By Sy Montgomery, photographs by Eleanor Briggs,
The Man-eating Tigers of Sundarbans.
Houghton Mifflin, 2001

Readers who judge this book by its melodramatic title will be in for a surprise. The Man-Eating Tigers of Sundarbans is an excellent book about the intertwined human and forest ecology of the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve of the India-Bangladesh border, a "strange and beautiful flooded forest, part ocean, part river, part trees."
Sundarbans is a mangrove flood-plain, filled with deer and mudskippers, egrets, eagles, pink dolphins, and crocodiles the exact color of the rivers. There are some five hundred tigers left here, more than anyplace in the world. That’s a wonderful thing. Yet three hundred local men are killed and eaten by Sundarbans tigers every year. That’s a very hard thing. Nowhere else on earth do tigers hunt humans, unless they are wounded or sick, unable to hunt their normal prey. So what is going on in Sundarbans? What should happen there? In author Sy Montgomery’s hands, Sundarbans becomes a case study of how to make choices about the fate of the earth’s remaining wild places.

Tigers thrive in Sundarbans because it’s the only wild place left amidst a human population explosion. Why do these tigers hunt men? Researchers have different ideas. It may be that tigers’ territory marking and tracking instincts are frustrated by the muddy mangrove forest, leading to aberrant behavior. A shortage of appropriate prey, and the ease of hunting humans compared to deer or wild boar, may also play a part. Saltwater permeates Sundarbans; perhaps salt in tigers’ drinking water makes them ill and more aggressive.

Montgomery and photographer Eleanor Briggs made four trips to Sundarbans and focused as much on the people as on the tigers. Local residents have their own ideas about the causes - and ramifications - of the tiger situation. Sundarbans is a closed reserve; cutting trees is prohibited. But an underfunded forest department cannot patrol it well and, as in all communities, many people violate the rules. Here, they are apt to become tiger food. As some forest guards see it, "The tigers do our job." Still, tigers are revered. Tradition has it that Daskin Ray, the tiger god, and Bonobibi, the forest goddess, rule Sundarbans. Every February there is a festival to celebrate their protection of the forest, and the reserve holds many rustic tiger shrines.

Like most villagers everywhere, the Sundarbans locals are ecologically informed. The people live by fishing. They know that if cutting trees is allowed, the mangroves will vanish and fish fry will have no safe place to grow: the entire riverine ecology will collapse. The Bay of Bengal is subject to yearly horrific cyclones; residents know that without the forest, everything would blow away. As Montgomery argues, "Sometimes what is true is hidden, as in a riddle." Here’s one: When are man-eating tigers really life-saving protectors? Answer: When they guard a forest on which everyone depends. It’s a question of balance; the good must be weighed against the bad. "Even dangerous man-eating tigers," Montgomery concludes, "may do us more good than harm."

John Caddy
Summer 2001

Summer 2002