ANIMALS WITH RICH HISTORIES: THE CASE OF THE LIONS OF GIR FOREST, GUJARAT, INDIA
MAHESH RANGARAJAN1
ABSTRACT
This article explores how far animals are or are not endowed with a sense of history. The century-long history of lion–human interaction in the lions’ last habitat in Asia—in India’s Gir Forest, Gujarat State—is the focal point of analysis. In turn, there have been longer-term shifts since ancient and medieval times. Aside from two specific phases of breakdown, Gir’s lions rarely attack people. To comprehend why this is so, both the lions and humans need to be seen as products of history. Although it is going too far to endow the lions with historical consciousness, Gir’s lions clearly do have memory of memories. Over a half-century since hunting ceased, living on a mix of domestic livestock and wild prey, they now co-inhabit not only the forest but a much larger territory in close proximity to resident people. Their case calls for rethinking both animal and human histories to allow for associate species that adapt to human presence, and are capable of memory.
Do animals have histories? Such a question seems axiomatic in our times partly due to the work on wild animal behavior of the last half-century or so. Emo-tive ties, kinship relations, communities, family lineages, and sibling linkages all emerged as critical in animal societies due to new studies from the 1960s onwards. Terms once regarded as uniquely human or suspected of being anthro-pomorphic are commonplace in discussing animal societies. New critiques, including scholarship like that of Jane Goodall and Shirley Strum, have reshaped our views of great ape and other primate societies. This is true in various parts of the world, and especially so in Asia and Africa. Much analysis was focused on how insightful scholars transformed our views of primate and elephant societies.2
1. I am grateful to colleagues and friends who have been sounding boards and travelers on these explorations. While the usual disclaimers apply, I especially thank: Gunnel Cederlof, Ravi Chellam, Divyabhanusinh, Y. V. Jhala, M. D. Madhusudan, Sindhu Radhakrishna, Sagari Ramdas, Anindya “Rana” Sinha, Gopi Sundar, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ghazala Shahabuddin, and Raman Sukumar. To Leela Gandhi, Heather Goodall, Vidya Athreya, and Ram Guha a special word of thanks for stimu-lating me to rethink key premises. To all participants in the History and Theory conference I owe a deep intellectual debt.
2. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), especially 247-262. For instance, on chimpanzees, see Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), and on baboons, see Shirley Strum, Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
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Some have now gone so far as to assert that we should redraw the ape–human boundary. Elephant specialists argue a less extreme case, but in a nuanced reposi-tioning they define elephants as “near persons,” capable of emotional intelligence and sensibility.3 By the 1970s, similar sorts of views—often deeply contested—began to be aired for cetaceans in general and for dolphins and whales in particu-lar. This list could go on. The omissions are crucial: these are not animals that have a historical record of killing and eating people.
With specific reference to large animals that can kill, eat, or maim humans (carnivores) or seriously harm their livelihoods (predators and mega herbivores), this phase marked new, intellectually coherent approaches to ecology and behav-ior. Scientists tried to unravel nature’s economy to get a sense of its function or structure, whether predation and production. Such studies soon struck deep roots in India and the rest of mainland Asia; other kinds of behaviorally nuanced works were slower to take off.4 But a work on the family life of tigers or studies of indi-vidual Asian elephant behavior mostly had to wait until the 1980s.5 Part of the shift had to do with the end of commercial trophy-hunting and a new consciousness of the endangerment of charismatic fauna. Even now, nearly twenty years on, it is population biology, ecological linkages, and habitat studies that get the major share of research funding, whereas primate studies as elsewhere in Asia remain an outlier, notwithstanding a fine track record of treating and studying individual ani-mals as distinct beings with personalities. Similarly, sociological works examine loss of usufruct rights, tensions of access arising from resource appropriation, and divergent impacts of technique on nature(s), but they examine much less the ambi-guities on the animal–human border.6 In many ways, we are at a historical juncture worldwide, but more so in India where particularly numerous and diverse strands are being interwoven. These include in situ studies of animals in the wild, envi-ronmental history, archaeology, and ecologically informed sociological studies.
Rethinking animals as subjects makes us remap human–animal boundaries in emotive as much as ecological terms. What I plan to do is to follow the story of one large cat species, a very rare one indeed, the lion in Asia. There is only one place left where they live on this vast continent: in the Gir Forest, Gujarat, western India.
The author David Quammen was intrigued by the biologist Ravi Chellam, who explained how he had followed lions unarmed and on foot for his doctoral
3. See http://www.theelephantcharter.info (accessed September 12, 2013). I thank Vivek Menon for this reference.
4. Andrew Whiten and Christophe Boesch, “The Culture of Chimpanzees,” Scientific American 284 (January 14, 2001), 60-67; Masao Kawai, “Newly Acquired Behaviour of a Troop of Japanese Monkeys on Koshima Islet,” Primates 65 (1965), 1-30. On India, see George Schaller, The Deer and the Tiger: A Study of Wildlife in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1968.
5. Raman Sukumar, The Asian Elephant (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Langurs of Abu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). On tigers, see Valmik Thapar and Fateh Singh Rathore, Tiger: Portrait of a Predator (London: Raintree Books, 1989), especially on how one male tiger in a western Indian Tiger Reserve revolutionized hunting techniques.
6. Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Idea in India, 1945–1997 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003). For an overview, see India’s Environmental History, vol. 2: Colonialism, Modernity and the Nation, ed. M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012), 1-37.
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work. Nor was the researcher alone: the forest had and has cattle grazers or Mal-dharis, cultivators, forest guards, people passing through to markets, wood and leaf collectors, forest villagers who are descendants of former Abyssinian slaves (the Siddis), and myriad others who encounter lions on foot or on motorcycles, bicycles, or bullock carts every day.7 How did this kind of milieu of lion–human interaction come about?
It is easy to collapse the lion into a story of empire or of multiple engagements with differing ways of aligning nature and nation, or to write a conservation his-tory. Yet all of these would fall short of another tantalizing question. Do these lions have a certain adaptive capability—to adapt, shift, or change the way they relate to one another and to humans they encounter so often and with whom they share living space? Excepting two specific historical moments of lion–human confrontations, the picture through the last century and more is one of a more general coexistence (though not harmony) of people and lions.
Before moving ahead, it may help to define how history relates to animals. Like their human neighbors, the lions are in Gir due to events in the past that are still unfolding. The lions are in history, but do they have an idea of history? To possess a historical consciousness entails having a sense of the past in a self-reflective, possibly critical and analytically coherent way or ways. Having a sense of history entails a worldview. It may be going too far to endow a wild animal (or any animal), in this case the Gir lion, with such sense. On the path to historical consciousness, however, there first comes historical adaptation; this helps us to pose a somewhat more modest though still very intriguing question. When and why did lions change the way they relate to and with humans? Was this behavior specific to a few lions and general to all people, or confined to certain people?
