The first magical moment when I saw a tiger
in Ranthambore, it was absolutely mesmerizing.
It's a moment where you lose yourself
somewhere within yourself.
This is the best place in the world to see
wild tigers.
For centuries, India's rulers battled over
Ranthambore Fort.
Today, it's home to a family with an
extraordinary story.
It's about what you don't know is going to
happen.
And that's the great joy of Ranthambore.
March, 1984.
A day that rewrote tiger history.
I was helping my brother-in-law, Tejbir, film a
tiger as it watched sambar deer feed in the lakes.
What happened next shocked us.
No one had ever filmed a tiger k*lling in
deep water before.
But then no one had really filmed wild
tigers at all.
And I was there, in the heart of it.
In the jungles of northwestern India,
there is a magical fort called Ranthambore.
It has stood for more than a thousand
years.
There are three lakes a few hundred
feet from each other, and it's full of wildlife.
Something happening every minute.
More wild tigers live in India than
anywhere else on earth.
And this was one of their most important
strongholds.
And when a tiger walks through the lakes,
the sound, the magic, the expl*si*n of activity.
So yes, the lakes, a place to die for.
But in 1976, when I first came to
Ranthambore, it wasn't known for tigers.
Back then, no one really knew anything
about wild tigers, myself included.
I'd grown up a city boy.
I was very busy in Delhi making
documentary films.
My first marriage was collapsing.
And one afternoon, I just walked out of my
house, leaving everything behind,
and caught a train to Ranthambore.
I went on a whim to escape the city.
It took me nearly a day to meet for this
thing, the director of the park.
And he looked me up and down and said,
what do you want?
I said, I want to go to the forest.
He said, but nobody goes to this forest.
It's an unknown area.
When I was passing the old gate,
as you went past the gate and you crossed
the rise of a hill, there in the distance
was Ranthambore Fort, looking at you.
And it grabbed me.
And that moment changed my life.
I wasn't a scientist, or a naturalist,
an activist, or a conservationist.
I was simply a filmmaker who fell in love
with the beauty of this place,
and with its tigers.
For the next half century, I've had the
great privilege of being amongst them.
All tiger life revolves around
the female, and across
the decades, five
tigresses became like family.
Now, for the first time, I'm able to piece
together the story of their matriarchal clan,
and tell you how these five revealed
the secret life of tigers.
None are closer to my heart than my first
Ranthambore tiger, Padmini.
She lived through some very dark times.
Not that long ago, people estimated that
there were 100,000 tigers in India.
When Europeans and their g*ns arrived in
the 18th century, a m*ssacre began.
It makes me sick to think of the
Maharajas, the queens and kings who
flushed out tigers and hammered them with
their g*ns.
I mean, one of our Maharajas, just one single
man, k*lled 1300 tigers and boasts about it.
The kings, the rulers, the emperors, the
rich, they all had tiger skins in their house.
I mean, even the Duke of
Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth
had gone to Ranthambore
and shot tigers there.
In the early 1970s, the Prime Minister,
Indira Gandhi, banned tiger hunting.
A census had revealed that there were just
1800 wild tigers left in India.
And she set up Project Tiger.
It was a wildlife conservation program
with one aim.
To protect India's remaining tigers.
In this land where the tiger roams,
it is not only an animal, but a symbol.
For thousands of years, India has had a culture
that goddesses ride a tiger to defeat evil.
The tiger is sacred, the guardian of the
forest.
In 1973, we set aside nine areas of the
country for tigers.
The old fort of Ranthambore,
with its lakes and forests,
was the smallest of these
special tiger reserves.
And then began a long,
difficult task, rehoming the
many people and cattle that
lived within the boundaries.
Such sacrifices were made for the tiger.
Now, in the heart of Ranthambore, it was
thought that just 12, maybe 13 tigers remained.
And they only ever came out at night.
I didn't think I had a hope of seeing one.
But I went out anyway with some of the
park guards and a searchlight to try.
Anywhere and everywhere, just couldn't
find tigers.
The director of the park, Fateh Singh
Rathore, had slowly become my tiger guru.
He knew every inch of this tiger reserve.
Huge, twirling moustache.
Very tough, with a great sense of humour.
And one day, we drove too close to the
water.
So we were floating in the shallow water
of a lake.
A head appeared.
It was my first Ranthambore tiger.
We called her Padmini.
I was 23, and I'd never felt such a
connection to any living thing before.
How sad that these few photos are the only
record of my times with her.
But she deserves her place in this
history.
She went on to have five cubs.
Four survived.
