History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 109-127

Wesleyan University 2013 ISSN: 0018-2656

ANIMALS WITH RICH HISTORIES:

THE CASE OF THE LIONS OF GIR FOREST, GUJARAT, INDIA
MAHESH RANGARAJAN1
ABSTRACT

This article explores how far animals are or are not endowed with a sense of history.
The century-long history of lionhuman interaction in the lions last habitat in Asiain
Indias Gir Forest, Gujarat Stateis the focal point of analysis. In turn, there have been
longer-term shifts since ancient and medieval times. Aside from two specific phases of
breakdown, Girs lions rarely attack people. To comprehend why this is so, both the lions
and humans need to be seen as products of history. Although it is going too far to endow
the lions with historical consciousness, Girs lions clearly do have memory of memories.
Over a half-century since hunting ceased, living on a mix of domestic livestock and wild
prey, they now co-inhabit not only the forest but a much larger territory in close proximity
to resident people. Their case calls for rethinking both animal and human histories to allow
for associate species that adapt to human presence, and are capable of memory.
Keywords: conservation, animal behavior, prey, princely states, imperial, emotion, memory, adaptation, survival, lion plague, extinction

Do animals have histories? Such a question seems axiomatic in our times partly
due to the work on wild animal behavior of the last half-century or so. Emotive ties, kinship relations, communities, family lineages, and sibling linkages
all emerged as critical in animal societies due to new studies from the 1960s
onwards. Terms once regarded as uniquely human or suspected of being anthropomorphic are commonplace in discussing animal societies. New critiques,
including scholarship like that of Jane Goodall and Shirley Strum, have reshaped
our views of great ape and other primate societies. This is true in various parts of
the world, and especially so in Asia and Africa. Much analysis was focused on
how insightful scholars transformed our views of primate and elephant societies.2
1. I am grateful to colleagues and friends who have been sounding boards and travelers on these
explorations. While the usual disclaimers apply, I especially thank: Gunnel Cederlof, Ravi Chellam,
Divyabhanusinh, Y. V. Jhala, M. D. Madhusudan, Sindhu Radhakrishna, Sagari Ramdas, Anindya
Rana Sinha, Gopi Sundar, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ghazala Shahabuddin, and Raman Sukumar. To
Leela Gandhi, Heather Goodall, Vidya Athreya, and Ram Guha a special word of thanks for stimulating me to rethink key premises. To all participants in the History and Theory conference I owe a
deep intellectual debt.
2. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(New York: Routledge, 1989), especially 247-262. For instance, on chimpanzees, see Jane Goodall,
In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), and on baboons, see Shirley Strum, Almost
Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).

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Some have now gone so far as to assert that we should redraw the apehuman
boundary. Elephant specialists argue a less extreme case, but in a nuanced repositioning they define elephants as near persons, capable of emotional intelligence
and sensibility.3By the 1970s, similar sorts of viewsoften deeply contested
began to be aired for cetaceans in general and for dolphins and whales in particular. This list could go on. The omissions are crucial: these are not animals that
have a historical record of killing and eating people.
With specific reference to large animals that can kill, eat, or maim humans
(carnivores) or seriously harm their livelihoods (predators and mega herbivores),
this phase marked new, intellectually coherent approaches to ecology and behavior.Scientists tried to unravel natures economy to get a sense of its function or
structure, whether predation and production. Such studies soon struck deep roots
in India and the rest of mainland Asia; other kinds of behaviorally nuanced works
were slower to take off.4 But a work on the family life of tigers or studies of individual Asian elephant behavior mostly had to wait until the 1980s.5 Part of the shift
had to do with the end of commercial trophy-hunting and a new consciousness
of the endangerment of charismatic fauna. Even now, nearly twenty years on, it
is population biology, ecological linkages, and habitat studies that get the major
share of research funding, whereas primate studies as elsewhere in Asia remain an
outlier, notwithstanding a fine track record of treating and studying individual animals as distinct beings with personalities. Similarly, sociological works examine
loss of usufruct rights, tensions of access arising from resource appropriation, and
divergent impacts of technique on nature(s), but they examine much less the ambiguities on the animalhuman border.6 In many ways, we are at a historical juncture
worldwide, but more so in India where particularly numerous and diverse strands
are being interwoven. These include in situ studies of animals in the wild, environmental history, archaeology, and ecologically informed sociological studies.
Rethinking animals as subjects makes us remap humananimal boundaries in
emotive as much as ecological terms. What I plan to do is to follow the story
of one large cat species, a very rare one indeed, the lion in Asia. There is only
one place left where they live on this vast continent: in the Gir Forest, Gujarat,
western India.
The author David Quammen was intrigued by the biologist Ravi Chellam,
who explained how he had followed lions unarmed and on foot for his doctoral
3. See http://www.theelephantcharter.info (accessed September 12, 2013). I thank Vivek Menon
for this reference.
4. Andrew Whiten and Christophe Boesch, The Culture of Chimpanzees, Scientific American
284 (January 14, 2001), 60-67; Masao Kawai, Newly Acquired Behaviour of a Troop of Japanese
Monkeys on Koshima Islet, Primates 65 (1965), 1-30. On India, see George Schaller, The Deer and
the Tiger: A Study of Wildlife in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1968.
5. Raman Sukumar, The Asian Elephant (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Langurs of Abu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). On
tigers, see Valmik Thapar and Fateh Singh Rathore, Tiger: Portrait of a Predator (London: Raintree
Books, 1989), especially on how one male tiger in a western Indian Tiger Reserve revolutionized
hunting techniques.
6. Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Idea in India, 19451997
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003). For an overview, see Indias Environmental History, vol. 2:
Colonialism, Modernity and the Nation, ed. M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Ranikhet:
Permanent Black, 2012), 1-37.

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work. Nor was the researcher alone: the forest had and has cattle grazers or Maldharis, cultivators, forest guards, people passing through to markets, wood and
leaf collectors, forest villagers who are descendants of former Abyssinian slaves
(the Siddis), and myriad others who encounter lions on foot or on motorcycles,
bicycles, or bullock carts every day.7 How did this kind of milieu of lionhuman
interaction come about?
It is easy to collapse the lion into a story of empire or of multiple engagements
with differing ways of aligning nature and nation, or to write a conservation history. Yet all of these would fall short of another tantalizing question. Do these
lions have a certain adaptive capabilityto adapt, shift, or change the way they
relate to one another and to humans they encounter so often and with whom they
share living space? Excepting two specific historical moments of lionhuman
confrontations, the picture through the last century and more is one of a more
general coexistence (though not harmony) of people and lions.
Before moving ahead, it may help to define how history relates to animals.
Like their human neighbors, the lions are in Gir due to events in the past that
are still unfolding. The lions are in history, but do they have an idea of history?
To possess a historical consciousness entails having a sense of the past in a selfreflective, possibly critical and analytically coherent way or ways. Having a sense
of history entails a worldview. It may be going too far to endow a wild animal (or
any animal), in this case the Gir lion, with such sense. On the path to historical
consciousness, however, there first comes historical adaptation; this helps us to
pose a somewhat more modest though still very intriguing question. When and
why did lions change the way they relate to and with humans? Was this behavior
specific to a few lions and general to all people, or confined to certain people?
How people view animals is a good place to begin the journey toward an
answer. How those in power responded to them gives insight into animalhuman
relations as much as into hierarchies in society. For instance, the Tamil Sangam
literature from before the Common Era is especially rich in its portrayal of how
bull elephants were particularly destructive as crop raiders.8 But what of animals
that directly predated on humans themselves? It is here that the narrative of
symbol and image has to go beyond representations to the texture of changing
relationships. To understand why and how the lion became a valued symbol, one
has to go back in time to disentangle how those humans who left records thought
of themselves (or other people) from how they felt about animals.9 Boundaries
between humans and animals were malleable and shifting ones. Indias long
history shows few sharp divides of culture and nature, the human and animal.
Overlap (with conflict) was the rule, not the exception.10
Before we try to make sense of Girs lions, it is best to note what typifies the
species. Lions are big cats: of the many species they are the only ones that are
7. David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the
Mind (New York: Pimlico, 2002), 83.
8. See Raman Sukumar, The Story of Asias Elephants (Mumbai: Marg, 2012), 139.
9. Mahesh Rangarajan, From Princely Symbol to Conservation Icon: A Political History of the
Lion in India, in The Unfinished Agenda, Nation-Building in South Asia, ed. Nariaki Nakazato and
Mushirul Hasan (Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 399-442.
10. Julie Hughes, Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment and Power in Indian Princely
States (Delhi: Permanent Black), 5.

