An elephant crosses a road. Representative image. Photo: PTI.
There’s a folktale in Ladakh that goes like this:
Once a yogi was meditating in a cave for several years. At the end of his meditation, the deity he was praying to manifested itself in the form of a snow leopard. He fed the animal as an act of kindness not knowing that he was, in fact, offering food to the deity. The next day, the snow leopard rewarded his kindness by leaving a freshly killed ungulate at the entrance of his cave…
Nothing binds people better than stories, and folklore has been making and holding these connections for centuries.
Today, as human-wildlife interactions escalate, and experts of all hues acknowledge that this multifaceted issue could do with more approaches than one, folklore could play an important part.
A growing body of research has been stressing the need to understand how people sustain complex and diverse connections with local wildlife – especially through folktales and narratives.
“I think that the first thing to do is genuinely respect people’s sentiments, even if they don’t align with conservation goals,” Saloni Bhatia, a postdoc at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas, IIT Bombay, said. “Folklore helps us understand the roots of people’s biases. It can be used to initiate dialogue.”
In India, however, such exploration remains inchoate.
This is why one study published on February 25 is notable: it uses archival records of folktales and interviews to examine how people and wildlife have coexisted in Ladakh.
A mythical snow lion
Researchers from Aberdeen, Jammu, Manipal, Mysuru and Seattle collected stories about ibexes, wolves and snow leopards in Ladakh and compared them with those of a mythical carnivore called ‘seng ge’, or snow lion, which finds frequent mention in Tibetan Buddhist folklore.
“Once people began to trust us, they would confide in us about various hunting expeditions that they had been part of,” Bhatia, a member of the study team, said. “In this one village we visited, people told us about the Mentok flower festival that happens in the summer, when the entire village celebrates the budding of wild flowers and offers them to the village deity.
The authors lined up their findings along social-cultural, ecological and psychological axes. To quote from their paper’s abstract:
… the ibex was predominantly associated with utilitarianism and positive symbolism. Both snow leopard and wolf narratives referenced negative affective and negative symbolic values, though more frequently in the case of wolves. Snow leopard narratives largely focused on utilitarian and ecologistic values.
“The great thing about cultural values is that they aren’t static — they change over time and between generations too,” Bhatia added. “The idea is to see if we can offer an alternative point of view – through sustained engagement or conversations – and enhance their appreciation and value for wildlife.”
Stories for conservation action
Around the world, a rich oral history of mythical animals and talking trees is being rekindled and used to ignite a new conservation conversation. For example, the Tonkean macaques in Indonesia are better protected, researchers found, because locals believe it’s taboo to harm the macaques, even if they occasionally raid crops.
But only recently have people in India “begun to conduct such studies, and we are still at the stage of building a body of knowledge and producing a framework of understanding,” according to Dhee, an independent researcher and lead author of ‘The leopard that learnt from the cat and other narratives of carnivore-human coexistence in northern India’ (2019).
Dhee said there is a lot more research waiting to be done, “many more steps to be taken and conversations that we need to have with people on ground who live with these animals before we can claim any specific successful interventions.”
For example, the authors of the study documented folktales that the people of Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh, cherished. In these stories, they found that the locals think of leopards as adaptive beings, not just instinct-driven creatures, who respond to specific situations. They are believed to possess qualities like conscious thought, sense of self and kinship. As a result, they are unlikely to adhere to conservation friendly behaviour that doesn’t also respect these beliefs.
“Recognising the role of culturally-informed knowledge means also giving value to the voices of the people who live with wildlife,” Dhee said. “These people have the capacity to produce strategies to address human-wildlife interactions that are most appropriate for themselves and their landscape.”
As one way forward, she suggested replacing top-down, landscape-wide policies with more participatory, flexible ones that are sensitive to each landscape.
Bhatia had another example in the Changpa community. Their members are mostly pastoralist, and know intimately as to where they need to graze their livestock.
“They rotate between different pastures, know how to treat injured or sick animals, know which herbs are toxic, which ones are medicinal, etc.” Bhatia said. “They are conservationists in their own right.”
There have been some studies suggesting that people’s animosity towards wild animals could be the result of a combination of losses they may have suffered and stories and myths that framed the animals in bad light.
To overcome such impressions, Bhatia suggested education as one way – especially to teach young students to understand and experience nature through their five senses. She recalled one such project of hers, when she worked with an NGO to develop storybooks and allied activities for schoolchildren in Ladakh.
“We also incorporated local myths and legends but tried to offer alternative points of views about some of the conservation issues with the help of the different characters in the storybook. Different target groups require different sets of tools,” she said.
Ultimately, according to her, “we will have to constantly engage and negotiate a relationship with the wildlife live with. When people consider animals as thinking beings, there is more willingness in people to constantly find new strategies and renegotiate living with animals rather than becoming intolerant and eradicating them.”
Also read: In a Country That Worshipped Tigers, Whence the Idea of ‘Man-Eater’?
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In 2017, in Sathanur, Karnataka, an elephant killed a forest guard. A few days later, when interacting with the locals, one of the older men told me that the elephant “had been visiting the spot where he killed the forest guard for three days straight. He is mourning and is sorry for his actions. Elephants understand everything.”
According to Bhatia, there is value in such anthropomorphism. “It helps people – for example children – empathise with wild animals. Irrespective of whether animals intend to or not, they do have agency – they have preferences, their behaviour affects humans and vice-versa. This needs to be factored into management policies.”
For centuries, wild animals have been travelling with humans, living in their stories and memories, guiding them through the underworld and at other times, shapeshifting into their partners. It’s in these stories that many young scientists are finding hope for conservation.
“It can help the larger population across the country to think of wild animals as complex and multidimensional beings with many more characteristics than just being ‘menacing man-eaters’,” Dhee said, adding that many existing narratives are rooted in “colonial and western conceptions of these animals”, so rediscovering and popularising local folklore could also empower the people living with animals.
Gana Kedlaya is a freelance science and travel journalist based in Bengaluru.