TIGERS IN THE SUNDARBANS: THEIR LIFESTYLE, ATTACKS, PROTECTION

TIGERS IN THE SUNDARBANS

The Sundarbans contains about 400 to 500 Bengal tigers, the largest colony in the world,. Bangladesh tiger census data released in 2018 showed numbers in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh had risen to 114 that year from a record low of 106 in 2015. A census in 2003 estimated the tiger population was between 260 and 280 in the Indian part of the Sundarbans. (there may be more now). The Royal Bengal tigers found here in the Sundarbans are unique because they are almost amphibians and spend long periods of times in the saline water, and are infamous man-eaters. According to local tradition, the tiger's name, bagh, must never be uttered. To speak it is to summon it. So people talk of mamu, uncle. Uncle tiger, lord of the Sundarbans. [Source: Kennedy Warne, National Geographic Magazine, February 2007]

In “Spell of the Tiger,” a book about the Sundarbans, Sy Montgomery wrote: "Here the tigers do not obey the same rules by which tigers everywhere else govern their lives. They hunt people. They take their prey even in broad daylight. They will even swim out into the Bay of Bengal, where the waves may be more than two feet high. They often swim from India to Bangladesh. The tigers are bound by neither day nor night, land nor water; these tigers, some say, are creatures of neither heaven nor earth."

Jeremy Page wrote in The Times: “The Sundarbans is home to 440 tigers, according to a joint Indian and Bangladeshi survey done in 2004. Remarkably, tigers which normally inhabit inland jungle have adapted by learning to swim, catch fish and drink salty water. As fast as the animals have adapted, however, the forest has shrunk further and the human population around it has multiplied to 2.5 million. [Source: Jeremy Page in Munshiganj, The Times, November 3, 2008]

Ari Shapiro of NPR wrote: “Unlike most big cats, Bengal tigers are happy in water and swim for miles from island to island. But they're elusive. "The first time I saw a Bengal tiger in the Sundarbans, it was some 45 years after I'd first been there," says Bittu Saghal, a conservationist and the editor of Sanctuary Asia magazine. "So you only see them when they decide that you're good enough to be given a vision of orange and black." Not everyone wants to see them. People here have been eaten by tigers. The forest rangers who protect this habitat put their lives at risk every day. Locals keep telling me that tigers here are so stealthy that if I see one, it will only be as its jaws clamp down on my neck. They don't smile when they say this.” [Source: Ari Shapiro, NPR, May 20, 2016]

Tiger Attacks in the Sundarbans

About a third of all the tiger attacks in India occur in the Sundarbans, a densely vegetated mangrove swamp on the border between India and Bangladesh. Estimates of tiger victims there range from 15 to 100 a year. There are between 260 to 520 tigers in the Sundarbans, the largest concentration in the world,

Sundarbans tigers have had a reputation for fierceness for a long time. In the late 1800s, according to British records, they killed roughly 700 people a year. In 1666 a French explorer wrote: "Among these islands, it is in many places dangerous to land, and great care must be had that the boat, which during the night is fastened to a tree, be kept at some distance from the shore, for it constantly happened that some person or another falls prey to tigers. these ferocious animals are very apt...to enter into the boat itself, while the people are asleep, and to carry away some victim."

Sundarbans tigers have been known to stalk their human prey for days and burst out of the water and snatch people sitting on boats. Their victims are mostly fishermen, honey gatherers and woodcutters who enter the swamps. Most villages in the Sundarbans have at least one tiger widow. One individual tiger, identified by his paw mark, killed at least 14 people.

