Valmik Thapar, a tenacious conservationist who wrote eloquently about tigers in India and worked to protect them against the impact of poachers, the loss of habitat and government policies that he abhorred, died on May 31 at his home in New Delhi. He was 72 or 73.
His family said in a statement that the cause was cancer. He was born in 1952, though the specific date is unclear.
Mr. Thapar was a big man with a loud, hyperarticulate and uncompromising style, which he channeled in service of tigers. He believed that they deserved nothing less than “inviolate protected areas” in which to live without human encroachment.
“He was not an institutional person, but he was an institution unto himself because of his knowledge, sensitivity and ability to communicate,” Ravi Singh, the chief executive and secretary general of the World Wildlife Fund-India, said in an interview.
Ullas Karanth, the former India program director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates four zoos and an aquarium in New York City, said in email that Mr. Thapar had “used his deep political and media connections to widely publicize the ‘tiger crisis.’”
The tiger population in India, home to most of the world’s wild tigers, fell from about 40,000 in the 1950s to 1,411 in 2006. But conservation efforts have led to its substantial growth, to 3,682 in 2022. In the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve, in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, where Mr. Thapar first fell in love with the animals, the number rose from about 15 in 2006 to about 70 in 2022, Mr. Singh said.
Mr. Thapar encountered his first wild tiger at age 10 from atop an elephant in Corbett National Park, in the lower Himalayas. He watched a tigress growl at the elephant before she fled with her two cubs.
Then, in 1976, at 23, he traveled from New Delhi to the Ranthambhore reserve, hoping that leaving the city for the wilderness would fill “an emptiness and despair and a lack of excitement” in his life, he wrote in “Living with Tigers” (2016).
The experience ignited a passion that led him to write numerous books about tigers. Ranthambhore became a second home, where he was mentored by Fateh Singh Rathore, the reserve’s field director and resident tiger expert.
One night, the two men drove at high speed in Mr. Rathore’s Jeep to find a tiger that Mr. Thapar had seen that day feeding off a buffalo carcass.
“As soon as we arrived, Fateh went into action, drove the Jeep up an incline, and we ended up with a snarling tiger in front of us,” Mr. Thapar wrote. “I had never experienced such excitement as I did at that moment. As it neared midnight, Fateh decided that he could get us to an even better vantage point, but, while negotiating a few rocks, he drove straight into the lake.
“I could not believe it — there we were, stuck in the water, with the tiger only meters away,” he added. “Luckily the wireless radio was working and Fateh summoned another jeep to pull us out.”
Ranthambhore was the foundation of Mr. Thapar’s knowledge of tigers; it’s where he tracked their behavior — using observational and writing skills comparable to those of the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s — and photographed and filmed them.
In 1983, he observed Genghis, a male tiger he had tracked, chase a young sambar deer to the edge of a lake.
“I had never seen a tiger chasing a deer in the water,” Mr. Thaper wrote. “Genghis didn’t falter and charged in as sheets of water splashed skywards from the flight of the sambar and the tiger’s pursuit of the deer. He missed, but what a spectacle he had created. An orchestra of alarms resounded over the lake,” as “peacock and greylag geese took flight.”
By 1989, when Mr. Thapar wrote “Tigers: The Secret Life” (with photographs by Mr. Rathore), the tigers’ numbers were shrinking as expanding human populations were impinging on their habitats.
“The lingering sense running through the book is that its position is desperate,” John Seidensticker, a curator of mammals at the National Zoological Park in Washington, wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “We are left with the feeling that unless the situation improves, Ranthambhore will soon be overrun with people demanding the few resources it contains. And the tiger will be lost.”
Valmik Thapar was born in Bombay (now Mumbai). His parents, Romesh and Raj (Malholtra) Thapar, founded Seminar, a monthly intellectual journal. It was ordered shut down in 1976 during a state of emergency proclaimed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whose assumption of absolute power had been criticized in the journal.
He earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Stephen’s College, a part of Delhi University, and shortly after made his pivotal journey from Delhi to Ranthambore — initially a voyage of discovery by a budding, if untrained, naturalist (he was sometimes called a social anthropologist) that became a mission to save the tiger.
In 1988, he started the Ranthambhore Foundation, which, The Times of India said in its obituary, “integrated conservation with community uplift” in villages surrounding the tiger reserve. It helped establish a women’s craft cooperative and a health clinic, worked to advance dairy development and published a monthly newsletter. He ran the foundation until 2000.
Mr. Thapar served on dozens of state and federal committees, including one that advised India’s Supreme Court on wildlife conservation.
One group he worked with was a government conservation effort called the Tiger Task Force, though he issued a blistering dissent in 2005 to its final report, which found that tigers could coexist with people.
“Alternatives where tigers have priority in identified protected reserves and people have priority outside them have to be explored fast and implemented expeditiously,” he wrote. “There is no other way. The present concept of a ‘new’ coexistence is a utopian idea and impractical and will not work.”
Mr. Singh, of the World Wildlife Fund, said Mr. Thapar’s dissent was “not hit and miss — it’s what he had been saying all along about poaching and the fragmentation of habitats.”
Mr. Thapar opposed, for instance, the Indian Forest Rights Act of 2006, which he felt would lead to more intrusions into wildlife habitats. Mr. Karanth, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, said the law “opened the floodgates of diversion of forest lands to all sorts of self-proclaimed forest dwellers on dubious and often false grounds.”
Mr. Thapar’s other books include “The Tiger’s Destiny” (1992); “Wild Tigers of Ranthambhore” (2000); “Tiger: The Ultimate Guide” (2004) and “Tiger Fire: 500 Years of the Tiger in India” (2017).
He also hosted, narrated or produced documentaries; one of them, “My Tiger Family” (2024), for the BBC, focused on five matriarchs he knew in Ranthambhore.
His survivors include his wife, Sanjana Kapoor, and his son, Hamir.
In a speech Mr. Thapar gave in London last year at the launch of a book, “Remembering Tigers,” by Margo Raggett, for which he wrote the preface, he said he doubted that tigers would survive well into the 21st century, but he praised photographers and filmmakers in the audience for keeping them in the spotlight.
By the time of the speech, however, he said he had shed his activist commitments and returned to the joy of his past — “watching wild tigers” and studying their individual personalities.
“In these last years of my life, I like to choose the quality of my time,” he added. “So for the last five years, I’ve been doing that in order to absorb maybe new information about tigers and what they’re about.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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