Author: Sy Montgomery
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 230
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143028413
Description
This is not only a life and death adventure story but a journey through one of the strangest places in the world. This book tells us all about the peculiar relationship between tigers and their human prey, how it feels to know that as a human being you are, to the tiger, merely a source of meat.
The Sundarbans, a huge, swampy area in the Bay of Bengal, remains the largest tract of mangrove forest on the face of the earth and is the only place where tigers eat men. Elsewhere in Asia, tigers are rapidly being hunted to extinction, but here they are the hunters, routinely carrying away fishermen, honey gatherers and woodcutters and feasting on human flesh.
Sy Montgomery has devoted years to this mist-shrouded, forest screened region, and in ‘spell of the Tiger’, she tells us all about the peculiar relationship between tigers and their human prey, how it feels to know that as a human being you are, to the tiger, merely a source of meat.
Although they fear tiger attacks, the men and women of Sundarbans have turned the tiger into an object of veneration. Montgomery investigates the strange forms of tiger worship. She comes to the conclusion that Sundarbans has been protected from destruction by the tigers who prevent humankind from destroying their own habitat.
Contents
Introduction
A Note on spelling and pronunciation
Sundarbans: A First encounter
With an Open Mouth
The Songs of Rabindranath
The Tiger is watching
Yesterday
The Sacred breath of God
Tiger Tracer
Bonobibi Puja
Lost
Tiger God of the Jungle
Possession
Between heaven and Earth
As if it had fire in it
Dreams of Tigers
Epilogue: The Kali Yuga
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgements
To Help Save the Tiger