The Leopard of Gopeshwar: An Excerpt from Crooked Cats

Nayanika Mathur’s Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (2021) was one of the main inspirations behind our Cataplisms series. The project, which examines the intersections of capitalism through a feline lens, draws from the idea at the heart of the book: exploring the deep connections between actions and impacts; and diving into seemingly separate spaces such as ecology, politics, law, conservation and climate change, and understanding how entwined they are. As Mathur writes in Crooked Cats, there is, “a dawning awareness of the intricate entanglements between spheres that are often kept apart, especially human-nonhuman relationships and planetary health, and the ways in which a slight change in one affects the other.” 

The book focuses on the systems that humans have created for “the government of big cats”, a relationship that is entangled, fragile and vital for all those affected by it. Through its focus on “crooked” cats—those that have gone off the straight and narrow and attack humans—the book looks at the outsized role that humans, and our institutions, have played in moulding the world. Mathur talks of the Anthropos itself as a predator and connects many of the issues that we face—such as increased human-animal conflict, the hurdles faced in conservation, and the imminent extinction of species—to human-caused ecological breakdowns and changes to the planet. 

While the scope of the book’s subject is global, Mathur focuses on particular instances which enables her to trace and illustrate the many interconnected strands. How does one identify exactly which big cat was responsible for attacking a human? What role does the law play in complex cover up operations that seek to negate the uncertainty of these identifications? How do groups of academics, lawmakers, conservationists or locals explain how a cat becomes “crooked”; and what are the impacts of each of these assumptions and theories? These are just some of the questions that the book tackles. 

In this excerpt from Crooked Cats, Mathur talks about the life and death of the leopard of Gopeshwar, the intricate links between the ecological and the political, and the critical role that humans play in the Anthropocene. 

We also invite you to listen to Mathur talking about similar themes in this audio story.

This book has emerged from the life and death of one particular big cat (bagh)—the leopard of Gopeshwar. This was the first crooked cat I came to intimately know: to sense, feel, and fear. She arrived one winter morning in a town called Gopeshwar in the Indian Himalaya and was hunted down three months later. I never, mercifully, saw her until after she was gone. But I felt her presence almost constantly: through her pugmarks; the corpses and injuries left behind; the dogs and other animals that vanished; her beastly chinghaad—scream-like roar—that she would let out in the middle of the night; gossip, rumor, jokes; the taste of fear; and the hair that stood up on the back of my neck. So overwhelming was her presence that I began to maintain a bagh diary, which sat alongside my personal diary and my fieldwork notes.

None of us ever knew beyond a modicum of doubt why the leopard of Gopeshwar (Gopeshwar-wallah bagh), as she was called, went off the straight and narrow path and became crooked (tedha) by attacking and eating humans. However, everyone was certain that human actions had something to do with her abnormal behavior. We were all terrified of her but were also, contradictorily, somewhat in awe of her. When she was finally killed, we celebrated and felt overwhelming relief but also shed a silent tear. Her corpse was paraded on the front of a forest department jeep with a red mark (tilak) on her forehead. The hunter, resplendent in his shikari (hunting) gear, and several police and forest department officials, also dressed in their khakis, stood behind with more than a touch of triumph. Those three months of living with a fearsome beast evoked such a jumble of conflicting emotions and left so many unanswered questions hanging in the air that this book, somehow, had to be written.

There are, I was told, two types of big cats. There are those that are seedha-saadha (straightforward/simple) and are as scared of humans as we are of them, if not more. Such bagh—the vast majority of leopards, tigers, and lions, in fact—know how to live with humans and are careful to avoid any unpleasant encounters with them. The problem lies with the other type of bagh, those that have gone off the straight and narrow path to become tedha (crooked). Popularly known as “man-eaters” (adamkhor), these big cats actively prey on humans. Their crookedness leads them to disrupt the peaceful coexistence that otherwise prevails between humans and big cats.

What makes a big cat crooked? How do we humans come to recognize and intimately know a crooked cat? How does one live beside such beasts? And what might they have to do with the climate crisis and life in the Anthropocene or, even more perplexingly, with disciplinary boundaries, methodologies, and the question of how academic writing intervenes in the world?

These are some of the questions that emerge directly from the beastly tale of the leopard of Gopeshwar. There is no resolution forthcoming in this book inspired by a particular big cat, no forensic clarity on why big cats become crooked and make prey of humans, no attempted prescription on how we can fix this unique problem of lions, tigers, and leopards that devour humans in India. What lies ahead, instead, are tales of multispecies encounters that seek to ask new questions emerging from an ethnographic grounding in India, while a planet in crisis looms large in the background.