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gregarious. Lions, especially the males, vocalize loudly and often. These are
large carnivores that are heard even more often than they are seen. They are also
diurnal, unlike the tiger or the American jaguar.
Seen one way, the Gir Forest is a shrunken remnant of a once vast range. It is
easy to forget that it holds probably the largest single population of big cats in
Asia: the tiger ranges over thirteen nation-states, but nowhere is there as large
a number in any one reserve or in a contiguous territory and its surrounds. The
shrinkage of the lions range in Eurasia is amazing: a century ago the Iraq delta
had lions, and a millennium ago, so did Palestine and Greece.
What is critical here is the larger evolutionary picture. The human impact in
prehistoric and historic times was significant but humans did not step into a static
frame. Even prior to the advent of humans, nature was dynamic and in flux. Lions
once formed part of an array of organisms across a vast swath of land from India
through west and central Asia and into Africa. Lions were major carnivores;
gazelles and antelopes were prey, and hyenas and jackals scavengers. In the great
mammalian radiations, India was a crossroads. Animals of the eastern realm
(tigers/cervids) and the western species (lions/antelopes) met in the subcontinent.
Nature was not static but dynamic. Change did not and does not always require
human actors.11 Genetic studies also indicate key points in the evolution of the
two big cats of Asia, the tiger and the lion. Since they are about the same size
and prefer different kinds of habitat, their paths rarely crossed.12 India was home
to both but the Gir and the Kathiawar peninsula have no records of tigers. Here,
the lion was the prime predator.
We now know that the lions of Gir are deeply inbred, and it is not only a near
brush with extinction in modern times that is the culprit. DNA studies show them
to be descendants of a population isolated from other lions since the second century bce. The Kathiawar peninsula was cut off by water until 1816 ce when an
earthquake restored the land bridge.13 Natural factors two millennia ago led to an
inbred population. Homo sapiens are a relatively recent arrival in India (roughly
70,000 years ago). But there is no evidence to link human intervention with the
causes of Gir lion inbreeding in ancient times. Debates on whether they are a
distinct subspecies may continue, but that they are lions with a long presence in
India is beyond doubt.
The lions preferred habitat was often savannah and scrub forest, which in
India have long had huge herds of cattle as well. Conflict with humans was never
far away. Cows or buffaloes are both heavier than many wild prey species, such
as the chital or the sambhar. Even the nilgai, the largest Asian antelope at 180
11. J. F. Eisenberg, The Mammalian Radiations: An Analysis of Trends in Evolution, Adaptation,
and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
12. Stephen OBrien et al., Setting the Molecular Clock in Felidae: The Great Cats, in Tigers of
the World: The Biology, Biopolitics, Management, and Conservation of an Endangered Species, ed.
R. L. Tilsonand U. S.Seal(Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes, 1987), 10-27.
13. Stephen OBrien, Prides and Prejudice, in The Lions of India, ed. Divyabhanusinh (Ranikhet:
Black Kite, 2008), 241-251. For an unconvincing if lucidly written view that the lions of Indias Gir
are a mongrel pack, a cocktail of genes, and a Khichdi lion see Romila Thapar, Valmik Thapar,
and Iqbal Ansari, Exotic Aliens in India: The Lion and the Cheetah (Delhi: Aleph, 2013), 179, 233,
180, 174 . Here the idea of pure races, well known in human politics, is reproduced uncritically.
Khichdi is a dish akin to stew, a mix of many ingredients.

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kilograms compared to 150 kilograms for a buffalo, can run faster than the latter;
the forest-dwelling sambhar equals a cow in body weight but can also get away
sooner. The domestication of bovids and their selective breeding apart, herding of
sheep, cattle, and goats offered large cats and canids easy meat on the hoof. From
a lions point of view, Indias forests and scrub jungles did have a large array of
prey species, but these do not compare in variety to the east African grasslands
or the veldt of Southern Africa. There were also fewer large prey species comparable to zebra or the Cape buffalo. That lions should hunt cattle was only logical.
There are ample records of cattle predation from the sixteenth century when the
human population density in India was 35 to a square kilometer (compared to 378
today).14 The abundance of wild prey was probably matched by a larger number
of cattle, given that the acreage under the plow was also far less than it is today.15
AN EQUAL TO THE SOVEREIGN

