Living with the leopards

​Art Direction and Book Design- Siddhi Vartak, Krupa Patil

Writer- Multiple contributors

Illustrator- Sefi George

others from the team- Sunetro Ghosal, Snowy Baptista

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This was a coffee table book made for the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai through a collective called 'Mumbaikars for Sanjay Gandhi National Park (MfSGNP)'. 

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Mumbaikars for Sanjay Gandhi National Park (MfSGNP) is a project initiated in 2011 by the Maharashtra Forest Department. This project is dedicated to understanding and managing human-leopard interactions through research, and conflict mitigation measures across the SGNP landscape by a Volunteer group of local Mumbai citizens working with the Maharashtra Forest Department. 

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The book is born out of an intention to spread awareness about Human-Leopard coexistence, an effort to ease the friction between the two in a big city like Mumbai that lives and breathes around the forest. 

The book consists of stories/experiences with leopards narrated by different people living close to the borders of the national park. Highlighting these stories could be seen as an effort to understand leopard behavior better and gather insights about dealing with these situations. 

Learning about these things and understanding the larger network of natural functioning could help us tackle the conflicts smartly rather than blindly- appointing hunters to kill the beast or letting the forest land get nibbled with time out of mere mindlessness, oblivion, and greed.

 

The illustrations in the book are hand-painted and arranged digitally. This artistic style is chosen to provide justice to the rawness of these stories and also help visualize the situations better. There are no photos available of these events since almost all these stories are about situations of panic. 

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The coffee table book was published in 2022 and launched by the CM of Maharashtra and the Department of Forest. Only 50 copies of the book are printed since the idea was not to sell. However, it stands proudly on the shelves of the SGNP Souvenir shop.

Do check it out if you get to visit the national park!