Original subtitles

The first magical moment when I saw a tiger in Ranthambore, it was absolutely mesmerizing.

It's a moment where you lose yourself somewhere within yourself.

This is the best place in the world to see wild tigers.

For centuries, India's rulers battled over Ranthambore Fort.

Today, it's home to a family with an extraordinary story.

It's about what you don't know is going to happen.

And that's the great joy of Ranthambore.

March, 1984.

A day that rewrote tiger history.

I was helping my brother-in-law, Tejbir, film a tiger as it watched sambar deer feed in the lakes.

What happened next shocked us.

No one had ever filmed a tiger killing in deep water before.

But then no one had really filmed wild tigers at all.

And I was there, in the heart of it.

In the jungles of northwestern India, there is a magical fort called Ranthambore.

It has stood for more than a thousand years.

There are three lakes a few hundred feet from each other, and it's full of wildlife.

Something happening every minute.

More wild tigers live in India than anywhere else on earth.

And this was one of their most important strongholds.

And when a tiger walks through the lakes, the sound, the magic, the explosion of activity.

So yes, the lakes, a place to die for.

But in 1976, when I first came to Ranthambore, it wasn't known for tigers.

Back then, no one really knew anything about wild tigers, myself included.

I'd grown up a city boy.

I was very busy in Delhi making documentary films.

My first marriage was collapsing.

And one afternoon, I just walked out of my house, leaving everything behind,

and caught a train to Ranthambore.

I went on a whim to escape the city.

It took me nearly a day to meet for this thing, the director of the park.

And he looked me up and down and said, what do you want?

I said, I want to go to the forest.

He said, but nobody goes to this forest.

It's an unknown area.

When I was passing the old gate, as you went past the gate and you crossed

the rise of a hill, there in the distance was Ranthambore Fort, looking at you.

And it grabbed me.

And that moment changed my life.

I wasn't a scientist, or a naturalist, an activist, or a conservationist.

I was simply a filmmaker who fell in love with the beauty of this place,

and with its tigers.

For the next half century, I've had the great privilege of being amongst them.

All tiger life revolves around the female, and across

the decades, five tigresses became like family.

Now, for the first time, I'm able to piece together the story of their matriarchal clan,

and tell you how these five revealed the secret life of tigers.

None are closer to my heart than my first Ranthambore tiger, Padmini.

She lived through some very dark times.

Not that long ago, people estimated that there were 100,000 tigers in India.

When Europeans and their guns arrived in the 18th century, a massacre began.

It makes me sick to think of the Maharajas, the queens and kings who

flushed out tigers and hammered them with their guns.

I mean, one of our Maharajas, just one single man, killed 1300 tigers and boasts about it.

The kings, the rulers, the emperors, the rich, they all had tiger skins in their house.

I mean, even the Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth

had gone to Ranthambore and shot tigers there.

In the early 1970s, the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, banned tiger hunting.

A census had revealed that there were just 1800 wild tigers left in India.

And she set up Project Tiger.

It was a wildlife conservation program with one aim.

To protect India's remaining tigers.

In this land where the tiger roams, it is not only an animal, but a symbol.

For thousands of years, India has had a culture that goddesses ride a tiger to defeat evil.

The tiger is sacred, the guardian of the forest.

In 1973, we set aside nine areas of the country for tigers.

The old fort of Ranthambore, with its lakes and forests,

was the smallest of these special tiger reserves.

And then began a long, difficult task, rehoming the

many people and cattle that lived within the boundaries.

Such sacrifices were made for the tiger.

Now, in the heart of Ranthambore, it was thought that just 12, maybe 13 tigers remained.

And they only ever came out at night.

I didn't think I had a hope of seeing one.

But I went out anyway with some of the park guards and a searchlight to try.

Anywhere and everywhere, just couldn't find tigers.

The director of the park, Fateh Singh Rathore, had slowly become my tiger guru.

He knew every inch of this tiger reserve.

Huge, twirling moustache.

Very tough, with a great sense of humour.

And one day, we drove too close to the water.

So we were floating in the shallow water of a lake.

A head appeared.

It was my first Ranthambore tiger.

We called her Padmini.

I was 23, and I'd never felt such a connection to any living thing before.

How sad that these few photos are the only record of my times with her.

But she deserves her place in this history.

She went on to have five cubs.

Four survived.

And it was the beginning of Ranthambore's clan of tigers.

She led that clan.