How people view animals is a good place to begin the journey toward an answer. How those in power responded to them gives insight into animal–human relations as much as into hierarchies in society. For instance, the Tamil Sangam literature from before the Common Era is especially rich in its portrayal of how bull elephants were particularly destructive as crop raiders.8 But what of animals that directly predated on humans themselves? It is here that the narrative of symbol and image has to go beyond representations to the texture of changing relationships. To understand why and how the lion became a valued symbol, one has to go back in time to disentangle how those humans who left records thought of themselves (or other people) from how they felt about animals.9 Boundaries between humans and animals were malleable and shifting ones. India’s long history shows few sharp divides of culture and nature, the human and animal. Overlap (with conflict) was the rule, not the exception.10
Before we try to make sense of Gir’s lions, it is best to note what typifies the species. Lions are big cats: of the many species they are the only ones that are
7. David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York: Pimlico, 2002), 83.
8. See Raman Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants (Mumbai: Marg, 2012), 139. 9. Mahesh Rangarajan, “From Princely Symbol to Conservation Icon: A Political History of the
Lion in India,” in The Unfinished Agenda, Nation-Building in South Asia, ed. Nariaki Nakazato and Mushirul Hasan (Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 399-442.
10. Julie Hughes, Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment and Power in Indian Princely States (Delhi: Permanent Black), 5.
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gregarious. Lions, especially the males, vocalize loudly and often. These are large carnivores that are heard even more often than they are seen. They are also diurnal, unlike the tiger or the American jaguar.
Seen one way, the Gir Forest is a shrunken remnant of a once vast range. It is easy to forget that it holds probably the largest single population of big cats in Asia: the tiger ranges over thirteen nation-states, but nowhere is there as large a number in any one reserve or in a contiguous territory and its surrounds. The shrinkage of the lions’ range in Eurasia is amazing: a century ago the Iraq delta had lions, and a millennium ago, so did Palestine and Greece.
What is critical here is the larger evolutionary picture. The human impact in prehistoric and historic times was significant but humans did not step into a static frame. Even prior to the advent of humans, nature was dynamic and in flux. Lions once formed part of an array of organisms across a vast swath of land from India through west and central Asia and into Africa. Lions were major carnivores; gazelles and antelopes were prey, and hyenas and jackals scavengers. In the great mammalian radiations, India was a crossroads. Animals of the eastern realm (tigers/cervids) and the western species (lions/antelopes) met in the subcontinent.
Nature was not static but dynamic. Change did not and does not always require human actors.11 Genetic studies also indicate key points in the evolution of the two big cats of Asia, the tiger and the lion. Since they are about the same size and prefer different kinds of habitat, their paths rarely crossed.12 India was home to both but the Gir and the Kathiawar peninsula have no records of tigers. Here, the lion was the prime predator.
We now know that the lions of Gir are deeply inbred, and it is not only a near brush with extinction in modern times that is the culprit. DNA studies show them to be descendants of a population isolated from other lions since the second cen-tury bce. The Kathiawar peninsula was cut off by water until 1816 ce when an earthquake restored the land bridge.13 Natural factors two millennia ago led to an inbred population. Homo sapiens are a relatively recent arrival in India (roughly 70,000 years ago). But there is no evidence to link human intervention with the causes of Gir lion inbreeding in ancient times. Debates on whether they are a distinct subspecies may continue, but that they are lions with a long presence in India is beyond doubt.
The lion’s preferred habitat was often savannah and scrub forest, which in India have long had huge herds of cattle as well. Conflict with humans was never far away. Cows or buffaloes are both heavier than many wild prey species, such as the chital or the sambhar. Even the nilgai, the largest Asian antelope at 180
11. J. F. Eisenberg, The Mammalian Radiations: An Analysis of Trends in Evolution, Adaptation, and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
12. Stephen O’Brien et al., “Setting the Molecular Clock in Felidae: The Great Cats,” in Tigers of the World: The Biology, Biopolitics, Management, and Conservation of an Endangered Species, ed. R. L. Tilson and U. S. Seal (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes, 1987), 10-27.
13. Stephen O’Brien, “Prides and Prejudice,” in The Lions of India, ed. Divyabhanusinh (Ranikhet: Black Kite, 2008), 241-251. For an unconvincing if lucidly written view that the lions of India’s Gir are a “mongrel pack,” “a cocktail of genes,” and a “Khichdi lion” see Romila Thapar, Valmik Thapar, and Iqbal Ansari, Exotic Aliens in India: The Lion and the Cheetah (Delhi: Aleph, 2013), 179, 233, 180, 174 . Here the idea of pure races, well known in human politics, is reproduced uncritically. Khichdi is a dish akin to stew, a mix of many ingredients.
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kilograms compared to 150 kilograms for a buffalo, can run faster than the latter; the forest-dwelling sambhar equals a cow in body weight but can also get away sooner. The domestication of bovids and their selective breeding apart, herding of sheep, cattle, and goats offered large cats and canids easy meat on the hoof. From a lion’s point of view, India’s forests and scrub jungles did have a large array of prey species, but these do not compare in variety to the east African grasslands or the veldt of Southern Africa. There were also fewer large prey species compa-rable to zebra or the Cape buffalo. That lions should hunt cattle was only logical. There are ample records of cattle predation from the sixteenth century when the human population density in India was 35 to a square kilometer (compared to 378 today).14 The abundance of wild prey was probably matched by a larger number of cattle, given that the acreage under the plow was also far less than it is today.15
“AN EQUAL TO THE SOVEREIGN”
It was not only substance but also symbol that could matter quite seriously.16 The lion was a much sought-after animal by hunters, not least because rulers often saw it as equal or near equal to themselves. In a sixteenth-century ce Sanskrit text, the Syainika Sastra, Rudra Deva of Kumaon in the foothills of the Himalaya recounted how a lion was most easily shot after the taking of a cow. An archer from a macchan, a platform on a tree, could kill it.17 Early Sanskrit pharmacope-ias from about 1100 years before Rudra Deva had classified animals in different groups, with the lion being a panchanaka, a five-clawed creature. It was also seen as guhasaya, a dweller of caves and on both counts was taboo as a meat item. Yet, and this is surely significant, the flesh of this “eater of the flesh” (along with that of the tiger) was eaten on rare ritual occasions by kings.18
Moreover, there is little doubt of its centrality in the world of the descendants of Timur (hence their own self-description as Timurid). Like the gazelle and ante-lope, the lion was so familiar to a man like Zia ud din Muhammad Babur, the first Mughal, that it found no mention in his memoirs, the Baburnamah. These were creatures well known to elite Muslim cultures across central and west Asia. Writ-ten in Turki in the 1520s and later translated into Persian, his accounts of natural history and topography are still useful.19 Indo-Persian chroniclers saw the lions as the equivalent of the Badshah: a keeper of order in the realm of animals. This was
14. Sumit Guha, Health and Population in South Asia from Earliest Times to the Present (Ran-ikhet: Permanent Black, 2001), 29-31.
15. Irfan Habib, “The Geographical Background,” in The Cambridge Economic History of India. Volume 1: c. 1200–1750, ed. Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhur (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 16.
16. The mythical Garuda, the mount of Visnu, is modeled most probably on the bearded vulture, a Himalayan bird par excellence. See Rishad Naoroji, Birds of Prey of the Indian Subcontinent (Delhi: Om Books, 2009), 27.
17. Syainika Sastra, Rudra Deva of Kumaon, The Art of Hunting in Ancient India, ed. Mohan Chand [reprint] (Delhi: Eastern Book Liners, 1982), 186-188.
18. Frances Zimmerman, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 15-17; Brian K. Smith, “Classifying Ani-mals and Humans in Ancient India,” Man 126, no. 3 (1991), 527-548.
