Tribal Tigers

How a shamanic community has saved tigers in the Dibang Valley of Arunachal Pradesh

- Sahil Nijhawan

THE PRELUDE

It was March 2012. I was in the Lower Dibang Valley district of Arunachal Pradesh conducting surveys for a renowned conservation organisation to determine tiger presence outside Protected Areas of Northeast India. “If you want to fi nd a lot of tigers, you must go high up in the mountains. In our culture, tigers live on tall mountains,” said an Idu Mishmi elder as I sat in his hut close to Roing town, the headquarters of the Lower Dibang Valley. I nodded, as you do when dismissing someone, politely. I was well versed in tiger ecology and knew that ‘a lot of tigers’ didn’t, and couldn’t, ‘live on high mountains’. During my years in graduate school and then as a conservation practitioner, I had fi rmly believed, backed by hard data, that tigers were a conservation dependent species that survived when governments and NGOs, like the one I worked for, put in active measures to protect them. There were no tiger reserves in the area, no guards and the nearest sizeable tiger population was more than 400 km. away in Assam’s Kaziranga. Surely the ‘tigers’ that the Idu elder was talking about were either fi ctional or unfortunate remnants of a past population.