Caroline Alexander wrote in The New Yorker: “Sundarbans tiger attacks were documented as early as the sixteen-hundreds, and legend has it that during the British colonial era tigers every year claimed hundreds of lives. Today, the number of reported deaths has averaged around ten a year for the past decade. This reduction involved an aggressive campaign to modify the conduct of both man and tiger, which inspired an arsenal of hopeful and imaginative tiger deterrents: masks with a painted human face worn on the back of the head to trick the tiger, who prefers attacking from behind; Tiger Guard Head Gear, a fibreglass casing for the head, neck, and chest, issued to forest staff, who, like villagers, are highly vulnerable. Hot and awkward in the summer, the outfit was, according to Dr. Sanyal, “very comfortable” in the winter, which is the working season. “I went inside the forest many, many times without attack — you look something like an astronaut,” he said, which alone may have deterred the baffled tigers. Another measure was the creation of life-size electrified clay dummies, dressed in the clothes of honey gatherers and fishermen and left to stand in the forest, administering a two-hundred-and-thirty-volt jolt to any attacking tiger. [Source: Caroline Alexander, The New Yorker, April 21, 2008]

Tiger Attacks in the Sundarbans

One 64-year-old woodcutter told Time, "My friend was chopping down a tree while three of us stood guard around him, watching the jungle. Suddenly, a tiger leapt over our heads and attacked my friend at the tree. The tiger was dragging him away...so I grabbed my friend's legs and tried to pull him out of the tigers mouth." The tiger let go but the man died from his injuries and the woodcutter never went back into the jungle. A fishermen said, "I woke up to see the flash of a tiger as it jumped over me to attack the man sleeping next to me. The tiger killed him." In June 2014, A Bengal tiger snatched a man off a fishing boat in eastern India, dragging him away into a mangrove swamp as his children looked on in horror, the man's son said

Phani Gayen was employed at the Saznekhali Wildlife Sanctuary in the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, where we were moored. Caroline Alexander wrote in The New Yorker: On June 23, 1984, at half past noon, he had gone into the forest with companions to collect wood. He turned and found a tiger springing for him, roaring. “I was then forty-five years old and very, very strong,” he said. “I did not allow the tiger’s face to touch my face.” He stroked his Adam’s apple. “The tiger’s throat is very hard, here.” As the tiger gripped him with its paws, its head hung over his shoulder, drenching his shirt with saliva. “I knew I was going to die. So I embraced the tiger. He was soft. The tiger was soft. Like a sponge.” Somehow, this surrender freed him — the tiger released him and turned on one of his companions. Taking the companion by the throat, the tiger headed back into the forest. [Source: Caroline Alexander, The New Yorker, April 21, 2008]

“The claw wounds on Gayen’s head and face kept him in the hospital for three months. The wounds healed, but his ear was damaged permanently. Over the years, he had told his story many times. “I no longer fear the tiger,” he declared, his scarred face lit by the yellow bulb that our boat’s generator powered. “It is the tiger’s nature.” But he avoids entering the forest.

Tiger Attacks in the Sundarbans in the Mid-2000s

Jeremy Page wrote in The Times: “The dawn mist was still clinging to the mangroves when the maneater struck. Mohammed Rasul Hussain, 45, had left his hut in southwestern Bangladesh at sunrise... with his younger brother, Sheraz, paddled across the river and into the vast Sundarbans forest. They moored their boat and set off on foot to search for crab, wild honey and firewood. [Source: Jeremy Page, The Times, November 3, 2008]

“Armed with only a machete, Mohammed did not stand a chance when the tiger leapt from the undergrowth, knocked him to the ground and sank its teeth into his neck. Sheraz could only scream in horror — and run. They buried Mohammed that evening, minus his left leg. “He knew the dangers of the forest, but he couldn’t do anything else to survive,” said Fatima, 30, his widow and the mother of their three children. “It would be better if there were no tigers here.”

“Maneaters have long been a problem here. Almost every village has its “tiger widows” and a shrine to Bon Bibi — the forest goddess who wards off the big cat. Since a hurricane last November, the conflict between tiger and human has escalated to a new pitch — highlighting the environmental threats to this unique habitat. Tigers have killed twenty people in the Bangladeshi Sundarbans so far this year, compared with six in 2007 and seven in 2006, according to forestry officials.

“Even more worryingly, tigers have started straying into villages on the forest’s fringes. “The situation is quite negative,” says Rajesh Chakma, the head forest ranger in Munshiganj, the worst affected district with 18 fatal attacks this year. “We could see many more attacks before the year’s end, as it’s mating season now and tigers become more aggressive.”

