“Where are they then?” I asked. “Are these not monkey sanctuaries?” I knew fully well that no protected area was solely for a group of animals but clearly these three were created at the behest of a primatologist turned bureaucrat for conserving monkeys. “In the fields, sir,” he was nonchalant. “The jowai is ripening and all the monkeys are in the village. We can even have tea there and watch them sir”. I was to hear this time and again over the day. Podumani has very little primates left. Bherjan’s hoolocks are all out in the 21 villages of Barekuri region. And I saw the capped langur and two of the macaques of Borjan, not in its forests but in adjacent Mahakali village. A middle aged schoolteacher and his awakening brood made us lal cha and gave us plastic chairs to sit on in his courtyard. In front of the yard was a splendid field full of paddy. Golden yellow grain to my right, black grains of jowai paddy to my left. A bunch of Assamese macaque came strolling down a large banyan to feed in the fields. Opposite the fields in a clump of bamboo, a dozen capped langurs squealed and crunched their morning repast.

The Assamese monkeys had a surprise in store for us. The Assamese is known from its close cousin the rhesus for having a uniformly brown grey pelage with no orange fur on its loins, by a rather pronounced beard in a big male and by its short tail carried parallel to the ground unlike the slightly curled tip of the rhesus. This troop had several females and young that came first and started feeding. It was only a full ten minutes later that the male came out and tentatively took guard at the edge of the field, standing on its hind legs often and peering out from the paddy stalks in search of danger. It was when he stood up that I saw his loins, bright orange on his upper thighs and rump. I looked for his tail tip. Curled in derision. There was no doubt about this animal. It was a rhesus. “This one has taken over the Assamese family,” Raju informed on being questioned. “The Assamese male is also there but it is less seen.” I spent two hours watching and photographing the monkeys. There was no sign of the Assamese. The northern Indian Rhesus had taken charge.

File photo: A rhesus macaque

The Barekuri region is even more a case in point. Near Bherjan, the forests of the Moran- Muttock people are full of gibbons hanging from trees. The Morans took on the Ahoms in 1769 and the British in 1836. The warrior Morans, who in a sense hastened the decline of the great Ahom Empire, was now protecting gibbons and in fact swore to protect them even from conservation groups such as us if we attempt translocation. I was taken there by a local schoolteacher and NGO activist Dambaru Chutia, who had filed a PIL against Oil India amongst other things for environmental reasons. The proliferation of NGOs is Assam’s great strength as well as its hamstring, for committed individuals such as him could well be the state’s first line of green defense while at the same time petty parochial needs and individual egos often ruined the larger dream.  In Barekuri, there were two young gibbons and a clearly pregnant adult female that were coming to the edges of the forest to eat bananas being proffered by the villagers on raised bamboo stakes. The golden lady was the least tempted by the goodies keeping well in the shade of the trees till the very last moment. The youngsters, black in youth, white eyebrows arched in defiance swung out time and again, grabbed the treat and rushed back into their trees in agile splendor. There was a need for the Moran to demonstrate their love of the gibbon by keeping aside forested land for them. No other call of love would serve India’s only ape in the long term. We did convey that to the youngsters as we supped on duck and cucumber curry served on a traditional bell metal vessel deep in Barekuri.

The lesson in protected area creation and management is there for all to see. Hastily conceptualised sanctuaries have done little to protect its key species. Like a sponge, our animals are being drawn to its peripheries and are surviving if at all due to some local protection efforts. The Forest Departments and the Ministry of Environment and Forests must take heed of this and try and align the conservation strategy of the country and the state to these realities. In Islam there is a belief that the path to the mosque is not laid first in the hope that the followers will walk in that fashion, but instead the path is laid along the footsteps of the followers. It is wise to accept reality and then fashion plans around them bringing them as close as possible to an ideal rather than fashioning an abstract ideal for an unpragmatic reality to match.