19. Babur Namah: The Memoirs of Zia Babur, Prince and Emperor, transl. Wheeler Thackston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
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an idea in India where the lion was mrigendra (the allusion being to the king of the gods, Indra, and to animals in general or deer in particular) in Sanskrit. Akbar (1556–1605) especially asserted imperial divinity: what is important was that he was the keeper of order in nature. It was the strong and benevolent rule of the Badshah that was praised not only in the khutba (Friday sermon) in mosques that were maintained by grants of revenue rights. This was to be especially important in areas like eastern Bengal where the clearing of the Ganges delta was the joint work of the state and land-colonizing Muslim peasantry alike. Here, the menace of tigers that ate humans was all too real. Predation by the mega-carnivore, then as now, was well known in deltaic Bengal.20
What of the lion? It is only recently that a meticulous scholar has shown how the Persian word for “lion,” shir, had been mistranslated in the standard English versions of the works of Akbar and Jahanigir’s time. Sher means lion, and babri tiger. A Persian speaker in the sixteenth century would have been unambiguous, unlike a Hindi- or Urdu-speaker today, where sher is often used for both spe-cies! A major cause of the confusion may have been that by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the word for “lion” in the Hindustani-Urdu-Hindi language cluster was babbar sher and for tiger, sher. Babbar in Urdu refers to the mane (of the lion), whereas in Persian babri means stripes (of the tiger). Sher is also a generic term for all big cats. With this error now in mind, the following account of a lion hunt from the Ain I Akbari, written by Abul Fazl, is very revealing: “A remarkable scene took place near Mathura. Shujat Khan, who had advanced very far, got suddenly timid. His Majesty remained standing where he was, and looked furiously at the lion. The brute cowered down before that divine glance and turned right about trembling all over. In a short time it was killed.”21 There were two other such instances (at Bari and Toda, both in north India) where Akbar on his travels encountered and killed lions that attacked members of his party. Several other lion hunts are described in the Akbarnamah, another work of Abul Fazl.22 One work of art from the Mughal era shows a skeleton of a man, probably the left-over remains of prey, with a pride of lions. In 1610, a lion hunt near Agra was almost fatal. A lioness had killed a cow, and knocked down the Badshah Jahangir, whose life was saved by the Rajput noble Anup Rai. Memoirs and paintings show the fatal combat that almost cost the ruler his life.23
Only the Badshah and a chosen few could enter the hunting ground, which was often surrounded by soldiers in a classic Mongol military maneuver of encircle-
20. Richard Eaton, The Islamic Frontier in Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).21. Abul Fazl Alami, Ain I Akbari, transl. H. Blochman [1927] (Delhi: Low Price Publications,
1997), I, 294. The word “lion” was substituted (and emphasis added) for “tiger” following the very important observations by Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asia’s Lions (Mumbai: Marg, 2005), 95, which is a fine study of the species through history using texts, sculpture, and art.
22. Abul Fazal Alami, Akbarnamah of Abu-l-Fazl, transl. Annette Beveridge (Delhi: ES Publica-tions, 1909–1914), II, 294, 482-483. Again, this has been corrected here as “lion” in place of “tiger” as given by Beveridge.
23. Stuart Cary Welch, India, Art and Culture, 1300–1800 (Delhi: Mapin, 1985), 187-188. The illustration of the hunt in 1610 clearly shows a lioness and not a tiger. See Tuzuk i Jahangiri, transl. and ed. A. Rogers and H. Beveridge [1909] (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1982), I, 185-188. Rog-ers and Beveridge—like Blochman—translated shir as “tiger,” and not “lion,” as would have been correct. The Persian word shir refers to a tiger unlike the Urdu term sher that could denote either.
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ment, the Qamargah. No wonder that Sir Thomas Roe, Elizabeth I’s ambassador, had to get imperial permission to shoot a lion. This was evidence of its royal status, not its rarity.24 Over time the lion hunt itself became highly stylized and ritualized. Aurangzeb, in the late seventeenth century, shot his lions from elephant-back near the banks of the river Tapti at Burhanpur. The failure of a hunt would have been an ill omen even for him, the last of the great Mughals, who was more oriented than his predecessors toward a more Islamic notion of piety. Bernier writes of how soldiers combed a forest for four days until the lion was killed. Since “it is considered a favorable omen when the king kills a lion,” he later recalled, “so is the escape of that animal portentous of infinite evil to the state.” 25
INDIGENEITY, ORIGINS, AND “ALIEN” LIONS
Familiarity with the animal is clear in the chronicles. They are testament to the fact the lion was a wild animal, both predator and prey. Despite this, a recent work forcefully argues that the lion was not indigenous to India but was imported from Africa by rulers and went feral.26 There is no documentary evidence of this.
Historians are aware of how debates about animals often reflect human aspi-rations or antagonisms. Writing in 1959, a leading sportsman of the princely states, Kesri Singh, surmised that the lion was an older inhabitant of India than its close relative, the tiger. Having organized tiger shoots in Jaipur, western India, observed the lions of the Gir, and helped the central Indian state of Gwalior in an abortive bid to habituate African-born lions, he was clear on what had happened. The tiger had vanquished the lion. He blamed fights with resident tigers for the failure of Gwalior’s experiment with lions. Ecological patriotism, passion for the tiger, and absence of evidence did not dampen his advocacy of the establishment of a population of lions. For Kesri Singh, the project was one of reintroducing an extinct animal into its former range.27 Unlike recent authors, he did not suggest that humans imported lions.
This matters for the lions of Gir Forest and their story because of the recent resurrection of the Kesri Singh thesis in reverse. Even before considering whether lions were imported into India in the past, it is worth asking how long an animal has to stay in a land before it ceases to be alien. The Thapar thesis is that lions were not native to India and were introduced probably by the Greeks. Even if lions were indeed imported in the third century bce and set free, this raises the larger question of what marks an entity as alien or exotic. After some 2300 years, are their descendants still alien? Further, there is no evidence of such a large car-nivore being introduced, naturalized, and evolving into a self-sustaining popula-tion anywhere in the world until modern times.28
24. Sir William Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615–19 as Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence (Delhi: Munshilal Manoharlal, 1926), 365.
25. Travels of Francois Bernier through the Mughal Empire, AD 1556–68, transl. Archibald Con-stable, 2nd ed. revised by Vincent A. Smith [1934] (Delhi: Oriental Reprint, 1983), 379.
26. Thapar, Thapar, and Ansari, Exotic Aliens. 27. Kesri Singh, The Tiger of Rajasthan [1959] (Bombay: Jaico Books, 1967), 155-160.28. Romila Thapar, “From Pride to Metaphor” in Thapar, Thapar and Ansari, Exotic Aliens, 24.
Insightful on symbolic history, the paper shows no evidence of actual re-naturing of lions into the Indian wilds.
