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My Tiger Family, BBC Two, review: hypnotic story of one man’s love affair with India’s tigers
This tale of a dynasty of wild tigers, tracked over 50 years, is a bewitching and deeply personal film
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In 1997 there was a BBC natural history series called Land of the Tiger. Its presenter Valmik Thapar had spent his life behind the camera but turned out to be a snake-charmer in front of it. His passion for India’s big fauna was rooted above all in one species, now revisited in the bewitching My Tiger Family (BBC Two).
The first time Thapar clapped eyes on a tiger half a century ago, he describes a mystical feeling “where you lose yourself within yourself”. He promptly abandoned the big city and a failing marriage to study the female tigers who raised their young in and around the ravishing lakes and ancient fort of Ranthambore.
This film is the fruit of a long collaborative friendship with the British natural history film-maker Mike Birkhead. They are both old men now, but Tharpar’s passion seems undimmed as he tells the story of the five tigresses he came to know and love as he filmed them day by day and year by year.
Tharpar’s first astounding money shot came in 1984 – “A day that rewrote tiger history,” he calls it – when he filmed a tiger killing a samba deer in deep water. Decades later he was astonished to capture footage of another of his favourites plunging into water to drag out a massive turtle. He even records the improbable spectacle of a mother suckling a pair of full-grown offspring.
So this is partly an anthology of greatest hits, each illuminating facets of tiger behaviour. It’s also a warning about the thin defences of conservationism. Hunting sprees such as those that brought a young Elizabeth II to Ranthambore may have long since been banned, but twice surges in poaching to feed the Chinese desire for powdered bones and pelts have reduced the park’s tiger population to almost single figures. You feel Tharpar’s despair as he blames himself for teaching tigers to trust humans.
He sounds like the enchanted narrator of a cyclical Indian fable. Imagine David Attenborough crossed with Salman Rushdie and telling of dynastic power struggles in the animal kingdom. Mothers fight off predatory males, then turn on their own daughters in territorial combat.
“The ferocity of tiger mating always impresses me,” he says as the male plunges his fangs into the neck of a female who’s having none of it. A hypnotic hour.