Part 1 of 4 · IWN Indian Wildlife Multimedia Series
India’s relationship with its wildlife has always been deeply emotional — spiritual, even. It is no surprise that Bollywood and regional cinema have returned to this theme again and again, from tearjerker melodramas about elephants in the 1970s to gripping contemporary thrillers about poaching networks. This article surveys the most significant feature films in Indian cinema that centre on wildlife, conservation, and the human-animal bond.
The early years: animals as protagonists
Long before wildlife conservation entered mainstream discourse, Indian cinema was already placing animals at the heart of its stories. These early films were less concerned with ecology and more with the emotional lives of their animal characters — and the humans devoted to them.
Haathi Mere Saathi (1971)
Arguably the film that defined the human-animal bond genre in Indian cinema, Haathi Mere Saathi starred Rajesh Khanna as Raju, a man who lives with four elephants and refuses to part with them even for the woman he loves. The film was a massive commercial success and sparked a wave of animal-centric films in Hindi cinema throughout the 1970s. Its emotional core — that animals are family — resonated deeply with Indian audiences and remains culturally relevant today.
Hathi (1999)
A later entry in the elephant-drama tradition, Hathi explored the relationship between a mahout and his elephant against the backdrop of forest communities and the pressures of development. While less celebrated than Haathi Mere Saathi, the film continued the tradition of using elephants as emotional anchors for stories about loyalty, loss, and belonging.
Regional adaptations and jungle narratives
India’s diverse regional cinema traditions — Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada — have each brought their own sensibility to wildlife storytelling, often drawing on local folklore and the particular ecosystems of their regions.
The Jungle Book (1994, Hindi)
Shyam Benegal’s live-action Hindi adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s classic is one of the few serious cinematic treatments of the Mowgli story by an Indian director. Unlike the animated Disney versions, Benegal’s film was grounded in the physical reality of Indian forests and treated its animal characters with naturalistic respect. The film starred Sahila Chadha and was notable for its lush location photography in actual Indian jungle settings.
Cheeta (1994)
This Tamil film followed the bond between a boy and a cheetah, exploring themes of friendship across species boundaries. Made during a period when the cheetah had already been declared extinct in India (the last recorded cheetahs were shot in 1947), the film carried an elegiac quality, even if unintentionally.
Contemporary cinema: crime, conservation, and complexity
More recent Indian productions have moved beyond the simple human-animal bond narrative to engage with the political and criminal dimensions of wildlife — poaching, habitat destruction, and the often-corrupt machinery of forest governance.
Sherni (2021)
Directed by Amit Masurkar and starring Vidya Balan, Sherni is one of the most thoughtful Indian films ever made about the intersection of wildlife, bureaucracy, and gender. Balan plays Vidya Vincent, a forest officer posted to a district in Madhya Pradesh where a tigress has begun attacking villagers and livestock. The film’s central tension is not between humans and tiger, but between Vidya’s genuine desire to manage the situation humanely and the political pressures — from local politicians, senior officials, and hunting lobbies — that push toward the tigress’s destruction.
What makes Sherni distinctive is its refusal of easy heroism. The tigress is never quite the villain, and the villagers whose livelihoods are threatened are never quite wrong either. Masurkar is more interested in the systems that create these conflicts — encroachment on forest land, the pressures on forest officers to please politicians rather than protect ecosystems, the casual corruption of the wildlife management apparatus — than in resolving them neatly. The film was released on Amazon Prime and received critical acclaim, with Balan’s restrained performance widely praised as one of her finest.
Poacher (2024)
Richie Mehta’s gripping Amazon Prime series — though technically a streaming production rather than a theatrical film — is perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of wildlife crime in Indian screen history. Based on the true story of one of India’s largest ivory poaching networks, uncovered by the Kerala Forest Department in 2015, Poacher follows the investigation across Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, and Delhi.
The series is notable for several reasons: it treats its forest officer protagonists as complex human beings rather than heroes; it gives space to the economic desperation that drives many low-level poachers; and it portrays the ivory trade’s international dimensions with a level of detail rarely seen in Indian productions. Shot on location across multiple states, Poacher is essential viewing for anyone interested in the intersection of wildlife and Indian society.
What these films tell us
Taken together, Indian wildlife feature films reflect a journey from sentimental attachment to political awareness. The early films anthropomorphised animals, making them stand-ins for human emotional needs. Contemporary productions are more likely to situate wildlife within systems — economic, political, ecological — and to ask harder questions about who benefits from conservation and who pays the price.
What remains constant is the centrality of the human-animal relationship. Indian cinema has never been comfortable with pure nature documentaries; it needs a human story at the centre. But increasingly, that human story is being told with greater nuance, and the animals in it are treated with greater respect.
Next in this series: Part 2 covers Indian wildlife documentaries, from Mike Pandey’s pioneering work to the landmark BBC/Netflix production Land of the Tiger.
Pooja Parvati is the author of IWN’s Jungle Stories series, covering Indian wildlife in cinema, literature, and the arts.