It is often thought that hunters of wild animals are diametrically opposed to conservation principles. After all, if you cared about something then you wouldn’t kill them, right?
Arjan Singh’s life could have followed that narrative—except it didn’t. Born into a princely Sikh family in the Ahluwalia dynasty of Kapurthala in 1917, “Billy,” as he was popularly known, grew up amid the forests of northern India. He killed his first leopard at the age of 12, and his first tiger at 14. His fascination with wildlife increased when he went to school in Nainital and met the legendary hunter and author Jim Corbett.
As an adult, Singh would camp with his brothers and family to shoot leopards and tigers during Christmas. Story goes that one night he shot a leopard in front of the headlights of his vehicle, when he had an epiphany that he had no right to kill something he could not create himself. From that moment, he vowed to dedicate himself to protecting India's wild animals.
Conservation was a little-known concept in the years directly following India’s independence. But for Singh, it became his guiding passion. Reluctant to be separated from the Terai region and its animals, he took up farming on a plot of land on the outskirts of what is today the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve. Close to his favourite habitat, Singh had the opportunity to observe wildlife in its natural surroundings and lived there till his death.
In fact, he was instrumental in getting Dudhwa the distinction of a tiger reserve. This love for the Dudhwa forests compelled him to approach the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, to declare the area a tiger reserve under the Indian government’s “Project Tiger” initiative. He pursued the matter with great tenacity, and the area was finally declared a “Project Tiger” reserve in 1988. Today, Dudhwa National Park is home to tigers, elephants and rhinoceros. It is a prime landscape that connects the important tiger habitats of India and Nepal.
Singh’s most notable conservation was the reintroduction of leopards and a tiger to Dudhwa National Park. He raised an orphaned male leopard cub, called Prince, and successfully reintroduced him into the wild in 1973. To provide Prince with a mate, he raised two orphaned female cubs named Harriet and Juliette. He never caged the three animals, instead allowing them to run around the house and its environs with hopes to help the animals develop their wild instincts. This approach worked for Prince. However, the two female cubs died prematurely due to poisoning by local farmers, leaving Singh grief-stricken.
In 1976, Singh acquired a hand-reared female tiger cub named Tara from Twycross Zoo in the United Kingdom and reintroduced her to the landscape of Dudhwa National Park after obtaining permission from Prime Minister Gandhi. The tigress gave birth to a litter of cubs in the forest, which Singh said was a triumphant success as it would restore the local gene pool.
But controversy was not far behind. In the 1990s, some tigers in the protected area were observed to have a Siberian tiger phenotype: a large head, pale pelage, white complexion, and wide stripes. The Forest Department suspected them of being Bengal-Siberian tiger hybrids, so Singh sent hair samples of the tigers from the area to the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. The results revealed that the tigers in question had a Bengal tiger mitochondrial haplotype, indicating that their mother was a Bengal tiger. However, further analysis could not conclusively prove that Tara was the source of the Siberian tiger genes.
Singh was a recipient of many awards for his commitment to conservation. In 1995, he was awarded the Padma Shri; and a year later, he was honoured with the Netherlands’s Order of the Golden Ark for major contributions to nature conservation. In 2004, he received the coveted J Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Award by the World Wildlife Fund for innovation in the field of conservation and in creating public awareness. In 2006, Singh received the Padma Bhushan and the Yash Bharati Award, the latter of which is the highest civilian award conferred by Uttar Pradesh.
The conservationist also penned a number of books, including “Tiger Haven,” “Tara, a Tigress,” “Tiger! Tiger!” “A Tiger's Story” and “Watching India's Wildlife: The Anthology of a Lifetime.” To ensure that his work in conservation continued even after his death, Singh established the Tiger Haven Society in 1992.
Singh died at the age of 92 on January 1, 2010. His ashes were interred at his home of Tiger Haven, which has since been converted into a wildlife centre. But his stories of compassion and conservation live on.