An award-winning documentary film-maker, Janaki Lenin is also author of the series, My Husband and Other Animals, 1 & 2, a two-volume series published by Westland in 2012 and 2018. Her introduction to the wild came after she married India’s most renowned herpetologist, Romulus Whitaker. In an interview with Curiosity magazine, Lenin shares deep insights into her world.
Tell me about how you conceived of the idea to write My Husband and Other Animals. You mention that it started as an exercise to document life with one of India’s most renowned herpetologists, your husband Rom Whitaker. The books however encompass a world of their own, even beyond herpetology. Was that intentional or something that developed as you began to write?
(In 2004), I was embarking on a career in writing after I decided I had had enough of filmmaking. Rom suggested writing a column but I was initially taken aback by the idea. But as ideas are known to do, it came to me in a flash – what it would be about and what it would be called. (The column ran for four years in the Hindu, Metroplus, one of India’s national newspapers). That’s how it came to be. It was not meant to be about herpetology alone. By then, I had become involved with elephants. I had co-authored the action plan for conflict management with Prof. Sukumar, primates (another action plan), and I had written about leopards. The column accommodated all my preoccupations. I imagined I was talking to readers who weren’t the least bit interested with animals. With the second book, I let myself be influenced by readers’ questions and the choice of subjects and the tone changed.
In the book, you describe how, as a city girl and a documentary filmmaker, you learned to embrace life in the wild, but it wasn’t without physical hardship and emotional adjustment. You’ve dealt with your first journey into a forest with brutal honesty, never idealizing it. What do you think people should know or be prepared for when they venture into forests for the first time?
Comfort can always wait but that moment in the forest may not come again. You cannot predict what you might see/hear/feel/smell, and that is part of the adventure. Whatever you get depends on your luck and your ability to be open to it. If you keep staring at your shoes and fret about leeches (and everybody does that), you lose out on that beautiful butterfly or bird that flits by. So what if you lose a drop of blood? The sky isn’t going to fall.
The chapter in your book entitled ‘Why did Raja Die?’ made for fascinating reading, because it warns tourists about the consequences of feeding wild animals. Raja, the elephant, died because he had come to depend on humans for food which changed his very personality. You describe how he became aggressive and eventually had to be killed. Is this something you see often? Could you elaborate on the deep and long-term consequences of our feeding wild animals?
People love to feed creatures – everything from elephants and monkeys to birds – because they think they are doing good. I was dragged against my will into feeding some cockatoos in Australia a few days ago, and I had them on my arms and on my head; one hung from my thumb and almost ripped it off with its sharp talons. I can see why it’s a charming experience.
There are several reasons why feeding them is a bad idea – the bad diet for one thing. What we feed them – rice, potato chips, biscuits, bananas – isn’t good for their health. You teach animals to expect food from humans. But not all humans want to feed animals. This is when macaques, for example, bite and scratch, often becoming a big nuisance. All the macaque nuisance in Delhi and other cities stems from this practice of feeding them. Once the problem becomes too much to handle, people complain to the authorities who offload the animals on to other people, usually some poor rural farmers. The most common solution to badly behaved animals (caused by stupid people feeding them in the first place) is to capture them and release them elsewhere. The people who caused the problem rarely pay the price of their own stupidity. But it’s always the animals that do.
Whitaker’s fascination for snakes–and his reverence for the King Cobra–has been well documented. When and how did yours begin?
I guess I became fascinated while trying to figure out why he was so besotted with them. I hadn’t met anyone who was so passionate about something and I envied that. My own experiences with king cobras began with a captive snake that came to the Crocodile Bank. I watched how she moved and reacted to various things. She seemed so innocent and vulnerable. Even though she was capable of killing all of us if she wanted to, she had enormous self-restraint. If she felt hassled, she would tell us off but not fly off the handle and go on a biting spree. She behaved a lot better than most tourists who visited the Croc Bank. That intrigued me a great deal.
You mention various ways in which you and your husband have studied (by attaching radio transmitters) the habits of the king cobra. What are the most alluring, little known facts that you’ve learned about this majestic snake?
