Latika Nath
“From a young girl who dreamt of becoming an ecologist to facing the impasse of patriarchy, I’ve had a fair share of obstacles in my way. But I survived, for I wanted to live with the tigers.” (Latika, 2021)
Growing Up in the Dachigam, Dalhousie, and Assam
The alabaster whites and emerald greens of Kashmir’s Dachigam National Park pulled out the wanderer in young Latika, who wished more than anything to return from school every day and spend her time with all animals that came her way. From frolicking with chickens and elephants to sighting Hangul and black bears, Latika spent her childhood on the back of nature's hand, going on hunting and fishing trips alongside her father, who, besides being a prolific doctor, was at that time a major conservation spokesperson for when India was finding its feet and erecting the Wildlife India Act and Project Tiger.
“My parents tell me the first time I went into the wild, I was just about twenty days old.” (Latika, 2025)
Latika's time away from Dachigam was spent in the broad expanse of her great-grandparents' house in Dalhousie, Himachal or the nooks and niches of her uncle's tea estate in Assam. At the impressionable age of four, Latika spotted her first tiger in Corbett National Park while on elephant back.
“There was a big tiger in tall elephant grass, and we were on elephant back when the tiger charged at us, and I was mesmerised. And from that day onwards I’ve had posters of tigers up on my wall.” (Latika, 2025)
Being in nature’s lush lap and being surrounded by great influences from the early conservation circle in India, like Dr M.K. Ranjitsinh, Anne Wright (Project Tiger, India), Dr Charles McDougal and Dr Seidensticker (Smithsonian Tiger Project, Nepal), Latika had already decided to become an ecologist at the age of six, a passion that only took root and flourished as she grew. And from that scaling tree, as she left for Delhi for her undergraduate, she took with her a promising fruit of wanting to return to Dachigam to work on the elusive snow leopards someday.
Elephants in Rajaji
Delhi University was the only place back then in the country offering an undergraduate degree in environmental sciences, and at 16, Latika realised she was going to have to sacrifice college life and deal with multiple uncertainties to continue in this course, but her perseverance led to her selection for the Chevening Scholarship by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This opened up new avenues and Latika went on to obtain a master's in rural resource management from the School of Forestry at the University College of North Wales, Bangor. She decided to work on computer techniques like remote sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) to plot variation in habitats of species.
Away from the snow-pillowed valleys of Dachigam, Latika was now in Rajaji, a forested region straddling the dense Western Ghats on one side and the fertile Gangetic River plains of India on the other. She was here to carry out her master’s project on human-elephant conflict with the help of the Wildlife Institute of India. This experience deepened her fascination with integrating technology with wildlife studies, a knowledge that would, in the future, help her understand the country’s biggest cat.
Incendiary Bombs, a Buried Dream, and a Different Path
Equipped with proficiency and fervour, Latika felt drawn back to the North of India to carry out her PhD on snow leopards. But in 1991 a tragedy rocked the lives of Latika and her family. A terrorist attack in Kashmir.
“The attack killed eight people and burnt down the house. After that I never went back… I’ve not had the courage to go back.” (Latika, personal communication).
Fortunately, her family managed to escape but not without leaving her with a permanent dread. However, while she was quietly, painfully, putting away her wish to work on snow leopards, the voice of a mentor pulled her out to look for grander opportunities.
“Will you take up the challenge of doing the first scientific study on tigers in India?” (Dr H. S. Pawar (Past Director of WII) to Latika, Latika 2020).
Conservation and Management of Tigers in Bandhavgarh
There was barely any talk of Indian women in the conservation field when Latika began her PhD on tigers in (19XX), and while she worked with established scientists like Dr Ullas Karanth, Latika found like-minded woman colleagues in the warm company of Ruchi Badola, Sumita Mukherjee, Neema Manjrekar and her junior Vidya Atreya, all of whom went on to weave grand stories of their own.
“There were not many role models for an Indian woman-to-be-conservationist to look up to at that time.” (Latika, personal communication)
However, not once did Latika feel out of place when she was on the field, tracking various tigers day in and day out. She was pioneering research on Bengal tigers in India, monitoring their behaviour and prey-predator interactions, and assessing the impact of being in regular contact with a big cat on the local village people. The little girl with animal posters in her room was now on the ground, and the tigers she came across during her fieldwork of five long years continued to inspire awe in her.
“Every Tiger has a personality and a character and a history.” (Latika, 2025)
Bandhavgarh is a different creature when one enters the undisturbed cores of the jungle, and Latika intended to chronicle all of the tigers in the national park. It was gruelling but fulfilling work. On many days and nights Latika and her team of two, her driver and an assistant, were the only visitors in the thickets of the jungle, tracking a tiger’s daily activities in the jeep or sometimes even on foot. It was a delicate game of maintaining a respectable distance from the tigers while also observing them with precision. It was here that Latika began clicking photos of the animals for anecdotal and personal data collection.
And much like Dr Goodall and her chimpanzees or Dr Fossey’s mountain gorillas, many a tiger grew used to Latika’s presence. Sita was a majestic tigress, a mother of many cubs and an icon in the national park. Latika fondly remembers the interesting maternal instincts Sita would show by leaving her cubs near the jeep while she hunted for prey or rested nearby, almost entrusting Latika as a nanny for the baby tigers.
On the other side of the spectrum of peculiar behaviours was a male tiger named Charger, a big and rough cat with the most brilliant bright yellow eyes and the largest territory in Bandhavgarh. Every time Charger entered an area in front of the jeep, it was a grandiose show filled with growls, but curiously, Charger only meddled with and stole prey caught by his females or wild dogs, and Latika never saw him make an active kill in all of the years. In fact, he had a rather funny and eccentric personality.