She was like the godmother of all the tigers I've known in Ranthambore.

And she was the mother of my next tiger.

The one who brought me the most joy.

Noon.

The beginning of Ranthambore's golden age.

In the 1980s, Ranthambore was a place transformed.

Tigers shed their nocturnal cloak.

They suddenly had no fear of man.

And the visibility, the low savanna grasslands here, meant you could see

tigers and watch their behaviour like nowhere else on earth.

Noon was my favorite.

She was called Noon because she was really active at noon.

Noon was a delight.

She was absolutely the opposite of Padmini.

She was the new generation of tigers that had grown without the fear of man.

I watched Noon drive away other females, fight them over prey, force out her sister.

I began to understand that the few square kilometers around the lakes were her territory.

She had claimed the richest tiger turf, one teeming with prey.

And now the hunters and people were gone.

It was a tiger paradise.

Pure magic.

It was around this time that I bought some land on the edge of Ranthambore.

More and more, this is where I wanted to be, alongside the tigers, learning more about their lives.

Ah, wow!

This is Noon's mate, a big male called Genghis.

One day, back in 1983, he had appeared suddenly by the lakes.

From where?

We don't know.

No one was monitoring the tigers in those days.

What we did know was that males move around much more than females.

As adults, they leave their family.

They seek out new, big territories that give them access to several females and lots of prey.

Areas like the lakes.

I remember a day a few months after he arrived.

Sambar deer had congregated in huge numbers to feast on succulent water plants.

But deer weren't the only animals in the water.

There are about 120 crocodiles in the lakes.

It's one of the only places in the world where Sambar deer face both predators.

We thought tigers only hunted them on land.

But then we saw Genghis make that extraordinary kill.

I couldn't believe that I was seeing an enormous tiger rushing into the water,

killing a Sambar.

And we were lucky.

This was the time to record for the world what Ranthambore was giving, because so

far the world had no real wild pictures of tigers.

And Ranthambore's tiger population was growing.

There were 13 tigers when I first arrived.

Now we thought there were 45.

They were the best days of my life.

Days I thought would never end.

I thought I would have another season with Genghis.

I didn't know, but that was the last time I saw Genghis in my life.

When it happened, it was like a nightmare.

Sometime in 1991, I was with Fateh Singh, my tiger guru.

And we were wondering what happened to a few of the tigers that we were watching.

We could no longer find them.

And Fateh Singh felt that they were missing and maybe they could have been poached.

And I said, no, not possible.

Who would poach these incredibly beautiful animals?

But then began our year of horror.

Poachers started to be caught with skins.

It knocked Fateh Singh and me out.

We just couldn't believe that this was a possibility.

The price of bones is soaring as tiger numbers plummet.

India's tigers are being murdered so the Chinese can

turn their bones into fixtures for fevers and rheumatism.

I think the population all over India is going down.

I think the primary reason for this is poaching and the bone

trade to meet the Chinese demand for medicinal derivatives.

I think the tiger faces probably extinction in the next decade.

Fateh Singh had no time for poachers.

If he found a poacher, he'd charge after him, take him to jail.

He believed that that was the only way Ranthambore would survive.

And he was beaten up himself.

He nearly died.

His driver jumped on his body to save him and took the beating.

This is a letter my tiger guru, Fateh Singh, wrote at that time.

"It is a massacre.

"When the police chief showed me the skin, I could not control myself.

"Tears were rolling down my cheeks.

"It's heartbreaking.

"And sometimes I feel guilty that I taught them to have faith in human beings.

"All the tigers were shot at point-blank range, just innocently looking at the man with the gun."

I think both Fateh Singh and I felt that over the years we'd worked very hard with the tigers,

they'd lost their fear of man.

And they treated the poachers in the friendliest of ways.

And they lost their lives.

Because by now we had learned to identify individuals by their stripes,

we could say with certainty that 30 tigers, tigers that we knew, were gone.

Around the lakes, just 15 terrified tigers remained.

And I was determined to do all I could to keep them alive.

I entered the arena of government.

Sat on endless committees.

I started a charity with local people.

I wrote books.

I made a TV series.

I'm Valmik Thapa.

It was the most time I'd spent away from Ranthambore.

But then, my next late tigress drew me back in.

Of all the tigers, she's the one who would teach me the most about the tigers' life.

We called her Machli, which means fish, because she had marks like fish bones on her cheek.