It was not only substance but also symbol that could matter quite seriously.16 The
lion was a much sought-after animal by hunters, not least because rulers often
saw it as equal or near equal to themselves. In a sixteenth-century ce Sanskrit
text, the Syainika Sastra, Rudra Deva of Kumaon in the foothills of the Himalaya
recounted how a lion was most easily shot after the taking of a cow. An archer
from a macchan, a platform on a tree, could kill it.17 Early Sanskrit pharmacopeias from about 1100 years before Rudra Deva had classified animals in different
groups, with the lion being a panchanaka, a five-clawed creature. It was also seen
as guhasaya, a dweller of caves and on both counts was taboo as a meat item. Yet,
and this is surely significant, the flesh of this eater of the flesh (along with that
of the tiger) was eaten on rare ritual occasions by kings.18
Moreover, there is little doubt of its centrality in the world of the descendants
of Timur (hence their own self-description as Timurid). Like the gazelle and antelope, the lion was so familiar to a man like Zia ud din Muhammad Babur, the first
Mughal, that it found no mention in his memoirs, the Baburnamah. These were
creatures well known to elite Muslim cultures across central and west Asia. Written in Turki in the 1520s and later translated into Persian, his accounts of natural
history and topography are still useful.19 Indo-Persian chroniclers saw the lions as
the equivalent of the Badshah: a keeper of order in the realm of animals. This was
14. Sumit Guha, Health and Population in South Asia from Earliest Times to the Present (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2001), 29-31.
15. Irfan Habib, The Geographical Background, in The Cambridge Economic History of India.
Volume 1: c. 12001750, ed. Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhur (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 16.
16. The mythical Garuda, the mount of Visnu, is modeled most probably on the bearded vulture, a
Himalayan bird par excellence. See Rishad Naoroji, Birds of Prey of the Indian Subcontinent (Delhi:
Om Books, 2009), 27.
17. Syainika Sastra, Rudra Deva of Kumaon, The Art of Hunting in Ancient India, ed. Mohan
Chand [reprint] (Delhi: Eastern Book Liners, 1982), 186-188.
18. Frances Zimmerman, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu
Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 15-17; Brian K. Smith, Classifying Animals and Humans in Ancient India, Man 126, no. 3 (1991), 527-548.
19. Babur Namah: The Memoirs of Zia Babur, Prince and Emperor, transl. Wheeler Thackston
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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an idea in India where the lion was mrigendra (the allusion being to the king of
the gods, Indra, and to animals in general or deer in particular) in Sanskrit. Akbar
(15561605) especially asserted imperial divinity: what is important was that he
was the keeper of order in nature. It was the strong and benevolent rule of the
Badshah that was praised not only in the khutba (Friday sermon) in mosques that
were maintained by grants of revenue rights. This was to be especially important
in areas like eastern Bengal where the clearing of the Ganges delta was the joint
work of the state and land-colonizing Muslim peasantry alike. Here, the menace
of tigers that ate humans was all too real. Predation by the mega-carnivore, then
as now, was well known in deltaic Bengal.20
What of the lion? It is only recently that a meticulous scholar has shown how
the Persian word for lion, shir, had been mistranslated in the standard English
versions of the works of Akbar and Jahanigirs time. Sher means lion, and babri
tiger. A Persian speaker in the sixteenth century would have been unambiguous,
unlike a Hindi- or Urdu-speaker today, where sher is often used for both species! A major cause of the confusion may have been that by the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the word for lion in the Hindustani-Urdu-Hindi language
cluster was babbar sher and for tiger, sher. Babbar in Urdu refers to the mane
(of the lion), whereas in Persian babri means stripes (of the tiger). Sher is also a
generic term for all big cats. With this error now in mind, the following account
of a lion hunt from the Ain I Akbari, written by Abul Fazl, is very revealing:
A remarkable scene took place near Mathura. Shujat Khan, who had advanced
very far, got suddenly timid. His Majesty remained standing where he was, and
looked furiously at the lion. The brute cowered down before that divine glance
and turned right about trembling all over. In a short time it was killed.21 There
were two other such instances (at Bari and Toda, both in north India) where
Akbar on his travels encountered and killed lions that attacked members of his
party. Several other lion hunts are described in the Akbarnamah, another work
of Abul Fazl.22 One work of art from the Mughal era shows a skeleton of a man,
probably the left-over remains of prey, with a pride of lions. In 1610, a lion hunt
near Agra was almost fatal. A lioness had killed a cow, and knocked down the
Badshah Jahangir, whose life was saved by the Rajput noble Anup Rai. Memoirs
and paintings show the fatal combat that almost cost the ruler his life.23
Only the Badshah and a chosen few could enter the hunting ground, which was
often surrounded by soldiers in a classic Mongol military maneuver of encircle20. Richard Eaton, The Islamic Frontier in Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
21. Abul Fazl Alami, Ain I Akbari, transl. H. Blochman [1927] (Delhi: Low Price Publications,
1997), I, 294. The word lion was substituted (and emphasis added) for tiger following the very
important observations by Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asias Lions (Mumbai: Marg, 2005), 95,
which is a fine study of the species through history using texts, sculpture, and art.
22. Abul Fazal Alami, Akbarnamah of Abu-l-Fazl, transl. Annette Beveridge (Delhi: ES Publications, 19091914), II, 294, 482-483. Again, this has been corrected here as lion in place of tiger
as given by Beveridge.
23. Stuart Cary Welch, India, Art and Culture, 13001800 (Delhi: Mapin, 1985), 187-188. The
illustration of the hunt in 1610 clearly shows a lioness and not a tiger. See Tuzuk i Jahangiri, transl.
and ed. A. Rogers and H. Beveridge [1909] (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1982), I, 185-188. Rogers and Beveridgelike Blochmantranslated shir as tiger, and not lion, as would have been
correct. The Persian word shir refers to a tiger unlike the Urdu term sher that could denote either.

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115

ment, the Qamargah. No wonder that Sir Thomas Roe, Elizabeth Is ambassador,
had to get imperial permission to shoot a lion. This was evidence of its royal status,
not its rarity.24 Over time the lion hunt itself became highly stylized and ritualized.
Aurangzeb, in the late seventeenth century, shot his lions from elephant-back near
the banks of the river Tapti at Burhanpur. The failure of a hunt would have been
an ill omen even for him, the last of the great Mughals, who was more oriented
than his predecessors toward a more Islamic notion of piety. Bernier writes of
how soldiers combed a forest for four days until the lion was killed. Since it is
considered a favorable omen when the king kills a lion, he later recalled, so is
the escape of that animal portentous of infinite evil to the state. 25
INDIGENEITY, ORIGINS, AND ALIEN LIONS

Familiarity with the animal is clear in the chronicles. They are testament to the
fact the lion was a wild animal, both predator and prey. Despite this, a recent
work forcefully argues that the lion was not indigenous to India but was imported
from Africa by rulers and went feral.26 There is no documentary evidence of this.
Historians are aware of how debates about animals often reflect human aspirations or antagonisms. Writing in 1959, a leading sportsman of the princely
states, Kesri Singh, surmised that the lion was an older inhabitant of India than
its close relative, the tiger. Having organized tiger shoots in Jaipur, western India,
observed the lions of the Gir, and helped the central Indian state of Gwalior in an
abortive bid to habituate African-born lions, he was clear on what had happened.
The tiger had vanquished the lion. He blamed fights with resident tigers for the
failure of Gwaliors experiment with lions. Ecological patriotism, passion for the
tiger, and absence of evidence did not dampen his advocacy of the establishment
of a population of lions. For Kesri Singh, the project was one of reintroducing an
extinct animal into its former range.27 Unlike recent authors, he did not suggest
that humans imported lions.
This matters for the lions of Gir Forest and their story because of the recent
resurrection of the Kesri Singh thesis in reverse. Even before considering whether
lions were imported into India in the past, it is worth asking how long an animal
has to stay in a land before it ceases to be alien. The Thapar thesis is that lions
were not native to India and were introduced probably by the Greeks. Even if
lions were indeed imported in the third century bce and set free, this raises the
larger question of what marks an entity as alien or exotic. After some 2300 years,
are their descendants still alien? Further, there is no evidence of such a large carnivore being introduced, naturalized, and evolving into a self-sustaining population anywhere in the world until modern times.28
24. Sir William Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 161519 as Narrated in his
Journal and Correspondence (Delhi: Munshilal Manoharlal, 1926), 365.
25. Travels of Francois Bernier through the Mughal Empire, AD 155668, transl. Archibald Constable, 2nd ed. revised by Vincent A. Smith [1934] (Delhi: Oriental Reprint, 1983), 379.
26. Thapar, Thapar, and Ansari, Exotic Aliens.
27. Kesri Singh, The Tiger of Rajasthan [1959] (Bombay: Jaico Books, 1967), 155-160.
28. Romila Thapar, From Pride to Metaphor in Thapar, Thapar and Ansari, Exotic Aliens, 24.
Insightful on symbolic history, the paper shows no evidence of actual re-naturing of lions into the
Indian wilds.