And it was the beginning of Ranthambore's
clan of tigers.
She led that clan.
She was like the godmother of all the
tigers I've known in Ranthambore.
And she was the mother of my next tiger.
The one who brought me the most joy.
Noon.
The beginning of Ranthambore's golden age.
In the 1980s, Ranthambore was a place
transformed.
Tigers shed their nocturnal cloak.
They suddenly had no fear of man.
And the visibility, the low savanna
grasslands here, meant you could see
tigers and watch their behaviour like
nowhere else on earth.
Noon was my favorite.
She was called Noon because she was really
active at noon.
Noon was a delight.
She was absolutely the opposite of
Padmini.
She was the new generation of tigers that
had grown without the fear of man.
I watched Noon drive away other females,
fight them over prey, force out her sister.
I began to understand that the few square
kilometers around the lakes were her territory.
She had claimed the richest tiger turf,
one teeming with prey.
And now the hunters and people were gone.
It was a tiger paradise.
Pure magic.
It was around this time that I bought some
land on the edge of Ranthambore.
More and more, this is where I wanted to be,
alongside the tigers, learning more about their lives.
Ah, wow!
This is Noon's mate, a big male called
Genghis.
One day, back in 1983, he had appeared
suddenly by the lakes.
From where?
We don't know.
No one was monitoring the tigers in those
days.
What we did know was that males move
around much more than females.
As adults, they leave their family.
They seek out new, big territories that give
them access to several females and lots of prey.
Areas like the lakes.
I remember a day a few months after he
arrived.
Sambar deer had congregated in huge
numbers to feast on succulent water plants.
But deer weren't the only animals in the
water.
There are about 120 crocodiles in the
lakes.
It's one of the only places in the world
where Sambar deer face both predators.
We thought tigers only hunted them on
land.
But then we saw Genghis make that
extraordinary k*ll.
I couldn't believe that I was seeing an
enormous tiger rushing into the water,
k*lling a Sambar.
And we were lucky.
This was the time to record for the world
what Ranthambore was giving, because so
far the world had no real wild pictures of
tigers.
And Ranthambore's tiger population was
growing.
There were 13 tigers when I first arrived.
Now we thought there were 45.
They were the best days of my life.
Days I thought would never end.
I thought I would have another season with
Genghis.
I didn't know, but that was the last time
I saw Genghis in my life.
When it happened, it was like a nightmare.
Sometime in 1991, I was with Fateh Singh,
my tiger guru.
And we were wondering what happened to a
few of the tigers that we were watching.
We could no longer find them.
And Fateh Singh felt that they were missing
and maybe they could have been poached.
And I said, no, not possible.
Who would poach these incredibly beautiful
animals?
But then began our year of horror.
Poachers started to be caught with skins.
It knocked Fateh Singh and me out.
We just couldn't believe that this was a
possibility.
The price of bones is soaring as tiger
numbers plummet.
India's tigers are being
m*rder*d so the Chinese can
turn their bones into fixtures
for fevers and rheumatism.
I think the population all over India is
going down.
I think the primary reason for
this is poaching and the bone
trade to meet the Chinese
demand for medicinal derivatives.
I think the tiger faces probably
extinction in the next decade.
Fateh Singh had no time for poachers.
If he found a poacher, he'd charge after
him, take him to jail.
He believed that that was the only way
Ranthambore would survive.
And he was beaten up himself.
He nearly died.
His driver jumped on his body to save him
and took the beating.
This is a letter my tiger guru,
Fateh Singh, wrote at that time.
"It is a m*ssacre.
"When the police chief showed me the skin,
I could not control myself.
"Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
"It's heartbreaking.
"And sometimes I feel guilty that I taught
them to have faith in human beings.
"All the tigers were shot at point-blank range,
just innocently looking at the man with the g*n."
I think both Fateh Singh and I felt that over the
years we'd worked very hard with the tigers,
they'd lost their fear of man.
And they treated the poachers in the
friendliest of ways.
And they lost their lives.
Because by now we had learned to identify
individuals by their stripes,
we could say with certainty that 30 tigers,
tigers that we knew, were gone.
Around the lakes,
just 15 terrified tigers remained.
And I was determined to do all I could
to keep them alive.
I entered the arena of government.
Sat on endless committees.
I started a charity with local people.
I wrote books.
I made a TV series.
I'm Valmik Thapa.
It was the most time I'd spent away from
Ranthambore.
But then, my next late tigress drew me back in.
Of all the tigers, she's the one who would
teach me the most about the tigers' life.
We called her Machli, which means fish, because
she had marks like fish bones on her cheek.