She was born during the crisis.

And for the first two years of her life, she had stayed with her mother,

as all tiger cubs do.

Now Machli was nearing adulthood.

I guess soon she would need a territory of her own.

But when and how would she carve one out?

Tigers communicate with each other silently.

They leave their scent in their territories.

This can attract conflict or repel conflict.

And through this process of territorial marking, they talk to each other.

Fateh and I watched the pair closely, certain their time together was coming to an end.

The lakes were rich with prey, but there was only enough for one resident tigress.

Would her mother force Machli out?

The bond Machli once shared with her mother was gone and replaced with aggression.

This time, Machli was the one to back down.

At the edge of the lakes is my favorite place, Rajbagh.

The ruined garden of the kings.

Now tigers hold court here.

I suspected Machli would soon try to overthrow her mother, so she could rule these ruins.

Her mother too sniffed out the threat.

To me, Machli seemed a little afraid.

But she stood her ground.

I wasn't sure who'd won the confrontation.

But shortly after this, Machli's mother left.

Maybe it was the threat of constant conflict.

Maybe she sacrificed her territory for her daughter.

Either way, Machli now ruled here.

Later that year, Fateh and I realized that a new male had arrived at the lakes.

He soon picked up Machli's scent.

We called him Bumburam.

And gradually he got closer to Machli, leaving markers of his own.

Then, one day, Machli approached him.

He was aged six or seven, and in his prime.

It wasn't long before Machli decided she was ready to mate.

The ferocity of tiger mating always impresses me.

I was excited by the thought of a new generation.

It was like a new dawn.

The dark days of hunting and poaching had long gone, I thought.

This was the chance for the clan to truly thrive.

It was a very happy time for me.

I'd met my wife Sanjana, and had a son, Hamir, named after one of Ranthambore's greatest rulers.

And soon, Machli herself had a litter.

Two cubs.

This is family life amongst the tiger.

This is the beauty of Ranthambore.

They're both male cubs, and she's really looking after them at the moment.

Oh wow, look at them, learning the ways of the mother.

It was an absolute delight watching these boys grow up.

And then one day, we heard rumours that trouble was headed their way.

Their father had vanished, and a new male was patrolling the area.

We called him Nick.

Without the protection of their father, Machli's family were in danger.

I'm really worried about these two cubs, because they're young male cubs.

There could be a new resident male in the area, so the tigress has to be really careful.

She's got to keep them well protected, she has to defend them and chase away any male intruder.

In fact, she's bound to fight the male, so that he keeps her distance from the cubs.

Nick was a huge male in his prime.

I shuddered to think what he could do to the cubs.

He could easily kill them in order to mate with Machli, and father a litter of his own.

A few days later, I found Machli being pursued by Nick.

He was definitely interested in mating.

Would she give in?

Or would she try and fight him off?

At first, it looked like she was keeping away from Nick,

so he couldn't get behind her and mount her.

But Nick was really enticed by her scent.

It didn't look like he would give up.

For Machli, victory.

For Nick, an injury that would make it hard to hunt.

Now he knew the cubs had a mother who would risk it all to protect them.

A few months later, I saw the most extraordinary moment between a tigress and her cubs.

Machli suckled them.

Her cubs were almost two years old.

There would have been no milk for them at this age.

Perhaps it was Machli's way of telling them it was time to say goodbye.

After that, everything changed.

I never saw the family together again.

And the cubs struck out to find territories of their own.

In 2004, I was very busy with a Supreme Court committee.

And we were hearing regularly that there was something going wrong in Sariska.

A hundred and fifty kilometers from the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve.

That poachers were out.

Nobody was sure about it.

The government of the day refused to admit that there was a problem.

Even though the director of the park was crying out for help.

Every tiger in Sariska by September 2004 had been poached and killed.

Sariska had no tigers and then in central India, not so far from Ranthambore,

the Panna Tiger Reserve.

All the tigers went extinct there.

So poaching took a massive turn.

When it happened the second time, it was the same Chinese pressure.

It was the illegal trade.

And a new demand for ornamental tiger skins.

It was again trying to keep your tigers safe.

How are you going to do it the second time around?

Scattered thoughts, June 2005.

The future of the tiger is bleak.

God help us.

The monsoon of that year was a critical moment.

It's a time when the rains lash the forest with incredible force.

Ranthambore completely shuts down.

The roads are washed away.

The perfect cover for poachers to strike.

