KINGS OF THE FOREST

Tom Parker journeys to India’s Sasan Gir National Park, home of the country’s last wild population of Asiatic lions
Out of nowhere a throaty roar, deep and penetrating, rips through the darkness. Everyone in our jeep freezes, it feels as though the source of the noise could be sitting just beside us. ‘A young male telling others this is his territory,’ says our pugee (tracker), Abu. A mischievous smile brightens his blackened face: ‘He’s still over 2 kilometres away – behind us.’
Our vehicle reverses, bumping along the pot-holed roads of the Sasan Gir National Park, home of the Panthera leo persica, more commonly known as the Asiatic Lion. This 1,400sq km nature reserve in southern Gujarat is the only place on earth they can be seen in the wild.
Without warning, our driver cuts the engine as we freewheel towards a dry riverbed. Abu is signally furiously towards the road in front of us. There, no more than 10m ahead, two large cats are reclining, regarding us with disdainful expressions.
A shrill bleating sound comes from Abu’s parted lips. This, I later discover, is an imitation of a young goat in distress and signifies an easy meal for a 160kg feline. As the designated hunter, the younger male silently gets to his feet and slinks towards the vehicle. Following in his footsteps comes a larger, battle-scarred female, clearly his mother.
Within seconds we are face-to-muzzle with the beasts. They are larger, yet more streamlined than I had imagined, with faded, leopard-type markings running the length of their powerful legs. The dense jungle makes long-range hunting difficult so they have developed into stockier, more athletic-looking, animals than their African cousins; their muscular legs and shoulders enabling them to launch lighting-fast surprise attacks from short distances.
Lions rely heavily on their sense of smell when tracking prey and, realising they have been fed a red herring, they retreat into the teak forest in search of some real food.
This does not feel like India. Everything about Sasan Gir turns your perceptions of what this country should be like on its head.
First there are the lions, of course. Secondly, and purely by coincidence, this also happens to be the settling place of the Siddis – descendants of the black slaves brought over by Arab traders from Africa from the 10th-16th centuries. The two villages where they live sit right on the park’s boundaries – and many are employed as guides and forest wardens. They have fully embraced the Gujarati culture; from the women’s saris, to the vegetarian thalis, to their use of the vernacular. The only factors that make them stand out are their facial appearance and a penchant for African music. As we leave the national park, I find myself jumping to the ridiculous conclusion they chose this spot because of some psychic connection with lions.
But this fanciful theory is quickly gobbled up when I am told the Asiatic lion has not always been confined to Sasan Gir. The animals once roamed most of northern India (its historic popularity meant it was chosen as the national animal of India rather than the tiger in the republic’s crest – representing strength, courage and justice.)
Yet, by 1920, largely because of poaching and the British colonisers’ insatiable appetite for hunting, only a dozen animals remained in the entire country, and they were all in the Gir forest. Perhaps ironically, their saviour was the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, who turned down an invitation from the Nawab of Junagadh to shoot one of the remaining animals.
That polite refusal was key to the species’ survival, says conservationist Nitin Ratangayra: ‘That single act made the nobility realise they were about to bring about the destruction of a unique species. Even for the hunter there is a chilling finality about extinction.’
Lord Curzon’s bold move resulted in the successful introduction of a ceiling on hunting – limited to three fully-grown males per year.
The lions thrived under the new regime. When the first proper census was undertaken in 1950 there were already 230 lions in the park. The population surge marked the start of an ongoing conflict with the park’s human inhabitants, the Maldhari tribe, who historically had enjoyed a largely congenial symbiosis with the creatures. The felines began killing large numbers of their livestock – a considerably easier and more reliable prey than the swift-footed, keen-eared forest deer. In an attempt to protect their assets the farmers began to poison lions and a 1968 census found the numbers were once again dropping at an alarming rate.
In response, the government of the time resettled 580 Maldhari families outside the national park boundaries. Although the move was relatively successful in the short term, at least in terms of saving cattle from meeting an untimely end, the lions gradually followed their source of food and widened their territory.
Lions are now regular visitors to villages outside the park – a lone male was even found wandering the beach on the nearby island of Diu, 50km – and a short swim – south of Gir.
As the lions have widened their hunting range, their number has increased to record levels. The official census in 2001 recorded 327 different sets of pugmarks, but the real figure is now thought to be closer to 500 and, once again, the frequency of attacks on livestock is a cause for concern.
Ishmal Babu Kadari is a 65-year-old Maldhari elder who finds himself on the frontline of the human-lion stand-off. ‘The problem is getting worse and worse,’ he says. ‘I’ve lost four buffalo calves in the past two years alone.’
Kadari and his family moved out of the park in the original exodus of the 1980s. ‘It’s difficult for outsiders to understand, but I’m not angry with the lions. They are my best friends, we’ve always lived with them – they are the spirit of this area.’
It is this respectful attitude that has contributed in large part to ensuring that the species has managed to survive in Sasan Gir. The respect for the creatures is community-wide, with pride running deep both in people’s emotional (and now economic) psyches.
‘The lion has come to define the people of Gujarat unlike any other animal in any other state,’ says Dr Asad Rahmani, director of the Bombay Natural History Society. ‘Not only does tourism bring money to the area, the lion has also been used as a political tool. They have been protected from poaching by the state government because the people love them and they are vote winners.’
Growing human-animal pressure is not the only problem; there is also a feeling among the conservation community that there are now too many lions in one place – raising the possibilities of a potentially disastrous epidemic. To try and counter this, there have been two attempts to relocate some breeding pairs to the Kuno-Palpur sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh. Both have failed.
‘Any attempts to move them have been blocked by the Gujarat government,’ says Bittu Sahgal, editor and founder of India’s leading wildlife and conservation magazine, Sanctuary. ‘The politicians are so possessive of the lions they don’t want anyone else in India to have them. And in the long run this could be their downfall.’
The relative success of Sasan Gir’s lions contrasts with the news of a dramatic fall in India’s tiger population from 2,800 to 1,400 over the past five years. The true extent of the latter animal’s decline came to light in 2005 when figures revealed the creature had become extinct in Rajasthan’s Sariska National Park, the showcase for Project Tiger – established by Indira Gandhi in 1972 to halt the animals’ slide to extinction. ‘Mrs Gandhi had a personal interest in tigers. That helped ensure the conservation efforts worked and that poaching was largely eradicated,’ says Debi Goenka, who runs the Bombay Environmental Action Group, one of the most active campaigning groups in the country. ‘Today, the politicians are only concerned with protecting the rapidly expanding economy.’
India’s rapid economic development has led to a significant loss in habitat – a phenomenon that affects tigers more seriously than lions. The key to understanding why is the distinction in the felines’ social behaviour. Tigers are solitary creatures whereas lions hunt in groups. They also have less of a dislike of contact with people, improving their chances of survival when food is scarce – at a pinch, lions will scavenge for food on the edge of human settlements.When the time comes to leave the park, fortune strikes again as we spot a leopard resting in the shade of a tree. If it was not for its lions, this is the animal for which Sasan Gir would be famous – there are believed to be around 300 of them here. That is great news for wildlife watchers, but potentially not for the local villagers – large as the park is, it does not support enough prey species to feed this abundance of predators. Unless measures are taken soon, cattle will not sleep easy in the vicinity of Sasan Gir ,