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FROM PROMINENCE TO ECLIPSE
Lions were well known to rulers in India, and were an integral part of literature and lore in Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, and Persian. The Mughal works of art from the sixteenth century onwards show lions in a biome that has now all but vanished. Paintings depict a vast, tree-covered savannah teeming with large herds of prey animals. Onagers, blackbucks, nilgai antelopes, and spotted deer (chital) abound. Mughals saw the lion, a vocal and large beast of open spaces, as a rival and a worthy adversary. Royal artworks were produced when Mughal royal entourages traveled, hunted, and camped. Relationships with wild animals were critical in a world where travel was by foot, horse, elephant, or camel. We can only speculate on how lions or (in mature forest and wet grassland) tigers menaced the vast trains of pack bullocks at times over a quarter of a million strong. Awareness of lions was central to the cognition of prince and painter, chronicler and traveler, painter and soldier alike.29 They had no doubt about its identity as a species.30
The eclipse of the lion really came about in the nineteenth century. It was exter-minated across much of north and central India following the British conquest. The elimination of “dangerous beasts” was a policy innovation, taken up first at a local level and then in a more concerted, coordinated manner at a pan-Indian level in the 1870s. The centrality of the lion’s role as cattle-lifter needs some emphasis. A key administrator of early colonial India, Sir Bartle Frere, hunted lions with ease due to the cooperation of herdsmen who were deeply troubled by their depredations.31 Better firearms were accompanied by bounties, to the tune of even twenty-five rupees in Kotah, a princely state in western India, in 1875. This combination of hunting and bounty-killing emptied many forests and grasslands of lions by this latter date when they survived in only small leftover patches of their once vast range in India. This period, especially the later nineteenth century, was a time of drastic decline of several large vertebrates partly due to executive polices aimed at wiping them out but also due to new technologies of war and the hunt.32
It is clear that there were very few lions left by 1900. Hunting had reduced numbers. Contemporary opinions on the numbers varied: twenty, seventy, a hundred, and a few dozen. There was no reliable figure or even a way of arriving at one, but British officers and officials of the three princely states, Junagadh, Bhavnagar, and Baroda, agreed there were very few. So, the last of Asia’s lions
29. Divyabhanusinh, “Lions, Cheetahs and Others in the Mughal Landscape,” in Shifting Ground: People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History, ed. M. Rangarajan and K. Sivara-makrishnan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
30. This is contrary to the view of Valmik Thapar, “Epilogue,” in Thapar, Thapar, and Ansari, Exotic Aliens, 228-236, and 232, where he argues they confused tigers with lions.
31. J. Martineau, The Life and Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. Sir Bartle Frere (London: John Murray, 1895), I: 33.
32. Mahesh Rangarajan, “The Raj and the Natural World,” Studies in History 14, no. 2 (1998), 198-226; Krithi Karanth, James D. Nicholls, K. Ullas Karanth, James Hines, and Norman L. Chris-tensen, “The Shrinking Ark: Patterns of Large Mammal Extinctions in India,” Transactions, Proceed-ings of the Royal Society of Britain 277 (2010), 1971-1979.
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have been through two narrow population bottlenecks, a fate they share with the cheetah. Low genetic variability is often seen as sign of vulnerability: already in the late nineteenth century the lions were seen as unique, a free-ranging popula-tion in an Asian redoubt. The cheetahs survived in several regions and do so to this day; the lion had a worse fate in store.33 It is notable that there is no docu-mentary or archival evidence that lions were ever imported to Gir and set free. Their rarity was a result of human persecution, not because the ruler released a few captive lions into the forest.34
A successor state of the Mughal Empire, the Babi Pathan house of Junagadh was the largest princely state in the Kathiawar peninsula. The Nawabs of Jun-agadh had already by the 1870s–80s become very choosy about who could shoot lions. By 1900, and especially so after Viceroy Curzon refused to take advantage of an invitation to hunt a lion, the court began to assert rights to all lions. Only a third of the Gir Forest, its last redoubt, which in 1876 covered nearly 4,000 square kilometers, lay in its confines. Lions that crossed into neighboring princedoms were shot on sight. The Nawab’s men tried to drive the animals back by beating drums and making a huge racket, or enticing them with bait of goats or buf-falo calves. This seesaw continued in the next few decades. Even as there were controls on hunting in the Nawab’s forest and in the smaller Mytiala reserve of Bhavnagar, lions often crossed boundaries.35
REIGN OF TERROR
What was more serious was the threat to human life in the early years of the twen-tieth century. Just when efforts to protect them gathered force, the lions became far more of a threat to human life than ever before. 1899–1901 saw a serious and prolonged drought, and lion attacks on herds of goats, cows, and buffaloes became commonplace well beyond the forest. Terms like “the reign of terror” were often used in the Gir Forest and the adjacent Kodinar Gir. Lions hunted and ate not just goats, cows, and buffaloes but also people in and beyond the forest. After 1904, this ceased altogether, and lion–human relations took a turn for the better. The rulers of Junagadh compensated losses of livestock, and also fiercely asserted that all lions, even those in other neighboring princely states, were their patrimony. Memories of the drought at the turn of the century became part of local lore, but the aggression of the lions in its aftermath soon became a dim memory as their behavior underwent a change for the better.36
The transition from the imperial social order and its polity in India was by no means seamless, least of all in Junagadh where the Muslim Nawab decided in 1947 to opt for union with Pakistan. He did this despite having a Hindu-majority
33. Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asia’s Lions, 123, 126.34. Valmik Thapar suggests the Nawab’s fifteen to twenty captive lions reproduced, explaining
their behavior with humans. Thapar, Thapar, and Ansari, Exotic Aliens, 134-157, 157, 232-233.35. Divyabhanusinh, “Junagadh State and its Lions: Conservation in Princely India, 1879–1947,”
Conservation and Society 4, no. 3 (2006), 522-540.36. M. A. Wynter-Blyth, “Gir Forest and its Lions,” Journal of the Bombay Natural History Soci-
ety 48, no. 3 (1949), 493-514; R. S. Dharamkumarsinh and M. A. Wynter-Blyth, “The Gir Forest and its Lions, Part III,” Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 49, no. 4 (1951) 685-695.
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population and no history of association with the demand for a Muslim majority homeland and nation-state. Yet his flight and the subsequent integration with India were followed by prime-ministerial intervention on the matter of secur-ing the future for the lions. Already in 1948 they had adherents among Gujarati speakers from beyond the confines of the former princely state, who felt they were a symbol of regional pride.37 Soon after, it became the national animal of the new Republic of India. The old order did not die away: another prince, the Jam Sahib of Navanagar, took over lion shoots, which continued till the end of the 1950s. British Indian tea-planter Edward Gee visited the forest to photograph the lions, and found the older shikari (literally “hunter” but used here for the for-est guards), still had “JF” on their uniforms. The Nawab had left for good, but “Junagadh Forests” was still an emblem of pride among the men who tracked the lions in their forest home.38 A well-known male lion named Tilyar died, and All India Radio news announced that the “king of lions and the father of several cubs” was no more!39
By the late 1960s, the species and the forest were both in trouble. A slew of sci-entific assessments made for grim reading. These studies were highly quantitative and all focused on how to ensure survival of an endangered forest ecosystem and its key mega-fauna, of which the lion was apex predator. Four-fifths of the prey were cattle, provoking poisoning by irate owners who were very poorly compen-sated for losses. Wild herbivores were few in number and over-grazing by cattle was taking a toll. Lion numbers counted via pug marks every few years showed a dip to 177 by 1968. Robert Grubh, the only Indian scholar in the larger research project, found that hide-collectors, mostly Scheduled Castes (earlier “Untouch-ables”) drove the lions from cattle kills as they needed the leather. By the time the big cats returned, much of the meat had been eaten, but by vultures. Regenera-tion of the acacia and teak forest required spaces free of cattle.40 Hence, in 1974, the Gir Lion Sanctuary project relocated some of the Maldharis’ settlements or nesses. Though these traditional herders had a very difficult time, the prey, the predator, and the forest did seem to recover. A new generation of researchers col-lecting lion scat found the share of wild prey to be eighty per cent by the end of the 1980s. Numbers also recovered and conflicts over cattle-lifting abated.41 The recovery of the population of lions was seen as an index of a renewing, healthy
37. Rangarajan, “From Princely Symbol to Conservation Icon,” 421.38. Edward Pritchard Gee, The Wildlife of India (London: Collins, 1964), 62-63. 39. R. Bedi, Simha (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India,
Publications Division, 1968), 51-52. Tilyar died in March 1965.40. Stephen H. Berwick, “The Gir Forest: An Endangered Ecosystem,” American Scientist 64, no.
