On the tiger trail, India’s women unveil and roar ahead in tourism

Female nature-based tour­ism guides in India, such as at the Pench Tiger Reserve in Mad­hya Pra­desh, are help­ing to upend sex­ist views, accord­ing to a report by the Thom­son Reu­ters Foundation.

Bob­bing along a dirt track in a cent­ral Indi­an tiger reserve, Var­sha Hinge sur­veyed the land­scape for paw­prints and listened out for deer calls warn­ing of tigers before hold­ing up a fin­ger for silence — as a tigress appeared in front of her jeep.

Hinge is one of 10 women safari guides at the Pench Tiger Reserve who are earn­ing their stripes through long days help­ing tour­ists catch a glimpse of tigers, leo­pards and wolves.

From entre­pren­eurs to res­taur­at­eurs, dozens of women liv­ing near the nation­al park are break­ing with tra­di­tion in Mad­hya Pra­desh, where vil­lage women veil them­selves in front of men and are usu­ally con­fined to their homes as moth­ers and homemakers.

“In the begin­ning, I was very hes­it­ant and I doubted myself, think­ing I would­n’t be able to do this,” said Hinge, ahead of Inter­na­tion­al Women’s Day on Friday.

“I live in a vil­lage with my in-laws and (ini­tially) I just could­n’t get com­fort­able with the idea of wear­ing pants and shirts in front of them,” the moth­er-of-two told the Thom­son Reu­ters Foundation.

The jour­ney has not been easy for these women. Girls in Mad­hya Pra­desh often drop out of school young and wed soon after to live a restric­ted life bound by age-old customs.

The female guides are help­ing to upend sex­ist views in India, which has one of the fast­est grow­ing major eco­nom­ies glob­ally but start­lingly few female employ­ees, in large part due to pre­ju­dice against work­ing women.

Only about one in four women work in India — home to 1.3 bil­lion people — which is a lower rate than in most coun­tries, accord­ing to the World Bank.

With no pri­or work exper­i­ence and homes full of chil­dren and in-laws, the women had to over­come not only their own anxi­et­ies but also stiff oppos­i­tion at home and in their new workplace.

Hinge said it took a lot of coax­ing to get her hus­band’s support.

“I real­ised that as a home­maker, I would be lim­ited to the four walls of my house and would­n’t grow or con­trib­ute any­thing to my fam­ily,” she said.

“So, I decided to con­vince every­one and go for the job.”

Evil eye

For­sak­ing their tra­di­tion­al sar­is and kur­ta tunics, the nation­al park’s first 10 female guides under­went months of train­ing in spot­ting big cats to pre­pare for their unusu­al jobs, where they spend hours cooped up in jeeps with strangers.

“Before this, I did­n’t even know how to inter­act with people prop­erly … or know what the word for ‘tree’ or ‘bird’ was in Eng­lish,” said safari guide Sunanda Kaw­al, 24.

“But after join­ing, I’ve seen a great improve­ment in myself. I’ve gained a lot of know­ledge and my fears have star­ted to fade away.”

As a series of safari jeeps lined up to enter the park, one male guide advised a tour­ist to stick with the men “if you really want the best exper­i­ence”, say­ing his women coun­ter­parts were not as qualified.

The women guides said such com­ments were com­mon. Most of the 50-odd male guides remain bit­ter, three years after the women joined their ranks, say­ing they are not up to the job and are tak­ing their share of safari rides and pay, the women said.

Guides can earn up to 12,000 rupees ($170) a month — far exceed­ing the aver­age for a rur­al Indi­an household.

“The male guides did­n’t want us to work here at all. Even now, they keep to them­selves and talk to each oth­er, but not us,” said Kaw­al, adding that her male col­leagues accuse the women of “cast­ing an evil eye” on the park.

Hinge’s hus­band Pra­deep Kumar, also a safari guide, said he was ostra­cised by his work­mates for sup­port­ing his wife.

Yet he believes female safari guides have some­thing new to offer — to their com­munit­ies and customers.

“We have seen a change in the women since they got these jobs. It allows them to earn money and that auto­mat­ic­ally makes a dif­fer­ence at home and with­in the fam­ily,” said Kumar.

“Plus, there are always some women guests who come here and say, ‘We want a woman guide, not a man’. That way it is a win-win.”

Change

While male guides may still be icy, the women say vil­la­gers have star­ted warm­ing up to them after noti­cing the extra money they bring home, with many now sup­port­ive of their girls work­ing out­side the home.

That was one of the main goals for the Sat­puda Found­a­tion, which helps women to make and sell everything from pickles to takeaway meals as part of its com­munity-based con­ser­va­tion work in the area — one of the world’s largest tiger landscapes.

“We have seen a change in atti­tude of loc­als,” said Kis­hor Rithe, the char­ity’s founder. “The tiger def­in­itely plays an import­ant role in the women’s eco­nom­ic development.”

Stud­ies show that women who have fin­an­cial con­trol invest more in their chil­dren’s edu­ca­tion, health­care, busi­nesses and com­munit­ies, which can be a step out of poverty.

One of the Sat­puda Found­a­tion’s latest ini­ti­at­ives is the Mowgli Res­taur­ant — a small, dimly lit road­side eat­ery named after the boy in Rud­y­ard Kip­ling’s child­hood clas­sic “The Jungle Book”, which is believed to have been inspired by Pench.

Col­lect­ively owned and run by eight vil­lage women, the ven­ture has made nearly 40,000 rupees since open­ing in Decem­ber, serving rice, dals, cur­ries and snacks to a grow­ing num­ber of cus­tom­ers on their way to and from the park.

Sand­hya Dah­er­w­al heads a loc­al women’s group which helped to set up the res­taur­ant and oth­er small busi­nesses that have giv­en about 100 women their own source of income since 2015.

“I wanted to do some­thing with my life and I was­n’t going to let some naysay­ers stop me,” she said.

“Suc­cess speaks for itself. When you do well, your respect in soci­ety auto­mat­ic­ally rises. And thanks to the tigers here, that is happening.”

($1 = 70.7520 Indi­an rupees) 

Fea­tured image: A group of women safari guides poses for a photo at Pench Tiger Reserve in cent­ral Mad­hya Pra­desh state, India on May 19, 2016. By Sat­puda Found­a­tion via Thom­son Reu­ters Found­a­tion. “GT” cropped and enhanced it.

Source: The Thom­son Reu­ters Found­a­tion, the char­it­able arm of Thom­son Reu­ters. Report­ing by Annie Banerji; edit­ing by Katy Migiro.