The more you study them, the more these creatures surprise you. I have to say I experience this vicariously because I’m not involved with the research. If something astounding happens, Rom would call or forward the email. King cobras are the largest venomous snakes in the world but they are still snakes, not known to have great intellect compared to mammals. The big surprise was they have a home range, a very defined area within which they live. It was obvious they knew every feature within their range – where to get water, where to hide when the time came to slough their skins, where to bask but still be within reach of a safe burrow. I’m in love with the people and king cobras of Agumbe (a small village located in the Indian state of Karnataka, Agumbe, bordering rainforests. Whitaker established the Agumbe Rainforest Research station for the study of King Cobras in 2005).
What do you like most about the spirit of Agumbe?
The people don’t hassle the snakes and the snakes in turn seem to trust the people. I mean snakes aren’t cute and cuddly, and king cobras are venomous to boot. Many residents don’t freak out when a king cobra makes her nest in their garden and lies coiled on top of it. One person asked if he can build a shed over a nest to protect her from the rains! Why do the residents of Agumbe have this magnanimity to let king cobra be? I have no idea. And the king cobras are equally chilled out. They look at you and calmly go their way. Every time I despair about the state of the world, I go to Agumbe for hope and see humanity at work.
You treat the term “conservationist” with caution, never referring to yourself as one, even though by any estimates, one would say you and Rom conserve a great deal. Is there a conflict that you’ve encountered in the term or a disconnection between what conservationists are expected to do and how helpful they really are?
I don’t know who a conservationist is. What is the qualification? Everyone who takes photographs of wildlife and outrages on social media calls themselves a conservationist. It’s mostly a self-proclamation.
I also have a problem with the model of conservation we espouse, declaring residents of an area as enemies of wildlife who have to be relocated for the cause of conservation. Take the Soligas in Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Tiger Reserve (in the Indian state of Karnataka). They have lived in the forest for nobody-knows-how-long and tiger numbers have increased despite their presence. Yet, there are efforts to shunt them out of the reserve. The hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who have been relocated like this for (the cause of protecting) wildlife are even more impoverished after their eviction. But few wildlife conservationists seem to care. If that is conservation, then I don’t want any part of it.
Conversely, farmers and pastoralists give up some of their livelihoods to support wildlife across India. And nobody called them conservationists. If anyone should be called conservationist, it should be them.
Your recent tweet about unintentionally creating a forest around your home went viral and was reported in the news. But was there ever a time when you regretted living so close to nature? The moment you found that your beloved dog had been killed by a leopard that took up residence here, you describe how emotionally difficult it was to cope with this and live with the knowledge that there may be another attack. How has this changed you?
I had already lived for a while at the Croc Bank and that spoiled me. I couldn’t consider living in a city ever again. But having a leopard in the garden was more than I bargained for. Frogs in the kitchen, scorpions in the bookcase, toads on the floor, bats under my desk, and other such creatures I could get used to. But the leopard struck one day without warning. We had absolutely no idea it was about. So the suddenness of it and the price – my favorite dog – were too overwhelming. I wanted the leopard removed, taken away somewhere. Rom had to make the leopard’s case. He asked if it couldn’t live here where else could it live. I brushed him off.
A couple of days later, I was talking to one of our neighbors who said he had lost goats to the leopard. And that’s when the penny dropped. He was losing something not only of emotional value but that also had an economic impact. And he wasn’t angry with the leopard or wishing it dead or removed. An illiterate man who hadn’t seen the world had more magnanimity while I wallowed in self-pity. I couldn’t get my dog back, but I could protect the rest better. And that’s what I did. I nearly lost another dog the following year but that was my own negligence. When I take my dogs for a walk now, I look at every shadow, every footprint, pay attention to monkey calls, listen to the birds if they are disturbed by something, etc. in short, I behave as if I were in a jungle. As Rom puts it, we were like water buffaloes before, now we are awake and alert. There’s a certain thrill in that.
