On July 29, a new documentary anthology India: Epic Wild Stories premiered on Warner Bros. Discovery’s Animal Planet India channel.
The anthology will feature monthly premieres and will span diverse ecosystems across India, celebrating its extraordinary biodiversity through the lens of acclaimed filmmakers.
It intends to offer audiences a deeper understanding of India’s natural world and the people working to protect it.
India: Epic Wild Stories kickstarts with a brand-new series Shared Spaces, which is being hosted by award winning environmental journalist Bahar Dutt and filmed by Emmy-nominated wildlife filmmaker and four times National Award-winning cinematographer, photographer, and conservationist Vijay Bedi and his brother Ajay, known as the Bedi Brothers.
Shared Spaces features journeys across the forests, mountains, coastlines and grasslands of India, intending to uncover the evolving relationship between people and wildlife.
Shared Spaces will be followed by four other documentaries by acclaimed Indian wildlife filmmakers.
Each will offer a unique perspective on India’s diverse landscapes and wildlife.
The project is a collaboration with Noida-based The Habitats Trust, which integrates community conservation by working directly with indigenous groups, local stakeholders, and forest departments.
Down To Earth spoke to Dutt and the Bedi Brothers about the anthology, especially the opening series, Shared Spaces, the conservation scene in India, the richness of its biodiversity and the road ahead. Excerpts:
Rajat Ghai (RG): The title Shared Spaces is interesting. In a day and age when global conservation continues to be dominated by Western themes such as ‘Fortress Conservation’, can this project help in dispelling those notions?
Bahar Dutt (BD): Yes. The process to dispel these notions has to start with the way we tell our stories. This was the thought behind the series as well: We have to think of wildlife and humans as living in a continuum. That is how the idea came about. So, every story that has been chosen is with that lens, which is that we need more home-grown India stories. We also need stories which look at the challenges that India is facing. For instance, if there is a linear infrastructure project coming up, how does one plan with wildlife rather than against it?
RG: How did you zero in on the subject matter of the six episodes that make up Shared Spaces?
BD: Shared Spaces consists of six episodes and each episodes features three stories. stories that showcase myriad forms of human wildlife interactions.
We have tried to do it in a more documentary format and not with any preconceived notions tied to scripts or shots.
We thus spent a lot of time just talking to people on the ground. Let me give the instance of a community in southern Bengal where there is a human-wildlife conflict problem. Interestingly, in that location we came across a very unique practice involving the forest department feeding wild elephants. In conservation parlance, this is called ‘supplementary feeding’ or ‘diversionary feeding’. This has not been shown to really work, in that it does not resolve conflict.
While it is a noble act, is it helping resolve conflict by feeding large quantities of vegetables to wild elephants? We also found, to our surprise, that the forest department was escorting local children to school in vehicles during their board exams. Again, a noble act, perhaps again symbolising the ways in which we are living with wildlife.
There is a lot of bad stuff happening. But there is also a lot of goodwill for wildlife, as we found during the course of making this film. I go back always to the lens of science and data to decide if conservation is working or not in these shared spaces and certainly not through a Western conservation gaze.
How did we sift through the stories? For one, we intended to cover different landscapes from the mountains to the desert to the sea. Second, we today talk a lot about a ‘New India’. Yet, our conservation stories are still very tiger-centric and focus a lot on legally protected areas.
Which is why in this series, we have done the first documentation of the breeding cycle of the salamander, an amphibian species. Now, everybody knows Darjeeling for tea, tourism and the toy train. But how many really come there to see the salamander? These animals are found in seasonal or ‘ephemeral’ ponds. Those ponds are shrinking and have no legal protection. How do you protect them?
Another episode features a story about the inter-tidal zone in Gujarat. In this landscape, one finds a rainforest between the sea and land. We found this place to be unprotected as well. Tourists were walking there and there were packets of chips thrown about. We do not fully know the biodiversity of this location. Again, the language of conservation has to be changed here: Instead of always going for a tiger safari, why not take children to an inter-tidal zone and do ‘tide pooling’?
RG: What did you find among the younger generation about the drive to conserve India’s wildlife during this project?
BD: Through my interactions, I have found that there is a lot of interest in wildlife. However, people, whether young or otherwise, do not know what to do. We may keep on saying that forests are getting diverted and trees are being cut. But what does an average citizen do?
In that context, this series also focuses on solutions. It shows what forest officers are doing. Or showcases an AI-generated technology that is working for wildlife. So, it spotlights solutions. And given the energy of Gen Z, who wants solutions, it gives them that. People are thus more likely to make this a conversation about what they need to do.
Conservation which inspires action would be my goal for a younger generation and as I said, the only way to do that is to say here is what needs to be done.
RG: Vijay, how challenging was it for you as a filmmaker to capture this whole panorama of landscapes across India for this project?
Vijay Bedi (VB): India is changing. A ‘New India’ needs new stories. A lot of reportage on India from a Western conservation gaze tends to leave out communities. Whereas wildlife and humans have been sharing space in this subcontinent since centuries.
The idea was thus to tell stories focusing on this aspect. Hence, we decided to highlight the Bugun Liocichla (Liocichla bugunorum). It is one of the rarest and most celebrated songbirds on earth.
It is completely endemic to a tiny patch of land outside of Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh. The land belonged to the Bugun tribe. Listed as Critically Endangered, conservationists estimate that only about 14 to 20 breeding pairs remain in the wild.
The bird is named after the eponymous Bugun tribe of Arunachal Pradesh’s West Kameng district and inhabits the Singchung Bugun Village Community Reserve, which is community land just outside the Eaglenest protected area. The tribe donated its land to conserve this bird.
Filming the Bugun in its native environment was a very challenging task. The area that it inhabits is cloud forest and is damp, misty and wet. We filmed for 15-17 days in the same spot to get a few seconds of footage.
Another challenging task was to film the salamander in Darjeeling. It may be a small amphibian, but it enjoys Schedule I status like the tiger. However, while so much research has been done on the tiger, this creature is unknown to many.
We were lucky to be able to film its entire breeding behaviour for the first time. My twin brother Ajay Bedi, who is a master editor, used opera music in the sequence where the salamanders encircle each other in a unique mating ritual. This addition in the background made the complex ritual visually more appealing and relatable to audiences. As storytellers, we were thus able to convey the message that these creatures are as beautiful and charismatic as the tiger and that we need to save them.