1 (1976), 28-40; S. H. Berwick and Paul Joslin, “An Analysis of Herbivory and Predation in the Gir Forest, India: An Ecosystem Approach to Conservation Planning,” Mimeo, International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Morges, Switzerland, no date, probably 1974; Robert Grubh, “The Griffon Vultures of the Gir Forest: Their Feeding Habits and the Nature of Their Association with the Asiatic Lion,” Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 75, supplement (1980), 1058-1068; Mary Anne Berwick, “The Ecology of the Maldhari Grazier in Gir Forest, India,” in Conser-vation in Developing Countries: Problems and Prospects, ed. J. C. Daniel and J. S. Serrao (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 81-94.
41. Ravi Chellam, “Ecology of the Asiatic Lion,” PhD dissertation, Saurashtra University, Gujarat, India, 1993.
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ecosystem in the Gir Forest. Guided by science, the government seemed to have rescued nature from oblivion: harmony was the norm.
“LION PLAGUE” RETURNS
Or so it seemed. The end of the 1980s also saw a major break with the recent past. There was tragic escalation of lion–human confrontations, and “lion plague” made a comeback. A new study showed sharp breaks and also long-term con-tinuities. From 1978 to 1991 there were on average two deaths a year due to lions, a total of fifteen attacks. The levels of attacks then rose dramatically to forty attacks a year in 1987–88. Of these, three-quarters occurred within the boundaries of the sanctuary. The intensive fieldwork combined lion records and studies with in-depth sociological investigation of who was adversely affected by lion attacks and when. There was grim news in lands close to the edge of the forest. Lions had been baited for a long time for “lion shows” for the tourists. The practice had been institutionalized after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s first and only visit to the Forest in 1956. In its effort to attract tourists, the Forest Department held “lion shows” where a pride was enticed to a chosen spot with a buffalo calf and allowed to kill and feed on it after the tourists had left.42 Goats were used to attract lions, their bleats serving as “a sort of live dinner bell,” as visitors watched on foot. By the end of the 1960s, thousands of tourists went out on “lion shows” every year.43 Such lions probably became less afraid of people and were not likely to flee a kill if chased by the cattle-owner. Baiting for tourists was finally halted in 1987. Lions in and near villages fed on human corpses and began hunting people as prey.
There was a second pattern: a disproportionate number of attackers were male, sub-adult lions that attacked people, not only cattle. Some were being edged out of the forest, which had one lion every seven square kilometers. Foresters unwit-tingly worsened matters. Any cattle-lifter was captured and let free in the reserve, but these very animals often left the forest and became more dangerous.
The situation was bad when viewed from the human side as well. Visiting fifty-six villages and interviewing seventy-three villagers, Vasant Saberwal and colleagues uncovered a disconcerting story. Their study did not simply ask what endangered the lions but when and why individual lions turned hunters of humans. Timing was of the essence. Drought began in March 1986 and ended in June 1988, changing the behavior of many lions. There was more lion predation beyond the forest edge. Each village in these subdistricts of Talala, Visavadar, and Mallya lost at least five animals a year to the lions. Cultivators and herders were unable to move in groups of less than five at night, and one in five had to keep livestock indoors. The drought changed things for the worse. Lions entered enclosures. Poorer villagers who went out to run electric pumps at night to water
42. Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asia’s Lions, 156-157.43. Gee, The Wildlife of India 84; the figures are from Paul Joslin, “Conserving the Asian Lion”
in 11th Technical Meeting of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, New Delhi, 25–28 Nov. 1969, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Publications, New Series 1, no. 18 (1970), 24-32.
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crops were especially vulnerable to fatal encounters. The Scheduled Castes were more at risk than others. Carnivores may not make social distinctions, but the uneven spread of wealth made some people far more risk-prone than others.
The experiences mirrored the cycle of 1901–1904 that had followed the drought of 1899–1901 or the Chappaniyo Kaal. The drought of “Samvat 1856” (the year is from the Vikram Samvat, not the Gregorian calendar) was more than a memory in the region, despite the fact that rains fail once every three years on average. It was still unclear how many lions resided outside the reserve, but it was clear that managing them in agricultural lands was crucial. Culling or removing excess lions to a second home in central India or for captive breeding was seen as the logical answer. Further, the researchers argued strongly for more substantial and timely compensation for loss of livestock. Many people beyond the forest were unfamiliar with the big cats. Unlike Maldharis, who had time-tested means of controlling the lions’ attacks, they were on unfamiliar terrain.44 As in 1901–1904, the “lion plague” was soon at an end.45 Since then, there has been no such escalation of attacks. Far more than in the case of tigers anywhere perhaps, the lions and residents of areas beyond the Gir Forest too have patterns of coexistence though not harmony. What was significant is that the recovery of wild-prey numbers and the lion population in the forest was now beyond any shadow of doubt. Most prey in the sanctuary were now wild animals. Far fewer cattle were being taken.46
The expansion of the range has accompanied a growth in the total number of lions. The new generation of biologists was marked by a fresh optimism. Cohabi-tation did entail risk, death, and injury but it could and did work. Subsequent studies showed one in four lions, as many as a hundred in all, living beyond the protected areas. By 2000, the range of lions was as large as 8,500 square kilome-ters and it is now over 10,000 square kilometers. They have reappeared in areas where they had not been seen for decades. Part of the reason lay in more effective conservation by the Gujarat Forest Department.47 The practice of translocating lions and leopards from villages where they killed cattle to the forest interior was given up as it actually fueled more conflict.48 Lions not only live in such hilly forest tracts; they are also found in the thickets of acacia and casurina on
44. Vasant K. Saberwal, James P. Gibbs, Ravi Chellam, and A. J. T. Johnsingh, “Lion–Human Conflict in the Gir Forest, India,” Conservation Biology 8, no. 2 (1994), 501-507.
45. The term is adopted from its use in Dutch-ruled Java, where “tiger plague” describes a break-down in tiger–people relations. See Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). This paper owes a deep intellectual debt to this landmark book.
46. A. J. T Johnsingh and Ravi Chellam, “Management of the Asiatic Lion in Gir Forest, India,” Symposium of the Zoological Society of London 65 (1993), 409-424.
47. Kaushik Banerjee, Yadavendra V. Jhala, and Bharat Pathak, “Demographic Structure and Abundance of Asiatic Lions, Panthera Leo persica in Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Gujarat, India,” Oryx 44 no. 2 (2009), 248-251. Also worth a closer look is Yadvendradev Jhala, Qamar Qureshi, Parabita Basu, and Kaushik Banerjee, Assessment of the Landscape between the Gir Protected Area and the Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Gujarat, for a Potential Lion Habitat Corridor, Technical Report (Dehra Dun: Wildlife Institute of India, 2009).
