Tiger Story: Lost Stripes of Gujarat

At end of 2016, a young tiger walked out of his home — the lush forests of Ratapani Wildlife Sanctuary that drape the right bank of the Narmada River, not very far from Bhopal, MP — to undertake an incredible journey. He decided to walk west.  He walked and walked…and walked — for more than two years — past villages, towns, cities, roads, railway lines, streams, rivers, forests, hills, and fields, with brief stopovers in between. He did this discreetly, never running into trouble with humans who also walked many of those same paths. In fact, they rarely got a whiff of him. Finally, in February 2019, he did what no tiger had done in 27 years. He walked past a man-made political boundary and entered Gujarat state. However, not all journeys have happy endings — especially when you are a tiger. Barely a fortnight after reaching the Mahisagar district on Gujarat’s eastern border with Madhya Pradesh, his long march finally ended — he died, ostensibly due to starvation.

Sad as it was, this tiger’s entry into Gujarat generated considerable media attention. After all, Gujarat was — even if for barely two weeks — the only place in the world that was home to three of the largest, and most charismatic, big cats of the world — the Asiatic lion (Panthera leo persica), Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris) and Indian leopard (Panthera pardus fusca). But there was a time in history when this was rather matter of fact for Gujarat. In the early 20th century, Gujarat was the only place in the world where you could hope to see four big cats — lion, leopard, tiger, and cheetah. The first two still live in Gujarat. Unfortunately, the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus) faded away from the state by the late 1930s, when the last one was shot in Junagadh district in 1940. And the tigers? Ah, the tigers of Gujarat! This is their story.

Gujarat, once part of the British-era Bombay Presidency, can be geographically divided into three distinct entities: the Kathiawar Peninsula, the salt pans of the Rann of Kutch that lie north of it, and the so-called “mainland Gujarat” with Rajasthan to its north and Maharashtra to its south. In the 20th century, each of these three distinct geographic divisions had its own emblematic flagship species: Asiatic lions in Kathiawar, wild asses in the Rann, and tigers in the “mainland”.

In the 19th century, the British-era districts of Ahmedabad and Kaira (Kheda) seem to have been the frontier for both lions and tigers in Gujarat (tigers have never been recorded from Kathiawar). Both cats were recorded and hunted there, though lions were eventually exterminated in the early decades of the 19th century. Tigers lingered for a little longer. The Shahi Bagh locality of Ahmedabad city was reported to be “infested with tigers” back then. There is an interesting record of a tiger being shot in the Rani Rupamati Mosque complex — now in the heart of modern-day Ahmedabad city — as late as 1840. Until the late 1860s, vagh (Gujarati for tiger) was also very common in what are now the Kheda and Anand districts, adjoining Ahmedabad. Four tigers were shot there in 1876. However, by the late 1870s, tigers were gone from Ahmedabad and Kaira, and had receded to the eastern districts of the province where they were still plentiful. For instance, in the Panchamahals district on the eastern frontier of Gujarat, 22 tigers were killed in a single year (1865).

By the turn of the 20th century, though Gujarat’s tiger numbers were a fraction of what they used to be in the 1850s, they still had plenty of territories to prowl and roar on the mainland. Although in low densities, tigers were common in the forests of Palanpur, Danta, Idar, and other smaller princely states in the north, the hilly tracts of Mahikantha and Rewakantha Agency in the east, and laid claim to the mixed teak forests to the south, especially the Dangs. The interior districts of Surat, Baroda and Bharuch also got an odd tiger here and there.

Around the 1860s, lions were making their last stand in south Kathiawar (Junagadh, Amreli and Bhavnagar) and within thirty years, by 1890, had been pushed to their last refuge in Gir, Junagadh, where their numbers were pitifully low. The looming threat of their extinction drew the attention of hunters, early naturalists, and administrators. Efforts towards their preservation were led by the Nawab of Junagadh. The lions of Gujarat, the sawaj of Kathiawar, would become fiercely protected from here onwards. But the vagh (tiger) in Gujarat’s mainland was fast losing ground. A combination of factors led by hunting, habitat loss, expansion of agriculture, and decimation of its wild prey base, led to the tiger’s rapid extermination.

