When he was about six years old, Venkat Raman Singh Shyam’s father took him by the hand and led him into a dense forest, where tigers, hyenas, sloth bears, nilgai antelope, and wild boars roamed freely. Shyam’s family, which belongs to the Gond tribe, lived in a hamlet at the periphery of the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Central India. Kanha, home to thick groves of bamboo and slender-trunked trees, including sal and East Indian ebony, is the forest that provided the backdrop for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. As the…
