The wild side of our cities

Sarika Sharma

The lights would probably have been all out had Nayan Khanolkar not been around, waiting for the big cat to arrive. Under that dim yellow light, as the camera snapped, it looked in the eye — a little lost, a lot innocent. One shot from this series clicked at Aarey Colony near Sanjay Gandhi National Park outside Mumbai has won the photographer the second prize in the coveted World Press Photo Awards’ Nature category.

Nayan started out photographing birds, but disturbed by an incident of a leopard being burnt alive in Uttarakhand, he shifted his focus to the big cat. Amid more such ‘news’ and that familiar narrative of leopard attacks in cities, he knew the solution lay in sensitising people to animal behaviour and creating awareness regarding conservation of India’s rich wildlife. His photography of urban leopards around Mumbai has been an attempt towards that.

Nayan says that, over these years, he has realised that a good wildlife photographer is someone who understands his subject very well and has an ability to tell a visual story about that subject in a powerful and memorable way. That calls for a lot of patience and a lot of research into animal behaviour and the road is fraught with challenges. It sometimes brings you face-to-face with the animal too. That is how Nayan met Luna, who, he had been observing for some time, up close.

“I was setting up a camera trap in the evening and observed crows circling over my head. Initially I thought that they were curious about me, but later realised that their attention was caught by something in the bush barely 15 metres away from me. I went in to investigate and bumped into ‘Luna’ — an urban leopardess,” he says. She was there at the edge of the frame, the moon hanging over her head. He had first seen her two years ago; Luna was a cub then.

“The more we trailed her, the more fascinated we grew. Luna seemed to be the epitome of natural selection... a leopard who had been brought up and had thrived in an urban landscape. Here she had learnt the ways of its other inhabitants — the humans. She knew that where humans roamed during the day, was her home at night. She snaked out of human hovels without anyone hearing a sound. A small man-made waterhole was her source of drinking water and stray dogs and pigs her kill. She had learnt to make peace with humans, who were largely unaware that in the greenery around their houses, lived their feline neighbour,” he writes in detail on his website.

Nayan feels Luna has changed the definition of the ‘wild’ as we know it. “The ‘wild’ is no longer the forested, vicious or unknown; the ‘wild’ that Luna epitomises is one that has reclaimed urban spaces without disturbing its human occupants,” he adds.

It is in this coexistence that lies the answer to man-animal conflict, Nayan says. And in the World Press Photo Awards honour, he sees a necessary platform to reach a much wider audience than he could have ever thought. “The main objective of this project was to create awareness about these wonderful predators and to convey that co-existence with them is possible. This award has definitely helped in that direction,” Nayan says.