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FROM PROMINENCE TO ECLIPSE

Lions were well known to rulers in India, and were an integral part of literature
and lore in Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, and Persian. The Mughal works of art from the
sixteenth century onwards show lions in a biome that has now all but vanished.
Paintings depict a vast, tree-covered savannah teeming with large herds of prey
animals. Onagers, blackbucks, nilgai antelopes, and spotted deer (chital) abound.
Mughals saw the lion, a vocal and large beast of open spaces, as a rival and a
worthy adversary. Royal artworks were produced when Mughal royal entourages
traveled, hunted, and camped. Relationships with wild animals were critical in a
world where travel was by foot, horse, elephant, or camel. We can only speculate
on how lions or (in mature forest and wet grassland) tigers menaced the vast
trains of pack bullocks at times over a quarter of a million strong. Awareness of
lions was central to the cognition of prince and painter, chronicler and traveler,
painter and soldier alike.29 They had no doubt about its identity as a species.30
The eclipse of the lion really came about in the nineteenth century. It was exterminated across much of north and central India following the British conquest.
The elimination of dangerous beasts was a policy innovation, taken up first at
a local level and then in a more concerted, coordinated manner at a pan-Indian
level in the 1870s. The centrality of the lions role as cattle-lifter needs some
emphasis. A key administrator of early colonial India, Sir Bartle Frere, hunted
lions with ease due to the cooperation of herdsmen who were deeply troubled by
their depredations.31 Better firearms were accompanied by bounties, to the tune of
even twenty-five rupees in Kotah, a princely state in western India, in 1875. This
combination of hunting and bounty-killing emptied many forests and grasslands of
lions by this latter date when they survived in only small leftover patches of their
once vast range in India. This period, especially the later nineteenth century, was
a time of drastic decline of several large vertebrates partly due to executive polices
aimed at wiping them out but also due to new technologies of war and the hunt.32
It is clear that there were very few lions left by 1900. Hunting had reduced
numbers. Contemporary opinions on the numbers varied: twenty, seventy, a
hundred, and a few dozen. There was no reliable figure or even a way of arriving
at one, but British officers and officials of the three princely states, Junagadh,
Bhavnagar, and Baroda, agreed there were very few. So, the last of Asias lions
29. Divyabhanusinh, Lions, Cheetahs and Others in the Mughal Landscape, in Shifting Ground:
People, Animals, and Mobility in Indias Environmental History, ed. M. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
30. This is contrary to the view of Valmik Thapar, Epilogue, in Thapar, Thapar, and Ansari,
Exotic Aliens, 228-236, and 232, where he argues they confused tigers with lions.
31. J. Martineau, The Life and Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. Sir Bartle Frere (London: John
Murray, 1895), I: 33.
32. Mahesh Rangarajan, The Raj and the Natural World, Studies in History 14, no. 2 (1998),
198-226; Krithi Karanth, James D. Nicholls, K. Ullas Karanth, James Hines, and Norman L. Christensen, The Shrinking Ark: Patterns of Large Mammal Extinctions in India, Transactions, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Britain 277 (2010), 1971-1979.

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have been through two narrow population bottlenecks, a fate they share with the
cheetah. Low genetic variability is often seen as sign of vulnerability: already in
the late nineteenthcentury the lions were seen as unique, a free-ranging population in an Asian redoubt. The cheetahs survived in several regions and do so to
this day; the lion had a worse fate in store.33 It is notable that there is no documentary or archival evidence that lions were ever imported to Gir and set free.
Their rarity was a result of human persecution, not because the ruler released a
few captive lions into the forest.34
A successor state of the Mughal Empire, the Babi Pathan house of Junagadh
was the largest princely state in the Kathiawar peninsula. The Nawabs of Junagadh had already by the 1870s80s become very choosy about who could shoot
lions. By 1900, and especially so after Viceroy Curzon refused to take advantage
of an invitation to hunt a lion, the court began to assert rights to all lions. Only a
third of the Gir Forest, its last redoubt, which in 1876 covered nearly 4,000 square
kilometers, lay in its confines. Lions that crossed into neighboring princedoms
were shot on sight. The Nawabs men tried to drive the animals back by beating
drums and making a huge racket, or enticing them with bait of goats or buffalo calves. This seesaw continued in the next few decades. Even as there were
controls on hunting in the Nawabs forest and in the smaller Mytiala reserve of
Bhavnagar, lions often crossed boundaries.35
REIGN OF TERROR

What was more serious was the threat to human life in the early years of the twentieth century. Just when efforts to protect them gathered force, the lions became
far more of a threat to human life than ever before. 18991901 saw a serious
and prolonged drought, andlion attacks on herds of goats, cows, and buffaloes
became commonplace well beyond the forest. Terms like the reign of terror
were often used in the Gir Forest and the adjacent Kodinar Gir. Lions hunted and
ate not just goats, cows, and buffaloes but also people in and beyond the forest.
After 1904, this ceased altogether, and lionhuman relations took a turn for the
better. The rulers of Junagadh compensated losses of livestock, and also fiercely
asserted that all lions, even those in other neighboring princely states, were their
patrimony. Memories of the drought at the turn of the century became part of
local lore, but the aggression of the lions in its aftermath soon became a dim
memory as their behavior underwent a change for the better.36
The transition from the imperial social order and its polity in India was by no
means seamless, least of all in Junagadh where the Muslim Nawab decided in
1947 to opt for union with Pakistan. He did this despite having a Hindu-majority
33. Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asias Lions, 123, 126.
34. Valmik Thapar suggests the Nawabs fifteen to twenty captive lions reproduced, explaining
their behavior with humans. Thapar, Thapar, and Ansari, Exotic Aliens, 134-157, 157, 232-233.
35. Divyabhanusinh, Junagadh State and its Lions: Conservation in Princely India, 18791947,
Conservation and Society 4, no. 3 (2006), 522-540.
36. M. A. Wynter-Blyth, Gir Forest and its Lions, Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 48, no. 3 (1949), 493-514; R. S. Dharamkumarsinh and M. A. Wynter-Blyth, The Gir Forest and
its Lions, Part III, Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 49, no. 4 (1951) 685-695.

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population and no history of association with the demand for a Muslim majority
homeland and nation-state. Yet his flight and the subsequent integration with
India were followed by prime-ministerial intervention on the matter of securing the future for the lions. Already in 1948 they had adherents among Gujarati
speakers from beyond the confines of the former princely state, who felt they
were a symbol of regional pride.37 Soon after, it became the national animal of
the new Republic of India. The old order did not die away: another prince, the
Jam Sahib of Navanagar, took over lion shoots, which continued till the end of
the 1950s. British Indian tea-planter Edward Gee visited the forest to photograph
the lions, and found the older shikari (literally hunter but used here for the forest guards), still had JF on their uniforms. The Nawab had left for good, but
Junagadh Forests was still an emblem of pride among the men who tracked
the lions in their forest home.38 A well-known male lion named Tilyar died, and
All India Radio news announced that the king of lions and the father of several
cubs was no more!39
By the late 1960s, the species and the forest were both in trouble. A slew of scientific assessments made for grim reading. These studies were highly quantitative
and all focused on how to ensure survival of an endangered forest ecosystem and
its key mega-fauna, of which the lion was apex predator. Four-fifths of the prey
were cattle, provoking poisoning by irate owners who were very poorly compensated for losses. Wild herbivores were few in number and over-grazing by cattle
was taking a toll. Lion numbers counted via pug marks every few years showed a
dip to 177 by 1968. Robert Grubh, the only Indian scholar in the larger research
project, found that hide-collectors, mostly Scheduled Castes (earlier Untouchables) drove the lions from cattle kills as they needed the leather. By the time the
big cats returned, much of the meat had been eaten, but by vultures. Regeneration of the acacia and teak forest required spaces free of cattle.40 Hence, in 1974,
the Gir Lion Sanctuary project relocated some of the Maldharis settlements or
nesses. Though these traditional herders had a very difficult time, the prey, the
predator, and the forest did seem to recover. A new generation of researchers collecting lion scat found the share of wild prey to be eighty per cent by the end of
the 1980s. Numbers also recovered and conflicts over cattle-lifting abated.41 The
recovery of the population of lions was seen as an index of a renewing, healthy
37. Rangarajan, From Princely Symbol to Conservation Icon, 421.
38. Edward Pritchard Gee, The Wildlife of India (London: Collins, 1964), 62-63.
39. R. Bedi, Simha (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India,
Publications Division, 1968), 51-52. Tilyar died in March 1965.
40. Stephen H. Berwick, The Gir Forest: An Endangered Ecosystem, American Scientist 64, no.
1 (1976), 28-40; S. H. Berwick and Paul Joslin, An Analysis of Herbivory and Predation in the Gir
Forest, India: An Ecosystem Approach to Conservation Planning, Mimeo, International Union for
the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Morges, Switzerland, no date, probably 1974; Robert Grubh,
The Griffon Vultures of the Gir Forest: Their Feeding Habits and the Nature of Their Association
with the Asiatic Lion, Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 75, supplement (1980), 10581068; Mary Anne Berwick, The Ecology of the Maldhari Grazier in Gir Forest, India, in Conservation in Developing Countries: Problems and Prospects, ed. J. C. Daniel and J. S. Serrao (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 81-94.
41. Ravi Chellam, Ecology of the Asiatic Lion, PhD dissertation, Saurashtra University, Gujarat,
India, 1993.

