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This wildlife warrior is fighting to preserve India’s natural heritage

MK Ranjitsinh Jhala is one of India’s foremost voices in wildlife conservation

Kishore Singh and Nidhi Gupta
Apr 19, 2018



Wankaner, for those who may not be able to pinpoint it on the map, is in Gujarat. Located in Morbi district (close to Rajkot), its origins and palaces are closely linked with the Jhala clan of Rajputs who, when not burdened with issues of administration and governance, turned to shikaar as a sport. Now an abhorred term, shikaar involved conservation as a part of hunting, before the abolition of the Privy Purse in 1972.

Back then, hunting estates were managed by princes, and rules were strictly followed (no hunting during mating season, for instance). It was here that a young MK Ranjitsinh would be treated to the sight of a leopard mother helping her cubs feed off a kill, from a tunnel over which a 3/4-inch sheet of toughened glass had been rigged as a roof. “I could touch the glass where the leopard lay,” he tells me at the venerable Gymkhana Club in Delhi.

Eighty-year-old Ranjitsinh is as much at home in Lutyens’ Delhi – from where he has helped enact laws responsible for India’s wildlife conservation – as he is in the jungle where he can be spotted wielding his camera. Other conservationists I have known – Kailash Sankhala and Col James Felix “Papa” Wakefield among them – have carried the smell of the forest about them, but Ranjitsinh wears his considerable knowledge instead. He joined the civil service in 1961 and found his calling as a wildlife saviour, having served as chairman of the Wildlife Trust in India and director of the WWF Tiger Conservation Programme.

When he first turned conservator, his father gifted him the glass roof that covered the tunnel in Wankaner. He writes about the incident at some length in his book, A Life With Wildlife: From Princely India To The Present, released last year. Wankaner has no more leopards. “I was born in an age and to a background where it was understood that tigers were to be shot and partridges to be eaten. I was very keen on wildlife, especially birds, and the gun was an act of possessing them, of destroying something that you admire. Now I feel the same way with my camera.”

Ranjitsinh, like any good raconteur, likes to weave different strands into the narrative. “I was keen on hunting,” he says, “but every time I shot an animal, remorse would follow.” Unlike his peers, therefore, he did not shoot for the pleasure of the kill. “I wanted to collect just one trophy of each species, as the thrill of the shoot was palling. I was at a point when my interest was tapering off, shifting from hunting towards photography.”

I had asked Ranjitsinh to share three incidents from his life that triggered his interest in conservation. He’s coming around, at his own pace, to tell me the second.

Ranjitsinh was 25 years old and posted in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh where, at the behest of his collector, he’d shot a man-eating tiger and established a reputation. “Now I was asked to get rid of bears that were destroying farmers’ fields.” A haka was organised. But he could not do it, distracted instead by his “ochre-orange-red coat” and his “rippling muscles”. That was the beginning of the end. “Or,” he says, philosophically, “the end of the beginning.”

Ranjitsinh shares a third incident, one he has not included in his book. It was 1974, he’d accompanied an Austrian doctor friend to Bhutan on the invitation of King Jigme Singye Wangchuk to hunt blue sheep. Ranjitsinh had decided to arm himself with a camera, even though the king kept insisting he accept a gun. Finally, he told his fellow royal, “I’ll shoot if I see something bigger than a 24-inch horn,” having previously shot under that size. As luck would have it, a handsome ram with a 25-inch horn was part of the herd that ran past, and the king placed a rifle in Ranjitsinh’s reluctant hands. “I put the telescope on,” he says, “but could not pull the trigger.”

We have met on and off through much of his career in the civil service, to converse about wildlife issues, often at conferences, and sometimes in the jungle, accompanied by his two daughters, both wildlife enthusiasts. Ranjitsinh has always held the view that India has tended towards the protection rather than decimation of animal species because of its inherent nature as a society.

“India,” he says, “is one of the easiest countries to preserve wildlife in. There is the infrastructure, the fear of the law, the majority of the nation is vegetarian, and there are strong communities like the Bishnois and Jains who are natural conservators. Unlike Africa, where everyone is a potential meat-eater, here only a few communities are hunters.”

It was fortuitous how Ranjitsinh came to be associated with the conservation of wildlife at the legislative level. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had seen his films on wildlife, and he was included in a meeting, in 1971, of wildlife enthusiasts. He was, perhaps, its junior-most member. Tiger-hunting and the export of tiger skins had already been banned, but hunting itself was still a state subject.

“At the meeting, conservationist Billy Arjan Singh had been hectoring on and [Gandhi] was getting restless,” he tells me. When she asked for suggestions, Ranjitsinh piped up to say that wildlife was being wrongly administered through the Forest Act (1927), when the requirement was for a law to set up national parks, and to legislate trade in taxidermy. The Centre, he pointed out, could constitute a wildlife act, should the states give it the power to do so.

“The first thing Mrs Gandhi did on being elected back to power in the Seventies was to write to each state on what she called a non-political subject, and 18 chief ministers wrote back saying they were willing to give the Centre the legislative power to draft wildlife laws.” There was resistance, of course, from indigenous people (tribals), and from some princes, “but she saw it through Parliament”, and the Indian Wildlife Protection Act (1972) was created.



Ranjitsinh, a member of the princely order, faced some flak from his own kin, not least from the maharaja of Bharatpur, against whom a complaint was filed by activists for hunting in the Keoladeo Ghana National Park in Rajasthan. “I requested him to shoot in his own forests, saying it would be a very sad day for me if he was persecuted under an Act I was responsible for writing.”

If stopping hunting was one of Ranjitsinh’s significant successes, others included setting up national parks and sanctuaries; the celebrated Project Tiger (1973); the even more successful crocodile breeding project (1975) which has brought the species back from near-extinction, to a point where they are breeding in the wild again; and, to a lesser extent, Project Snow Leopard (2009).

Among large animals, peninsular India’s track record on preservation has been reasonably good, having lost only the cheetah “because we didn’t know how to prevent extinction.” All that has changed now, with expertise available from around the world on saving wildlife species. “Any loss now will be wilful,” he says.

The two species Ranjitsinh is worried about at the moment are the Kashmir stag in Dachigam, and the great Indian bustard in Rajasthan, which are threatened by eroded habitat and poaching. Both are state animals, and their extinction will bring infamy to their respective states.

“The bustard,” he says sadly, “is going. There are only 100 birds left.” I look at the printed penguins on his tie, prancing playfully – and plentifully – across its length. “We lay great pride in our heritage – historical, cultural, religious, architectural,” Ranjitsinh pauses. “We have every reason to protect our natural heritage too. “Everything,” he says quietly, “should not have a price tag attached to it.”

I met him as a teenager in 1971 at Periyar Wildlife sanctuary in South India. Ranjit Singh would have been in his mid 30s.

We were holidaying as a family in a lodge on stilts deep in the jungle - accessed only by boat.

Ranjit Singh was on official visit and decided to stay in the adjoining suit. My dad being a forest / wildlife official from the neighbouring state, also was keen on photography. Both were former hunters having shot leopards & dad shot 2 tigers in the 50s.

We had an unusual experience of catching a pack of Dhole (red dogs) in the lake as we came around a bend. We ended up catching a young animal and it was sent to a zoo.