Living with the sugarcane tigers of Pilibhit

“What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them,” John Berger wrote years ago in About Looking (and in a slightly different context from which I’m using the line). Wherever one lives or whatever one does, this relationship with animals continues in India. It could be a relationship mediated by love, fear, distrust, hate or indifference, but animals are part of our daily landscape, and we negotiate space with them—be it in a city, a village or a forest’s fringe.

In the Pilibhit forest belt in Uttar Pradesh’s Terai region, fear is the primary emotion that mediates the relationship with animals. Here, tigers live as comfortably in the sugarcane fields as they do in the nearby forest, but cause a great deal of discomfort and terror among the small farmers and labourers—many of them women, for whom the same fields are both workplace and home.

Over many decades, the region’s original grasslands have been replaced by fields of tall, clustered sugarcane, and the tigers, as well as their prey, have become habituated to living in them. They are so completely at home here, even giving birth and raising cubs in the midst of the crops, that locals and conservationists call them sugarcane tigers. Anuj Behal visits Pilibhit and writes about the daily difficulties, negotiations and paradoxes of living beside protected creatures as agriculture expands, the forest shrinks, and tiger numbers rise due to a combination of conservation and community awareness.

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Shalini Umachandran is Editor, Mint Lounge.