According to the Hindu notion of time, we are now in the last of the four yugas, or world ages, that make up the lifetime of each universe.
The first of the four yugas is known as the Krita Yuga, an Edenic age when the world is young and moist and whole, fresh from divine emanation. Saintliness comes naturally, and from the moment of birth everyone knows their dharma, their purpose in the world, and fulfills it with joyful devotion.
But in the following yugas, beauty, peace, and moral order diminish bit by bit. In the Trita Yuga, duties are no longer inborn but must be learned. In the Dvapara Yuga, true saintliness is extinct.
Today’s era is called the Kali Yuga. The goddess Kali is known as the great destroyer, the black one, who adorns herself with the blood-dripping hands and heads of her victims like jewelry, who dances on the corpse of her husband, who stretches out her tongue in her hunger to devour the world. Both the goddess and the era take their names from the word kaal, or time. For time is the great destroyer, and by the end of the Kali Yuga, our time is up. It could be very soon, sages warn. As Karan Singh, the former chancellor of the University of Jammu and Kashmir points out, Hindu texts claim that each world cycle is 4.3 billion years long. “If you insist on scientific confirmation,” he says, “you might note that 4.3 billion years is roughly the age of the earth.”
In a passage of the Vishnu Purana, a classic text of Hindu myth and tradition, the Kali Yuga is described so clearly that everyone today will surely recognize it as the modern era: in the Kali Yuga, “Property becomes rank, wealth the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union, falsehood the source of success.”
The Kali Yuga is the final age before this world dissolves. It is the era in which we repudiate our gods. It is the era in which we extinguish rather than revere life. It is the age in which our sins drown our virtues.
Only in an age of blind greed could we accomplish the cataclysmic evil of obliterating from the earth as many as a dozen species a day. Yet this, biologists tell us, we are now doing without fanfare or mourning. Most of the victims are invertebrates, animals like worms or insects, or plants or fungi so little known that scientists have not yet given them Latin names. Most of them are lost as people overrun these creatures’ homes, converting wild lands to farms and roads and condos, factories and pipelines and mines. Liverworts and termites, jellyfish and dragonflies, flatworms and orchids: we crowd them out in a ravenous grab for more space, more jobs, more money.
“But does it really matter?” asks an Asiaweek editorial accompanying its cover story on the tiger’s precarious survival. “Species come and go,” writes its author. “Now it is the tiger’s turn.”
To exterminate any species—each the culmination of millions of years of evolution—for economic reasons, says Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, is a tradeoff as foolish and wasteful as “burning Renaissance paintings to cook dinner.”
But if we eradicate the tiger, our sin is greater still. If we eradicate the tiger, we murder a god.
Everyone in Sundarbans knows that Daksin Ray can enter the body of any tiger at will. Thus all tigers are sacred and holy, expressions of the power of God.
Even the skeptical Rathin sees the sense of the idea. The man-eater, he says, is the most powerful force protecting Sundarbans’ forest—and protecting the people who depend upon its bounty. “The tiger is silently doing the work of ecodiscipline,” he told me. “In that way the tiger is a god—the tiger is looking after the forest, and the forest is looking after it.” It is no accident, his words suggest, that the largest population of tigers in the world lives in Sundarbans, and that here survives the largest remaining tract of mangrove forest on earth. Here the tiger still wields its most potent power over people.
With the same ease that Daksin Ray enters the body of a tiger, so do tigers of Asian mythology bridge the gaps between living and dead, village and forest, heaven and earth. Tigers help people understand their past and their future and their relationship with the forces that govern the world. Without the tiger, the human world is incomplete.
This truth is understood in cultures wherever tigers have roamed. These peoples’ sacred stories tell us that tigers are our kin, our teachers, and our guardians. In India many tribes claim they are descended from tigers, including the Baghel Rajput, the Bhil, the Santal, the Khond, the Baghani. The Sudanese of Western Java and the Acehnese and Minangkabau of Sumatra also claim that tigers founded their clans.
So strong is the Khond kinship with the tiger that the people claim they can even become tigers through a spell. The anthropological scholar Robert Wessing presents the story of one Khond tribesman who routinely changed into a tiger to go hunting. But when he wanted to change back to a person, someone had to pronounce the right spell. The tiger-man taught the spell to a friend, but his friend died. So he taught the spell to his wife. The next day he changed into a tiger to hunt. When he returned, carrying his kill in his mouth, he approached his wife. But she was so frightened of his tigrine form that she began to scream and run. By jumping about and roaring, he tried to remind her to pronounce the spell, but she only screamed louder. He eventually became so irritated that he ate her. He then realized that he had eaten the one person alive who knew the spell to turn him back into a person. His wife, of course, had been just as foolish in failing to recognize her own beloved husband there on her doorstep, bringing home their dinner.
It is important, this story tells us, to remember who we are, and who the tiger is to us.
Who are we? Never before this age have people been so preoccupied with this question. Never before have we been so obsessed with the search for the self. It can be argued that until relatively recently in our evolution, we did not have the luxury of time to consider such things; we died too young, before we could acquire the wisdom to wonder. It can equally be argued that today, as we stand at the brink of extinguishing the tiger, we have come closer than ever to destroying the knowledge that could answer our question.
Thanks to the tiger, the people of Sundarbans still understand what the rest of us pretend to ignore: that all who share the sacred breath of life—chital and boar, frog and fish, idiot and genius—are made of meat. And all bodies made of meat bow before the divine, humbled by the spell of the tiger.
Can we believe what the people of Sundarbans say is true?
Can tigers fly through the air? Appear from nowhere? Shrink a human body to half its size? This I do not know. But of this I am certain: in this permeable, mutable world, surely God may at any time enter the body of a tiger to remind us who we are.
If, in the height of our hubris, we exterminate the tiger, we risk losing sight of the deepest truth our kind has ever known: that we are not God.
“What will it say about the human race if we let the tiger go extinct?” asks Ashok Kumar, director of World Wildlife Fund’s trade monitoring unit in India. “What can we save? Can we save ourselves?”