Misplaced Priorities and Ecological Imbalance: A reading of Sherni

Title: Sherni

Director: Amit V. Masurkar

Year: 2021

When a tigress kills a human, it is not a prey just for her. The deceased human can become prey to many other 'socio-political' animals. We normally fail to understand that a wild animal encroaching on human boundaries and preying on a human is not a real issue. The real issue, which is also an outcome of many interrelated issues, is to know why an animal needs to cross its boundary in the jungle. It is equally risky for the animal. The 2021 movie Sherni by Amit Masurkar raises some of the most pertinent questions related to our wild-life issues. The political nature of the issues; an emotional rather than logical approach to dealing with them; political interventions in normal decision-making; utter neglect of human concern and empathy; and not considering animal(s) worth a thought are some of the glaring problems identified by the screenwriter and director and presented efficiently.

          The movie talks about a newly recruited female forest officer, Vidhya Vincent, and the task of capturing a man-hunting tigress identified as T12. However, this simple task becomes a big issue for the forest officer and the forest department, as they are constantly under pressure from politicians, senior officers, and villagers. The villagers are constantly incited against the department's attempts to capture the tigress by the leaders of both ruling and opposition parties. Vidhya is trying to understand the problem of tigress holistically so that such issues can also be avoided in the future. While cooperating with the political power, senior officers are planning to kill T12 with the help of a hunter who wants to add one more number to his list of hunting down tigers. Ultimately, the tigress was hunted down, and the forest officer got transferred to another department. 

          The forest officer, originally from the southern part of the country, is assigned duty in the northern part of the country. All the officers, seniors and juniors, are from the northern part of India. She is Christian. Being a married young female, she has her challenges in handling her home from a distance, plus she also must think about the expectations of her husband, mother-in-law, and mother. In one sequence, both the mothers come to the village with Vidhya's husband, Pawan, as a surprise for her. They were invited to the house of Prof. Noorani for dinner. Here, Vidhya was expected to wear all the jewelry given to her by her mother-in-law, and Pawan preferred to go in a t-shirt and shorts. Thus, an expectation from a woman is different from one from a man. During that dinner only, she got a call about an emergency at the forest, and she had to leave; Prof. Noorani also accompanied her as he was also involved in the T12 case. Here, Pawan and both the mothers insist that Pawan go with her, despite knowing that Vidhya is going on her duty and that going into the forest at mid-night is not new to her. But because she is a woman, this is something normal in society.

          Prof. Hassan Noorani is another important character in the film. He teaches zoology at a nearby college and helps forest officers in their operations voluntarily. Like Vidhya, he, too, is an odd man out. He is a Muslim, and like Vidhya, he also thinks in terms of long-term holistic solutions to problems. He tries his level best to create awareness among the villagers through street plays and training forest friends. But his street plays were hijacked by the ruling party MLA for his election campaigns.

          These two characters from the minority groups are in direct conflict with the people in power and the majoritarian mob, who are not ready to look at issues from a logical perspective. Both the local leaders have "Singh" (lion) in their names, and they are the ones who play politics over the issue of tigress. Both have only one agenda: to incite people over this issue against the other party. A feasible and logical solution might mean losing an important issue for them. And both leaders always appear with a mob of supporters and try to thwart the investigation process undertaken by the forest department. The decision to hunt down tigress T12 was also politically motivated and announced by the ruling party leader to the forest officers as if the officers did not know what they were supposed to do. The leader also brings the hunter of his acquaintance. 

          The problem begins when some villagers take their animals into the jungle for grazing, and one of the buffaloes is hunted down by the tigress. The Forest Department immediately comes into action and tries to identify the tiger who did it, and in the cameras set up there, they found that it is a tigress, T12. Soon, T12 attacks one villager in the jungle, and he dies. Here, the tigress is not really crossing the boundary of the jungle and encroaching on the village. Rather, the villagers are trying to encroach on the jungle. Vidhya and her team and Prof. Noorani attempt to communicate with the villagers and advise them not to wander into the jungle area. But for the villagers, they do not have any other territory where they can take their animals for grazing. They had good, fertile land, but that was converted into a plantation field by the previous forest officer, and the villagers are not allowed to enter it. Thus, villagers have no choice but to depend on the jungle. 