I had no idea where Machli was, or if she was still alive.

I kept busy in Delhi working with the then prime minister to create a moment of huge change.

In the end, Project Tiger was scrapped and the National Tiger Conservation Authority was launched.

This time, because of various connections with the empowered committee,

with the Supreme Court committee, we declared a red alert and an emergency in Ranthambore.

200 armed men were sent in to surround the periphery and to flush out any intruder.

And it created a scare.

We knew that there were problems in Ranthambore.

Fateh Singh, who had by now retired, said that half the tigers of Ranthambore had been poached.

That there were barely 21 tigers left.

Terrified tigers who'd experienced a second round of poaching.

I think the lake tigers must have known what was going on because on the edges of

their territory, there were vacant areas, the tigers on the outer areas had vanished

and the silence of death hung in the air.

Every tiger on the lakes would have known that.

Luckily, the area around the lakes was the inner sanctum.

It was very difficult for poachers to get to the lake area.

So the lake tigers survived because the area around is fortified.

There are gates and entry points.

There are lots of forest guards.

So the poachers were not going to take a risk in this area.

So the lake tigers kept on producing cubs that would go out

and repopulate areas where tigers had been poached.

And that's what happened. That's what saved Ranthambore.

And that's what saved Machli.

She survived yet another crisis.

And her final litter would grow up and spread out all over Ranthambore and beyond.

When I first went to Ranthambore, it was a tiny patch of 300 square kilometers.

Today, adjacent to it are three tiger reserves.

And we have 5,000 square kilometers where tiger populations can go to, where tigers can migrate to.

That's success.

That required hard work by a bunch of people.

And one of those people is my colleague, Dr. Dharmendra Khandel.

He has data of 20 years of Ranthambore's tigers.

And that enables us to really look back and work out for the first time exactly

how Ranthambore's tigers are related.

Today, we know that Machli's genes are in 75% of all Ranthambore tigers,

including my next tiger, Krishna, one of Machli's daughters, and a tigress that shook my being.

She ruled the lakes for a while and had four little cubs of her own.

It's very rare to find a tigress with four small cubs.

And there was an incredible afternoon when she took her cubs and walked to the palace den.

To get to the palace den, you have to cross a little bit of water.

And that's where a few big crocodiles lie, waiting to get their chance on anything that passes.

She carefully negotiated the water carrying the weakest cub in her mouth,

while the others followed her.

She lost one of the cubs.

It brought tears to my eyes that day.

One of the cubs that survived still lives around the lakes today.

She was named Arrowhead because she had two pointy eyebrows, like two arrows on her forehead.

She's family.

She always surprises me.

And I see much of her today.

For a while, she ruled the lakes.

But today this territory is no longer hers and she should not be here.

Recently, she started behaving in unpredictable ways.

I was startled when I saw, on a camera's viewfinder, Arrowhead arriving at the

lakes and finding a way to attack an enormous soft-shell turtle.

And she not only grabs a turtle in the shallow water, she picks it up and rushes

back into the grass and starts to devour it.

Was she, like Genghis all those years before, not afraid of crocodiles in the lakes?

Well, what I saw next made me think that she was not fearless, but desperate.

Arrowhead's back in the lakes.

And this time she chases after a small crocodile.

She charges into the water, misses the baby crocodile, but she doesn't realize

she's in a deep place and there are bigger crocodiles.

The big crocodiles pounce on her under the water.

And I don't know how,

she manages to free herself.

And then, a short while later, someone filmed her eating a crocodile.

Suddenly, memories of years ago come flooding back.

And I remembered that my nephew Jaisal had filmed this.

Arrowhead's grandmother, Machli, wrestling and eventually killing a four -meter crocodile.

No one had ever recorded such a thing before or since.

Severe droughts had driven Machli to behave in this way.

What was driving Arrowhead?

A few days later, we found out.

She had been pregnant and in desperate need of protein for her milk.

Now her cubs have been filmed, just weeks old.

Ah, they're lovely shots. Absolutely lovely.

It's amazing.

This is really valuable, precious footage.

They're barely able to crawl.

Wow, it's amazing.

This is the secret life of tigers.

But how will Arrowhead keep them alive?

She no longer rules the lakes.

And she's finding it difficult to survive.

She's desperate because she has very little prey to hunt.

Trespassing into the lake territory as she'd done before is much more risky with such small cubs.

Today, the lakes are ruled by another tigress.