48. Vidya R. Athreya, Sanjay S. Thakur, Sujoy Chaudhury, and Anirudha V. Belsare, “Leopards in Human-Dominated Areas: A Spillover from Translocation into Nearby Forests,”Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 104, no. 2 (2007), 45-50.
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the coast. Such habitats lead to very close proximity to people. A pair of lions in Savarkundla regularly drank water from cattle troughs.49 Cattle kills are also secured by enterprising villagers who bring in tourists for impromptu lion shows on village commons.50 Here, the relative ease with which lions feed on kills in the presence of humans enables cattle owners to gain revenues directly from tourists in areas where the writ of foresters does not run. From being a predator of cattle the lion became a source of cash for villagers who took advantage of impromptu tourism. Proximity to people has not led to a new wave of attacks by lions.
The policy shift is important: the new studies do not favor moving any more Maldharis out. The sanctuary is home to 2,500 of them and to their 12,000 cattle. The lion densities are highest where both wild and domestic prey are available. The direct rivalry between chital and cattle is therefore not acute. Maldharis cre-ate or enlarge waterholes. Though areas around the settlements or nesses are often over-grazed, overall the creation of more water points expands available chital habitat. Conversely, Diwakar Sharma has argued that the sambhar needed spacing between the settlements to enable adequately dense forest for its habitat to endure. Only 300 square kilometers is totally cattle-free. These are areas with denser growth and more of the larger forest-dwelling sambhar, not the chital. Ninety per cent of the wild meat on the hoof is chital. Given the average body weight of only forty kilos, the pride sizes are small. The extent of competition between the deer and cattle is less than once supposed. In fact, the latter eat coarse grasses and leaves on which no wild herbivore in the forest feeds. The wheel had come full circle: from a situation in the early 1970s where there was panic about any cattle presence in the forest, their continued presence was now seen as beneficial to the lions and not necessarily detrimental to the wild ungulate communities.51 Given certain specific conditions, cattle and their keepers could even benefit the lions.
Lion sociology opened up new facets of the interaction of lions and humans. Intensive field studies have found lionesses in groups of two or three being the lynchpin of the territorial structure. The sizes of the prides were smaller than in plains habitats in eastern Africa, and the lionesses were the key rather than the male coalitions. Radio-collared lionesses stayed in the forest in the day but at night ventured into open fields. Having looked at forty-five female groups over three years, Venkat Meena found the average range-size to be thirty-three square kilometers: in turn this meant the forest itself could sustain fifty-five to sixty breeding groups or three every 100 square kilometers. Here, her work took into account lion social structures as they have evolved in this specific forest.52 Given the smaller size of prey, less extensive home ranges, and high densities, smaller
49. Phulchhap, Rajkot (Gujarati newspaper), April 21, 2003, quoted by Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asia’s Lions, 212.
50. Himanshu Kaushik, “Watch Lions Feast in Gir for a Price,” Times of India, April 22, 2008.51. D. Sharma and A. J. T. Johnsingh, Impacts of Management Practices on Lion and Ungulate
Habitats in Gir Protected Area (Dehra Dun: Wildlife Institute of India, 1996), 77-78; Chittaranjan Dave and Yadvendradev Jhala, “Is Livestock Grazing Detrimental for Native Wild Ungulates? The Case of the Chital (Axis axis) in Gir Forest, India,” Journal of Tropical Ecology 27, no. 3 (2011): 133-137.
52. Venkat Meena, “Reproductive Strategy and Behavior of Male Asiatic Lions,” PhD disserta-tion, Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun, 2008.
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prides were the norm.53 In one part of their range, the lions eat carcasses of cattle dead in cow shelters: the pinjrapoles and gaoshalas. Here, the size of prides was and is larger. The numbers of cattle taken by the lions remain high: in the end of the 1990s it totaled over 1500 cattle a year.
The losses were unevenly spread over its vast range. Lions in the National Park where there were no resident cattle took the least, but in the larger sanctu-ary, domestic stock made up half their prey. Even in the National Park, it was as high as forty per cent, well above an all-India average of one-third of the diet being domestic animals.54 But outside the sanctuary, three-fourths of the prey was domestic animals.55
How do the lions of Gir compare to lions elsewhere? The density of lions in Gir was less than the well-known reserves of Kenya’s Maasai Mara and Ngorongoro, in Tanzania, but was respectable compared to most major African reserves. The figure for density of adult lions per hundred square kilometers was and is misleading. In the larger, nonforest landscape, the density is barely two lions per hundred square kilometers, but in the western Gir it was fifteen or even twenty per hundred square kilometers.56 Radio-collaring of adult males outside the sanctuary showed one with a range much larger than earlier suspected. The Ranigalo male and the Dholikui lion were radio-collared in the Mytiala forests, a small forest area. The former covered a total area of nearly 1,200 square kilome-ters and the latter 900 kilometers, with a substantial overlap. After the Dholikui male died, the partner moved into an agro-pastoral landscape, living off livestock and taking refuge in hills and in chiku orchards.57 Even earlier, the spread of orchards in the Talala subdistrict was shown to be creating small pockets where lions could find respite during the day.58
The key to the lions’ fate still hinges on the Gir Forest itself. The rebounding of chital numbers from a very low base of three per square kilometer to forty-five has helped the lions in more ways than one. The seasonal cycle helps predators. Stags drop their antlers and are in velvet, being easier to hunt in late winter and early summer. Lionesses can support their cubs. Further, the presence of livestock is a plus in summer, for their condition is poor and they are easy to hunt, just at the time wild ungulates are also localized near the scarce water points. The forest lions are distinct from those in more open areas in the way they live. Lions live in larger prides in the eastern Gir where the prey are larger, mainly domestic water buffalo
53. Yadavendra V. Jhala, Shoumen Mukherjee, Nita Shah, Kartikeya S. Chauhan, Chittaranjan V. Dave, V. Meena, and Kausik Banerjee, “Home Range and Habitat Preferences of Female Lions (Panthera leo persica) in the Gir Forests, India,” Biodiversity Conservation 18 (2009), 3383-3394.
54. M. D. Madhusudan and Charudutt Mishra, “Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: Conserving Large Mammals in a Densely Populated Country,” in Battles over Nature: Science and the Politics of Conservation, ed. Vasant Saberwal and Mahesh Rangarajan (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2003), 31-55.
55. Venkat Meena, Y. V. Jhala, Ravi Chellam, and Bharat Pathak, “Implications of Diet Composi-tion of Asiatic Lions for Their Conservation,” Journal of Zoology 284, no. 1 (2011), 1-8.
56. Y. V. Jhala, Ravi Chellam, B. Pathak, V. Meena, and P. Basu, Ecology of Lions in the Greater Gir Landscape (Dehra Dun: Wildlife Institute of India, 2011), 29, Table 3.2.
57. Ibid., 83.58. S. Vijayan and B. Pati, “Impact of Changing Crop Patterns on Man–Animal Conflict around
Gir Protected Area with Specific Reference to Talala Sub-District, Gujarat, India,” Population and Environment 23, no. 6 (2002), 541-559.
