For generations, a story about two tigers has travelled through Gond households in Madhya Pradesh’s Kanha landscape. They were called Ram and Laxman. 

According to the oral tradition remembered by Dayal Singh Kusre, a Gond Adivasi who worked as a cook in different parts of Kanha, the tigers once shared a household with people. People fed them, treated them with respect, and regarded them as protectors.

The story survives in community memory, along with a practice of making offerings to tigers. It is not a scientific account of tiger behaviour.

For Kusre, the story is inseparable from a larger understanding of nature. “Forests and wildlife are not something to be protected from a distance. Both are part of a shared landscape, where people must learn how to live alongside other species”, Kusre tells The Better India.

But can cultural memory really help people negotiate their place alongside wild animals? 

When tigers were part of the household

Kusre recalls a Gond tribal story in which Ram and Laxman occupied a place within the household’s collective memory. 

According to the Gond folklore, family members were instructed not to encounter the tigers when they first entered the household. A newly married bride, in particular, was told not to open a particular locked room or door. 

The restriction was associated with the belief that the tigers would not recognise a new family member, much as traditional households have sometimes maintained rules around interactions between younger women and senior male relatives.

In the story, one daughter-in-law eventually opened the door without knowing or following the instructions. She saw the tiger’s face, and the animal left the household.

Kusre recounts the tiger’s message to the family’s eldest man: he would now stay in the forest and receive his food there.

The room and its closed door represent a boundary that members of the household were expected to respect. The tiger was part of the story, but so was the responsibility of people to recognise that a relationship with wildlife came with limits.

The tradition also carries an idea of reciprocity. 

Kusre says, “The family believed that if people had food, they should ensure that the wildlife around them was fed, too”

He also describes a practice of making an offering of a goat or a hen to the tiger in the forest once a year, with the belief that the animal would continue to protect the family.

For Kusre, reverence for Ram and Laxman is part of a wider relationship with nature.

“For us, nature is our all; we bow at her feet,” he says. “If we have to cross 10 km of forests also,........

© The Better India