Amitabh Bachchan has fuelled a tourism boom, but Gir's lions need a second home

The sharp decline in India’s tiger population has been, quite rightly, the focus of much media attention in the last few years. It is now estimated that barely 1,400 of them survive in the wild compared to around 40,000 a century ago. While this is very depressing, we hear very little about how India’s other big cat, the Asiatic Lion, has been brought back from near extinction. At the beginning of the 20th century, India’s lion population had dropped to a few dozen in the Gir forests of Junagarh (now in Gujarat). This is still the only place where the animal is found in the wild but the 2010 survey suggests that the population has grown to 411. Meanwhile, encouraged by Amitabh Bachchan’s ad-campaign, the lions have become the lynchpin of Gujarat’s aggressive tourism strategy with a 96 per cent year-on-year jump in tourists visiting Gir National Park during October-December 2010. Perhaps it’s time to pay a bit more attention to India’s other big cat.

The royal lion
Every culture that encounters the lion has tended to give the animal a special status. We know that lions were considered royal game in Mesopotamia from the 2nd millennium BC and only the king could hunt them. The animal is represented in a multitude of sculptures, friezes and paintings in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. At Beital-Wali in Lower Nubia, a tame lioness is shown near the throne of Rameses II (1290-1224 BC) with an inscription: “Slayer of his Enemies”.

Strangely, there is very little evidence to show that Indians of the Harappan period were aware of the lion. Harappan seals are full of tigers and other wild animals, but no lions. Why were the early Indians so lukewarm to an animal with such obvious charms?

The most likely reason is that the lion was not common in the subcontinent at that time. Till the 3rd millennium BC, north-west India was much wetter than it is today with higher rainfall and the Saraswati river in full flow. The lion is an animal that hunts in open grasslands and could not penetrate the tiger-infested jungles that existed in the region. However, the balance shifted as the climate became drier and the Saraswati dwindled. There would have been a savannah phase when lions from Iran could have made their way through Balochistan and then into the tiger territory. This explains why the earliest artifact depicting a lion in the subcontinent, a golden goblet, was found in Balochistan. As Harappan urban centres were abandoned and populations migrated to the Gangetic plains, the lions would have taken over the newly dry wilderness. Over time, they would penetrate as far east as Bihar, coexisting in many places with tigers.

Once the lion became a familiar animal, it was quickly appropriated by Indian culture. As in the Middle-East, it became the symbol of bravery and of the power of the state. The Mauryans carved them on their columns and the Mughal emperors hunted them near Agra and Ropar. So, when India became Independent, lions became the national emblem.

The last lions
Despite all the prestige associated with it, the Asiatic Lion nearly went extinct. The last reported sighting of a lion in Iran was in 1942. In Iraq, the magnificent Assyrian friezes are all that remain of a beast last sighted in 1917. British records show that there were lions in Haryana and Punjab till the 1820s. In Rajasthan and central India, they survived in the wild till the 1860s. Then they suddenly all but disappeared. What happened in the 19th century?

The popular view is that they were killed for sport but the real culprit was a loss of habitat to agriculture. A growing human population needed more food even as the newly built railways encouraged cash crops like cotton. All forms of wildlife were affected but the lions and cheetahs lost the flatlands they need to survive. The tiger did relatively better for the moment because it could survive in hilly and swampy terrain that is less conducive to faming.

By the late 19th century, there were reports that perhaps only a dozen Asiatic Lions were left in the wild in Gir. The actual number was probably somewhat larger, but at last alarm bells began to ring. Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, heard of this and refused to go on a lion hunt in Gir during his state visit to Junagarh in November 1900. The Nawabs of Junagarh, with the support of the colonial government, now became the guardians of the endangered species for the next half-century. Note how the Indian cheetah did not attract similar patronage and went extinct.

Back from the brink
Thanks to the Nawabs, the number of lions had drifted up to around 230 by the time India became Independent. However, after some growth in the 1950s, the population plunged to just 177 in 1970. Faced with this crisis, the Gir Lion Sanctuary Project was born in 1972, a year before the better-known Project Tiger. At this stage, there were less than 200 lions and 1,827 tigers in the wild. Four decades later, the number of lions has risen to over 400 while the tiger population is down to 1,400. This is not to suggest that Asiatic Lions are out of danger. There was a spate of poaching incidents in 2007 and, just a few weeks ago, in mid-December 2010, the authorities arrested 25 members of a gang from Karnataka with lion body-parts. The lions of Gir also suffer from a very narrow genetic base and are susceptible to epidemics. Nevertheless, the overall effort is paying off.

Gir now has a problem of plenty as the lion population is too large for the existing sanctuary and the animals are drifting into the surrounding countryside. Lions are being seen along the coast near Kodinar and even as far away as Palitana. For years, Kuno in Madhya Pradesh has been proposed as a second home but, for a number of reasons, the authorities in Gujarat have resisted this. Meanwhile, Amitabh Bachchan’s advertisement campaign has fuelled a tourism boom that will soon exhaust the visitor-carrying capacity of Gir. The Asiatic Lion had barely escaped extinction but it now desperately needs space to flourish. Perhaps tourist dollars will encourage the creation of a new sanctuary within Gujarat. Perhaps Mr Bachchan will use his extraordinary charm to find a second home for India’s other big cat.