A lump of clay painted yellow and black vaguely resembling a tiger sits at the corner of a bend inside the forest. An incense stick burns beside the offering of flowers near the crudely shaped deity. I am inside the buffer zone of Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve on an early morning safari and a shrine inside the forest piques my curiosity. “This has been made in remembrance of one of the villagers killed by the tiger in the forest, and also as an appeal to the tiger,” Ramfal, the jeep guide at Waghoba Eco Lodge of Pugdundee Safaris, enlightens me. “The entire region was once upon a time ruled by the Gond tribe. There is a temple inside the core forest near Tadoba lake for tribal chief Taru,” he adds. Ramfal belongs to the Gond tribal community, who have been co-existing with the wildlife for centuries, and he has so much to tell. Like many others from the tribe, Ramfal’s family were also forest foragers and agriculturists. With the forest becoming a reserve, some of the tribals were relocated and lost the land. A few of them picked up jobs as guides, drivers and housekeeping staff at the growing number of hotels and wildlife resorts.
Manav Khanduja, co-founder of Pugdundee Safaris, says, “The people of the Gond tribe have generational knowledge of the forest. They revere and understand it, which makes them great guides.”
As Ramfal steers the jeep past a boulder, expecting a resting leopard, he shares a local legend: “Taru was the village chief who fought with a tiger and was killed in the encounter. The villagers built a tiger shrine dedicated to Taru, their saviour, their God.”
Though the villagers in the core area were moved out when the Tadoba and Andhari forest reserves were merged in 1995, a yearly fair in December-January continues to draw tribals from nearby villages to the shrine of Tadoba. Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve — one of the oldest, largest and most famous of the 51 tiger reserves in India, located in the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra — in fact derives its name from the legendary Gond hero ‘Taru-baba’.
A dry deciduous forest, the Tadoba reserve has an abundance of bamboo, teak, tendu and mahua trees. The guide points out a pale tree that seems to have been stripped of its bark — ‘Kullu’, the Gond name for the Ghost tree; gond katira is made from the resin of this tree, and it cools the body in summer, he informs. ‘Do you want to see only tiger and leopard?’ he asks suddenly. Pleased at my willingness to see the forest beyond the cats, Shaheen, the naturalist accompanying me on the safari, and Ramfal show me rare sights that most tiger-chasing tourists miss: a monitor lizard standing on its hind legs sniffing the air for danger, a serpent eagle sweeping down to hunt a small banded-racer snake, a foraging sloth bear, a dancing peacock. When a barking deer makes alarm calls, they listen intently and drive towards a nearby watering hole. At the watering hole, patience pays: a massive male tiger, chhota dadhiyal, saunters towards the water, unperturbed by human presence. The sight of the enormous animal validates why the Gond tribe revere the apex predator of the forest. As most tourists disperse soon after the sighting, we linger in the forest with Shaheen and Narendra interpreting the sounds and sights around us. We see a herd of Indian Gaur, a family of langurs and an Indian Pitta — or Navranga in Gondi, the most elusive bird with nine colours in its plumage — hopping in the mud, which the guide tells me is believed to be a sign of good fortune.
The Gond way of life is, however, not limited to tiger shrines. The forest is enmeshed in Gond culture, rituals and philosophy towards life. The most interesting tribal system is the ‘anti-clock’ for keeping time, which mirrors the planetary movement around the sun and the natural pattern of anticlockwise growth of climbing plants. The forest reflects in their ‘Gond art’, which depicts the interdependence of trees, birds, deer, gaur, tigers and leopards. These guardians of the forest worship the rivers, trees, birds and animals, and believe in taking from the forest only as much as is required. As a Gondi proverb goes: ‘Mara dantom, jeevmantom’ — ‘where there are trees, life breathes.’