Pure love

When a hunter from nepal and an ecologist from india fell in love, the result was a trans-border initiative to save the vanishing tiger. Sudeshna Sarkar reports.

Ask them to describe one of the most moving moments in their lives and the Ranas speak of tigers. "Remember the Vogue covers?" asks Latika Nath Rana.

A premonition

"A National Geographic team had come to the park to research a book and complete a documentary on tigers. We were filming Sita, Bachchi's mother, whose family I have known for generations," he says.

"I knew Sita's parents, I knew her quirks, her territory ... I had known her as a newborn, and I have known her as a mother and grandmother."

It was in the 1990s and Sita had just given birth. Her cubs were hardly a few weeks old.

"Soon it was the monsoon season," he says. "From July to October, the park remains closed to visitors, and we had to leave."

"One day, Latika called me up from New Delhi and asked me, ‘Do you know how the cubs are doing?' All of a sudden, I had a sense of premonition. I thought the cubs were dead. So, I went back to the park and headed for the den where Sita used to hide her babies."

As he waited with mounting tension, Sita emerged from hiding. He heard the soft, throaty purring sounds she used for her cubs. Suddenly tiny balls of fur started stumbling out of the den, following their mother on unsteady feet.

"I discovered they were a new litter!" says Nanda, who was dumbstruck at this point.

"When a tigress loses her cubs, she mates immediately to produce another litter in response to her primitive instinct for preservation of her species. When I realised my fears had come true, I started weeping. The tears would not stop."

What makes the Ranas' recollections unusual is that they are also an unusual couple.

Latika is probably one of the few women in the world to have a doctor's degree in tiger management, while Nanda is a wildlife photographer and consultant, who is now building his own eco-friendly camp near the Kanha National Park, also in Madhya Pradesh.

Latika was dubbed ‘The Tiger Princess' by National Geographic which featured her in one of its Truth Files programmes, while Nanda comes from a dynasty that has ruled his country for decades and is better known for its tiger trophies than its conservation work.

Nanda is the great-grandson of Chandra Shumshere Jung Bahadur Rana, who was the longest reigning Rana prime minister of Nepal, and who held power from 1901 to 1929.

The Rana clan were the virtual rulers of Nepal from 1846 to 1950, when the kings were only figureheads. One Rana prime minister was followed by another, a son or brother or other scion of the family.

One of the celebrated photographs of the dynasty shows a Rana prime minister posing regally with his foot on the body of a dead tiger, while scores more lie around.

The Rana regime ended in 1950 when there was a mass revolt led by Nepal's fledgeling political parties.

However, the descendants of the Ranas still remain among the most influential and richest in Nepal.

Till his thirties, Nanda was content to remain a pampered son of the influential Rana clan. He drove the most expensive cars in the kingdom and led "a good life".

He says ruefully, "I was very spoilt. My mother gave me everything. I raced motorcycles, and in all probability drove the first BMW in Nepal. I bred tropical fish and pheasants, unheard of in Nepal. I went down to India to hunt. I would simply enjoy myself."

The turning point ...

... came about 19 years ago when he re-visited a camp in Parsali in Uttar Pradesh, one of his favourite haunts.

"The place was in ruins," he recounts. "There were hardly any birds or animals, even the trees had been chopped down mercilessly. It was shocking. I wanted my children to see what I had seen, and realised soon there would be very little left to see."

Around this time, his brother-in-law, who was running a wildlife camp in Bandhavgarh, asked him to shoulder a few management responsibilities. "I said, OK, I will run your camp for a year," Nanda told him. He stayed on for 10 years.

During this time, his interest in photography grew and the camera replaced the hunting rifle. He also began visiting other wildlife camps and presenting slide shows.

In the 1990s, National Geographic asked him to be their consultant for a book titled, The Year of the Tiger by Michael Nichols and Geoffrey C Ward, and a documentary, The Eye of the Tiger.

His reputation as a wildlife expert grew and next, he was asked by Partridge Films to help make two full-length natural history films on the same subject.

It took four-and-a-half years to make Sita's Story and A Tiger's Tale, which traced Sita's life from when she was a three-month-old cub to motherhood and the subsequent growing up of her own cubs.

Nanda's patience as a photographer is legendary. He spends months and