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119

ecosystem in the Gir Forest. Guided by science, the government seemed to have
rescued nature from oblivion: harmony was the norm.
LION PLAGUE RETURNS

Or so it seemed. The end of the 1980s also saw a major break with the recent
past. There was tragic escalation of lionhuman confrontations, and lion plague
made a comeback. A new study showed sharp breaks and also long-term continuities. From 1978 to 1991 there were on average two deaths a year due to
lions, a total of fifteen attacks. The levels of attacks then rose dramatically to
forty attacks a year in 198788. Of these, three-quarters occurred within the
boundaries of the sanctuary. The intensive fieldwork combined lion records and
studies with in-depth sociological investigation of who was adversely affected
by lion attacks and when. There was grim news in lands close to the edge of the
forest. Lions had been baited for a long time for lion shows for the tourists.
The practice had been institutionalized after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehrus
first and only visit to the Forest in 1956. In its effort to attract tourists, the Forest
Department held lion shows where a pride was enticed to a chosen spot with a
buffalo calf and allowed to kill and feed on it after the tourists had left.42 Goats
were used to attract lions, their bleats serving as a sort of live dinner bell, as
visitors watched on foot. By the end of the 1960s, thousands of tourists went out
on lion shows every year.43 Such lions probably became less afraid of people
and were not likely to flee a kill if chased by the cattle-owner. Baiting for tourists
was finally halted in 1987. Lions in and near villages fed on human corpses and
began hunting people as prey.
There was a second pattern: a disproportionate number of attackers were male,
sub-adult lions that attacked people, not only cattle. Some were being edged out
of the forest, which had one lion every seven square kilometers. Foresters unwittingly worsened matters. Any cattle-lifter was captured and let free in the reserve,
but these very animals often left the forest and became more dangerous.
The situation was bad when viewed from the human side as well. Visiting
fifty-six villages and interviewing seventy-three villagers, Vasant Saberwal
and colleagues uncovered a disconcerting story. Their study did not simply ask
what endangered the lions but when and why individual lions turned hunters of
humans. Timing was of the essence. Drought began in March 1986 and ended in
June 1988, changing the behavior of many lions. There was more lion predation
beyond the forest edge. Each village in these subdistricts of Talala, Visavadar,
and Mallya lost at least five animals a year to the lions. Cultivators and herders
were unable to move in groups of less than five at night, and one in five had to
keep livestock indoors. The drought changed things for the worse. Lions entered
enclosures. Poorer villagers who went out to run electric pumps at night to water
42. Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asias Lions, 156-157.
43. Gee, The Wildlife of India 84; the figures are from Paul Joslin, Conserving the Asian Lion
in 11th Technical Meeting of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, New Delhi,
2528 Nov. 1969, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Publications, New Series 1,
no. 18 (1970), 24-32.

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mahesh rangarajan

crops were especially vulnerable to fatal encounters. The Scheduled Castes were
more at risk than others. Carnivores may not make social distinctions, but the
uneven spread of wealth made some people far more risk-prone than others.
The experiences mirrored the cycle of 19011904 that had followed the
drought of 18991901 or the Chappaniyo Kaal. The drought of Samvat 1856
(the year is from the Vikram Samvat, not the Gregorian calendar) was more than
a memory in the region, despite the fact that rains fail once every three years
on average. It was still unclear how many lions resided outside the reserve, but
it was clear that managing them in agricultural lands was crucial. Culling or
removing excess lions to a second home in central India or for captive breeding
was seen as the logical answer. Further, the researchers argued strongly for more
substantial and timely compensation for loss of livestock. Many people beyond
the forest were unfamiliar with the big cats. Unlike Maldharis, who had timetested means of controlling the lions attacks, they were on unfamiliar terrain.44
As in 19011904, the lion plague was soon at an end.45 Since then, there has
been no such escalation of attacks. Far more than in the case of tigers anywhere
perhaps, the lions and residents of areas beyond the Gir Forest too have patterns
of coexistence though not harmony. What was significant is that the recovery
of wild-prey numbers and the lion population in the forest was now beyond any
shadow of doubt. Most prey in the sanctuary were now wild animals. Far fewer
cattle were being taken.46
The expansion of the range has accompanied a growth in the total number of
lions. The new generation of biologists was marked by a fresh optimism. Cohabitation did entail risk, death, and injury but it could and did work. Subsequent
studies showed one in four lions, as many as a hundred in all, living beyond the
protected areas. By 2000, the range of lions was as large as 8,500 square kilometers and it is now over 10,000 square kilometers. They have reappeared in areas
where they had not been seen for decades. Part of the reason lay in more effective
conservation by the Gujarat Forest Department.47 The practice of translocating
lions and leopards from villages where they killed cattle to the forest interior
was given up as it actually fueled more conflict.48 Lions not only live in such
hilly forest tracts; they are also found in the thickets of acacia and casurina on
44. Vasant K. Saberwal, James P. Gibbs, Ravi Chellam, and A. J. T. Johnsingh, LionHuman
Conflict in the Gir Forest, India, Conservation Biology 8, no. 2 (1994), 501-507.
45. The term is adopted from its use in Dutch-ruled Java, where tiger plague describes a breakdown in tigerpeople relations. See Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the
Malay World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). This paper owes a deep intellectual debt
to this landmark book.
46. A. J. T Johnsingh and Ravi Chellam, Management of the Asiatic Lion in Gir Forest, India,
Symposium of the Zoological Society of London 65 (1993), 409-424.
47. Kaushik Banerjee, Yadavendra V. Jhala, and Bharat Pathak, Demographic Structure and
Abundance of Asiatic Lions, Panthera Leo persica in Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Gujarat, India,
Oryx 44 no. 2 (2009), 248-251. Also worth a closer look is Yadvendradev Jhala, Qamar Qureshi,
Parabita Basu, and Kaushik Banerjee, Assessment of the Landscape between the Gir Protected Area
and the Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Gujarat, for a Potential Lion Habitat Corridor, Technical Report
(Dehra Dun: Wildlife Institute of India, 2009).
48. Vidya R. Athreya, Sanjay S. Thakur, Sujoy Chaudhury, and Anirudha V. Belsare, Leopards
in Human-Dominated Areas: A Spillover from Translocation into Nearby Forests,Journal of the
Bombay Natural History Society 104, no. 2 (2007), 45-50.

