Part 4 of 8 · IWN Indian Wildlife Multimedia Series

India’s biodiversity does not sort itself neatly by species. It sorts itself by landscape. The Western Ghats produce a different kind of life from the high Himalayas. The Aravallis shelter animals the Sundarbans would never see. To understand Indian wildlife on screen is, in large part, to understand the documentary traditions that have grown up around particular ecosystems — the filmmakers who have chosen a place and stayed with it, in some cases for decades, until they knew it well enough to show it properly.

The Western Ghats: India’s biodiversity engine

The Western Ghats run for nearly 1,600 kilometres along India’s western coast. They are older than the Himalayas, richer in endemic species than almost anywhere else on earth, and under pressure from every direction — plantation agriculture, hydroelectric projects, linear infrastructure cutting through forest corridors. They were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012, and a significant part of the case for that designation was made by Sandesh Kadur’s Sahyadris: Mountains of the Monsoon, which spent four years in the Ghats capturing the Nilgiri tahr rut, the lion-tailed macaque, and the purple frog — several on camera for the first time.

Shekar Dattatri’s Mindless Mining: The Tragedy of Kudremukh held a specific act of destruction up to the light — an iron ore mine operating inside Kudremukh National Park, stripping rainforest for over two decades — and contributed to the mine’s eventual closure. A Dream of Trees, directed by Saravanakumar, documents the two-decade restoration project of Nature Conservation Foundation scientists T.R. Shankar Raman and Divya Mudappa in the Anamalai Hills: a patient record of forest coming back, of plantation land becoming habitat again, made by people who understood the science from the inside.

The brothers Ajay and Vijay Bedi spent three years in the Ghats’ rainforests making The Secret Life of Frogs, capturing the complete life cycle of the purple frog on camera for the first time. More recently, Sandesh Kadur’s Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness (2025), produced by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, brought the biosphere reserve to theatrical screens as a portrait of resilience: a landscape where most of the land has been converted to human use and wildlife finds a way regardless.

The Himalayan arc: altitude and ambition

The Himalayas have attracted documentary work of very different scales. At the intimate end sits Munmun Dhalaria’s The Jujurana’s Kingdom (2019), a National Geographic-funded short film following the western tragopan — locally called the jujurana, king of birds — in Himachal Pradesh’s Great Himalayan National Park. Dhalaria, founder of Moon Peak Films and a National Geographic Storytelling Explorer, spent most of 2017 and 2018 in the field, documenting one of the longest sightings of the jujurana ever recorded in the wild. With only around 3,300 of this vulnerable pheasant surviving, the film is among the most important wildlife films to emerge from the Indian Himalayas. It won Best Film: Mountain Wildlife at the 4th IMF Mountain Film Festival in 2020 and is on YouTube.

At the other end of the scale sits Sandesh Kadur’s ongoing Siang Valley Expedition — a collaboration between Felis Creations, the National Geographic Society, and ATREE, retracing a century-old zoological survey through the eastern Himalayas to classify new species and document a biodiversity frontier that remains, as Kadur has said, among the most critical and least-documented ecosystems on earth. Mike Pandey’s decades of Himalayan wildlife work — including Himachal’s Avian Paradise for the state forest department — constitute the most sustained single-filmmaker portrait of the range in Indian documentary history.

The Aravallis: a gap in the record

The Aravallis are among the oldest fold mountain ranges on earth and one of the most under-documented major ecosystems in Indian wildlife film. Stretching nearly 700 kilometres from Gujarat through Rajasthan into Haryana and Delhi, they form a critical water recharge zone, a barrier against desertification from the Thar Desert, and a wildlife corridor for leopards, wolves, jackals, and many bird species. Their proximity to India’s most densely populated cities has made them uniquely vulnerable to illegal mining, encroachment, and development.

Documentary attention to the Aravallis has tended toward advocacy rather than natural history. Al Jazeera’s 101 East produced a 2024 documentary following a conservationist’s campaign against illegal mining across the range. The citizen group Aravalli Bachao has produced short films documenting mining operations and the Bandhwari landfill crisis — essential records of a landscape under siege. But a sustained natural history documentary on the Aravallis — their wildlife, their ecology, the extraordinary survival of leopards in a landscape increasingly surrounded by cities — has not yet been made. It is one of the more significant gaps in Indian wildlife filmmaking.

The Rann of Kutch: salt, flamingos, and scale

The Rann of Kutch transforms itself so dramatically between seasons that it can feel like two different places. In the dry months it is a white, featureless expanse of cracked earth. When the monsoon arrives, the sea pushes in and the Rann becomes a shallow wetland, and then the flamingos come. The Great and Little Rann together are the only places in Asia where both greater and lesser flamingos breed, and the scale of the congregation — hundreds of thousands of birds turning the salt flat pink — is one of the great wildlife spectacles of the subcontinent.

The Roundglass Sustain platform has produced focused short documentary work on the Rann’s flamingo ecology, including A Study in Pink: The Flamboyant Flamingos of Kutch, directed by Shatakshi Gawade. The Kutch Desert Wildlife Sanctuary — at over 7,500 square kilometres the largest in India — also shelters the Indian wild ass, wolf, and desert fox, species that have received far less documentary attention than the flamingos that share their landscape.

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Next in this series: Part 5 travels to northeast India, where a generation of young indigenous filmmakers — trained through the Green Hub fellowship — is documenting the wildlife and ecology of the region’s forests from the inside.

This article does not claim to be exhaustive. It attempts to cover as much ground as possible while maintaining editorial rigour. We welcome reader inputs — titles, filmmakers, corrections — to strengthen this record. Write to us at indiawildlifenews.com/contact-us/

Sources: Felis Creations · Shekar Dattatri · Nature Conservation Foundation · Moon Peak Films · Mike Pandey · ATREE · Al Jazeera 101 East · Aravalli Bachao · Roundglass Sustain · Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies · UNESCO World Heritage Centre

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Pooja Parvati is the author of IWN’s Jungle Stories series, covering Indian wildlife in cinema, literature, and the arts.