For Valmik Thapar, the tiger was never just a symbol of wild India. It was a living, breathing force—majestic, imperiled, and, to him, essential. His death on May 31st in New Delhi, from cancer, marks the end of a five-decade crusade to ensure that the world’s largest cat did not vanish from the subcontinent it had long ruled.
Born in 1952 into a politically connected family in Delhi, Thapar’s early years offered him proximity to power, but it was a chance encounter with a tiger in the wilds of Ranthambhore in the 1970s that changed his life. Under the mentorship of Fateh Singh Rathore, the architect of India’s Project Tiger, Thapar became an unlikely but relentless advocate for the species. He was not a trained biologist, but he brought to the cause a potent mix of storytelling, conviction, and unyielding moral clarity.
Over the years, he authored more than 30 books and presented acclaimed wildlife documentaries, including Land of the Tiger for the BBC. Yet it was not the cameras or accolades that defined him—it was his relationship with the cats themselves. He named them, tracked them, mourned them. His detailed chronicles of Ranthambhore’s tigers, particularly tigresses like Padmini, Machli, and Krishna, read less like field notes and more like family histories. In these accounts, he observed behaviors that helped rewrite scientific understanding of tigers: Males caring for cubs, hunting in water, and even complex territorial dynamics.
His most constant companion in this pursuit was frustration. India’s forest bureaucracy, in his view, was chronically inert—often more concerned with paperwork than poaching, with formality over fieldwork. He served on more than 150 committees and task forces, only to see many of their recommendations shelved. He was unafraid to dissent, famously rejecting the conclusions of the 2005 Tiger Task Force, arguing that coexistence with people, while ideal in theory, too often meant slow extinction for the tiger.
Thapar believed the tiger needed space—real, inviolate space—to thrive. It was not a romantic notion, but an ecological one. He decried the steady encroachment of villages, the rise of plantations in place of forests, and the government’s hesitance to arm and support forest guards. Time and again, he returned to a single truth: Without political will and public pressure, tigers would disappear.
Yet in his later years, there was cause for hope. India’s tiger population, which had plunged below 1,500, began to stabilize. Ranthambhore, once on the brink, boasted dozens of thriving individuals. The DNA of one tigress, Machli, ran through more than three-quarters of the park’s current population—a legacy Thapar helped secure.
He was not always easy—abrasive, critics said, dogged to a fault—but he was respected. Those who worked alongside him spoke of a man driven less by ego than by obsession. “The tiger overwhelms me,” he once said. “I know nothing else.”
In truth, he knew much more. He knew how to make people care. And in doing so, he gave the tiger not just a voice, but a future.