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and cattle. Elsewhere in the Greater Gir area, lion group sizes are small, very similar to those in forest habitats in southern and western Africa and the Kalahari rather than the savannah in east Africa.59 Such meticulous research shows great diversity and range in the behavioral patterns of lions in different parts of their habitat across the Gir landscape. The animals shift in predation patterns. Territory and nocturnal/diurnal activity vary and change often in response to human action.
LIONS, ANIMALS, AND HISTORY
There is no real “tradition” among the lions in Gir or Kathiawar in general of preying on humans. In this respect, they stand in stark contrast to the tigers of the Bengal delta, who have preyed on humans since the seventeenth century.60 Why they do so remains a matter of debate, and again, records of attacks go back to times when key prey species now extinct were locally known in large parts of the vast mangrove forests that span Bangladesh and the eastern Indian state of Paschim Bangal. In Kenya’s Tsavo, Philip Caputo suggests that abandonment of slaves over decades induced lions to become human eaters. “Packing” large numbers of humans, first in slave trains, and then in the late 1890s as laborers for railway-building, created such preconditions. These were conducive to a break-down in any truce between lions and people.61 Jim Corbett similarly attributed the incidence of man-eating leopards in the foothills of the Himalaya in the 1920s to the disposal without cremation of dead bodies after a pandemic of flu and chol-era.62 More recently, the paucity of wild prey has been adduced as the key factor in the increase in lion victims among cultivators and herders in Tanzania.63
The Gir lions are distinct from the hand-reared and raised lions that, although wild, were intimate with human “parents” but could be deadly. Junagadh’s archival records show no instance of release of captive-bred lions. In fact, they were difficult to track until hunting ceased. Lions that allow the eager tourist to approach on foot is an artifact of Gir; the very setting of tourist and feline a few hundred meters apart was unimaginable before the 1950s. Yet there was no general history of sharp-edged conflict via direct predation on humans. The Adamsons’ Elsa in Kenya in the 1960s was the archetype but not the first such case of a hand-reared carnivore being released in the wild. In more than one case, such lions became a major menace to humans and attacked and ate them.64 Such animals reared in close proximity to human care lose all fear of people. In the free-ranging state, human presence has long been associated with fire, and has for
59. Jhala et al., Ecology of Lions, 62-63.60. For an excellent anthropological study of the Bengal delta, see Annu Jalais, The Forest of
Tigers: People, Environment and Livelihood in the Sundarbans (London: Routledge, 2009). 61. Philip Caputo, Ghosts of Tsavo: Stalking the Mystery Lions of East Africa (Washington, DC:
National Geographic Society, 2002), 262-274.62. Jim Corbett, The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1948), 1-4.63. Craig Packer, D. Scheel, and A. E. Pusey, “Why Lions Form Groups: Food is Not Enough,”
American Naturalist 136, no. 1 (1990), 1-19.64. Norman Carr, Return to the Wild: A Story of Two Lions (London: Collins, 1962); Adrian
House, The Great Safari: The Lives of George and Joy Adamson (London: Harper Collins, 1993); and Caroline Cass, Joy Adamson: Behind the Mask (London: Trafalgar Square Publishers, 1997).
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centuries also been linked to weapons. White farmers in Zimbabwe were wilding the land, with the raising of lion cubs on a ranch where they roamed free. Such range management of lions that were not shot for sport was seen as distinct from the hunting legacy of the apartheid, white-settler state of Rhodesia. The phase ended around 2000 due to intense land conflicts, but there was an association of whiteness, tourism, and lions on the game ranch.65
Yet the Gir surely stands out as a fascinating story with larger meanings. After the crises a hundred years ago and just under a half-century ago, few believed the lions’ future was secure. In the crisis of 1899–1904, it was uncontrolled, elite hunting and also of retaliation for attacks on humans and cattle that seemed to put them at risk. By 1970 it was ecosystem collapse. The last half-century has seen a steady recovery. There has been no clear road to a peaceable relationship with the animals (or with humans). Nor can there be one. Any cohabitation with a large-bodied, wild mammal can come into conflict with animal husbandry or cultivation.66 But the lion plagues were exceptional. These must be among the only lions in the world regularly tracked and viewed on foot.
It is perhaps time to investigate the possibility of a distinct “lion culture” of the Gir the way primatologists talk of distinctive gorilla or chimpanzee cultures at specific sites.67 It is historically possible to argue that a certain pattern of behaviors ranging from avoidance to tolerance has enabled lions as much as Maldharis to coexist in the forest for at least the last two centuries. For the larger landscape, too, there is ample evidence that lions here behave very differently from their coun-terparts anywhere else. Of course, there is now evidence of similar cases of large predatory animals sharing living spaces with people elsewhere in India. It is com-monplace to view this in terms of low human density or specific livelihood patterns that indirectly open up spaces for wild animals. A series of complex relations and tipping points in each case can lead to a downward spiral in coexistence. But the adaptive capability of the wild animal—in this case the lion—is surely significant.68
The uniqueness of Gir has been invoked since the mid 1990s in support of an assertive regional nationalism. Since all lions are in one site, biologists fear decline due to feline distemper or another epidemic. Kuno in central India was picked out: historically part of the species’ range until the 1870s, it still has no lions. The prides of the Gir Forest are seen as a badge of Gujarat’s uniqueness. The debate rages on, with the state of Gujarat opposed to relocating any lions at
65. Yuka Suzuki, “Putting the Lion Out at Night: Domestication and the Taming of the Wild,” in Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, ed. Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mul-lin (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007), 229-248.
66. M. D. Madhusudan and Charududutt Mishra, “Why Big Fierce Animals Are Threatened: Conserving Large Mammals in a Densely Populated Landscape,” in Saberwal and Rangarajan, eds., Battles over Nature, 30-45.
67. Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986). See especially Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (London: Harper Collins, 1971). Mahesh Rangarajan, “Region’s Honour, Nation’s Pride: Gir’s Lions at the Cusp of History,” in Divyabhanus-inh, ed., The Lions of India, 252-261.
68. Vidya Athreya, R. Navya, M. Odden, J. D. Linnel, and K. U. Karanth, A Report on Monitoring of the Collared Tigress in Brahmapuri Forest Division, Maharashtra (Bangalore: Centre for Wildlife Studies, 2012). So far, scholars have focused mostly on “inviolate,” strict reserves with no or few human settlements. Such work may shed fresh light on tiger–human relations.
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all. Their future, it is argued, is secure only in the state, where people, especially those in and around the Gir, have learned to live with them. The pride in the lion is part assertion of regional linguistic identity in a vast, heterogeneous country.69
HISTORY OR MEMORY?