            Another such human intervention in forest life is a copper mine. The tigress T12 is heading towards the national park from this small jungle, where she would have enough food and water. But then, there is this copper mine in her way, and on the other side, there is a highway and factories on the opposite side. Thus, all the paths for T12 to move ahead are obstructed by human intervention. All these developmental works are done without considering the impact on other ecological beings within the same environment. These developmental works, while undoubtedly important for humans, are anthropocentric and directly harmful for other living beings in the environment. The developmental works are so necessary in the human ecosystem that humans are not considered “advanced” without them.

A Screenshot from the Movie

          There is a constant conflict between logical reasoning in solving a problem and incitement and an emotional outlook on the issue. There are a couple of people in the forest department who make logical and holistic decisions, incorporating the villagers as well in the decision-making process. While there are politicians who are in favor of emotional incitement so that they can leverage the votes of the villagers, the tigress, the villagers, and their problems—both ecological and economic—are just a matter of electoral issue. And then there is a third group of people, primarily consisting of senior forest officers, who are not taking their rightful stand on the issues. They simply observe the orders of the political power, keeping themselves safe. Despite their knowledge of the root of the problem, they prefer to act otherwise just to stay in the good books of powerful people.

          The logical reasoning and solutions are further thwarted in the process of considering the feelings of the local people. The person who died in the jungle was killed by a bear, but nobody believed the evidence. Even the minister said that if six out of ten people believe that the man was killed by a tigress, then he was killed by a tigress, and he did not even care about the evidence. This kind of decision, purely taken to please people, affects the ecological balance and animosity among the wildlife and people living nearby. Another incident is when Pappu bhaiya, the hunter assigned to kill the tigress, 'wrongly' identifies T12 poop, and he remains adamant despite the correction from the forest officer that that was a leopard's droppings. The forest officers are trained in identifying all these aspects of wildlife, but merely out of ego, Pappu Bhaiya does not agree. One more such instance is when Pappu Bhaiya proposes to kill not only the T12 but her two cubs as well. Here, he argues that since the mother hunts humans, the cubs will also grow into man-eaters. Such an argument does not have any scientific basis, and Prof. Noorani and Vidhya had to literally fight against this proposal to save the cubs. On another occasion, Pappu shoots at a tiger, but fortunately, a forest officer saves it. Pappu argues that it was T12, the tigress, while the forest officer identifies it as Pasha, a male tiger. Here, Pappu is a symbolic representation of upper-class toxic masculinity who enjoys political impunity and who is simply interested in the increase in numbers of his hunts and ready to go to any extent and do the illegal things as well.  

The people living nearby and dependent on the jungle are primarily tribal. Like the wildlife, they also belong to the periphery of society; their betterment is not a priority for the authorities. They are also seen as workers for the industries that developed around them. Most of them are not educated, and they are educated only up to school level. They do not see the wildlife as their enemy; instead, there is a nice balance between the village and the wild life. But as soon as the human “development” enters, the balance no longer sustains itself.

Even the media enters the picture not to raise the issue and create a discussion for a better wildlife solution but to make it a political issue and get maximum TRP from it. The entire debate is framed there as "Insaan ya sherni" (human or tigress), as if there were no other possibilities of solving the problem. In anthropocentric discourse, the answer is clear: the human, and hence the tigress, must die. The television media brings the politicians to discuss the issues, but they will simply prefer to talk from the side of humans, as that is their vote bank. The director brings all the issues that our society normally faces as a branch of the main issue; most of them are directly raised by poor political management and intensified by media coverage. In both cases, the solution to the problem has never been a priority. `

The title of the film "Sherni" is a misnomer, as the entire story revolves around a tigress, T12, and in Hindi it should be called "Baghini". But the problem associated with T12 and its socio-political implications are very well represented in the movie. Both the positive characters attempting a solution are coming from minority groups, and the victims of the tigress are the tribals, and hence the solution of the problem is seen from a completely different perspective where political mileage is the priority. Through the cinematic narrative, we can see that a very different form of feudalism is active under the garb of electoral democracy.