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121

the coast. Such habitats lead to very close proximity to people. A pair of lions
in Savarkundla regularly drank water from cattle troughs.49 Cattle kills are also
secured by enterprising villagers who bring in tourists for impromptu lion shows
on village commons.50 Here, the relative ease with which lions feed on kills in the
presence of humans enables cattle owners to gain revenues directly from tourists
in areas where the writ of foresters does not run. From being a predator of cattle
the lion became a source of cash for villagers who took advantage of impromptu
tourism. Proximity to people has not led to a new wave of attacks by lions.
The policy shift is important: the new studies do not favor moving any more
Maldharis out. The sanctuary is home to 2,500 of them and to their 12,000 cattle.
The lion densities are highest where both wild and domestic prey are available.
The direct rivalry between chital and cattle is therefore not acute. Maldharis create or enlarge waterholes. Though areas around the settlements or nesses are often
over-grazed, overall the creation of more water points expands available chital
habitat. Conversely, Diwakar Sharma has argued that the sambhar needed spacing
between the settlements to enable adequately dense forest for its habitat to endure.
Only 300 square kilometers is totally cattle-free. These are areas with denser
growth and more of the larger forest-dwelling sambhar, not the chital. Ninety
per cent of the wild meat on the hoof is chital. Given the average body weight of
only forty kilos, the pride sizes are small. The extent of competition between the
deer and cattle is less than once supposed. In fact, the latter eat coarse grasses and
leaves on which no wild herbivore in the forest feeds. The wheel had come full
circle: from a situation in the early 1970s where there was panic about any cattle
presence in the forest, their continued presence was now seen as beneficial to the
lions and not necessarily detrimental to the wild ungulate communities.51 Given
certain specific conditions, cattle and their keepers could even benefit the lions.
Lion sociology opened up new facets of the interaction of lions and humans.
Intensive field studies have found lionesses in groups of two or three being the
lynchpin of the territorial structure. The sizes of the prides were smaller than in
plains habitats in eastern Africa, and the lionesses were the key rather than the
male coalitions. Radio-collared lionesses stayed in the forest in the day but at
night ventured into open fields. Having looked at forty-five female groups over
three years, Venkat Meena found the average range-size to be thirty-three square
kilometers: in turn this meant the forest itself could sustain fifty-five to sixty
breeding groups or three every 100 square kilometers. Here, her work took into
account lion social structures as they have evolved in this specific forest.52 Given
the smaller size of prey, less extensive home ranges, and high densities, smaller
49. Phulchhap, Rajkot (Gujarati newspaper), April 21, 2003, quoted by Divyabhanusinh, The
Story of Asias Lions, 212.
50. Himanshu Kaushik, Watch Lions Feast in Gir for a Price, Times of India, April 22, 2008.
51. D. Sharma and A. J. T. Johnsingh, Impacts of Management Practices on Lion and Ungulate
Habitats in Gir Protected Area (Dehra Dun: Wildlife Institute of India, 1996), 77-78; Chittaranjan
Dave and Yadvendradev Jhala, Is Livestock Grazing Detrimental for Native Wild Ungulates? The
Case of the Chital (Axis axis) in Gir Forest, India, Journal of Tropical Ecology 27, no. 3 (2011):
133-137.
52. Venkat Meena, Reproductive Strategy and Behavior of Male Asiatic Lions, PhD dissertation, Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun, 2008.

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prides were the norm.53 In one part of their range, the lions eat carcasses of cattle
dead incow shelters: the pinjrapoles and gaoshalas. Here, the size of prides was
and is larger. The numbers of cattle taken by the lions remain high: in the end of
the 1990s it totaled over 1500 cattle a year.
The losses were unevenly spread over its vast range. Lions in the National
Park where there were no resident cattle took the least, but in the larger sanctuary, domestic stock made up half their prey. Even in the National Park, it was
as high as forty per cent, well above an all-India average of one-third of the diet
being domestic animals.54 But outside the sanctuary, three-fourths of the prey was
domestic animals.55
How do the lions of Gir compare to lions elsewhere? The density of lions
in Gir was less than the well-known reserves of Kenyas Maasai Mara and
Ngorongoro, in Tanzania, but was respectable compared to most major African
reserves. The figure for density of adult lions per hundred square kilometers was
and is misleading. In the larger, nonforest landscape, the density is barely two
lions per hundred square kilometers, but in the western Gir it was fifteen or even
twenty per hundred square kilometers.56 Radio-collaring of adult males outside
the sanctuary showed one with a range much larger than earlier suspected. The
Ranigalo male and the Dholikui lion were radio-collared in the Mytiala forests, a
small forest area. The former covered a total area of nearly 1,200 square kilometers and the latter 900 kilometers, with a substantial overlap. After the Dholikui
male died, the partner moved into an agro-pastoral landscape, living off livestock
and taking refuge in hills and in chiku orchards.57 Even earlier, the spread of
orchards in the Talala subdistrict was shown to be creating small pockets where
lions could find respite during the day.58
The key to the lions fate still hinges on the Gir Forest itself. The rebounding
of chital numbers from avery low base of three per square kilometer to forty-five
has helped the lions in more ways than one. The seasonal cycle helps predators.
Stags drop their antlers and are in velvet, being easier to hunt in late winter and
early summer. Lionesses can support their cubs. Further, the presence of livestock
is a plus in summer, for their condition is poor and they are easy to hunt, just at the
time wild ungulates are also localized near the scarce water points. The forest lions
are distinct from those in more open areas in the way they live. Lions live in larger
prides in the eastern Gir where the prey are larger, mainly domestic water buffalo
53. Yadavendra V. Jhala, Shoumen Mukherjee, Nita Shah, Kartikeya S. Chauhan, Chittaranjan
V. Dave, V. Meena, and Kausik Banerjee, Home Range and Habitat Preferences of Female Lions
(Panthera leo persica) in the Gir Forests, India, Biodiversity Conservation 18 (2009), 3383-3394.
54. M. D. Madhusudan and Charudutt Mishra, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: Conserving
Large Mammals in a Densely Populated Country, in Battles over Nature: Science and the Politics
of Conservation, ed. Vasant Saberwal and Mahesh Rangarajan (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2003),
31-55.
55. Venkat Meena, Y. V. Jhala, Ravi Chellam, and Bharat Pathak, Implications of Diet Composition of Asiatic Lions for Their Conservation, Journal of Zoology 284, no. 1 (2011), 1-8.
56. Y. V. Jhala, Ravi Chellam, B. Pathak, V. Meena, and P. Basu, Ecology of Lions in the Greater
Gir Landscape (Dehra Dun: Wildlife Institute of India, 2011), 29, Table 3.2.
57. Ibid., 83.
58. S. Vijayan and B. Pati, Impact of Changing Crop Patterns on ManAnimal Conflict around
Gir Protected Area with Specific Reference to Talala Sub-District, Gujarat, India,Population and
Environment 23, no. 6 (2002), 541-559.

