From where did the tiger come?

GENETICISTS, HISTORIANS AND EXPERTS HAVE SEVERAL THEORIES ON THE BIG CAT

- RAJAT GHAI

IT IS impossible to tell when tigers walked into India. “We can, however, suggest when the habitats in India were appropriate for tigers, or when they diverged and became distinct from other tiger populations,” says Uma Ramakrishnan, molecular ecologist and assistant professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru.

No scholar can give an exact date for this, says Mahesh Rangarajan, professor of history and environmental studies at Ashoka University at Sonipat. They will just give the accidentally surviving evidences that have accumulated over time, he says, adding, “If you see the references in author Shibani Bose’s latest work Mega Mammals in Ancient India: Rhinos, Tigers, and Elephants, the tiger was very much here in the historic times, say 5,000 years ago.” Records show a long association of the tiger with humans, he says.

In her book, Bose uses “an archive comprising archaeology, a gamut of literary texts as well as visual depictions” to etch out histories of rhinos, elephants and tigers in ancient India. “The tiger has scant presence in the fossil record, but figures in the archaeological record at Mesolithic Mahadaha, Neolithic Loebanr III and Aligrama in Swat, at Atranjikhera and at Madar Dih,” her book notes.

Despite scant evidence as far as fossils are concerned, tigers abound in literary and pictorial representations of ancient India.

India’s ‘tiger man’ Valmik Thapar writes in his 2002 book