya include a group of resident Wildebeest running and disappearing into the horizon at the Masai Mara National Reserve, while a troop of elephants become the lead stars in another frame, photographed right after a dust storm at the Samburu National Reserve, against the backdrop of an orangish-yellow setting sun. So has Singh faced life-threatening situations in his quest for a perfect frame? “Never,” he says. “Every animal gives you clues. Tigers give very subtle warnings before a charge, like they will touch the tip of their nose with the tongue, their whiskers stand up, they start twitching their tail or they render a low growl. An elephant will flap its ears and look at you. It will do a short mock charge. The elephant’s behaviour towards man is conditioned by its experience with man. So elephants who have never been harassed by men are very calm but in certain parts,where there is poaching and they have been harassed, they are very aggressive.”