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and cattle. Elsewhere in the Greater Gir area, lion group sizes are small, very
similar to those in forest habitats in southern and western Africa and the Kalahari
rather than the savannah in east Africa.59 Such meticulous research shows great
diversity and range in the behavioral patterns of lions in different parts of their
habitat across the Gir landscape. The animals shift in predation patterns. Territory
and nocturnal/diurnal activity vary and change often in response to human action.
LIONS, ANIMALS, AND HISTORY

There is no real tradition among the lions in Gir or Kathiawar in general of

preying on humans. In this respect, they stand in stark contrast to the tigers of
the Bengal delta, who have preyed on humans since the seventeenth century.60
Why they do so remains a matter of debate, and again, records of attacks go back
to times when key prey species now extinct were locally known in large parts
of the vast mangrove forests that span Bangladesh and the eastern Indian state
of Paschim Bangal. In Kenyas Tsavo, Philip Caputo suggests that abandonment
of slaves over decades induced lions to become human eaters. Packing large
numbers of humans, first in slave trains, and then in the late 1890s as laborers for
railway-building, created such preconditions. These were conducive to a breakdown in any truce between lions and people.61 Jim Corbett similarly attributed the
incidence of man-eating leopards in the foothills of the Himalaya in the 1920s to
the disposal without cremation of dead bodies after a pandemic of flu and cholera.62 More recently, the paucity of wild prey has been adduced as the key factor
in the increase in lion victims among cultivators and herders in Tanzania.63
The Gir lions are distinct from the hand-reared and raised lions that, although
wild, were intimate with human parents but could be deadly. Junagadhs
archival records show no instance of release of captive-bred lions. In fact, they
were difficult to track until hunting ceased. Lions that allow the eager tourist
to approach on foot is an artifact of Gir; the very setting of tourist and feline
a few hundred meters apart was unimaginable before the 1950s. Yet there was
no general history of sharp-edged conflict via direct predation on humans. The
Adamsons Elsa in Kenya in the 1960s was the archetype but not the first such
case of a hand-reared carnivore being released in the wild. In more than one case,
such lions became a major menace to humans and attacked and ate them.64 Such
animals reared in close proximity to human care lose all fear of people. In the
free-ranging state, human presence has long been associated with fire, and has for
59. Jhala et al., Ecology of Lions, 62-63.
60. For an excellent anthropological study of the Bengal delta, see Annu Jalais, The Forest of
Tigers: People, Environment and Livelihood in the Sundarbans (London: Routledge, 2009).
61. Philip Caputo, Ghosts of Tsavo: Stalking the Mystery Lions of East Africa (Washington, DC:
National Geographic Society, 2002), 262-274.
62. Jim Corbett, The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1948), 1-4.
63. Craig Packer, D. Scheel, and A. E. Pusey, Why Lions Form Groups: Food is Not Enough,
American Naturalist 136, no. 1 (1990), 1-19.
64. Norman Carr, Return to the Wild: A Story of Two Lions (London: Collins, 1962); Adrian
House, The Great Safari: The Lives of George and Joy Adamson (London: Harper Collins, 1993);
and Caroline Cass, Joy Adamson: Behind the Mask (London: Trafalgar Square Publishers, 1997).

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centuries also been linked to weapons. White farmers in Zimbabwe were wilding
the land, with the raising of lion cubs on a ranch where they roamed free. Such
range management of lions that were not shot for sport was seen as distinct from
the hunting legacy of the apartheid, white-settler state of Rhodesia. The phase
ended around 2000 due to intense land conflicts, but there was an association of
whiteness, tourism, and lions on the game ranch.65
Yet the Gir surely stands out as a fascinating story with larger meanings. After
the crises a hundred years ago and just under a half-century ago, few believed
the lions future was secure. In the crisis of 18991904, it was uncontrolled, elite
hunting and also of retaliation for attacks on humans and cattle that seemed to
put them at risk. By 1970 it was ecosystem collapse. The last half-century has
seen a steady recovery. There has been no clear road to a peaceable relationship
with the animals (or with humans). Nor can there be one. Any cohabitation with
a large-bodied, wild mammal can come into conflict with animal husbandry or
cultivation.66 But the lion plagues were exceptional. These must be among the
only lions in the world regularly tracked and viewed on foot.
It is perhaps time to investigate the possibility of a distinct lion culture of the
Gir the way primatologists talk of distinctive gorilla or chimpanzee cultures at
specific sites.67 It is historically possible to argue that a certain pattern of behaviors
ranging from avoidance to tolerance has enabled lions as much as Maldharis to
coexist in the forest for at least the last two centuries. For the larger landscape, too,
there is ample evidence that lions here behave very differently from their counterparts anywhere else. Of course, there is now evidence of similar cases of large
predatory animals sharing living spaces with people elsewhere in India. It is commonplace to view this in terms of low human density or specific livelihood patterns
that indirectly open up spaces for wild animals. A series of complex relations and
tipping points in each case can lead to a downward spiral in coexistence. But the
adaptive capability of the wild animalin this case the lionis surely significant.68
The uniqueness of Gir has been invoked since the mid 1990s in support of
an assertive regional nationalism. Since all lions are in one site, biologists fear
decline due to feline distemper or another epidemic. Kuno in central India was
picked out: historically part of the species range until the 1870s, it still has no
lions. The prides of the Gir Forest are seen as a badge of Gujarats uniqueness.
The debate rages on, with the state of Gujarat opposed to relocating any lions at
65. Yuka Suzuki, Putting the Lion Out at Night: Domestication and the Taming of the Wild, in
Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, ed. Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007), 229-248.
66. M. D. Madhusudan and Charududutt Mishra, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Threatened:
Conserving Large Mammals in a Densely Populated Landscape, in Saberwal and Rangarajan, eds.,
Battles over Nature, 30-45.
67. Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 1986). See especially Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (London: Harper Collins, 1971). Mahesh
Rangarajan, Regions Honour, Nations Pride: Girs Lions at the Cusp of History, in Divyabhanusinh, ed., The Lions of India, 252-261.
68. Vidya Athreya, R. Navya, M. Odden, J. D. Linnel, and K. U. Karanth, A Report on Monitoring
of the Collared Tigress in Brahmapuri Forest Division, Maharashtra (Bangalore: Centre for Wildlife
Studies, 2012). So far, scholars have focused mostly on inviolate, strict reserves with no or few
human settlements. Such work may shed fresh light on tigerhuman relations.

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all. Their future, it is argued, is secure only in the state, where people, especially
those in and around the Gir, have learned to live with them. The pride in the lion
is part assertion of regional linguistic identity in a vast, heterogeneous country.69
HISTORY OR MEMORY?

