Understanding an elusive big cat | Review of The Ghost of the Mountains

Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi explores what it means to share a landscape with the snow leopard

Peter Matthiessen's mystical The Snow Leopard (1978) casts a long shadow over any writing on the enigmatic cat. Since then, a spate of popular books on it have been published in the west, with western researchers and travellers taking centre stage. Here at last is The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, an Indian researcher. It's the story of a lad growing up in Aurangabad in central India who dared to dream of scaling mountains like the legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner and studying wildlife like the field biologist George Schaller. He achieved those ambitions against the odds.

Studying prey habits

How does one study a creature that is rarely seen? It's not for nothing that the snow leopard is called 'the ghost of the mountains'. If you claim to have seen a yeti, you could get away with it, Suryawanshi says, but you face ridicule if you state that you have seen a snow leopard. As a Master's student, he sidesteps the quandary by studying the grazing habits of its prey, the blue sheep, which is really a goat in sheep's clothing. He studies the ghost itself for his PhD, negotiating the dangerous terrain while keeping his senses alert, and is rewarded with the sight of the beautiful elusive cats playing, courting, and hunting.

How to reduce the impact of humans on snow leopards is a central theme of the book. Even if the cats are no more than apparitions to most people, signs of their presence are around. When they kill livestock, herders retaliate. Yet livestock degrade pastures by reducing the forage available for wild herbivores such as the blue sheep. Studying snow leopard droppings, the author and his team establish that given a choice, the cat prefers its prey wild. Would encouraging herding practices that leave enough forage for wild herbivores increase snow leopard numbers? Then, even while worrying about antagonising older researchers, Suryawanshi asks: would more snow leopards mean they would kill more livestock? This thought process is uncommon because the mainstream discourse on tiger conservation is consumed by increasing the numbers of tigers. What are the consequences of having more predators is rarely asked. This isn't the only time he challenges accepted wisdom. Later he questions whether large cats are indeed the top dogs of their habitats.

Saviour complex

In India, conservation suffers from a conservationist saviour complex. Conservation NGOs decide which mitigation measure to use, where to set it up, and how. Villagers are passive recipients of charity. Building cat-proof corrals and offering monetary compensation to lessen the burden of living with predators is widely practiced. Suryawanshi learns that autonomy encourages farmers and herders to become active partners in protecting their property. He also realises that money can't buy tolerance. Women nurture their animals, often staying awake night after night to keep watch, yet men pocket the cash when snow leopards kill livestock. The emotional loss women suffer most often goes unacknowledged.

In the larger scheme, the problems of livestock grazing and snow leopard bashing are of a lesser magnitude than those posed by solar parks destroying the best Spitian grasslands. In tackling powerful corporations, Suryawanshi continues to see communities as the custodians of the mountains.

While communities can thwart the best-made plans of companies, the author seems befuddled when a bitter rift cleaves the global community of snow leopard researchers. In 2017, a team of western experts downgraded the IUCN Red List status of the snow leopard from 'endangered' to 'vulnerable' without the participation of any researcher from a snow leopard range country. This is yet another reminder of the predominance of western narratives of the snow leopard.

In the author's lively recounting, research findings and conservation efforts are neither dense nor dry. Through vivid descriptions, we see the azure blue skies, breathe the oxygen-poor air, labour up treacherous mountain slopes, and revel at the magnificence of a certain spotted cat with a furry boa of a tail and snowshoe paws. The sprinkling of lyrical sentences makes the book a joy to read. For instance, when a fox unexpectedly comes upon a cavorting snow leopard couple, he describes its blood-curdling scream "as if [he] had already died and was looking down on his own dead body."

Reminiscent of Jonathan Slaght's book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, set in the frigid expanses of the Russian Far East, this is the memoir of an intrepid and committed Indian wildlife researcher and conservationist. For long, the alpine ghost was the soul of wilderness in public imagination. But in Suryawanshi's telling, the snow leopard lives cheek by jowl with humans, even if they rarely ever see it. In doing so, he breaks free of the mystical aura conjured by Matthiessen and casts a long sunbeam not only on this most enigmatic cat but what it means to live with it.