TIGER,LION AND THE INDIAN CRAB

“The forest which has tigers should never be cut, nor should the tigers be chased away from the forest.” 

Mahabharata

I was drawn to animals from an early age, my fascination starting with the elephant whose pencil sketch I saw on my green coloured cover of Titagarh Paper Mills manufactured exercise book. I was also drawn to the she-wolf whose picture of suckling Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, appeared in my first history books. But what interested me more was the whole lot of myths, legends and symbolism woven around animals.

I have always been bemused to see fashionable women  judge you not by what you are but by the traits of the animal of your sun sign ? Such animalistic evaluation makes one feel kind of weird but then I guess  this is what life is all about. But let me confess, I, too, have fallen prey to it and religiously check up, even before the menu card, the paper mat in Bar-b-Q restaurant in Park Street, to check up  which animal denotes the year I was born in the Chinese calendar.

I was especially drawn to Native American mythologies which held that boundaries between the human and animal were so much blurred that bears appear as humans wearing coats made of bearskins. I repeatedly wondered whether such stories inspired some of the touristy Bengalis I saw who would dress like  monkeys during winters for the warmth it assures, even though monkeys are not normally associated with cold climates. 

Animals have been assigned various traits which are found or desirable in human beings and have inspired many martial arts and military tactics.They have also inspired analytical tools for determining types of personality of human beings:   the Myers- Briggs test is a tool to ascertain what is an individual's animal personality from a clutch consisting of owl, fox, sloth, lion, deer, octopus, cat, otter, wolf, dolphin, honey bee, beaver, dog, meerkat, parrot and elephant.

However, of even greater interest is depiction of a country's ideal symbolically through a mascot, called the National animal which good quizzers had to remember : the US has the Bald Eagle, Germany the Black Eagle , New Zealand the Kiwi, Nepal the cow and so and and so forth. Some countries, fearful of the wrath of other animals, and probably of the gods they may represent, have, in addition to the National animal,  chosen a clutch of other animals under different categories. India celebrates its faunal pluralism by

accommodating many- so even though the national animal is  the tiger, the peacock is the national bird, the Ganges Dolphin the National Aquatic Animal, the Elephant the National Heritage Mammal  and the Grey langur as the  National mammal ( as if the tiger, elephant and the Ganges Dolphin are not mammals!). 

An interesting thing I found was the competitiveness between the tiger and the lion, primarily , if not solely in India, because this country is the only one where the two co-exist and also probably because its people have been called argumentative by its most illustrious Nobel prize winner for economics . Let us dig deep into history and see how the cult of these two magnificent beasts have emerged, and how the importance has seen a see- saw fluctuation.

Paradoxically, even though the lion would lose at least nine times out of ten to a tiger in a duel, it is not the more powerful of the two which is associated, by very many cultures ( including England which does not have lions), as part of imperial symbolism. 

The tiger did not exist, like in Europe, Africa, Middle East which were home to the lions alone.  So if the lion came to be regarded as symbols of divinity in ancient Egypt, of royalty in Mesopotamia and Acaemenid Persia ( whose flag till 1979 had the Shir-va- khorshid or sun and lion emblem) , as a transport for royalty like the Assyrian Goddess Inana  which Saddam Hussain appropriated much later on for his Lion of Babylon tank (with technology imported from a Russian model),   immortalised  as the zodiac sign of Sun fromthe legend of the Persian Sun god Mithra, and  take the pride of place at the entrance of temples  and public buildings beginning with the Temple Mountain at Troy and in numerous friezes, sculpture and paintings it would not have caught the goat of the tiger.

The tiger would not have lost much sleep either when the lion became the emblem of the tribe of Judah, stamped its preeminence in the Jewish world as symbol of the capital city of Jerusalem, came to be associated with Mark the Evangelist and thought to represent Jesus' Resurrection. He wouldn't have been embittered even when the lion wove its importance in the Islamic world not only as one of the four beings that support Allah's throne or came to be adopted, through its Mongolian and Turkish name Arsalan, as titles by many Seljuk and Ottoman rulers. There would have no disappointment to see the lion swamp the British Isles, home to neither of the two beasts, as the major charge in heraldry and royal insignia and symbols.

But where the tiger would have felt real bad, cheated  and exclaimed a "WTF" would have been to see itself being beaten by the lion in the world of ideas and symbols in India which was the only country where the two co-existed. To begin with, the tiger came first, about 12000 years ago from East Asia and occupied huge swathes of the country.  Its presence has been confirmed by the Harrappan seals, even as the lion was absent. The lion  came much later, after the decline of the Harrappan culture, after the drying of Saraswati and associated  climatic changes made north west India much drier than what it was during Harrappan times. The earliest artefact depicting a lion in the subcontinent, a golden goblet , was found in Balochistan, and is , therefore, thought to have come from Iran.

