Tiger-Wallahs: Saving the Greatest of the Great Cats (Oxford India Collection)

For many years historian and screenwriter Geoffrey C. Ward has been visiting the Indian jungles, drawn by their beauty and the mystery and power of the great endangered predator that has always ruled them--the tiger. In this intensely personal book, he combines history, biography and first-hand reporting to evoke the special appeal of India's forests and describes encounters with some of the 'tiger-wallahs' who have struggled against overwhelming odds to save the species from extinction. The remarkable tiger-wallahs covered here are Jim Corbett, the great destroyer of maneaters, who became a still greater conservationist; Billy Arjan Singh, the Spartan farmer who despises hunters and hunting, tried to return a tigress to the wild, and, all alone, carved out a national park; Fateh Singh Rathore, the uninhibited Rajput who cheerfully risked his life defending the jungles in his charge; and Valmik Thapar, the son of New Delhi intellectuals, who began as Fateh's disciple, became an authority in his own right, and now champions a new kind of conservation that may provide the tiger's only hope. An epilogue especially written for this edition brings the story of the tiger and its champions up to date. This evocative and well-illustrated book about a magnificent animal and its ablest defenders, one of the first to document the conflicts that plague efforts to save the species, will interest conservationists, ecologists and wildlife enthusiasts and appeal to a wide general readership.