Stitched Into the Landscape — Part 3
A leopard deity worshipped in hilltop shrines may help explain how people in Mumbai live alongside one of the world’s densest populations of wild leopards.
The deity is Waghoba, worshipped by the Warli, an Indigenous community of Maharashtra, in hamlets in and around Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a forest of about 103 square kilometres that sits within Mumbai and Thane. According to WCS India, at least 20,000 people per square kilometre live on the park’s periphery, and about 40 to 50 tribal hamlets lie inside its boundary.
Waghoba Shrines
A 2021 study in Frontiers in Conservation Science, by researchers from WCS India, the Wildlife Conservation Trust and two Norwegian institutions, documented 150 Waghoba shrines across Mumbai Suburban, Palghar and Thane districts during fieldwork in 2018 and 2019. The authors think that is likely an undercount, since they could not reach every hilltop shrine.
The Warli believe Waghoba protects them from the risks of sharing space with big cats if they worship the deity and perform the required rituals, especially at the annual festival of Waghbaras. The origin narratives the authors recorded involve negotiation and kinship between people and the deity, which they say reinforces a sense of mutual obligation.
Warli people often put occasional livestock losses down to their own failure to perform the rituals, according to the study, rather than blaming the leopard. The authors suggest that institutions like this may build tolerance of big cats, a conclusion they describe as exploratory, and they note that such institutions do not remove conflict but help negotiate it.
Warli painting, the community’s best-known art form, draws people and animals together in a single composition. Jivya Soma Mashe, the artist from Thane district often credited with bringing it to a wide audience, painted works that are now held at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.
Works of Jivya Soma Mashe, Musée du Quai Branly Paris. Photo by dalbera. CC BY-SA 2.0
The relationship carries costs. WCS India notes that leopards often kill dogs and livestock near people because they are easy to find there. The study’s authors propose that human-animal relationships of this kind could help large carnivores return to areas where they have been lost.
Next in this series: Part 4 — The Pardhan Gond artists of Madhya Pradesh, whose paintings place the tiger back into cosmic relationship with the forest it came from.
This series does not claim to be exhaustive. It attempts to cover as much ground as possible while maintaining editorial rigour. We welcome reader inputs of traditions, communities, or corrections to strengthen this record. Write to us at indiawildlifenews.com/contact-us/
Sources: Frontiers in Conservation Science (2021) · WCS India: The Warli and Their Waghoba · WCS India: Waghoba, When the Guardian of the Forest is Seen in the City