She was born during the crisis.
And for the first two years of her life,
she had stayed with her mother,
as all tiger cubs do.
Now Machli was nearing adulthood.
I guess soon she would need a territory of
her own.
But when and how would she carve one out?
Tigers communicate with each other
silently.
They leave their scent in their
territories.
This can attract conflict or repel
conflict.
And through this process of territorial
marking, they talk to each other.
Fateh and I watched the pair closely, certain
their time together was coming to an end.
The lakes were rich with prey, but there
was only enough for one resident tigress.
Would her mother force Machli out?
The bond Machli once shared with her
mother was gone and replaced with aggression.
This time, Machli was the one to back
down.
At the edge of the lakes is my favorite
place, Rajbagh.
The ruined garden of the kings.
Now tigers hold court here.
I suspected Machli would soon try to overthrow
her mother, so she could rule these ruins.
Her mother too sniffed out the threat.
To me, Machli seemed a little afraid.
But she stood her ground.
I wasn't sure who'd won the confrontation.
But shortly after this, Machli's mother
left.
Maybe it was the threat of constant
conflict.
Maybe she sacrificed her territory for her
daughter.
Either way, Machli now ruled here.
Later that year, Fateh and I realized that
a new male had arrived at the lakes.
He soon picked up Machli's scent.
We called him Bumburam.
And gradually he got closer to Machli,
leaving markers of his own.
Then, one day, Machli approached him.
He was aged six or seven, and in his prime.
It wasn't long before Machli decided she
was ready to mate.
The ferocity of tiger mating always
impresses me.
I was excited by the thought of a new
generation.
It was like a new dawn.
The dark days of hunting and poaching had
long gone, I thought.
This was the chance for the clan to truly thrive.
It was a very happy time for me.
I'd met my wife Sanjana, and had a son, Hamir,
named after one of Ranthambore's greatest rulers.
And soon, Machli herself had a litter.
Two cubs.
This is family life amongst the tiger.
This is the beauty of Ranthambore.
They're both male cubs, and she's really
looking after them at the moment.
Oh wow, look at them, learning the ways of
the mother.
It was an absolute delight watching these
boys grow up.
And then one day, we heard rumours that
trouble was headed their way.
Their father had vanished, and a new male
was patrolling the area.
We called him Nick.
Without the protection of their father,
Machli's family were in danger.
I'm really worried about these two cubs,
because they're young male cubs.
There could be a new resident male in the
area, so the tigress has to be really careful.
She's got to keep them well protected, she has
to defend them and chase away any male intruder.
In fact, she's bound to fight the male, so
that he keeps her distance from the cubs.
Nick was a huge male in his prime.
I shuddered to think what he could do to
the cubs.
He could easily k*ll them in order to mate
with Machli, and father a litter of his own.
A few days later, I found Machli being
pursued by Nick.
He was definitely interested in mating.
Would she give in?
Or would she try and fight him off?
At first, it looked like she
was keeping away from Nick,
so he couldn't get
behind her and mount her.
But Nick was really enticed by her scent.
It didn't look like he would give up.
For Machli, victory.
For Nick, an injury that would make it
hard to hunt.
Now he knew the cubs had a mother who
would risk it all to protect them.
A few months later, I saw the most extraordinary
moment between a tigress and her cubs.
Machli suckled them.
Her cubs were almost two years old.
There would have been no milk for them at
this age.
Perhaps it was Machli's way of telling
them it was time to say goodbye.
After that, everything changed.
I never saw the family together again.
And the cubs struck out to find
territories of their own.
In 2004, I was very busy with a Supreme
Court committee.
And we were hearing regularly that there
was something going wrong in Sariska.
A hundred and fifty kilometers from the
Ranthambore Tiger Reserve.
That poachers were out.
Nobody was sure about it.
The government of the day refused to admit
that there was a problem.
Even though the director of the park was
crying out for help.
Every tiger in Sariska by September 2004
had been poached and k*lled.
Sariska had no tigers and then in central
India, not so far from Ranthambore,
the Panna Tiger Reserve.
All the tigers went extinct there.
So poaching took a massive turn.
When it happened the second time,
it was the same Chinese pressure.
It was the ill*gal trade.
And a new demand for ornamental tiger
skins.
It was again trying to keep your tigers
safe.
How are you going to do it the second time
around?
Scattered thoughts, June 2005.
The future of the tiger is bleak.
God help us.
The monsoon of that year was a critical
moment.
It's a time when the rains lash the forest
with incredible force.
Ranthambore completely shuts down.
The roads are washed away.
