Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

Tigers Not Burning So Bright

A lot of fuss was made about a film called Roja that made the rounds some years ago. The critics loved it, the audiences screamed their approval from their seats. The government was so pleased with Roja that it waived the entertainment tax it usually applies to films. It ran for months. Even I, usually lazy about seeing films, finally went to see it.

I came away appalled. The noisy and incongruous songs, the improbable coincidences, the half-baked story and the putrefyingly poor acting were all bad enough, but those are features a lot of films boast. Roja was no worse in those respects than many others. What was truly alarming about this film was its shoddy, superficial treatment of one of India's most tangled problems: What's happening in Kashmir.

If you leave out the songs, Roja is about a young man who is kidnapped by Kashmiri militants. These men are presented as shadowy creatures who are prone to sudden bouts of insane shouting and violence. This is precisely the picture the government wants to project of the militants in that state; this is why it decreed that Roja should be shown free of tax all over the country.

It's also precisely this image of the issue there, our refusal to see it as one involving real people with real problems rather than cardboard terrorists, that keeps the whole bloody tangle unresolved. But I don't want, in this column, to get into an examination of the tragedy of Kashmir. Instead, I want to tell you about one scene that a lot of people remember about the film. That's when the militants set an Indian flag on fire. The already beaten and bound hero flings himself on the burning flag, smothering the flames while shouting Jai Hind! loudly.

Predictably, audiences went wild over this heroic display, clapping and cheering our hero on. What a patriot, risking his life to save that symbol of India! How much he must love the country! I thought of this particular scene in Roja recently. That was while I watched another film, one about the Indian tiger.

It had several sequences showing these regal animals, whose every movement -- down to just licking their massive paws -- is languidly elegant, fluid and powerful. Tigers exude power and danger, but also beauty and grace. I know of no animal, no living thing, that captures this seductive combination quite as magnificently as the tiger.

Innumerable organisations within India have recognised this appeal and use the tiger as their symbol; including, notably, at least one that pretends to be intensely patriotic, the Shiv Sena. And around the world, the tiger brings India to peoples's minds, emblematic to them of the mystique and charm they think India holds.

So what was this film? Was it a tourist promotion of some kind? Or a wildlife documentary on BBC? No, neither of those. Instead, it was a film about how this symbol of India is vanishing at a truly phenomenal speed. Made by a British organisation called the Environmental Investigative Agency, the film estimates that one or two tigers are dying in India every single day. Not because of disease, nor of old age. They are being killed by poachers. These criminals are poisoning or shooting our tigers, funneling their skins, their bones, their penises into the voracious, flourishing and illegal international wildlife trade. Risks there are low, profits huge.