Books

OTHER STORIES RELATED TO BOOKS Director's Cut

The literary editor of this magazine has a wry sense of the inevitable. Because I happened to write The Tiger by the River, a novel far from being conservationist in personality, he has in his wisdom flung Valmik Thapar's The Cult of the Tiger into my machaan.

This summer truly has been tiger season in Indian writing, as if the ghost of Corbett has returned to haunt our hard drives. A tiger hunt in David Davidar's The House of Blue Mangoes, a shipwrecked boy sharing a raft with a tiger in The Life of Pi and now this unusual volume on the tiger cult that Thapar sees as the primordial pashmina of pre-twelve bore civilisation.

THE CULT OF THE TIGER By Valmik Thapar Oxford Price: 295 Pages: 103

There is a reason for it; this intense, obsessive, almost religious involvement with the great cat, its flame-striped coat and ever-questioning amber eyes burning so bright in the eternal forests of our imagination. And it is from its arborescent heart that Thapar plucks the simple, beautiful truth about this ancient, tragic beast.

The Tiger is the soul of Asia.

That one insight alone reveals the fire in the passion of one of India's foremost eco-warriors, and the book is an unashamed panegyric to the beast. Thapar journeys through time and civilisations and the research is staggering-he reaches into primordia, conjuring the sabre-toothed monster and its later genetic siblings; from the ravines by the Amoor to China, Siam, Vietnam and India. That the tiger is purely Asian in origin is a reasserted fact, and Thapar argues that the colonising Caucasian with his rifle has been the singular nemesis of the tiger. The invading Dutch decimated Sumatra's tigers, the evangelical Bible-pushers shot down the great cats in China to destroy their mythical, divine status, British hunters scythed through tiger populations in the Indian and Burmese forests. Even in a place as unlikely as Singapore, where, as myth goes, the last tiger was shot cowering in the dining room of the Raffles Hotel. In killing the tiger, the invader was killing the soul of Asia, a feat in which the communists later participated with enthusiasm by declaring it a pest.

But then, both dread anything mystical or animistic. The tiger is sacred conveyance, the steed of the Taoist popes, the holy bronco of Durga, the speedbeast of the Dravidian god Ayyappan. Shamans invoked its spirit in their sorceries, and for many tribes killing the beast was a sin. The tiger was an iconograph of man's noble self, a higher, purer and invincible aatma that acted as a warden of the harmonies of nature and man. In folklore, the tiger drove away evil spirits and in Java, before it became extinct, guarded the Tree of Life. Even in death, its bones and skin granted life to the ailing and the infirm. But the march of civilisation savaged the forests and sent large populations of the cat into extinction. And along with it, the gentle beliefs of men who lived in concord with nature's cycles.

The myth endures.

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