What a Student From Bhopal Learned While Filming How Pench’s Villagers Live With Tigers

The evening before he died, Babita Uikey’s husband was busy alerting his village about a lone tiger prowling the neighbouring forest. Residents of the Turia village, a fringe village near Madhya Pradesh’s Pench National Park, Babita and her husband belonged to the community that made a living from mahua flowers (honey tree flower). 

Braving the throes of the wild to fill their baskets with the pale yellow blossoms was part and parcel of their lives. But that particular day, Babita’s husband had spotted a wandering tiger, and he tried to save everyone he could. 

Everyone but himself.  

The next morning, Babita found her husband in a state that still keeps her up at night. It was her daughter who lit the pyre. 

When IFS Rajnish Singh, deputy director of Pench Tiger Reserve, visited Babita the next day, he had the same question you do: Why did her husband go into the forest despite knowing there was a tiger? 

“He thought there would be more mahua flowers for him to collect, now that no one else would have filled their baskets with them,” Babita told the officer. 

She hasn’t recovered yet from the shock. “I can’t stand the forest anymore. Every time I pass by, I get flashbacks.” Her daughter, meanwhile, has a love-hate relationship with the forest; after all, it is her home, but it’s also the thing that snatched her father away. 

For these informal settlements, every day is a tightrope between death and survival. 

And it is this lived reality that Bhopal-based student filmmaker, Tushar Bhojwani, a graduate of the National Film and Television School in the UK, attempted to decode through his short film Roar of the Tiger, which was nominated as a semi-finalist for the Student Academy Awards (Student Oscars) this year. 

During his master’s in directing and producing science and natural history, Tushar travelled to Pench Tiger Reserve, lived with the fringe communities for 40 days to understand the dynamics of human-wildlife co-existence. 

The men and the mahua of the Pench Tiger Reserve

Picture an area so spectacular — the 758 sq km reserve is home to chital(spotted deer), sambar deer, wild boar, gaur (Indian bison), barking deer, chinkara (Indian gazelle),tigers, leopards, jackals, mongoose, hyenas and more — it was the original setting of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book(1894). 

Over 325 species of birds, including the osprey, grey-headed fishing eagle, white-eyed buzzard, pintail duck, bar-headed goose, coots, and gadwall, call the forest here home. It’s a beautiful tapestry of wildlife. And the hero is the mahua flower. 

As Tushar explains, “Mahua grows during February through April in Madhya Pradesh. The communities here go into the forest to collect it. If someone ventures alone, there’s a high possibility that the tiger might attack them. If they go in a group, the tiger becomes aware of human activity, and it won’t go near the group.” 

As Tushar learnt, “In Madhya Pradesh, if the breadwinner of the family gets attacked by the tiger, a member of their family is employed by the forest department so that there is an income.” 

Babita is currently working with the forest department. 

How do you confront a future shaped by unpredictability? 

Tushar’s documentary film was geared towards understanding this. “The film is about how humans and tigers are trying to share the same space. Some people are unhappy with the tigers; they retaliate for the death of a family member or cattle. Some people are happy with the tigers as these provide for their employment opportunities — forest guides, safari drivers, etc.” 

Tushar’s film is laced with this dichotomy.

The perils of human-animal conflict & who suffers

A Times of India report (2024) on a dual calamity in the buffer zone of Pench Tiger Reserve drew attention to the worrying rise of human-tiger conflicts in this area. In one attack, a woman farmer was killed in Jhinjeria (the east side of the buffer zone). In a subsequent attack, a farmer, Chanduji Ingle (45), was seriously injured on the west side of the reserve in Parseoni taluka. 

The Maharashtra belt, in particular, has been seeing an uptick in these cases. Chandrapur district reported 111 human deaths from tiger attacks in 2022-2023, in comparison to 47 deaths in 2019-2020 and 36 deaths in 2018-2019. 

As Tushar learnt, the solutions did not fall into binaries. 

“Despite the attacks, these communities still want to continue living here. They’ve been sharing this ecosystem with the tigers for a very long time. It’s their home too; their livelihood is surrounded by the tigers.” That being said, Tushar commends the ingenuity of the forest department in educating the villagers on co-existing with the tigers. 

Pedalling through Pench with a song of hope 

Prakash Uikey and his bicycle have become a mainstay on the muddy roads of Pench. Prakash sings as he cycles through the villages of Chandrapur, Pindrai, and Kurai; listen carefully, and you’ll observe that his words are messages of awareness and hope. Prakash took to this unique hobby after a 70-year-old man was killed in a tiger attack in December 2022. People blamed the forest department for not spreading awareness. 

As Jiley Singh Dhurve of the forest department tried to shout over the din of the mob uproar, “If killing us will bring this man back to life, I will be the first to volunteer.” But his words rang hollow; the mob wouldn’t listen; they burnt effigies and posters. 

To this end, the ‘Sayane Mowgli ki Cycle’ initiative, named after Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, sees local men spread messages in ways that the villagers will comprehend. As Shubham Baronia, range officer of Rukhad buffer area, shared, “Under the ‘Sayane Mowgli ki Cycle’ initiative, one cycle covers one circle in a week and then goes to another circle. The cycle riders are accompanied by beat guards. Apart from the set of instructions, phone numbers are also mentioned so that people can contact us whenever there is a need. This initiative has helped the department form an attachment with people.”

Another concept that fascinated Tushar was bagh-rakhi. “On Raksha Bandhan, men wear a tiger mask and go from door-to-door; girls tie a rakhi (sacred thread) and promise to protect them. It’s a creative way to teach the younger audience that you have to save the tigers.”

Dhurve elaborates, “When we meet the villagers grazing their cattle, we tell them that accidents never happen because of the tigers; they happen because of us. Humans are not tigers’ prey. But when these grazers interfere when a tiger is attacking their cattle, they will get attacked too, in the process.” 

Keen that the people of these fringe villages should no longer have to live a life steeped in fear, the forest department is giving them an option to relocate. But this, again, comes with its set of challenges. Farmer Mathilal Mathuram belongs to the Karmajhiri village, which is one of the villages that have been offered the option. 

He shares, “We are both happy and not. We have lived here for so many years. We worship Baghdev (tiger god) and know that we are because of the forest.” 

While relocating means proximity to better educational and health facilities, it also means sacrificing an income for some. 

“One of the men here runs a canteen; the major income is from tourists who come to see the tigers. He isn’t happy about relocating,” Tushar reasons. 

As Tushar’s film explores, there are multiple facets to this reality. To this end, life in and around Pench Tiger Reserve is a story of progress — one built on coexistence and attempted harmony with the wild.

All pictures courtesy Tushar Bhojwani

Sources 

‘Pedaling through Pench to reduce human-wildlife conflict’: by Deepanwita Gita Niyogi, Published on 16 September 2024.

‘After back-to-back attacks on humans, Pench to study tiger behaviour in buffer areas’: by Vijay Pinjarkar, Published on 20 September 2024.

‘Living in fear as tigers leave the woods for the hood’: by Arathi Menon, Published on 27 November 2024.

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