“In the village of Horinagar no one goes out after dark anymore, even to use the lavatory. On June 20 a tiger swam across the river from the Sundarbans and killed three people before villagers surrounded it, threw a noose around its neck and beat it to death with sticks. They summoned the forestry officials, as is required by law, but those who arrived could not provide help as they had no tranquillisers. “The tigers never used to come into the villages, never in my lifetime,” says Shri Poti Mundal, 40, whose father and sister-in-law were killed by the tiger. “If they had captured it and released it, it might have come back.” “Other villages in the area have started lighting fires at night or using loudspeakers from the local mosque to scare off any approaching tigers.”

Tiger Attacks in the Sundarbans in the 2010s

Ari Shapiro of NPR wrote: “An average of 25 people on the Indian side of the Sundarbans are attacked every year by tigers. Some experts warn that climate change will lead to even more tiger attacks... At the Netidhopani camp, on the western edge of the forest reserve, the most recent tiger sighting was just yesterday, around high noon. I meet forest guard Debnath Mondal. A long scar runs from his left ear down his jaw. His mouth is pulled to the right, near his cheek. “"It was the first of June, 2010, at 8:15 in the morning," he says, starting to tell me about how he got those scars.“Two weeks before, a team had gone out to attach a radio collar to a Bengal tiger. Mondal himself put the tracker on the animal. He believes the tiger remembered that, and hunted him down. [Source: Ari Shapiro, NPR, May 20, 2016]

“On that morning six years ago, his team of about a dozen men left the camp to visit a nearby watering hole, intending to take the data card out of a camera trap there. The radio collar on the tiger was sending GPS signals to a tracking center thousands of miles away in northern India. If someone had been watching those signals, he would have seen the blip of the tiger on the screen, slowly creeping through the forest to the watering hole where the men were working.

“The forest guards stood in a circle, facing out, scanning the trees for movement. And then everything happened very fast. "I saw the tiger coming in. Everyone shouted, 'Tiger!' But before I could do anything, it pounced on me. It landed on my thighs and chest and bit my face and head," Mondal says. He takes his hat off and shows me the line on his scalp where the tiger tore at him. "I had 80 stitches in my scalp. I can no longer see out of my left eye or hear out of my left ear."

“The forest guards fought the tiger with their bamboo poles until it ran away, and they rushed their bleeding friend to a speedboat to take him to the hospital, hours away. Three months after the attack, Mondal was back on patrol. He bears no ill will toward the animal that attacked him. "No," he says. "We are here to save the tiger. It gives us life. I have to be careful. And teach others to be careful. But I don't have any anger towards the animal." “The tiger is an integral part of the forest, he says. "I believe that if the forest is destroyed, man will not survive. We have to save the forest, the tiger, the trees are our life."

Tiger Attacks in Bangladesh

In January 2002, Ananova reported: “Angry villagers in Bangladesh have trapped a tiger with fishing nets and beat it to death. It came after the animal attacked and wounded a young man. The aging tiger was foraged into the fishing village of Sardarpara from the forest, and attacked a young man who was walking to the local market. As word spread, a mob of dozens of fishermen rushed to rescue the man and beat the tiger with wooden oars and iron rods. The wounded man was taken to the hospital with a bleeding arm. Bangladesh does not have a figure on the tiger population of the forest, which is shared by Bangladesh and India. But foraging tigers killed at least a dozen Bangladeshis in the past year, authorities said. [Source: Ananova, January 12, 2002]

In April 2000, Inam Ahmed of United Press International: “Panicked Bangladeshi villagers beat to death an endangered Royal Bengal Tiger Wednesday and then attacked local forest department officials who came to investigate the incident. According to reports, the tiger entered the Datnekhali village overnight in search of food. It then fell asleep in the kitchen of a hut where it was discovered Wednesday morning. Scared villagers immediately raised alarm and started beating drums and utensils to scare the tiger away. This in turn is reported to have scared the animal, which attacked the mob, wounding two villagers. The other villagers, however, managed to corner the animal and beat it to death using sticks and spears. Later as forest department officials arrived at the spot, the enraged villagers beat them up. [Source: Inam Ahmed, United Press International, April 12, 2000]

This is the second time that a tiger has been killed this year. On January 24, another tiger was ensnared and killed. The Global Tiger Forum early this year had said Bangladesh has 362 tigers left in the Sundarbans. There has been an increasing trend in tigers entering villages as humans are encroaching on the forest. Experts say this has led to man-eating incidents.