It is surely going too far to endow lions with a sense of history such as humans have or historians imagine, a sense in which the past is re-imagined in multiple, contested ways to debate how the present came to be. Nevertheless, there is a complex tapestry of human–animal relations, and within that, the idea that ani-mals too evolve, not only in simple biological terms but also in terms of patterns of behavior, deserves consideration. Mark Wynter-Blyth, a sportsman-turned-naturalist (not unusual in the 1950s) remarked how after the events of the early 1900s, “Their habits underwent a profound change for never again are they heard of as a menace to human life.”70
After the end of all hunts in mid-century, this developed into an acceptance of human presence. Dharamkumarsinh recalled how “Lions that had been hunted behaved very differently from those fed for the lion shows. It was wary and could move very fast.”71
Another observer, who knew the forest from the hunting days and into the preservation era, was more emphatic. Lavkumar Khacher, an ornithologist and principal of the same elite school that Wynter-Blyth attended, felt positive about human–lion relationships. He recalled the friendliness of a lion nicknamed Sultan and singled out the foresters and shikari guides for their “fine job” of winning over the big cats. Refuting the idea that they were simply docile like tabby cats, he recalled that the other male, Akbar, “kept his distance and when a couple of us tried to approach, he sat up. Tail twitching and uttered a low growl. Tabby cats indeed.”72
Despite lion plague, this process continues. How it will endure as lion numbers grow and rising incomes change the human landscape is unclear. The question is a serious one. Is there cross-generational learning among the lions and how does it proceed? How far does this extend among animals? It has often been assumed that humans alone have a sense of the collective. Do animals have an equivalent?
Evolutionary biologists who examine species differentiation often did not relate to the very short time-frame of human cultural change. Yet there is now evidence that such changes occur because the cultural and intellectual processes of humans parallel genetic/biologic processes. The evidence from Gir poses a question. Is something comparable happening with these lions?
69. Rangarajan, “Region’s Honour, Nation’s Pride,” 252-261. 70. M. A. Wynter-Blyth and R. S. Dharamkumarsinh, “The History of the Lion in Junagadh State,
1880–1936,” Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 49, no. 3 (1951), 468.71. R. S. Dharamkumarsinh, Reminiscences of Indian Wildlife (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998), 77. Emphasis added.72. Lavkumar Khacher, “Lion Shows in the Gir Forest: At Home with Humans,” in The Oxford
Anthology of Indian Wildlife. Volume 2: Watching and Conserving, ed. Mahesh Rangarajan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 191-193.
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My argument is that if they did not learn, the Gir lions could not have survived the last century. At its simplest level, memory for animals is measured in terms of adaptive benefit. This means that behaviors that help improve survival and breeding success (largely via acquiring food with as little energy expenditure as possible, so disturbance is a serious aspect) will take root. Perhaps it is best to look at co-adaptation over historically brief but significant periods. A distinction might be useful. The concept of “evolution” refers to biological processes such as genetic mutation and then sexual selection. They matter for Gir as they stress that this population of lions has long been isolated from other lions. The isolated gene pool of this particular population of lions is vulnerable to extinction due to in-breeding. It does not account for their behavior. What is notable is not the genetic heritage alone but the ways in which the human–animal boundaries have been renegotiated, and what the lions and people do with the changing circumstances they face, not only in ways that affect the genetic results, but those that affect the historical ones.
But it goes beyond the individual animal as well. It may help to explore further whether co-adaptation is a useful concept. Lions and the resident humans are both contingent, location-specific products of a shared past. In turn, each and both have interacted and shaped that history, not equally, not as each lion (or herder or cultivator or prince or official) pleases but in time-specific ways rooted in a particular context. The lions mostly leave people (not their livestock) alone; in turn there was no local tradition of hunting the big cats save for the princes and landed elites, long faded into oblivion. Like the tigers of Java whose history was chronicled by Boomgaard, the Gir lions are a historical entity, behaving differ-ently today compared to a quarter, a half-century, or a century ago. Java’s tigers died out in the early 1970s, just as Gir’s lions began to recover. But for the human residents in Gir and surrounding areas, the lions are an associate species, not tame or companions by any stretch. This is a contingent, nonreplicable but notable case of cohabitation that often (not always) spells coexistence.
We may well need to rethink the human–animal boundary. These lions exhibit a capacity (which humans had liked to think was theirs alone) of perhaps remem-bering and analyzing events and then passing on that knowledge to younger members of the prides. This could be dangerous for humans when it was the case of lions habituated by baiting. For the most part the absence of persecution has led the big cats not to fear or avoid people they see as part of the landscape. One might even go so far as to say lions in Gir come as close to trusting people as wild predators can.
In many mammals, one generation (or less!) may be adequate to learn. In-depth, cross-generational work on long-lived mammals often yields new insights.73 Big cats (mainly tigers) in heavily hunted reserves that are now safe havens have lost their fear of jeep-borne observers. Individual histories and habits are now documented. Each adult animal has a distinct personality and behavioral pattern.74 Gir’s lions offer a less bleak view of how animals may respond to
73. Cynthia Moss, Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Joyce Poole, Coming of Age with Elephants: A Memoir (London: Hyperion Books, 1996).
74. Valmik Thapar, The Secret Life of Tigers (London: Raintree Books, 1989; Delhi: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1999; 2nd ed., 2009). Great familiarity with the Kalahari lions is recorded movingly by Delia and Mark Owens, The Cry of the Kalahari (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).
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human presence. India still has surviving wildlife, not in reserves, embedded in larger, living landscapes. Tropical systems have great ebbs and flows of energy levels (as in drought or flood), and this makes for great mobility and flexibility of animal ranges, making close contact with humans more not less likely.75 There are limits to how far animals can adapt, but it is the possibilities both in the trop-ics and in other regions that raise hopes of a peaceful association.76 In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, David Western goes so far as to argue that large mammals and zebu cattle have co-adapted or co-evolved since prehistoric times; the extinc-tions of large vertebrates in Africa postdate European conquest.77
Such coexistence was not the case in India, with its long history of animal domestication and local overkill by hunts and land transformation via agricul-ture.78 But an astonishing number of large animals remain if in smaller parts of their historical range. Animals too make their histories not as they will it, but via interaction with humans who share their landscapes. It is in this that the lions of Gir are as much products and actors of a specific history. This is especially so because of the proximity of so many lions to such large numbers of humans both within and increasingly beyond the forest perimeter. It is a proximity lived in nonantagonistic or at least in nonconfrontational ways.
The lions may be more than actors in a common history. Their story opens up a window on how animals—even wild and untamed ones—can evolve in close association with people. Categories like “wild” and “tame” are too crude to do justice to multiple layers of association. How to engage with animal conscious-ness—that animals have memory and are capable of emotional intelligence—is not clear. How will recognition of animals as sentient beings possessed of mem-ory reorder the historical craft? This is not about history per se and much more about memory. But it is also about social processes, and it is these that pose stiff challenges to a clear-cut binary along the human–animal boundary.
The lions of Gir beckon not to a post-human future but to the glimmer of hope of coexistence. There can be historically brief but significant moments of peace between humans and nature, even cohabitation with a large, free-ranging carni-vore in our long, sometimes relentless war on nature. This is a story of lions, but with consequences far beyond the forest. Such narratives indicate the potential for re-engaging pasts and crafting a better future. If notions of memory change, we may need to rethink our ideas of how not just animals but we as humans relate to their capacity for memory.
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75. See M. D. Madhusudan and M. Rangarajan, “Nature without Borders:The Problem” Seminar 638, no. 10 (September 2010), 12-13.
76. Tony Fitzjohn with Miles Bredin, Born Wild: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Passion for Lions and for Africa (London: Penguin, 2010); Robert Franklin Leslie, In the Shadow of a Rain-bow: The True Story of a Friendship between Man and Wolf (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996); Gary Paul Nabhan, Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).
77. David Western, In the Dust of Kilimanjaro (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997).78. P. K. Joglekar, “Holocene Faunal Studies,” Man and Environment 19, no. 1 (1994) 179-204.
