The majesty of the Bengal tiger although considered a threat to their existence by the locals in Sunderbans, is in effect a direct check on the wilful onslaught of nature by unconcerned people.
Consider it this way; the threat of the tiger in the jungle and the Crocs in the river has been the major discouragement for the communities living here from deforesting the area and expanding human activities. And the clear upshot is — advantage Conservation.
Nature Police
The Sundarbans, a tangle of unforgiving islands at the mouth of the Ganges River, are home to perhaps the world’s largest population of wild tigers — as well as millions of the poorest people in India andBangladesh. Despite decades of attempts to keep the tigers at bay, they still kill about two dozen people every year.
“But,without the tiger,” said Bish Tarafdar, a fisherman who was mauled last year, “there would be no jungle.”
He’s almost certainly right. As India industrializes, it is facing serious deforestation problems elsewhere.
As India booms, its many irrigation and hydropower projects have also reduced the flow of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers which feed the Sundarbans. That means less fresh water in the tidal basin.
The changes have made watermelons, once an attractive crop, impossible to grow. Rice paddies, the backbone of both the village diet and its economy, are producing less. Harvest season comes earlier every year.
The tigers are suffering from the changes, too. Once more commonly spotted in the south, where no humans live, they have been increasingly seen in northern woods, closer to the inhabited islands.
“It’s certainly become more inhospitable than it used to be,” said Anurag Danda, senior program coordinator of WWF India Sundarbans. “Of course people are scared, but that sense of fear has always been there.”
Despite the fear, the villagers also prize the tigers because they know the beasts are all that’s keeping the crowded world outside, from encroaching on their homes.
“In India, where processes driving the tiger toward extinction were
quite similar to those in the Malay world, colonizer and colonized took on
different roles. There, the British acted much as China’s Manchu rulers did,
organizing hunts and using their abilities to kill tigers to consolidate their
rule. “Big game hunting represented the striving and victory of civilized
man over the darker primeval and untamed forces still at work in the world,”
John MacKenzie wrote about hunting and the British empire. “It was as
though the virile imperialist and the lion—in India the tiger—were locked in
deadly combat for control of the natural world. But unlike the colonized
in the Malay world, at least some in India then identified with the tiger in the
anti-colonial struggle. Not just Tippu Sultan, “the tiger of Mysore,” but the
Muslim League too in the 1930s, adopted the tiger as its symbol of
resistance.”
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