By the time India became independent, the fortunes of the two big cats had undergone a complete reversal. Lions, which barely a century ago seemed to be decidedly losing the battle for survival in Gujarat were now doing comparatively well. A protected species by then, their numbers had risen to around 227 according to the 1950 census of lions conducted by MA Wynter-Blyth and Dharmakumarsinhji, two pioneering naturalists of Gujarat. Tigers, still awaiting the tag of a protected species, were not even deemed worthy of a count. Tiger shooting was still in vogue and some areas were especially well known as excellent tiger hunting grounds (erstwhile princely states of Danta and Rajpipla, Satkashi forests of Baroda, and Vijaynagar forests of Sabarkantha). As late as 1952, a man-eating tiger was shot in Bharuch district. M A Rashid, one of Gujarat’s most renowned forest officers and conservationists, writing on the status of the tiger in Cheetal: Journal of the Wildlife Preservation Society of India in 1979, remarked that tigers were “fairly abundant” in numerous districts of Gujarat up to the early 1960s.

While no tiger census was conducted in Gujarat until 1973, Rashid believed that there were at least 50 tigers in the state in 1960, the year Gujarat state was carved out of Bombay. Contemporary forest department administrative records give some hint on the tiger population. Three tigers were shot between 1960-61, two in 1962-63. Finally, the tiger was declared as a protected species in October 1963. While this step was quite far-sighted at the time — given that tiger hunting in India would be outlawed only in 1971 after a Delhi High Court order (later upheld by the Supreme Court) — but it was already too late for Gujarat’s tigers. The first-ever tiger census in Gujarat conducted in 1972 revealed the presence of only eight tigers in the entire state, all of them being recorded from the Dangs forest.  In another tiger census carried out in 1979, in tandem with a lion census in Gir, the results were 205 lions and a mere 7 tigers. Even with these tigers, there was a lingering doubt about how many were resident animals and how many were transient, having migrated into Dangs from the forests of Melghat in Maharashtra with which Dangs shared a forest corridor. The last reported tiger in Dangs was shot by a poacher near Waghai in 1983. And with that, the vagh of Gujarat became locally extinct.

Post 1983, unconfirmed reports of tiger sightings occasionally came from Dangs, Banaskantha, and Sabarkantha forests (bordering Rajasthan) in the north, but on enquiry turned out to be false — usually, a leopard misreported as a tiger. Then in 1992, a tiger was reported from Kheda, their old haunt which had last recorded a tiger more than a century ago. It turned out that a dispersing male tiger from Rajasthan had crossed into Gujarat’s Banaskantha district and eventually reached as far as Nani Aral village in Kheda. The guest, however, soon started marching back to his parent state. But he wouldn’t have a happy ending either, just like the Ratapani tiger who would enter Gujarat 27 years later. He was killed barely a few miles short of the Rajasthan border.

Since then, numerous tiger sightings have been reported in Dangs over the decades, but no conclusive evidence of their presence was ever found. It was only in 2019 that the Ratapani tiger became the first tiger to be camera trapped in Gujarat’s history.

It is also worth mentioning here that MK Ranjitsinh proposed tiger reintroduction in Gujarat twice in the 1980s, first when he was the forest secretary of Madhya Pradesh and later as the director of Wildlife Preservation of India. But Gujarat did not take up those proposals.

So that was the story of Gujarat’s tigers. One wonders if the vagh will roar in Gujarat again? Will the state someday regain its lost glory as the land of stripes, manes, and spots? Can the tigers naturally recolonise their old haunts in Gujarat as shown by the lions in Kathiawar? The answer, my friends, blows in the dust of a wandering tiger’s footsteps.