Film-maker Valmik Thapar’s love letter to a tiger clan in India has been 50 years in the making. You’ll be left agog at this tale of obsession, survival – and poachers out for blood
Valmik Thapar saw his first wild tiger 50 years ago. “You lose yourself within yourself,” he says. He had travelled on a whim from Delhi to Ranthambore nature reserve in northern India – one of nine parks created by the Project Tiger conservation initiative launched by the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in 1973 – and basically never left.
The hour-long documentary My Tiger Family is a photo album of the time he spent with these unendingly magnificent beasts, concentrating on the five matriarchs he has watched claim the prey-stuffed territory around Ranthambore’s lakes.
Padmini – the subject of that life-changing first sighting – lived through the era of mass hunting. In the 18th century, Europeans arrived with their guns and killing tigers became the sport of anyone rich enough to join them. One maharajah boasted of killing 1,300. We see black and white photos of groups – one including a young Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip – standing proudly over the corpses. It never ceases to amaze. The original wild tiger population of about 100,000 was down to just 1,800 when Project Tiger was launched. A dozen of them were living in Ranthambore when Thapar arrived.
Padmini gave birth to Noon in the 1980s, which Thapar says marked the beginning of the reserve’s golden age. The dozen survivors had lived in fear, only gradually learning that it was safe to come out during the day. The new generation roamed freely; numbers crept up from 12 to 45. “They were the best days of my life,” says Thapar, his expressive voice suffused with love. “I thought they would never end.” We watch footage of Noon and her mate, Genghis. It doesn’t matter how often a tiger appears on screen – you are always struck anew by their power and beauty, as if you have never seen one before.
The best days ended in the early 90s. Poachers arrived, eager to supply tiger bones to China for use in medicines. Two-thirds of the tigers were killed, most shot at point-blank range because they had never learned to fear men, let alone men with guns. “Sometimes I feel guilty that I taught them to have faith in human beings,” says Thapar. For the first time, you wish that his voice wasn’t quite so expressive. The reserve’s director and Thapar’s mentor, Fateh Singh Rathore, was nearly beaten to death by poachers. His driver flung his body over him and saved his life.
Thapar turned his attention to activism, sitting on government committees, setting up a charity and beginning to write the books and make the TV programmes – including 1997’s The Land of the Tiger – that he has since become widely known for.
But all this is given as an aside. We get no real detail about Thapar’s decades of conservation work, or much sense of the enormous knowledge he has accumulated over the course of his career. Even the most cursory reading of his Wikipedia entry alone suggests that he should be the subject of at least one documentary himself, but My Tiger Family remains firmly focused on those he loves.
Machli was born during the poaching crisis and prevailed. Her DNA survives in 75% of Ranthambore’s 70 tigers, including her granddaughter Arrowhead, via Krishna – whose litter of four cubs, instead of the usual one or two, “shook my being”, says Thapar.
Another poaching crisis struck in the mid-2000s, in which entire tiger populations in two other reserves were lost and Ranthambore’s own was reduced by half. As a result, Project Tiger was folded into the more powerful National Tiger Conservation Authority and armed guards began patrolling the parks. Again, the politics – and Thapar’s part in this – are not mentioned.
My Tiger Family is not the place to come if you want to learn much about tigers. Thapar notes a handful of the new discoveries made on the reserve – that tigers are capable of killing in deep water, for example, or that a mother will suckle full-grown cubs when she has no milk left, possibly as a way of gently marking the beginning of their adulthood and saying goodbye – but this is not a usual natural history documentary. It is a tribute to a handful of individual tigers and the astonishing beauty of their surroundings. It also stands as a tribute to what people can do to protect precious things when they want to – and a reminder of why we should want to.
My Tiger Family aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer