The one-man army who secured the tiger — with love and awe: Valmik Thapar (1952-2025)

A veritable one-man army, he authored over two dozen books mostly on big cats, presented several wildlife documentaries, including the seminal BBC series Land of the Tiger (1997), and remained the loudest – and most articulate – voice for conservation in India since the 1990s.

With no formal training in wildlife biology or conservation, Thapar developed a deep understanding of tiger behaviour, as he put it, by watching wild tigers in Ranthambhore over five decades. In 1976, it was a chance encounter with Fateh Singh Rathore, then director of Ranthambhore tiger reserve, that had him hooked for life.

Both outspoken and often contrarian, Rathore and Thapar formed an indefatigable partnership — until Rathore’s demise in 2011 — that influenced and, often, shaped India’s conservation efforts and policies over the decades.

Thapar served in multiple apex bodies of the government, including the National Board for Wildlife and the Central Empowered Committee of the Supreme Court. He was also a member of the Tiger Task Force set up to prescribe reforms in the aftermath of the disappearance of tigers from Rajasthan’s Sariska in 2005.

That was also the year I started learning the mercurial ways of India’s Tigerman.

Thapar was warmly supportive of my work in The Indian Express from the day I first reported the total loss of tigers in Rajasthan’s Sariska tiger reserve in January 2005. He offered me encouragement, insights and contacts, as the investigative series took me to parks across the country: Ranthambhore (Rajasthan), Panna, Kanha (Madhya Pradesh), Indrawati (Chhattisgarh), Valmiki (Bihar) and Palamu (Jharkhand) over the next three months.

In May 2005, I reported how Ranthambhore was in shambles despite attracting more money than all other tiger reserves combined. Non-profits, including Thapar’s NGO Ranthambhore Foundation, had received a sizeable chunk of those funds. The report appeared in the morning then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Ranthambhore. Thapar was livid over what he said would be his last phone call to me.

It was a we-told-you-so moment for a couple of young conservationists who had flagged how often Thapar used to grandly bemoan how he failed to save “his” tigers. “Valmik is in love with his ego,” his critics would carp.

Two months later, it was Thapar himself, back at what he loved doing, who would alert me to what he perceived as a “pro-people bias” in the Tiger Task Force report which observed that the tiger “issue is not about the tiger per se… but about rebuilding forest economies.’’

Thapar’s legendary stubbornness – a key shield for his activism – did not come in the way of changing his mind. Inviolate areas are often impractical, he would eventually concede, and “conservation is impossible without community support.”

Thapar had set up his Ranthambhore Foundation back in 1987 to work towards integrating local communities into conservation efforts, and also partnered with another non-profit, Dastkar, to create livelihoods for displaced villagers.

But Thapar’s fight, as he wrote in his 2012 book Tiger My Life, Ranthambhore and Beyond, “was always for inviolate spaces—where the tiger could live free, away from noise, away from humans.” Post-Sariska, though, reform was in the air and prompted him to look beyond the model of exclusionary conservation.

Around 2006, Thapar’s “tiger guru” Fateh Singh Rathore was also warming up to “soft strategies” — such as educating children from traditional hunter communities — pushed by biologist Dharmendra Khandal, who had recently joined Rathore’s non-profit TigerWatch. From mostly-stick, the Rathore-Thapar conservation scale started leaning decisively towards mostly-carrot in a matter of years.

What did not change was Thapar’s inbuilt distrust of the government system, even though he remained an insider most of his life. Perhaps that intimate knowledge led him to observe that “bureaucracy killed more tigers than bullets ever did.”

Yet, even Rajesh Gopal, who took heavy flak as then head of Project Tiger from Thapar during the Sariska years, is quick to assert that his adversary was not self-serving. “All said and done, Valmik really helped the tiger’s cause,” Gopal told The Indian Express.

Until his last days, Thapar was involved in conservation work, guiding Khandal on various TigerWatch projects, and curating a defining collection of photos of Ranthambhore.

Thapar was born in 1952 in Mumbai to Romesh and Raj Thapar, journalists and co-founders of the political journal Seminar. He is survived by his wife, actor and director Sanjana Kapoor, and son Hamir Thapar.

Days before his death, I had called Thapar for a comment about a story I was working on related to the use of live bait to lure tigers. He never mentioned he was admitted to a hospital, but readily agreed to weigh in on the “stupid thing they are doing, feeding tigers and risking lives.”

The promised quote arrived on WhatsApp within minutes. Later, I learnt he was in considerable discomfort and “fussed all day in an irritable mood.”

On his first tiger sighting, Thapar once wrote: “It was like shedding one layer of skin and putting on another… The transformation was total.”

Until his last days, the mere mention of tigers would have the same impact on the man. Not always William Blake’s tiger with its “fearful symmetry” but something softer, more magical.