‘From Catapults to Cameras’: Looking at the wild through children’s lens

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It was in 2019 that filmmaker Ashwika Kapur got to know about the ritualistic hunting festivals, which take place in the seven south-western districts of West Bengal—also called jangal mahal, comprising areas such as Purulia, Jhargram and Bankura—between January and June every year.

The region, which is home to a number of threatened and endangered species such as the pangolin, fishing cat and elephants, wolves, Indian porcupines, Bengal foxes, civets, painted spurfowl, and more, sees a bloody massacre of wildlife when armed hunting groups, comprising thousands of villagers, set out to kill whatever animal they can find. Kapur, who grew up in Kolkata, had been a long-term volunteer with the notfor-profit group, Human and Environment Alliance League, or HEAL, at that time.

The latter, comprising passionate young individuals from Kolkata, including farmers, filmmakers, lawyers and homemakers, has been working on interventions, community engagement, wildlife and environmental crime investigations and filing of public interest litigations in pursuit of environmental justice in Bengal since 2017. The team has been filing PILs to get a ban on hunting festivals such as the Pakhibandh in places like Jhargram.

“When I spoke to Suvrajyoti Chatterjee (secretary and founder-trustee, HEAL), he stated that I wouldn’t be able to understand the scale and magnitude of the hunts until I witnessed them myself. So, we headed to a village in Jhargram, and the mindless massacre—the bloodbath—that I saw there was really numbing," says Kapur.