This is the retelling of a story.
A story that belongs to a people who live close to wildlife in the rainforests and evergreen forests of the many taluks of Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka, India. This landscape belongs to one of the world’s most significant biodiversity hotspots, the Western Ghats. And the protagonist is the tiger. Not exactly the apex predator that roams the verdant depths of these forests, but a deified tiger that has manifested in the human imagination called ‘Huliyappa’, a Kannada moniker which loosely translates to ‘tiger father’.
Huliyappa is a story in which a collective human reverence for Nature and her large mammals has been conserving individual wild animals that wander the same land as us and sometimes even lead to conflict. It is a faith system that springs from an unflinching spiritual foothold — one that understands the small place humans have in this immense world, one that views all the other-than-human creatures as equally rightful inheritors of Earth.
Our retelling of the Huliyappa story reveals sloth bear attack survivors and people who have lost their beloved cattle and pets repeatedly to conflict with large mammals. These women and men, who share their land with large predators, elucidate their stories in their voices at their own pace. Quite the orators, they have propelled, with their gumption, our quest to make this story retold.
All of the featured people in the film dwell so deep inside forests that they need to either walk or arrange for vehicles to travel the many kilometres needed to reach the nearest civilisation, which brings many dangers. But about five years ago, when we began our research for this film and heard their stories of encounters and conflicts with wildlife, we were dumbfounded by the way they vehemently defended the large mammals, believing that conflict might have risen only because there might have been lapses in their worship of Huliyappa, the apotheosised tiger!
Their faith in Huliyappa was not even remotely shaken by even nearly-fatal attacks they or someone they deeply loved experienced or witnessed. This convinced us that ‘Huliyappa’ was a story worth looking more carefully into, and one that is worth all the attention it befittingly compels despite being so widespread in the region and yet not so easily accessible to the world beyond.
The film also features conversations with cultural theorists from the same landscape, who are passionately invested in the culture and heritage of their sacred Western Ghats land. We first met them five years ago, when we set out to find as many details about Huliyappa as possible, and they opened up a whole world of possibilities of the origin of this oral tradition as a faith not documented hitherto as elaborately and as inclusively as in our film, but has endured despite it for generations that have been the inheritors and conveyors of the faith.
Yet, as with many cultural traditions, the increasing urbanisation, and the consequent exodus of youth from villages in pursuit of careers in cities, threatens the future of this precious tradition which has maintained an unlikely harmony between people and large carnivora for centuries.
In the many years of our frequent, several-week-long field work in these remote parts of rural Karnataka, Huliyappa has haunted us as an elusive muse for a long time. And today, we see him with much more clarity, which has only deepened for us the awe and mysticism that surround him.
The Huliyappa film will bring to the forefront as many faces from as many communities — tribal and the scholarly, the employment creators and the employees — as possible from this landscape, shining light on each of them, including the marginalised ones, as the everyday heroes that they are, elaborating on the many different nuances in their belief that Huliyappa protects them, their livestock, their crops and everything that is dear and important to them from the actual predators and large mammals of the forests they live in. And raises an important concern about the preservation of such indigenous practices centred around faith, empathy, compassion and simple rural wisdom into the future, if we are to maintain the equilibrium with Nature and the sensitivity of the undeniable interconnectedness with all life which sustains all species.
Directed by Sourabha Rao (India)