‘Tigers & Tribes: A Silent Conversation’ brings tribals in tiger reserves into the fold
A coffee table book, ‘Tigers and Tribes: A Silent Conversation’ is born out of a three-day art exhibition in Delhi, organised by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Sankala Foundation to commemorate 50 years of Project Tiger.
These 50 years of tiger conservation in India have been a battle between tribal rights activists and wildlife conservationists. The creation of people-free tiger reserves has been the mainstay of NTCA’s tiger conservation efforts and securing rights to traditional forest areas has been the hope and dream for India’s forest-dwelling tribal communities.
At first glance, the NTCA seems to be offering an olive branch to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs through this book. But this is no olive branch because less than a month before its publication, on June 19, 2024, the NTCA sent a letter directing forest officials to expedite the rehabilitation of 64,801 families — most of them tribals — from 591 villages located within the core areas of 54 tiger reserves. This order elicited strong responses and renewed calls for implementation of the Forest Rights Act (2006), through which tribal communities are granted individual and community rights to live in their traditional forest homes and access, manage and use forest resources.
The book is authored by Bharat Lal, the secretary general of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), and Dr SP Yadav, a retired Indian Forest Service officer with over a decade of experience at the NTCA and the current director general of the International Big Cat Alliance. The NTCA takes little ownership of this effort. They call it ‘An Ode to the Silent Conversations between Tigers and Tribal Communities’.
It is a collection of paintings made by tribal communities living in and around tiger reserves. These were chosen from among those presented at the exhibition in Delhi. The works have been organised by their respective states and are presented alphabetically, not by the painting style or the tribal communities whose members created them. The reproduction of the paintings is of high quality.
While the artworks have been chosen for the message conveyed and not artistic merit, these demonstrate the beautiful diversity of painting styles among the different communities that live alongside tigers. Among my personal favourites is a watercolour on paper by Sri Mungkam Ngemu from Namdapha Tiger Reserve. In the painting, a young woman with dishevelled hair, a sharp nose, fine eyebrows, small lips and a narrow chin, wearing a wraparound skirt and a crop top, is seen snuggling next to a large sleeping tiger. She is hugging the foreleg of the tiger while resting her head on his shoulder. The tiger is calm, eyes shut, at peace with himself and his surroundings, and rests his chin on his foreleg like a house cat. Their expressions bring the painting alive and suggest that the woman slept while the tiger was watching over her, and now that she is fast asleep, he is trying to catch a nap. If a twig were to snap in the forest, he would wake up and scan his surroundings while she would stay resting, knowing that he is watching over her.
Another of my favourites is an oil pastel on paper by Ka Abdul Razak of Periyar Tiger Reserve. In it, an elephant raises her head out of a pond and looks at the sky longingly. The elephant is painted in detail, and the forest and water in the background are a blur of emotions fleeting in the breeze. This pleasant image reminded me of the tragic death of an elephant that had chewed a detonator and spent his last days suffering from unimaginable pain in a similar pond in Kerala.
In another acrylic on canvas, artist Vivekanaand Patil from Pench Tiger Reserve paints a hauntingly empty forest village, perhaps depicting the relocation of tribal people from tiger habitats. It seems the artist is offering a back-handed compliment. Beyond the brilliance of some of the paintings, the book leaves many things wanting. There is no text accompanying the paintings — the little smattering of information lists the tiger reserves and tribes of every state in an encyclopaedic manner. There is nothing about the painting styles or the paintings themselves. A few works of schoolchildren from Delhi have been snuck into random places without warning the reader. Many of the photographs are without captions. The book begins and ends with too many photographs of the country’s President, Prime Minister and other important politicians and officials.
These oversights and political messaging, together with an absence of any intelligent commentary on the artworks, make the whole effort feel like a departmental report. Yet, I cannot but compliment the effort to bring artists and artworks from so many tribal regions of India under one umbrella of tiger conservation. It would be great to see the same sentiment repeated in the actions of tiger conservation and NTCA.
— The writer is an ecologist and conservationist
