The Hindu Business Line : No babe in woods!

She first saw a tiger when she was four years old, “seated on the lap of my father in an open jeep. It was a heavily wooded area and there was a very large forest tract near my house. We were returning to our village from the town and bus, saamney baitha tha (he was sitting in front). So my father switched off the light… there was thick jungle on either side of the track, and it wasn’t possible to pass and we didn’t want to draw his attention.”

Sipping a strawberry and pomegranate mocktail, and digging into delicious jugalbandi kebabs (a mix of chicken and mutton), Ratna Singh, Head Naturalist at Taj Safaris’ sprawling 190-acre Pashan Garh property in Panna, Madhya Pradesh, adds that the memory is still vivid. “And it’s not like the tigers you see in the national parks these days; they are habituated to humans, those weren’t.”

When you comment that she relates this as though seeing tigers is a common phenomenon for four-year-olds, she says, “But honestly, sighting wild animals was not uncommon for us. I grew up on stories that leopards would come to the villages and pick off cattle, and we had many animals at home.”

These included not only horses and cattle but two leopard cubs, too, which were sent to her house after their mother had been shot. “My mother would feed them from a bottle, bathe them and look after them as her children.” But after six months one died of pneumonia and the other was taken away to a zoo.

Ratna’s father was an ilakedaar (landlord) in village Khaira in Bandhavgarh, and at the age of four she was sent to La Martiniere School in Lucknow. In 1999 she joined Delhi University for a B.A. in History, which was followed by a postgraduate degree in International Law, which she completed in 2003, after which she worked for a year with the International Committee of the Red Cross before joining the UNHCR for another year. A brief stint in the legal department of American Express and then it was back to the forest for the woman who is passionately fond of the jungle and wildlife.

“I used to go to parks all the time and some of my cousins told me about this opening. I was aware of a career in forest lodges, but in these places women normally do maintenance and housekeeping; I didn’t want to do that. I don’t even do housekeeping in my own house and wasn’t about to housekeep for somebody else!”

Rigorous training

She applied for a naturalist’s position with Taj Safaris, went through an initial five-week selection process, followed by another phase where she competed with people who had substantial jungle experience. “I marvelled at myself; when I started I was at the lowest rung; out of about 500 applicants only nine made the cut, and I was one!”

The training course was rigorous and physically very taxing. “The idea was to pressure you as much as possible; we had to climb, jump and walk for hours. We got up at 5 a.m. and hardly slept,” she recalls, while driving the Tata jeep on the ghat road from Pashan Garh to the Panna National Park… a good 40-minute drive, including a 5 km ghat section.

But the journey was not always smooth, and some of the males she trained with were quite nasty. “They were quite good to start with because they didn’t think I would be any competition because I am small built, or whatever,” she says with a shrug, adding, “but finally I made it and they didn’t!”

Today Ratna is the only female head naturalist at Taj Safaris, and probably in India too, and says proudly, “Do you know that even in Africa they don’t have any woman head naturalist yet?”

There were interesting moments during training. Like the day they had been walking non-stop from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m., and at 2 a.m. she entered her room door to find a scorpion inside and yelled: “Guys, I have a scorpion in my room.” After a while a voice responded, “Is it on the bed?” When she said no, the voice added, “So just go to sleep.”

Exciting forest moments

Ratna enjoys her work and says she is a much calmer person now, because life is not an everyday struggle; “I don’t have to deal with harried people, I deal with people who are on holiday and relaxed.” Normally, people stay at the Pashan Garh lodge for two or three nights, and are well behaved. “Not only are they on holiday, and hence relaxed, this environment is also new for most people. They rely on you completely to lead and guide them in the forest, so there can’t be too much of a conflict. Except for a rare exception, people are very nice,” she says.

So has she had some tough moments in the forests?

“Tough moments no, but exciting moments have been many,” is her response. She recalls the day at the Pench National Park, also in Madhya Pradesh, when there was an alarm call from the animals. We knew a tigress had been walking in the forest and I was driving the jeep at a steady pace as I knew she would come out of the shrubs and walk across the road.”

The tigress did just that, but after crossing the road, turned back, walked over to the vehicle and “stood right next to me. Everyone in the jeep froze but I wasn’t scared because I could read her body language. She was not at all aggressive and was in fact quite relaxed and was just looking. She stood beside me for about 10-12 seconds, looked at everybody and walked away.”

Another time, on a hot summer day, once again at the Pench forest and at a rocky area known for leopards, she was telling her foreign guests that it was too hot and the leopards must be resting in shady spots. “They didn’t get me, so at the base of the hillock there was a cave and I said it is so hot outside and it must be so cool in there. And if I were a leopard I would be there.” The moment she uttered these words, a leopard walked out of the cave and the guests started “teasing me, saying it was a cue, and you had it all planned out with the leopard. It was a fantastic experience.”

Feudal background

Hailing from a feudal background, how are her parents looking at her job? “Well, I do come from a feudal background, but I’ve not had very traditional upbringing.” And hers is a modern family. Her mother is a graduate and her father a postgraduate in Chemistry from the Banaras Hindu University. Rewa (about 150 km from Allahabad) was a kingdom and it had five or six important noble households and hers was one. “As for my parents’ reaction, this is what I want to do, and for them being in the jungle was normal; my parents and aunts would ride horses and shoot animals and my grandmother also used to hunt.”

Ratna of course has never hunted, and her father, who has hunted “everything including tigers and leopards… till the early 1970s, everybody in this heavily forested region hunted”, later turned a conservationist.

Is there any pressure from her parents on marriage?

Now comes the shocker, as Ratna smiles and says, “I have a very good answer for that question. There is no pressure because I am already married…”

One almost expects to hear her say “to the forest”, but instead she says: “To Aditya Vir Chauhan, for five years. He is a software engineer with Accenture and right now in Santa Clara in the US. He travels around the world; last night he was in Montreal, and next it will be Toronto.” Every 60 days the naturalist get a 15-day break and she catches up with him during this window.

Asked if her husband has always encouraged her in her career, she says, “Well, he has neither encouraged nor discouraged me. I told him when we got married that this is what I want to do and can’t do it when I get old, so I have to do it now. So he said, ‘whatever you like’. Simple!” He hails from a similar background, and though hers was an arranged marriage “there was no pressure from my parents; they said you decide and I did!”

By now we have reached the Ken River and we take a boat to look for crocodiles and sight a couple lurking in the water along the river bank. The Panna forest is very different from Bandhavgarh, which is more wet and replete with bamboo and Sal trees. The landscape here is more dramatic and rocky; it is a deciduous forest with a predominance of teak trees and thorny bushes.

Through the drive Ratna shows us many chinkaras or the Indian gazelle, spotted deer, neel gai (blue bull) and birds such as fork-tailed black drongo, Shikra the hunter bird, Red-vented Bulbul, Brahmani starling, Tree Swift, Minivet and Bee-eaters.

Future plans

Ratna says she would like to do something for the local community and, after putting in a few more years as a naturalist, go back to a rural life. She grew up in a 300-year-old ancestral house… or rather a haveli with 30 rooms. “I want to build a house somewhere in the jungle... not with 30 but three bedrooms! I’ve inherited some land, will buy some more and we have decided that after a few years we will settle down in this area and go into farming.”

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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