Plain Tales From The Wild

If this bittersweet little story tells of the compassion of animal lovers, it also tells of the needless cruelty of others. This has always been the story of India’s wildlife: a little compassion, but much cruelty. Every day, the planet we share with the trees, birds and animals is under siege.

Yet, there is some cause for hope. Conservationist and wildlife activist Valmik Thapar, in his preface to this book, shares his thoughts with us: “In 1992 I thought that the tiger would be virtually extinct by 2000. I was proved wrong,” he says. “And that is hope — hope for the future when more battles will be fought to save our wilderness from extinction.” Battling for Survival, edited by Thapar, traces the efforts by individuals and groups, over two centuries, to save India’s vast wildernesses from extinction. While it lauds the efforts of legendary activists, as well as the Bombay Natural History Society, the book also tells of how, tragically, India’s wildlife has mainly depended on the extent to which the political leadership has cared. This is also an account of the powers and limitations of legislation in preserving and protecting wildlife; and, as with the Kudremukh judgement, the increasingly important role of the courts.

Thapar brings together a rich collection of writings about Indian wildlife and efforts to save it. In the early 19th century, India was a treasure house of wildlife. “Game was everywhere plentiful and there was little limit or restriction imposed on what they shot, or where. In fact it was a matter of government policy to clear whole areas of game to open up fresh tracts for cultivation,” says Major-General J.G. Elliott in Field Sports in India, 1800-1947. And interestingly, in 1933, A.A. Dunbar Brander wrote about the main reasons for the increase in the destruction of game: the motorcar, he wrote, “is perhaps the biggest factor of all, in the disappearance of game. Since the war whole tracts have been opened up — in fact no tract is inviolate — cars penetrating into dirt tracks into country in one day, which previously took a week’s marching with camels and horses. Every car that moves by day or night has one or more guns in it, and practically every animal seen which presents a fair chance of being killed, without further questions asked, is fired at. The destruction is terrible.”

While the book is an eminently well-intentioned enterprise, Thapar’s own prose is often exclamatory, loose and disjointed as it links the various pages of India’s wildlife history. His passion for the cause of the tiger seems to blind him to other realities. “How I wished her major passion was wild tigers and not domestic animals,” he writes of Maneka Gandhi, without stopping to recall how it was her intervention that saved thousands of stray dogs from brutal killing.

And yet, despite its weaknesses, the depth of his feeling for India’s wild treasure makes this volume a powerful plea for concern and compassion.