The protagonist of Gargi Rawat’s Tiger Season is a journalist, Sunaina Joshi. Employed with a leading media house, she covers issues faced by the voiceless masses. While she understands the significance of her job, the wildlife enthusiast in her yearns to write stories about animal welfare and conservation, which are often sidelined in the rigmarole of daily news.
The opportunity finally knocks on her door when a leading actor, trying to restore his image after a drug scandal, decides to do a shoot around wildlife conservation. Things take a dramatic turn when a guard is attacked by a tiger.
It is conspicuous that Rawat, an environment reporter, borrows heavily from her own experiences to breathe life into Sunaina’s character. Subjects of top headlines from the past two or three years—drug scandals involving movie stars, the success of Project Tiger, to the ever-widening chasm between opposing ideologies—find their way into her writing and form the background for the book.
This approach of revisiting recent events can act as a handy stimulus and engaging tool for readers, depending on how authors relay it. Do they simply reiterate the news that’s already known, or do they use it as a foundation and add more meaning and depth to the story, giving readers a fresh perspective?
Tiger Season manages to capitalise on that front, but only in parts. While the author has ensured that she includes all that is there to wildlife conservation and neatly tied up the narrative with the business of journalism, some of the plot points aren’t dealt with in detail. That is missing also in Sunaina’s growth—emotional or otherwise—as a professional.
Which is why, reading the book sometimes feels akin to going through a list of events, which happen in and around a tiger reserve in Rajasthan, where much of the novel is set. There are insignificant dinners, and speeches by the actor, which get more attention than required and seem repetitive. So much so that if one were to switch the contents of these events, it wouldn’t impact the larger storyline. A similar treatment is meted out to a host of characters whose names float around, but they are not developed well enough to provide context to their presence.
These shortcomings notwithstanding, Tiger Season is an important book, mainly because its heart is in the right place. It uses the topic of tiger conservation to initiate a larger conversation about wildlife welfare. It delves into the intricacies of man-animal conflict and how the support of the local populace is integral to the success or failure of any project in the field. The book also manages to bring to the fore the difficult life of forest rangers, showing how tricky it can become for them to arrive at a middle ground between villagers and wild beasts.
Rawat does this using simple and accessible language, thus ensuring that even pre-teens will be able to read, understand and appreciate the importance of the subject. When writing a book, every author must answer an important question: who is it for? Through her choices in terms of the narrative and vocabulary, Rawat has made her decision clear: Tiger Season is for those looking for a starting point into the larger discourse on wildlife welfare. Those looking for a more nuanced analysis of the issue may have to look further.