A central argument of this book is that we cannot understand the climate crisis, extinction and endangerment of animals, as well as what is termed “human-animal conflict” (a term I dislike and, hence, refer to becoming crooked instead) without understanding mundane bureaucracy and the everyday state. Crooked Cats studies how the local state bureaucracy in India is engaged – through actors as varied as conservationists, forest guards, hunters, lawyers, photographers, former aristocrats, and bureaucrats – in regulating big cats that have been criminalised. It does so by centring forms of knowing big cats that escape bureaucratic rationality, yet it is precisely such (effaced) practices that are central to the government of big cats. I wish to hold seemingly distinct questions – knowledge of nonhuman animals that is localised and distinct – alongside – and not in opposition to or through their ontological differences with – the bureaucratic and state practices through which they are attempted to be governed. Doing so would pave the way open for the imagination of a new form of government that is able to take on diverse ways of knowing, recognising, and living-with nonhuman animals; a regime of rule that recognises the uncanny moment of recognition as one confronts the nonhuman animal for a flash of a second, rather than one that is cowed down by its history of materiality and performative public politics of big cat preservation. The Anthropocene framing of Crooked Cats allows for a distinctive piecing together of different elements: bureaucratic, legal, political, nonhuman, uncanny, visceral, embodied, environmental, specific (local, regional, national) and global, with specific histories of colonial practices lingering on. It opens out the possibility of letting beastly tales of crooked cats in India illuminate subjects as niche as the pigeonholing of sub-disciplines within anthropology, and as weighty as what it means to live through the climate crisis in a new geological epoch of the planet.

The government of big cats is aimed at enfolding microprocesses of the state and bureaucratic everydayness—ranging from petitions to identification practices to the execution of conservationist law and government guidelines—into the conversation on the Anthropocene and climate change. Even in some otherwise strong writings on the climate crisis we see that such banal bureaucratic practices and things—as well as the state form—are neglected or treated as somehow irrelevant to the discussion. The focus is on issues like ecological collapse, with, for instance, the impacts of flooding or the devastation of a cyclone considered as somehow distinct from grumbles about corruption, bureaucratic inertia, and state violence. Crooked Cats argues for the untenability of such a separation of domains (“the climatic” from “the political” or the state); it demonstrates that the endangerment/extinction of vulnerable species like tigers, lions, and leopards cannot be divorced from serious considerations of the state; politics at local, regional, national, and international levels; and their corresponding governance regimes. As Jobson has correctly noted in his review of sociocultural anthropology in 2019, “The Anthropocene marks a crisis not only of climate but of the state form” (2020, 263). The governance of big cats depicts the inextricability of these twin crises—of the climate and the state.

Nonhuman governance is as complex as it is vital. A central question in the government of big cats relates to IDing the beast. In a landscape in which several big cats coexist, most of which are not man-eaters, how is the crooked cat identified? How is certain knowledge of the guilt of a big cat arrived at anterior to its killing? In my book I study the various methods through which hunters, bureaucrats, locals, scientists, conservationists, and other actors identify a specific, individual man-eater. These methods range from bureaucratic ID’ing to scientific camera-trap images, fecal analysis, and DNA tests to the practices of the colonial cultures of shikar (the hunt). I contrast these to the lived, embodied, visceral practices that are actually operationalized in the hunt. I show the criticality of correct identification of a man-eater subsequent to the passage of the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, which made any killing of a tiger, lion, or leopard that has not been declared a man-eater into a criminal offense. The question I ask here is, What difference has the legal protection of big cats and the creation of a new state document—the hunting permit—that regulates killing effected in the project of managing man-eaters? I explore the vexed twin issues of correctly identifying a particular big cat as a man-eater and the state’s response to its own accidental—and illegal—killing of an innocent big cat. I describe the complicated game of retrospective erasure that needs to be played—involving the disappearance of various matter ranging from the body of the big cat to photographs to the silencing of accomplices and members of media—in order to paper over the illegal death of an innocent big cat. I stress the point that all shikaris (hunters) make, which is the inherent impossibility of ever being able to incontrovertibly identify a big cat prior to killing it. Yet, given the transnational drive of preserving big cats and in the context of India’s own conservationist legal regime, the hunting permit and associated documents that claim correct identification remain on, often as impediments to swift action and always as a necessary fiction of the reasoned government of big cats.