The perfect cover for poachers to strike.
I had no idea where Machli was,
or if she was still alive.
I kept busy in Delhi working with the then
prime minister to create a moment of huge change.
In the end, Project Tiger was scrapped and the
National Tiger Conservation Authority was launched.
This time, because of various connections
with the empowered committee,
with the Supreme Court committee, we declared
a red alert and an emergency in Ranthambore.
200 armed men were sent in to surround the
periphery and to flush out any intruder.
And it created a scare.
We knew that there were problems in
Ranthambore.
Fateh Singh, who had by now retired, said that
half the tigers of Ranthambore had been poached.
That there were barely 21 tigers left.
Terrified tigers who'd experienced a
second round of poaching.
I think the lake tigers must have known
what was going on because on the edges of
their territory, there were vacant areas,
the tigers on the outer areas had vanished
and the silence of death hung in the air.
Every tiger on the lakes would have known that.
Luckily, the area around the lakes was the
inner sanctum.
It was very difficult for poachers to get
to the lake area.
So the lake tigers survived because the
area around is fortified.
There are gates and entry points.
There are lots of forest guards.
So the poachers were not going to take a
risk in this area.
So the lake tigers kept on
producing cubs that would go out
and repopulate areas
where tigers had been poached.
And that's what happened.
That's what saved Ranthambore.
And that's what saved Machli.
She survived yet another crisis.
And her final litter would grow up and
spread out all over Ranthambore and beyond.
When I first went to Ranthambore, it
was a tiny patch of 300 square kilometers.
Today, adjacent to it are three tiger reserves.
And we have 5,000 square kilometers where tiger
populations can go to, where tigers can migrate to.
That's success.
That required hard work by a bunch of
people.
And one of those people is my colleague,
Dr. Dharmendra Khandel.
He has data of 20 years of Ranthambore's
tigers.
And that enables us to really look back
and work out for the first time exactly
how Ranthambore's tigers are related.
Today, we know that Machli's genes are in
75% of all Ranthambore tigers,
including my next tiger, Krishna, one of Machli's
daughters, and a tigress that shook my being.
She ruled the lakes for a while and had
four little cubs of her own.
It's very rare to find a tigress with four
small cubs.
And there was an incredible afternoon when
she took her cubs and walked to the palace den.
To get to the palace den, you have to
cross a little bit of water.
And that's where a few big crocodiles lie, waiting
to get their chance on anything that passes.
She carefully negotiated the water
carrying the weakest cub in her mouth,
while the others followed her.
She lost one of the cubs.
It brought tears to my eyes that day.
One of the cubs that survived still lives
around the lakes today.
She was named Arrowhead because she had two
pointy eyebrows, like two arrows on her forehead.
She's family.
She always surprises me.
And I see much of her today.
For a while, she ruled the lakes.
But today this territory is no longer hers
and she should not be here.
Recently, she started behaving in
unpredictable ways.
I was startled when I saw, on a camera's
viewfinder, Arrowhead arriving at the
lakes and finding a way to attack an
enormous soft-shell turtle.
And she not only grabs a turtle in the
shallow water, she picks it up and rushes
back into the grass and starts to devour
it.
Was she, like Genghis all those years
before, not afraid of crocodiles in the lakes?
Well, what I saw next made me think that
she was not fearless, but desperate.
Arrowhead's back in the lakes.
And this time she chases after a small
crocodile.
She charges into the water, misses the
baby crocodile, but she doesn't realize
she's in a deep place and there are bigger
crocodiles.
The big crocodiles pounce on her under the
water.
And I don't know how,
she manages to free herself.
And then, a short while later,
someone filmed her eating a crocodile.
Suddenly, memories of years ago come
flooding back.
And I remembered that my nephew Jaisal had
filmed this.
Arrowhead's grandmother, Machli, wrestling
and eventually k*lling a four -meter crocodile.
No one had ever recorded such a thing
before or since.
Severe droughts had driven Machli to
behave in this way.
What was driving Arrowhead?
A few days later, we found out.
She had been pregnant and in desperate
need of protein for her milk.
Now her cubs have been filmed,
just weeks old.
Ah, they're lovely shots.
Absolutely lovely.
It's amazing.
This is really valuable, precious footage.
They're barely able to crawl.
Wow, it's amazing.
This is the secret life of tigers.
But how will Arrowhead keep them alive?
She no longer rules the lakes.
And she's finding it difficult to survive.
She's desperate because she has very
little prey to hunt.
Trespassing into the lake territory as she'd done
before is much more risky with such small cubs.
