In The Shadow Of The Tiger
Sundarbans is a confluence of immigrant population of various indigenous communities and culture. The history dates back centuries and through the shifting rivers, the civilisation and the religions formed. I first arrived ten years back to thank the islanders after successfully defending my photojournalism thesis about the sinking Ghoramara island. Little did I know that would mark a decade of exploration in the delta, documenting the sinking island of Ghoramara, the cyclone in Mousuni and now the intense tiger-man conflict in the Bali Island, Sundarbans.
It is the world’s largest mangrove delta with hundreds of islands across the two nations, India and Bangladesh. The Indian side has 105 islands out of which 54 are inhabited, housing more than 4.5 million people. Carved within the delta is the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, home to 100 royal Bengal tigers, one of the largest isolated tiger population in the world. Between 1980 – 2019 there has been 1095 cases of tiger attacks in the Indian Sundarbans with an average of 28 tiger attacks every year. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) described Sundarbans as ‘the global hotspot for human- tiger conflict.’ Of all the tiger conservation landscapes in the world, the Sundarbans have recorded the highest number of human deaths by tigers.
The close proximity to the tigers has always been a cause of concern and have resulted in human-animal conflicts over the years, but the global Covid 19 pandemic further initiated a reverse migration from urban to rural areas, pushing people, not trained with generational forest survival skills, back to the forest for livelihood, collecting honey and fish, further escalating the conflict at an alarming pace. The increasing human flow around tiger reserves increased the number of tiger attacks. The number of casualties continue to rise steadily an alarming 30 deaths in the last 15 months alone.
The Royal Bengal Tiger, India’s national animal, is an endangered species facing significant threats of poaching and habitat destruction. Global warming, rising sea level and the growing salinity in water is steadily destroying the mangrove cover, which affects the deer population feeding on these mangrove forests . This has resulted in straying of tigers from the core forest region to habitable islands in search of easy hunt further escalating the conflict with humans. It is also pertinent to remember that the mangrove cover in Sundarbans is the first frontier of defence and acts as the buffer zone for densely populated regions like Kolkata and Dhaka to survive in times of super cyclonic storms.
This project focusses on the tiger-human conflict, in the Sundarbans- a crisis often overlooked in regional coverage lacking thorough research, but is also a social and cultural issue with deep impact in the lives and livelihood of the people, many of them, vulnerable and marginalized, along with religious and caste hierarchies. Collaborating with local community, this project looks at amplifying their voices and involve them in developing symbiotic solutions.
Working with local communities, especially the children and woman helps identify their voices and brings out opportunities for sustainable and alternative livelihood options, bringing economic development in this unique ecosystem. Visual storytelling has the power to break barriers, across cultures and communities and can be an effective tool to advance diversity, equity, inclusion and also to inspire empathy and change. This crisis both critical to the community living in the region, and to the ecology at large is a concern for all of humanity, and its resolution is a symbiotic responsibility.