Why Are Sundarbans Tigers So Dangerous?

"Why the tigers are so different in their view of people," wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, "is subject to various speculations”: they drink salt water and are therefore more irritable; they acquired a taste for humans from eating incompletely cremated corpses floating down from the holy Ganges; the sucking ooze of the swamp makes it difficult for tigers to catch their prey; the dampness of the region discourages normal territoriality and made the tigers more aggressive.

One in every three Sundarbans tiger, Geoffrey C. Ward wrote in Smithsonian magazine "is thought to be an 'opportunistic man-eater,' one that will kill and eat any vulnerable human it happens to encounter. No one is certain why. Some believe the daily tides that wash away the tigers' scent markings force the animal to be unusually combative in order to hold on to their territories. Another possible explanation is that too much salt water might affect their livers, rendering them especially irritable." [Source: Geoffrey C. Ward, Smithsonian, November 1987]

One World Wildlife Fund scientist told TIME, "Every Sundarbans tiger is a potential man-eater. This trait for killing human beings had definitely been passed down to cubs." Efforts to shoot the man-eaters has proved ineffective. See Protection Against Man-eating Tigers Under Tiger Attacks

The people of the Sundarbans worship the man eaters as Dakisn Ray, the tiger god, often depicted as a warrior riding a tiger. Both Muslims and Hindus pay homage to Daksin Ray. "Everyone in Sundarbans knows that Daksin Ray can enter the body of any tiger at will," Sy Montgomery wrote.. "Thus all tigers are scared and holy, expressions of the power of God." People in this part of the Indian subcontinent believe in gunins, specialists who deal with the mystical powers of "tigers, crocodiles, ghost, illnesses and gods."

Jeremy Page wrote in The Times: ““Experts on tiger behaviour are unsure exactly what caused the rise in the attacks as they have not had time to do the necessary research. Most of them suspect that one central factor was Hurricane Sidr, which killed 4,000 people and destroyed 20 per cent of the Sundarbans in November 2007. “Tigers have been displaced to this area – and they are territorial,” Mr Chakma said. Many also blame a “perfect storm” of environmental problems — rising sea levels, the silting up of rivers, annual floods and salination of fresh water supplies. “The Sundarbans is dying,” said Ainun Nishat, the head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Bangladesh office and an expert on the Sundarbans. “The forest is getting degraded, so that means less prey,” he said. “And you must remember that this is not the tigers’ natural habitat.” [Source: Jeremy Page, The Times, November 3, 2008]

Protection Against Tigers in the Sundarbans

Tigers rarely attack an animal or a person that is facing them. To reduce the number of deaths in the Sundarbans, villagers wear clay masks on the back of their head to, theoretically, make a tiger approaching from behind think that the person is facing them. Masks on the back of the head worked for about two years before the tigers wizened to the trick, and attacked anyway.

In another effort to protect villagers in the Sundarbans, clay dummies dressed as farmers, woodcutters and fisherman were electrically wired to household batteries and even car batteries that gave attacking tigers a 230 volt jolt when they jumped the dummies. The plan eventually turned out to be unmanageable. It was too time-consuming and dangerous to change the batteries.

There are also forest guards and patrols. Ari Shapiro of NPR wrote: “In a remote corner of eastern India, far in the jungle and hours by boat from any village, there is a camp with a brightly colored shrine to a forest goddess. Behind a tall fence, a statue of Bonbibi wears silks and garlands, with a gold headdress. She shelters a boy from a tiger. Every day, forest guard Bhabotaron Paik prostrates himself before the goddess and makes an offering of sweets before he goes out on patrol. When he has finished the ritual — the puja — Paik explains that protection from Bonbibi comes with conditions. "We will not take more than we need from the jungle. That is our vow to the goddess." “The goddess Bonbibi — revered by Hindus, Muslims and Christians alike — reminds people here to live lightly on the land. But the landscape is changing, despite the people's small footprint.” [Source: Ari Shapiro, NPR, May 20, 2016]