“While I was on Bandheli, a young female elephant, we met Charger. The terrain was full of hillocks and we followed Charger down a small hill, at the bottom of which were six chitals (spotted deer) and a fawn. Now tigers are traditionally very quiet animals. But Charger looked back at us, almost mischiveously and took off at full speed down the hill, running noisily through the leaf litter and skidded to a halt in front of the shocked baby deer. There he was, standing tall, with the fawn at his chin. And he just reached out and almost patted the deer and walked off.” (Latika, 2025)
Camera Traps in the Jungle and Trunk Calls Back Home
This was an era of STD calls and analog cameras and Latika wished to advance the state of tiger monitoring. Back then, forest officers mostly followed tiger trails and distinguished between tigers based on transient pugmarks in the ground. These marks were traced with a marker by laying a glass or acrylic sheet on the ground and recorded for data keeping.
Latika felt she could apply more advanced technology, and with the help of Dr Karanth and a team of engineering students at IIT Bombay, she managed to manually MacGyver camera traps using normal point-and-shoot cameras and security infrared motion sensors.
Latika successfully set up twenty-four pairs of them across Bandhawgarh. The cameras were crude, not very waterproof, limited to a battery life of two days and the length of the film, and had to be locked in iron boxes to prevent tampering or stealing. This meant that once a setup was up and running, it was a game of fate and chance as to what sort of an animal would trigger the trap to take photos and whether it would be of any value for the project.
“If you had a monkey jumping in front of the camera, and thirty-six images were finished, that was that film over. And you would never know this until much later when you have processed the rolls!” (Latika, personal communication)
In such various ways, fieldwork during her PhD kept Latika on her toes and kept her working long hours. But every chance she got to return back to the closest city, she made sure to trunk call Delhi to convey her good health and well-being back home.
The Onslaught of a Heavily Male-Dominated Community
Latika remembers, with a sour taste in her mouth, the first of many times she was in a room full of men that were going to assess her potential to carry out her research work. She had applied for the INLAKS scholarship in India to support her PhD and the committee made remarks about her being too young and spoilt to work on such an important project.
“I was called the girl in chiffon sarees, who nobody believed could work in the field.” (Latika, 2021)
While quite a few people at the Wildlife Institute of India supported Latika, a male-centric, hostile, misogynistic environment kept Latika from progressing further. One of her supervisors, hailing from the same caste, wanted her to consider his principles as written in stone, which Latika knew went against the very rules of practising science. She decided to switch out of WII and continue her PhD under the guidance of Dr David Macdonald at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford, who showed her correspondences he had received saying he better not work with Latika. Latika managed to recover from this and finally she could focus all her attention on data collection and fieldwork in Bandhavgarh.
However, here too her work was hindered. A letter was sent to one of Latika’s grantors, questioning the authenticity of her research and accusing her of forging data, leading to the withdrawal of the grant. For one long year, all her research remained halted until a committee in the US verified that the data was original and she was given her grant back.
What followed for many years was a systematic harassment that denied her access to employment and opportunities. In (XXXX) Latika decided to apply as a member to the IUCN Cat Specialist Group and she was made to withdraw her application. Once, while in Malaysia, she came to know she was unjustly blacklisted from a position for which she was a top applicant.
“Male colleagues ensured that my work was buried. For almost twenty years, I’ve had people writing to people who were interviewing me for jobs, including international ones, and ensuring that I did not get the job.” (Latika, personal communications)
“The Tiger Princess”
Every time a new layer of bricks got added to the wall of patriarchy standing before her, Latika thought deeply about the tigers that would benefit from her research and she kept going. Four scholarships and five years later, in 2000, Latika had successfully obtained a PhD from Oxford and had become the first Indian to obtain her doctorate on tigers.
But that brick wall managed to compress and bury her work. The well-crafted thesis titled “Conservation and Management of the Tiger, Panthera tigris tigris, in Bandhavgarh National Park, India” that was a result of many years of pain and effort, which is now widely acknowledged internationally, was never credited and never referenced in the Indian conservation sphere. It became too much for Latika and she decided to move away from academia.
In the midst of all this, National Geographic caught sight of this enigmatic Indian woman, who came from a family of royals and had dared to work on tigers. And they named Latika, India’s Tiger Princess. At first the title felt superfluous to Latika, but over the years she realised that she was turning into the role model for the next generation of women conservation biologists. After the documentary that was shot with Latika, she continued working with NatGeo India to spread awareness about wildlife through their television channel.
“I will always realise my responsibility to meet people’s perception of being the ‘Tiger Princess’. But I think there’s a lot more to me than that.” (Latika, 2021)
Photography Post the Silencing of a Decade
Away from academia, back at her home too, Latika was facing a personal crisis. Her husband, Mr Nanda Rana, whom she had married during her PhD, ensured that Latika could not continue with her photography. Since after their separation, even after many years, Latika has had no access to the copies of pictures she took from her previous years.
In 2012, wanting to distance herself from her life in Delhi, Latika gathered up her courage to hold a camera again and start travelling. Even though her time had been made to stand still, technological advancements had zoomed by and Latika found herself unsure of being able to use digital cameras. But she started capturing nature the way she saw it, beautiful and radiant, through her eyes. And people were quick to notice.
"As a woman going into (such) fields, you need to understand that family life will always be an issue, but you need not be afraid; stand up, make yourself heard; there’s plenty of support for you out there. And if it is your dream to work in the field of conservation, there’s a whole community of us who are there to support you.” (Latika, 2021)
