Gayathri Vaidyanathan: It was November 2006.. .the setting…Gopeshwar, in Uttarakhand…on the borderlands with Tibet. The Himalayas loom in the background…it’s harsh up here, cold, not many roads… surrounded by wilderness… Nayanika Mathur is doing research in a dusty government office.
Nayanika Mathur: somebody came running into the office, and he said, Bag wapas aa gaya hai, which means the leopard has returned, and there was this gasp of horror in the room, and everyone just stopped what they were doing and they looked up and said, No! They were sort of incredulous, but also, they were just horrified.
Nayanika: And then anyway, so this man went on to tell the story about this woman who was actually my neighbor in Gopeshwar. She was climbing up the mountain on which Gopeshwar is spread out to get some fodder for her goats, so going up to the jungle, to just collect some of that. And suddenly, out of nowhere, this leopard appeared and it attacked her. And this is broad daylight. She shrieked, so lots of people came running…
Mary-Rose Abraham: …And it was clear.. the leopard was going for a kill…
Nayanika: I was absolutely horrified — I said you know well, was it just a chance encounter? Is it that she just bumped into a leopard and they were like, no, no, no! The way this has happened in broad daylight. You know, in front of other people, the way in which the leopard attacked her, it’s very clear that this is an aadham khor, that it is a Man Eater who has returned.
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MRA: The woman survived the encounter, though she was brutally injured.. and the leopard? …
GV: for 3 months, she became the Maneater of Gopeshwar.. she officially killed 7 people, unofficially she killed many more …
MRA: until she was eventually hunted down and killed…
GV: Now, you might be thinking — this is off somewhere in the Himalayas, this has nothing to do with me, right? There’s hardly room for man in India — never mind man-eaters…
MRA: You’d be mistaken. We are increasingly sharing space with predators and wild animals. People of Mumbai, you know this — leopards are strolling through your shopping malls, moseying into buildings, prowling the night streets… the sharing of space has deadly consequences…
GV.. for the animals, that is… not so much the humans.. or, at least that was the case until the pandemic.. Covid is the result of a breaching of ecological boundaries. As we expand our lives, as we live ever larger, buy more stuff, and to power it, build more dams and blast open more mountaintops for coal — we encroach on their spaces.
MRA: We are thrown together — this leads to new viruses jumping from wild species into humans. Like Covid-19. Which scientists think might have jumped from pangolins. Which are these tiny wild creatures, the size of a mongoose.. they’re covered in scales like armour.. and they are the most trafficked mammal in the world. Not the tiger, not the elephant… the pangolin!…
GV: So, how can we rework our relationship with the natural world and co-exist with other species? This is Chatroom 10, your bonus episode on Scrolls & Leaves. I’m Gayathri Vaidyanathan
MRA: And I’m Mary-Rose Abraham. And a small request — we’re an independently funded podcast and we do not host ads, so if you like our work, please consider donating via Patreon. Every bit helps – maybe a saravana bhavan meal or Starbucks latte a month? Details on our website, scrollsandleaves.com. And of course, if you have feedback – do let us know!
GV: OK – back to Nayanika, who’s an anthropologist at Oxford University and author of the upcoming book Crooked Cats. I’m eagerly looking forward to it — it’s a compilation of 15 years of fieldwork on big cat encounters in India. And it all began after this leopard attack in Gopeshwar.. Nayanika began collecting stories…
Nayanika: So I went to different districts, I looked at district archives, I collected a lot of stories and narratives, by victims of attacks of leopards. In Uttarakhand. I also did, again, as I said, I was working within these government offices at the time, I also looked at the archives, the district archives, where I found, you know, fascinating petitions, documents, images, newspaper accounts of leopards that were systematically attacking humans.
GV: She wanted to know why…
Nayanika: Why is this leopard prowling over here? Why is this leopard behaving in a way that is seen as crooked? That’s not seen as straightforward as seedha, but a teda, a teda bhag, a crooked cat?
MRA: She began assembling an alternative archive, as it were, filled with the tales of beastly encounters.. from pahadis or mountain folk, of women, children, men
Nayanika: I think that they’re powerful ways of narrating the world. And to think about how do these narratives then what do they tell us about the world? What do they tell us about the climate crisis? What do they tell us about human relations with big cats? And I think we need these narratives in this moment, because these are the people we never listened to, right.
So when we talk about conservation or when we talk about climate change, or when we talk about the environment, we listen to the voices of experts, you know, we listen to voices that we understand, that speak in the language that we speak in. And I don’t mean just English language, or Hindi or something. I mean, they have these kind of coherent narratives, they assume these expressions of expertise, they are scientific, they are rational, they are factual, they are empirical, they’re very different modes of knowledge
MRA: Back in Uttarakhand, Nayanika met a woman, whom she calls Vimla for privacy reasons… Vimla was a farmer…she had a sickle in her hand and she was harvesting…
Nayanika: by mistake, without knowing, she was quickly chopping it with this sickle that she had, there was a little leopard cub, which was sitting in the bushes, probably abandoned by her mother, and she accidentally nicked the foot of this leopard. So it was slightly injured — this little cub, and she felt terrible, but she was really scared that the mother might be around, you know, and she’d attack her. So she ran off, she left this cub and she ran off.
GV: A few years later, Vimla started feeling..something..
Nayanika: something which is really interesting about people who live near leopards and tigers is that they will tell you that you know that there’s a leopard here because you can feel his gaze on your back, you can feel him watching you. So even if you don’t see him, even if you don’t see pugmarks, even if you don’t see any other sign of this big cat, there are other ways in which you have this knowledge of the fact that this animal is actually in your midst or is watching you. So after a few years, she started feeling that there are these sort of beastly eyes trained on her and she just knew it – patha tha mujhe, ki hai bhag… so, there is a leopard here.
