The plight of the tiger has been closely watched in India since the 1970s, when the decimation of a once-thriving population was recognized. In recent years, India and other countries have experienced a rebound in numbers thanks to a global conservation initiative known as Tx2, which in 2010 announced its intent to double the world population of tigers by 2022. As of this writing, World Wildlife Fund estimates the global tiger population at about 4,000. More than half of those tigers are found in India. The rebound, however, seems to be self-limiting. There can only be as many tigers as there is territory and food to support them and corridors they can use to disperse to new territory. Bringing back tiger numbers without increasing the amount of wilderness available to them is an impossible task. And, as tiger numbers grow, human-tiger conflict increases as well.
More worrisome yet, in October 2018, the Chinese government rescinded a decades-old ban on tiger body parts. While the new policy applies only to farmed tigers, it is effectively impossible to tell the body parts of a farmed tiger from those of a poached wild tiger—and poached tigers potentially offer far more profit for dealers than do farmed cats. Conservationists fear the lifting of the ban will prove catastrophic to the world’s remaining wild tigers. While China temporarily reinstated the ban in November 2018 due to pressure from environmental organizations, conservationists concerned about the world’s remaining wild tigers are fighting fiercely to have the ban permanently reinstated.
Machli is based upon a real tigress by the same name, born in 1996 or 1997, who ruled the lakes region of Ranthambore in her prime. She was glorious. I was privileged to witness her there during a trip I took with my mother to Ranthambore and the Sawai Madhopur district in January of 2006, during what we were told was the deepest cold snap in seventy years. When I encountered Machli, she was accompanied by two subadults, somewhere around fifteen months old. She died of old age in 2016 after having raised five litters of cubs. Her body was strewn with flowers, given a funeral procession, and cremated in observance of Hindu rituals.
The village of Vinyal is based partly on villages I visited in the Sawai Madhopur district, and partly on secondhand accounts, though the name of the village is invented. When I traveled to India, my guide, Vipul Jain, and several other people I interviewed mentioned an uprising in which villagers drove thousands of head of livestock into the park during a water crisis. Everyone who mentioned the uprising told me, in effect, “It didn’t happen the way you heard.” They said this without asking what I’d heard. Presumably, they knew the version of the story that had gone public. I took that as permission to write about the episode the way I imagined.
Organizations such as WWF-India, the Indian arm of the World Wildlife Fund, have led the effort to protect tiger populations for decades. You can read more about the efforts of WWF-India at www.wwfindia.org/about_wwf/priority_species, or visit the World Wildlife Fund’s U.S. website, which maintains a tiger page at www.worldwildlife.org/species/tiger. The U.S.-based organization Panthera focuses on saving wild cats of all types; its tiger page is at www.panthera.org/cat/tiger.
Some of the incidents described in the book sprang from my imagination (notably the river rescue). The text that Sarah reads during her first visit to the park, which begins, “The Aravalli Hills are the oldest in the world,” is credited to an unnamed natural history book, but I actually wrote this passage based on the history I learned during my visit to Ranthambore.
Many other descriptions and incidents in these pages are based upon my observations of tigers at Ranthambore, Kanha, and the Sundarbans, and on stories I heard while interviewing naturalists, wildlife veterinarians, and others involved in conservation and ecotourism. Other incidents are based on events related in natural history books and are credited below. Those books have educated and enlightened me and have informed my work, though any errors are my own.
Although tigresses are sometimes forced to kill their offspring or let them die, to my knowledge, the real Machli never killed any of her cubs.
The scene of the aftermath of a tiger accident was inspired by the book Of Tigers and Men: Entering the Age of Extinction, by Richard Ives, which is also where I first encountered the myth of human-tiger hybrids, or were-tigers. William tells Sarah the story of Sundarbans tigers and the masks local fishermen and honey hunters use to protect themselves from tiger attack; I read many accounts of the Sundarbans tigers and these masks, including in Sy Montgomery’s haunting book Spell of the Tiger: The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans. The phenomenon of forest animals broadcasting the movements of a tiger is colorfully described in Stephen Mills’s excellent book Tiger.
Noted tiger expert Valmik Thapar recorded instances of a Ranthambore male cooling himself at a water hole with a tigress and their cubs in his book The Secret Life of Tigers. An instance of a tiger eating so much it apparently couldn’t move is documented in Stephen Mills’s Tiger.
“No one asked them whether there should be a park here … all our lives will be destroyed, as well” is a quote from Valmik Thapar, quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward and Diane Raines Ward’s book Tiger-Wallahs: Saving the Greatest of the Great Cats.
The text that Sarah recites—“For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness … For he can spraggle upon waggle”—is from “Jubilate Agno,” by Christopher Smart, originally published in 1759. The story of the real Machli mating with an intruder, presumably in order to convince him to spare her cubs, is recounted in Tiger, by Stephen Mills. Finally, in one of Sarah’s journal entries, she includes a quote from the Bible: “Weeping for her children, and refusing consolation, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:18).