It is surely going too far to endow lions with a sense of history such as humans
have or historians imagine, a sense in which the past is re-imagined in multiple,
contested ways to debate how the present came to be. Nevertheless, there is a
complex tapestry of humananimal relations, and within that, the idea that animals too evolve, not only in simple biological terms but also in terms of patterns
of behavior, deserves consideration. Mark Wynter-Blyth, a sportsman-turnednaturalist (not unusual in the 1950s) remarked how after the events of the early
1900s, Their habits underwent a profound change for never again are they heard
of as a menace to human life.70
After the end of all hunts in mid-century, this developed into an acceptance of
human presence. Dharamkumarsinh recalled how Lions that had been hunted
behaved very differently from those fed for the lion shows. It was wary and could
move very fast.71
Another observer, who knew the forest from the hunting days and into the
preservation era, was more emphatic. Lavkumar Khacher, an ornithologist and
principal of the same elite school that Wynter-Blyth attended, felt positive about
humanlion relationships. He recalled the friendliness of a lion nicknamed Sultan
and singled out the foresters and shikari guides for their fine job of winning
over the big cats. Refuting the idea that they were simply docile like tabby cats,
he recalled that the other male, Akbar, kept his distance and when a couple of
us tried to approach, he sat up. Tail twitching and uttered a low growl. Tabby
cats indeed.72
Despite lion plague, this process continues. How it will endure as lion numbers
grow and rising incomes change the human landscape is unclear. The question is
a serious one. Is there cross-generational learning among the lions and how does
it proceed? How far does this extend among animals? It has often been assumed
that humans alone have a sense of the collective. Do animals have an equivalent?
Evolutionary biologists who examine species differentiation often did not
relate to the very short time-frame of human cultural change. Yet there is now
evidence that such changes occur because the cultural and intellectual processes
of humans parallel genetic/biologic processes. The evidence from Gir poses a
question. Issomething comparable happening with these lions?
69. Rangarajan, Regions Honour, Nations Pride, 252-261.
70. M. A. Wynter-Blyth and R. S. Dharamkumarsinh, The History of the Lion in Junagadh State,
18801936, Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 49, no. 3 (1951), 468.
71. R. S. Dharamkumarsinh, Reminiscences of Indian Wildlife (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998), 77. Emphasis added.
72. Lavkumar Khacher, Lion Shows in the Gir Forest: At Home with Humans, in The Oxford
Anthology of Indian Wildlife. Volume 2: Watching and Conserving, ed. Mahesh Rangarajan (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 191-193.

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My argument is that if they did not learn, the Gir lions could not have survived
the last century. At its simplest level, memory for animals is measured in terms
of adaptive benefit. This means that behaviors that help improve survival and
breeding success (largely via acquiring food with as little energy expenditure as
possible, so disturbance is a serious aspect) will take root. Perhaps it is best to look
at co-adaptation over historically brief but significant periods. A distinction might
be useful.The concept of evolution refers to biological processes such as genetic
mutation and then sexual selection. They matter for Gir as they stress that this
population of lions has long been isolated from other lions. The isolated gene pool
of this particular population of lions is vulnerable to extinction due to in-breeding.
It does not account for their behavior. What is notable is not the genetic heritage
alone but the ways in which the humananimal boundaries have been renegotiated,
and what the lions and people do with the changing circumstances they face, not
only in ways that affect the genetic results, but those that affect the historical ones.
But it goes beyond the individual animal as well. It may help to explore further
whether co-adaptation is a useful concept. Lions and the resident humans are both
contingent, location-specific products of a shared past. In turn, each and both
have interacted and shaped that history, not equally, not as each lion (or herder
or cultivator or prince or official) pleases but in time-specific ways rooted in a
particular context. The lions mostly leave people (not their livestock) alone; in
turn there was no local tradition of hunting the big cats save for the princes and
landed elites, long faded into oblivion. Like the tigers of Java whose history was
chronicled by Boomgaard, the Gir lions are a historical entity, behaving differently today compared to a quarter, a half-century, or a century ago. Javas tigers
died out in the early 1970s, just as Girs lions began to recover. But for the human
residents in Gir and surrounding areas, the lions are an associate species, not tame
or companions by any stretch. This is a contingent, nonreplicable but notable case
of cohabitation that often (not always) spells coexistence.
We may well need to rethink thehumananimal boundary. These lions exhibit
a capacity (which humans had liked to think was theirs alone) of perhaps remembering and analyzing events and then passing on that knowledge to younger
members of the prides. This could be dangerous for humans when it was the case
of lions habituated by baiting. For the most part the absence of persecution has
led the big cats not to fear or avoid people they see as part of the landscape. One
might even go so far as to say lions in Gir come as close to trusting people as
wild predators can.
In many mammals, one generation (or less!) may be adequate to learn.
In-depth, cross-generational work on long-lived mammals often yields new
insights.73 Big cats (mainly tigers) in heavily hunted reserves that are now safe
havens have lost their fear of jeep-borne observers. Individual histories and habits
are now documented. Each adult animal has a distinct personality and behavioral
pattern.74 Girs lions offer a less bleak view of how animals may respond to
73. Cynthia Moss, Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000); Joyce Poole, Coming of Age with Elephants: A Memoir (London:
Hyperion Books, 1996).
74. Valmik Thapar, The Secret Life of Tigers (London: Raintree Books, 1989; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999; 2nd ed., 2009). Great familiarity with the Kalahari lions is recorded movingly by
Delia and Mark Owens, The Cry of the Kalahari (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).

animals with rich histories

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human presence. India still has surviving wildlife, not in reserves, embedded in
larger, living landscapes. Tropical systems have great ebbs and flows of energy
levels (as in drought or flood), and this makes for great mobility and flexibility
of animal ranges, making close contact with humans more not less likely.75 There
are limits to how far animals can adapt, but it is the possibilities both in the tropics and in other regions that raise hopes of a peaceful association.76 In the case of
sub-Saharan Africa, David Western goes so far as to argue that large mammals
and zebu cattle have co-adapted or co-evolved since prehistoric times; the extinctions of large vertebrates in Africa postdate European conquest.77
Such coexistence was not the case in India, with its long history of animal
domestication and local overkill by hunts and land transformation via agriculture.78 But an astonishing number of large animals remain if in smaller parts of
their historical range. Animals too make their histories not as they will it, but via
interaction with humans who share their landscapes. It is in this that the lions of
Gir are as much products and actors of a specific history. This is especially so
because of the proximity of so many lions to such large numbers of humans both
within and increasingly beyond the forest perimeter. It is a proximity lived in
nonantagonistic or at least in nonconfrontational ways.
The lions may be more than actors in a common history. Their story opens up
a window on how animalseven wild and untamed onescan evolve in close
association with people. Categories like wild and tame are too crude to do
justice to multiple layers of association. How to engage with animal consciousnessthat animals have memory and are capable of emotional intelligenceis
not clear. How will recognition of animals as sentient beings possessed of memory reorder the historical craft? This is not about history per se and much more
about memory. But it is also about social processes, and it is these that pose stiff
challenges to a clear-cut binary along the humananimal boundary.
The lions of Gir beckon not to a post-human future but to the glimmer of hope
of coexistence. There can be historically brief but significant moments of peace
between humans and nature, even cohabitation with a large, free-ranging carnivore in our long, sometimes relentless war on nature. This is a story of lions, but
with consequences far beyond the forest. Such narratives indicate the potential
for re-engaging pasts and crafting a better future. If notions of memory change,
we may need to rethink our ideas of how not just animals but we as humans relate
to their capacity for memory.
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
75. See M. D. Madhusudan and M. Rangarajan, Nature without Borders:The Problem Seminar
638, no. 10 (September 2010), 12-13.
76. Tony Fitzjohn with Miles Bredin,Born Wild: The Extraordinary Story of One Mans Passion
for Lions and for Africa (London: Penguin, 2010); Robert Franklin Leslie,In the Shadow of a Rainbow: The True Story of a Friendship between Man and Wolf (New York and London:W. W. Norton
and Company,1996); Gary Paul Nabhan,Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist
in Italy (New York:Penguin Books, 1994).
77. David Western, In the Dust of Kilimanjaro (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997).
78. P. K. Joglekar, Holocene Faunal Studies, Man and Environment 19, no. 1 (1994) 179-204.