And then she started noticing that this leopard became more and more confident. So it would come out of the bushes or the forest, or wherever it was, and observe her, but observe from a distance. And then she said, and she always knew this was the same leopard cub that she had hurt. And she, once when the leopard was quite close to her, she could see that there was, you know, it was limping a bit. So this was the same one whose leg, she accidentally hurt.
Now, this leopard never did anything to her, it never hurt her or her family or anybody, but it would come and watch her.
And I said, well, did he or she come and watch other people as well? And she said, No, just me.
MRA: Vimla knew the leopard wouldn’t hurt her…
Nayanika: the leopard knew it was an accident, and that’s why it never hurt her. But if the leopard had thought that it was a deliberate attack on her, then the leopard would have hurt her. But she would always come and watch her because she wanted her to know that I know that you did this to me. That I know you hurt me, but I will not hurt you because I know you did not hurt me deliberately.
so she talked about how these animals are able to individually recognize another human, so they’re able to distinguish me from you, for instance. But she also said something, which to me, I found fascinating, she talked about the memory of leopards and tigers. And she talked about how they have not just memory in terms of something happening to them now and six months later, they recognize they’ll remember it. But they also have memory, which is passed down from mother to child, or across generations. You know, again, not just Vimla, but many people have talked about the ways in which leopards or tigers remember what happened in their generation, what happened to their kin, and they pass it down to different generations, and they educate their children on it, for instance.
GV: Now, dear listener, maybe by now you’re wondering like I was whether Vimla was just imagining things. Maybe it’s her guilt talking in the form of a pair of eyes trained on her back… after all, no one else saw this leopard hanging around her… so that’s what I asked Nayanika…
Nayanika: I don’t think Vimla was imagining it, it’s actually quite normal that you have, that you recognize a particular leopard or a particular tiger and the leopard or tiger recognizes you — that you know that this is a deeply intelligent animal that has memory, that is capable of recognition, that is capable of an ethical behavior, that is capable of understanding justice and injustice, and acts according to it. There is a huge overlap in the core message of these stories and what animal behavior, what wildlife studies, what animal history, what studies of cognition in animals are also bringing out.
So for instance, if you just take the question of memory, there is work which is coming out from animal history, as well as from animal sciences of other forms, that talk about the fact that animals do have memory, that they are capable of recognizing there’s a lot of quote unquote, natural science work as well as from the humanities literature, that’s coming out that argues precisely what someone like Vimla is arguing, the only difference is that they argue it in a very different way. For instance, if you go back to dogs, they’re putting dogs in these MRI scanners and attaching rods to their head and seeing what lights up when you say a certain name, or you know, you show them something, etc. They’re just working through very different means. I can see clear overlaps. You know, they, they’re talking about similar things which are that they are sentient, intelligent, feeling beings, and that the ways in which we act, they respond to human action, that a lot of this is actually a relationship between us and this animal. And it is this relationship between us as humans and this animal that is guiding what is happening here.
MRA: People who live close to nature have an immense wisdom, and it’s only by listening to them that we’ll ever truly resolve our environmental problems… so listen is what Nayanika has been doing. And one day, she listened to a man with one arm in a dhaba in the Himalaya…
Nayanika: which is where I asked this, this young man who had his arm chewed off by a leopard. I asked him, he literally is a man with one arm because of the leopard. And I still clearly remember when I met him, I met him in a little dhaba in the Pithoragarh district and I asked him so, why do you think this leopard attacked you? And he went on this like really long rant that thankfully I recorded. I listen to it even now, quite often, actually. Because it’s such a powerful narrative. He said, Well, you know why he attacked me? It wasn’t the poor thing. He called it, it wasn’t the poor thing’s fault, it was actually our fault. And I was like, what do you mean? Who’s this “our”?
And he went on this long rant about the Indian state, about the political structures, about how you know there is for deforestation, there is damming of rivers, how there is poaching of wild animals, how the state stands by and watches all this happening and doesn’t actually do anything, but is actually complicit in it on. How there is only lip service paid to conservation. But then there are some people who pretend to be conservationists, but they actually only care about tigers and leopards. They don’t care about humans. And you know, that will never work because you have to care for all human, all living beings in an equal way. You have to be compassionate
And But what was interesting about the narrative was that it was actually I was to find out quite commonplace. So when I’ll ask somebody in Uttarkhand or in the mountains, why did this happen to you? Why did the tiger attack you? They’re not blaming the tiger, they are blaming us — they are blaming political structures, they are blaming historical structures that have allowed for this world to function in the way in which it does. They blame big capital, they will name big industrialists who are setting up dams or chopping off forests, who are making obscene amounts of money, who are sort of denuding the Himalaya, who are killing it. And in the process of killing these animals, killing the world in which they live, killing, destroying, you know, basically leading to an ecological collapse. That is the reason that this leopard attacked me, this is the reason the tiger is acting the way it is.
Now, for me, I think that you know when I put all these very many stories together, I think of them as really much more powerful than I don’t know a WWF report that blames you know, the lack of a conservationist ethic or that has this very sort of apolitical, slightly, you know, technical account of why this happened. These are much richer, more vivid, more lived experiences that allow us to make sense of why we are in the predicament that we are. And because we don’t take them seriously because we are looking for speech of a particular form that is coherent, that’s rational, that’s in the English language, that speaks a language of expertise that we recognize, and that we respect and that has legitimacy, we are not listening to these voices. And I think till we listen to these deeply political and these deeply situational, and actually much more evocative stories, we can’t really see the kind of radical change that is actually required in this moment.
GV: You were listening to Nayanika Mathur on Chatroom 10 on Scrolls and Leaves. For episode notes, visit scrollsandleaves.com/chatroom10. We’ll be back in two weeks. Bye for now!