Arjan Singh remains one of India’s most celebrated conservationists and authorities on wildlife. Based since 1959 in Tiger Haven, his farm in Uttar Pradesh five miles away from the Nepal border, he helped establish and gain official recognition for the Dudhwa National Park. From here, Arjan Singh studied the varied wildlife of the area, reared and successfully returned to the wild a tigress and two leopards and, generally, waged a crusade against environmental destruction. Above all, he studied and was a spokesman for the tiger. In 1976 he was awarded the World Wildlife Fund Gold Medal in recognition of his field work.

The Legend of the Maneater is a book with a definite purpose. It aims to spread the message that wildlife, particularly the tiger and other large predators, must be protected far more effectively than at present: ‘This is essential not only because animals are wonderful in themselves, but because their presence in the wild is the surest way of stemming environmental degradation and the best indicator of the environmental health of our planet.’

The first four chapters of this book deftly and wittily evoke the author’s childhood and youth and show his evolution to becoming a conservationist. He emphasizes that the desire to kill compulsively is not an atavistic inheritance in human beings, ‘but a deep complex of redirected aggression triggered by an insufficiency in the so-called sport hunter.’

In the thirteen chapters that follow, the author eloquently refutes an entire gamut of misconceptions concerning the great predators which have accumulated over the ages, and which have been used to justify the wanton destruction of the tiger in particular. He illustrates his argument with case histories of some man eaters he was associated with: tigers take to maneating only under extreme pressure and entirely because of human interference in tiger habitats.