How a Chance Encounter With Tigress Padmini Sparked India’s Wildlife Revival & Forest Comeback |
A documentary camera lingers on a tigress moving through dry grass, no rush in her stride.
For many,Legendary Tigers of Indiacaptures the beauty of the wild. For Valmik Thapar, whose voice carries the film, it draws from decades spent observing the Royal Bengal Tiger up close.
Thapar, who passed away in May last year, had arrived in Ranthambore in the early 1970s as someone looking to step away from the noise of Delhi. He was then a young filmmaker, not a conservationist.
Along the way, he found a landscape that was on the edge of being forgotten.
And then, he encountered a tigress who would anchor his life to this place.
The tigress who changed everything. She was called Padmini. Padmini raised cubs that would go on to shape Ranthambore’s tiger population. Her daughter, Noor, established dominance over fertile territories near the lakes.
Then, another tigress would come to define Ranthambore for the world: Machli.
Machli challenged her own mother for territory, raised generations, and became central to the identity of the park. Her genetic line continued through tigresses like Krishna and Arrowhead.
But even as these lives played out, many lives were being lost. This story of individual tigers unfolding in one forest mirrored a larger reality across the country. While some landscapes still held on, India’s overall tiger population was slipping towards a dangerous decline.
In 1973, India launched Project Tiger with just 1,827 tigers left in the wild. It began with the realisation that India was on the verge of losing its most powerful symbol.
When the tiger was almost........