Today, the lakes are ruled by another
tigress.
Riddhi.
She too has three cubs, three mouths to
feed.
She's one of Arrowhead's older daughters
from a previous litter.
So now we have mother and daughter with
three cubs each in bordering territories.
What will happen?
We have no idea.
Which of them will survive?
Will they meet?
Will they fight?
Will they play?
I can't wait to see this new family drama
play out.
Today, 70 tigers live across this landscape
instead of the 13 we began with 50 years ago.
And I wonder which of them will become
like family.
When I'm asked what have I done with my life,
the only answer I can give is this.
That I have been amongst
the wild tigers that roam
Ranthambore's magnificent
lakes and helped them to thrive.
And my love for five tigresses in
particular has moulded me.
Padmini.
Noon.
Machli.
Krishna.
And Arrowhead.
Piecing together the story of their matriarchal
clan has been the privilege of my life.
They have been like family to me.
And I can only hope that this story of their
secret lives will help others to love them as I do.
And endeavour to fight for their future.
Everybody's aware in the tiger world that
this year is the 50th anniversary of the
celebration of the establishment of Project Tiger
which has helped in conserving India's tigers.
But for me that didn't interest me in the
film because I knew a lot of other people
would want to pursue that what I describe
as a more political film.
But then Valmik rang me up from the edge
of one of Ranthambore's famous lakes and
said, there's this amazing tiger
called Charger who specializes
in charging into the lakes
and chasing all the deer out.
So I thought, should I watch telly, play
golf, smoke cigars, or do this one more film?
My first tiger film was initially not
supposed to revolve around tigers.
Because I was an evolutionary biologist,
I wanted to do a film
about the evolution of the peacock's tail.
So I thought I'll have to go to India to
make it and I took it to the BBC
and they said, yes, we'll take a film on the
evolution of the peacock's tail for
David Attenborough's Wildlife on One series,
but you've got to make it the tale of
the peacock and the tiger.
The key thing that stimulated me to know
that I could make a film was Valmik's
three or four books on the tigers of
Ranthambore which were gloriously illustrated.
The imagery, the evocative nature of this
huge fort that sits on the edge of
Ranthambore and then
the tigers that run in and out
of the lakes through the
lilies, past the crocodiles.
It was like Disneyland for wildlife.
I did my recce and went to Ranthambore.
It was better than I ever imagined.
It was magnificent and is magnificent still.
But the weak link for me was getting tiger
footage.
Tejbir, Valmik's brother-in-law who helped
me on my peacock film set,
we filmed tigers in the 1980s.
I think Valmik's got the footage.
And so I went to meet Valmik.
When he met me at the door, there's this big figure
who I instantly knew was a star in the making.
A hugely charismatic person.
He realised I was passionate about
conservation.
And he was passionate about conservation.
So I think it created an understanding
where we could work together.
But the nitty-gritty of that meeting was,
Valmik, can you find your tiger footage?
I had no idea what the tiger footage was
like.
We found some cliched,
dusty film cans under his desk
which turned out to have
some phenomenal tiger footage.
Valmik's most favourite tiger, Genghis,
charging into Ranthambore Lakes, k*lling deer.
So that was an absolute wonderful moment.
So after I finished that film,
I instantly thought, this guy could
present a superb landmark series on the
Indian subcontinent.
But the key was making Valmik Thepper into
a presenter, as opposed to a contributor.
At the time we made Land of the Tiger,
we were both 39, 40 years old.
That created a little bit of chemistry
where we got on very well.
So I couldn't force Valmik to do something.
I had to convince him, which is good training to
be convinced, and he would challenge me a lot.
But we're still working together,
30 years on.
He will ring me up periodically and say,
Mike, there's this event going on, or
there's this crisis going on.
And this film is a product of exactly that.
And we definitely are friends,
more than colleagues.
It goes further than that for me.
It wasn't that Valmik was just a presenter.
It wasn't that Valmik was just a punter.
It wasn't that Valmik was
just a powerful character
fighting for the good of
India's tigers and its land.
There were more aspects to his life that I
appreciated, I think.
We may have got older and more grumpy and
lots more bits of our bodies ache without
any doubts, but I don't think our passion for
tigers and conserving tigers has diminished at all.
Telling stories about tigers, especially
this film, which might have quite a nice
good news aspect to it, will both educate
people and encourage them that there's hope.
Not false hope, but it's important to give
them hope that the tigers of Ranthambore,
which have been through two significant
crises, have come through.
And a huge part of that is
down to Valmik's enthusiasm
and bullishness to fight
and help save the tiger.
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