The abundance of wildlife in African reserves, beautifully captured in these two books, has lessons for our wardens in India.
The Dark Continent, for many Indians, is a continental mass that has remained outside its area of interest in spite of several links — the Indian community’s successful business entrepreneurship (and Idi Amin’s ouster of Indians from Uganda), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s transformation into the Mahatma in South Africa, the beauty pageants and Bollywood song sequences filmed in Sun City, the recent Indian Premier League tournaments in Cape Town, and now, famously, US President Barack Obama’s familial links with Kenya. This is also Lion King territory; we’ve been aware at a subliminal level of the abundance of wildlife in Africa; for the last decade Indian tourists have been packing the Masai Mara onto their itineraries; and now, in quick succession, there are two books by Indian photographers on safaris into the heart of wild Africa.
Tiger man Valmik Thapar, usually associated with Ranthambhore, where he has worked extensively, spent a dozen-odd days photographing in Kenya, an exercise he admits his wife Sanjna Kapoor believed “was based more on arrogance than on expertise”. Foreign tourists to India have often complained about the elusive quality of India’s wildlife, and their disenchantment at being fobbed off with a few deer sightings, and now it appears that Thapar may have joined the bandwagon of African wildlife supporters with his reiteration that in “just a few days” one gets to see so much wildlife that “[it] is a place on the world map that cannot be missed in the course of the one life we have”.
Diinesh Kumble honed his photographic skills in Bandipur and Nagarhole, national parks in Karnataka, where his fascination for wildlife was whetted, though it was “my frequent trips to South Africa since 2001 that got me hooked on to wildlife and photography”. Kumble, brother of cricketer Anil Kumble, travelled through both Kenya and Tanzania, and two of those safaris are the subject of his book. Anil Kumble himself is a wildlife photography aficionado, and writes in the Foreword, “Having toured the African continent on many cricketing sojourns, I have had limited opportunities of getting away into the wild to capture images,” something he claims to have “thoroughly enjoyed”. He points out that his brother’s safaris, spanning two weeks, have resulted in his capturing images of the Big Five — the elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard — in a way that illustrates their “behavioural patterns”.
Kumble’s first safari, to Kenya, spanned eight days in August 2006 as a last-minute entrant on India International Photographic Council’s photographer’s only trip with barely enough time for the mandatory yellow fever inoculation. Beginning at the Amboseli National Park, known for its elephants and Mt Kilimanjaro, amidst the Maasai tribesmen, Kumble learned that the heat across the “vast dry lands” could be “excruciating”. Despite that, though, he tells magical stories, through extended captions and pictures that capture the wilderness in detail. The effervescence is candidly engaging, if sometimes wide-eyed, but Kumble’s power of the dramatic narrative comes up a winner, such as when he follows a herd of elephants with their calves, passing close to a lioness crouching in the grass. “I could feel my heart racing as the elephants passed within striking distance of the lioness,” he writes.
Kumble observes a hungry lioness set her sights on a wildebeest, but Thapar actually manages to photograph a pride of lions bring a wildebeest down and settle down for a feast, while in another series he rapidly shoots two crocodiles downing a zebra, after which 35 of them tear into its carcass, reducing it to flesh and bone in a matter of moments. Thapar’s professional eye is trained to ensure that each image is a worthy memoir and tells a story, and he picks several such stories, so you see ostriches courting, vultures feeding on carcasses, lion cubs playing and adults mating, enchanting shots of zebras and giraffe and leopards, slopes abundant with wild buffalos, hippos bathing, a puff adder soaking in the sun…
By the time Kumble returns in October-November 2008, for the second leg of his African safari, you can see the difference in the way he frames his pictures, less fixated now on portraits, more on the ambient environment and the co-existence between the species, and manages to film the migration of zebras, wildebeests and other antelopes, a journey entailing the necessity of having to cross the crocodile-infested Mara river. “Many drown in the confusion to cross and are swept downstream by the current,” he observes, “some are taken down by crocodiles, but most survive to reach the opposite shore.” It is an event, according to him, that is “perhaps the most phenomenal wildlife spectacle on earth”.
In her Afterword to Thapar’s book, the author of The Guardians of Eden, Kuki Gallmann talks of the mismanagement of our planet’s natural resources. “The Earth is tired,” she warns. “She is shaking us off.” As guardian of Ol ari Nyiro, a private wildlife sanctuary spread over 100,000 acres and containing “the only remaining indigenous relic forest in the area”, she helped save it when she vowed that she would go after the poachers and then put them “at the service of protecting the wildlife” using “the same skills they had used to kill it”. She hoped to save migratory paths, ensured cattle did not graze in the reserve even in years of drought and in the face of mounting pressures, connections Thapar says he can make with Ranthambhore, though “government controls and restrictions” have choked the Indian system and, of course, unlike in Kenya, private reserves are not permitted.
Clearly, there are lessons India can learn in wildlife management from Africa. For, as Gallmann notes, “If Venice sinks, the world will be poorer; but what is man-made can be... reproduced. But if the habitats of wild animals go, if their migration routes are interrupted..., if the...precious knowledge... is obliterated, if the primeval forests are destroyed and the beautiful birds and the shy creatures which live in them go, if the wild lands are encroached upon by the mindless... development governed by power and greed, there will be no coming back. They will be lost forever, and their loss will take our own self-destruction a step closer.”
AN AFRICAN DIARY
12 Days in Kenya’s Magical Wilderness
Author: Valmik Thapar
Publisher: Oxford
Pages: 154
Price: Rs 1,995
DREAM SAFARI
A Pictorial Journey Through Africa’s Cradle of Life
Author: Diinesh Kumble
Publisher: KRAB
Pages: 224
Price: Rs 2,250