Riddhi.

She too has three cubs, three mouths to feed.

She's one of Arrowhead's older daughters from a previous litter.

So now we have mother and daughter with three cubs each in bordering territories.

What will happen?

We have no idea.

Which of them will survive?

Will they meet?

Will they fight?

Will they play?

I can't wait to see this new family drama play out.

Today, 70 tigers live across this landscape instead of the 13 we began with 50 years ago.

And I wonder which of them will become like family.

When I'm asked what have I done with my life,

the only answer I can give is this.

That I have been amongst the wild tigers that roam

Ranthambore's magnificent lakes and helped them to thrive.

And my love for five tigresses in particular has moulded me.

Padmini.

Noon.

Machli.

Krishna.

And Arrowhead.

Piecing together the story of their matriarchal clan has been the privilege of my life.

They have been like family to me.

And I can only hope that this story of their secret lives will help others to love them as I do.

And endeavour to fight for their future.

Everybody's aware in the tiger world that this year is the 50th anniversary of the

celebration of the establishment of Project Tiger which has helped in conserving India's tigers.

But for me that didn't interest me in the film because I knew a lot of other people

would want to pursue that what I describe as a more political film.

But then Valmik rang me up from the edge of one of Ranthambore's famous lakes and

said, there's this amazing tiger called Charger who specializes

in charging into the lakes and chasing all the deer out.

So I thought, should I watch telly, play golf, smoke cigars, or do this one more film?

My first tiger film was initially not supposed to revolve around tigers.

Because I was an evolutionary biologist, I wanted to do a film

about the evolution of the peacock's tail.

So I thought I'll have to go to India to make it and I took it to the BBC

and they said, yes, we'll take a film on the evolution of the peacock's tail for

David Attenborough's Wildlife on One series,

but you've got to make it the tale of the peacock and the tiger.

The key thing that stimulated me to know that I could make a film was Valmik's

three or four books on the tigers of Ranthambore which were gloriously illustrated.

The imagery, the evocative nature of this huge fort that sits on the edge of

Ranthambore and then the tigers that run in and out

of the lakes through the lilies, past the crocodiles.

It was like Disneyland for wildlife.

I did my recce and went to Ranthambore.

It was better than I ever imagined.

It was magnificent and is magnificent still.

But the weak link for me was getting tiger footage.

Tejbir, Valmik's brother-in-law who helped me on my peacock film set,

we filmed tigers in the 1980s.

I think Valmik's got the footage.

And so I went to meet Valmik.

When he met me at the door, there's this big figure who I instantly knew was a star in the making.

A hugely charismatic person.

He realised I was passionate about conservation.

And he was passionate about conservation.

So I think it created an understanding where we could work together.

But the nitty-gritty of that meeting was, Valmik, can you find your tiger footage?

I had no idea what the tiger footage was like.

We found some clichéed, dusty film cans under his desk

which turned out to have some phenomenal tiger footage.

Valmik's most favourite tiger, Genghis, charging into Ranthambore Lakes, killing deer.

So that was an absolute wonderful moment.

So after I finished that film, I instantly thought, this guy could

present a superb landmark series on the Indian subcontinent.

But the key was making Valmik Thepper into a presenter, as opposed to a contributor.

At the time we made Land of the Tiger, we were both 39, 40 years old.

That created a little bit of chemistry where we got on very well.

So I couldn't force Valmik to do something.

I had to convince him, which is good training to be convinced, and he would challenge me a lot.

But we're still working together, 30 years on.

He will ring me up periodically and say,

Mike, there's this event going on, or there's this crisis going on.

And this film is a product of exactly that.

And we definitely are friends, more than colleagues.

It goes further than that for me.

It wasn't that Valmik was just a presenter.

It wasn't that Valmik was just a punter.

It wasn't that Valmik was just a powerful character

fighting for the good of India's tigers and its land.

There were more aspects to his life that I appreciated, I think.

We may have got older and more grumpy and lots more bits of our bodies ache without

any doubts, but I don't think our passion for tigers and conserving tigers has diminished at all.

Telling stories about tigers, especially this film, which might have quite a nice

good news aspect to it, will both educate people and encourage them that there's hope.

Not false hope, but it's important to give them hope that the tigers of Ranthambore,

which have been through two significant crises, have come through.

And a huge part of that is down to Valmik's enthusiasm

and bullishness to fight and help save the tiger.