But once the lion became a familiar animal in the subcontinent, it was quickly appropriated by Indian culture - becoming a symbol of royal power and bravery. The use of lions in symbols and signage gained importance in India from the second half of the first millennium, with the rise of the great Hindu kingdoms- the mahajanpadas, Mauryas and Guptas. Piyadassi, or Ashok the Great, installed the lions on top of his pillars, and the lion continued to be the favoured animal of the Guptas, Firozeshah Tughlaq , down to the Mughals and even the British.  The Sarnath Lion on top of the Dharam Chakra is the National Emblem of free India. The word for throne in Sanskrit and many Indian languages is singhasana or the Lion's seat, thus making the Lion and the king virtually inseparable.

The lion quickly moved into the centre stage  of Hindu mythology primarily due to its association as the vaahan Durga rides while slaying Mahishasur and as Narsimhan or the Man-Lion, the avatar of Vishnu who saved Prahlad.  It appeared in the dream of Mahavira's mother before he was born Gautam Budhha's first sermon was called simhanada, the lion's roar, and he himself came to be known as Sakyasimha, the lion of Sakyas.  It also became the vehicle of two bodhisattavas, Majushri and Avalokiteshwara. Communities proud of their martial tradition, such as Rajputs and Sikhs ( it is interesting to note that Prahlad is mentioned 27 times in Guru granthsahib) , commonly use Singh as their surname.

Meanwhile, in India, the tiger was reduced to localised importance as the vehicle of Lord Ayappan in Kerala, amongst the Warli tribe in Maharsahtra who worship Vaghdevata, the tiger god, and was held in reverence in Nagaland. Its major importance lay in the form of  tiger skin the rishi or the yogi preferred to sit on as  it denoted creative energy and conquest of lust and the mind. The tiger suffered further due to organised shooting, which along with holding lavish Durga Puja celebrations, were two major ploys by natives to cultivate  the British . While the Durga Pujas prospered and proliferated, the tiger population saw a steep decline. When the nation became free in 1947, it was the Lion, and not the Tiger, which was declared as the national animal of India. 

Fortunately, in 1973, the environmentalists, alarmed at the decline in tiger population, replaced the lion as the national animal with the tiger. It was a great move and put the focus on saving the tiger and its habitat and brings in substantial foreign exchange because the tiger also fulfils the same function what the monarchy does in Britain : brings in the tourists. However, even before the

environmentalists, the Reserve Bank of India had done its two bit for the tiger by replacing the lion which had featured along with a palm tree as the symbol in  the original East India Double Mohur, with that of the tiger.

There is no denying the fact the tiger held its ground as the leading symbol of imperial power in China, Korea and also became the national animal of Malaysia, South Korea and Bangladesh.  It came to be associated with high virility, though this led to its widespread hunting for the aphrodisiacal powers it held out. Its robustness accounted for the many countries of East Asia, viz., Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong,  who maintained high levels of economic growth and rapid industrialisation from 1960s to 1990s  onwards, to be called Asian tigers.

But even then, in many of these countries, the tiger was forced to share space with the lion ( which was absolutely non existent here)  as a result of the activities of Indian Buddhist and Hindu missionaries. Buddhist missionaries introduced the lions to China, Indonesia, Cambodia and Burma. The stylised depictions of the beast  in these countries is the result of the artists 'unfamiliarity with the sight of the beast. The lion plays an important role in the Mahavamsa, a Pali epic , which is the foundation myth of the Sinhalese ( sinhala or the lion people) people of Sri Lanka. What could have been most definitely a tiger was mistaken as a lion by Sang Nila Uttama,  a 14th century Sumatran Malay prince, who on the advice of his Chief Minister named the island Singapore-  Singa which was Malay for lion and pur for city!

While actual fight between the two could not have been seen by many, history has been replete with the symbolic fight between the two. The Seringapatnam medal, which  displays the words Asad Allah al-ghalib ( God's Lion conquers) commemorated the British (lions)  victory in 1799 at the battle of Seringapatnam  over Tipu Sultan  ( tiger). The tiger first struck back symbolically over the lion when Netaji chose it to be  depicted  on the flag of the Azad Hind Fauj as a challenge to the British royalty symbols of tiger . This probably inspired the Eelam separatists  of Sri Lanka to call themselves and use the symbol of Tiger in their fight against the majority Sinhalese country on whose flag is emblazoned a stylised lion.  

However, the tiger could be under a fresh attack yet. One doesn't know whether there was any other intention or not, but when Make in India campaign was launched, the logo that was chosen was that of a lion consisting of cogs , probably to position it as different and yet no less robust than  the earlier economic giants from Asia called the Asian Tigers. But what is a clear -cut challenge to the tiger is the  move of the Rajya Sabha MP from Jharkhand Parimal Nathwanii who has sent a proposal to the environment ministry which in turn has passed it on to the National Board for Wild Life to declare the lion as the national animal.

So what is your pick, the Tiger or the Lion? Pi or Lion King? Or should we settle in for a compromise formula and have either the liger or tigon? Or you think that it is more important to save both the beasts and not quibble over symbols? Do you think that lion had an unfairly long innings of pre- eminence because the royalty , whose male members were slothful,  identified with the beast who moved around with his harem and ate of his lionesses' efforts? Or do you think that the tiger represents the way we humans want to live our lives- without inhibitions, with our instincts and passion?

Or should we push aside both and make the Indian Crab the national animal of India?