The tiger has captured the imagination of human beings from the beginning of recorded history. It has been feared, worshipped, admired, hunted, studied, photographed, written about, immortalized in art and poetry, and has enthralled king and commoner alike. Tiger Fire celebrates this magnificent predator by bringing together the very best non-fiction writing, photography and art on the Indian tiger from the first written description of a real-life encounter with the animal by the Mughal Emperor Babur in the sixteenth century to photographs and studies of the last of the species surviving in the wild today.
Conceived and edited by the world’s foremost authority on the Indian tiger, Valmik Thapar (who has also contributed many pieces and photographs to this volume), the book’s contributors are drawn from an array of renowned naturalists, writers, photographers, and tiger enthusiasts down the centuries including Babur, Akbar, François Bernier, Thomas Roe, R.G. Burton, Walter Campbell, Thomas Williamson, F.W. Champion, Kesri Singh, Jim Corbett, Hugh Allen, Richard Perry, Arjan Singh, George Schaller, Kenneth Anderson, M. Krishnan, Peter Jackson, Fateh Singh Rathore, Kim Sullivan, Tejbir Singh, Jaisal and Anjali Singh, Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh, K. Ullas Karanth, Dharmendra Khandal, and Dhritiman Mukherjee. Culled from over a million words (both published and unpublished) on the animal, and several thousand photographs, the accounts and pictures assembled in this book show us the tiger in extraordinary and compelling detail.
The book contains stories and reports of tiger hunts, attacks on humans by tigers, fights between the tiger and other animals such as the leopard, the bison, the wild dog, the boar, and the elephant, narratives about tigers rearing their young, finding mates, and wild tigers forging bonds with humans.
Using his unequalled knowledge of wild tigers, derived from almost forty years of observing them in their natural habitat, Valmik Thapar has put together the most ambitious book ever published on the tiger in India. A lasting testimonial to an animal that has dazzled the human race, Tiger Fire will be treasured by everyone who possesses it.