Spare a thought for the tiger

Vikramdeep Johal

LIKE other kids, my six-year-old daughter came out of the Jungle Book show aping the jumping Mowgli. They were all delighted that the wild child had cleverly and bravely ended Shere Khan’s reign of terror. With good triumphing over evil and brains over brawn, the parents were happy too, but I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. A number of questions crossed my mind. Why had the filmmaker made the ferocious tiger literally burn in the fires of hell, a la Ravana? Why were revenge and hatred the main motifs instead of symbiotic coexistence? Why was the awe-inspiring beast depicted as the villain when he was as much a part of the jungle as any other animal? And, with a tell-tale Muslim name like Shere Khan, wasn’t this Hollywood movie fuelling Islamophobia, that lethal virus which is spreading fast around the world?

Back home with these disturbing thoughts, I opened Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 book — the one I had bought and buried in my library years ago — to find out whether he had treated the tiger any less cruelly. I was shocked to read that the big cat’s end was even more gory here. He’s trampled to death by a rampaging herd of buffaloes, and the vengeful Mowgli not only skins him with a knife but also sings and dances proudly with the hide beneath his feet. What an irony that these fables were dedicated by the author to his daughter Josephine, who died at the age of six.

Incidentally, the film’s release has coincided with a report by the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Tiger Forum, which claims that the international tiger count is on the rise apparently for the first time in a century, with India leading the pack by a mile. However, the feel-good figures have been debunked by experts, who are blaming it on flawed survey methodologies. According to them, habitat loss and poaching continue to endanger the predator despite worldwide conservation efforts — and there’s absolutely no room for complacency.

The tiger is a key cog in the ecological wheel. Its survival is vitally linked to our own. It’s nothing less than suicidal for us to rejoice at its death, be it in reel or real life. The least we can do is to make ourselves and our future generations realise that this wonderful animal can’t be taken for granted. Otherwise, William Blake’s 1794 poem will end up as the Elusive One’s epitaph: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”