Living with Tigers in the Sundarbans

Ari Shapiro of NPR wrote: “In the village of Rajat Jubilee, people depend on the jungle for food and income. Sometimes they ply the coastline for crabs or go deeper into the forest for honey. And activities like that can make them vulnerable to tigers. "I've seen my friends being caught by the tiger. And some of the women in this village have been widowed because their husbands were taken away by the tiger," says Arjan Mondal. [Source: Ari Shapiro, NPR, May 20, 2016]

“He has worked as a fisherman here for 20 years. We sit in his dusty courtyard outside a mud brick hut, surrounded by tropical fruit trees and a small plot of vegetables. A line of well-trained ducks from his pond waddles by to eat out of a bowl. Mondal tells us that three times when he's been fishing out in the jungle, a tiger has crept up on him and he's had to fight it off with a pole.

“Over the years, villagers have tried different ways of preventing tiger attacks. At one point, they made special backward-facing masks with a face to wear on the back of the head. People thought this would confuse the tigers, since cats like to sneak up on people from behind. It didn't work.

“Sometimes the animals even venture into this village, searching for a meal. Arati Sardar, who lives in a hut near the river with her children, raises bees for honey and keeps goats and chickens for food. One morning, she woke up to find that a goat was missing. "So when we came out of the house, we saw the track marks and we guessed that it was a tiger," she says. "Later on, people who were near the river found blood, and everybody knew that the tiger had come in to take the goat."

Using Solar Energy to Help People Live with Tigers

Ari Shapiro of NPR wrote: “The World Wildlife Fund came up with a plan to allow people to make a living in the village instead of foraging deep in the jungle — and scare tigers away from villagers' homes. It's a solar energy project, run via a power station on land donated by the local community. "If the people are accessing the clean energy, you have time to spend during the evening and also during the day because it gives you opportunities to do different livelihood activities than they were doing," says Ratul Saha, who runs the Sundarbans program for the World Wildlife Fund-India. "Spending less time inside the forest means less exposure to the tiger." Beyond this, having light deters tigers and other wildlife and means people can see their own surroundings more easily. [Source: Ari Shapiro, NPR, May 20, 2016]

“Renewable-energy experts hope that underdeveloped places like this can skip straight to clean energy without ever relying on fossil fuels, in the same way that they got cellphones without ever depending on landlines — "leapfrogging" technology. Minoti Aulia, 40, runs her village's committee of women — and the solar power station. With electricity, "everything has changed," she says. "From cooking our meals to children studying for long hours to not feeling scared — the fear of darkness. And women have now got engaged in a lot of other work, which earlier they were not able to because there was no light."

“Solar power arrived in this village about five years ago. Until that time, people lived pretty much the same kind of lives their grandparents did. Nighttime lighting has changed everything. The fisherman Mondal no longer has to venture far away from the village. The women in his household make products that they sell at the local market. They don't have to set aside their weaving or embroidery when the sun goes down.

“Before solar lighting came, people tended to stay in their huts after dark. There was nothing to do outside, and you might get bitten by a snake or attacked by a tiger. Now, when the sun goes down and the air has cooled, this little village completely comes to life. Each of these little shacks has opened up for business, each one with a bulb hanging down from the ceiling.

“In one shop, people huddle around a television set. In another, 21-year-old Pintu Mondal is making a sale. "I've got cellphones here, printers — it's a cybercafe," he says. “He says this is like a little city now, it's a business hub. He's wearing a digital bracelet like a Fitbit that sends his health statistics to his smartphone: heart rate, number of steps he's walked that day.

“Mondal says his parents and grandparents don't understand this at all. But they do understand that this shop has made him financially independent, without having to go into the jungle and cross paths with a tiger. “And over at the hut of Sardar, who lost the goat to a tiger, her 17-year-old daughter Ria can now study after dark without having to rely on dim, smoky kerosene lamps, as she used to. "What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you hope your life will be?" I ask her. "I want to serve human beings," she says

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: India tourism website ( incredibleindia.org), India’s Ministry of Tourism and other government websites, UNESCO, Wikipedia, Lonely Planet guides, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Yomiuri Shimbun and various books and other publications.

Updated in August 2020