Sanctuary |In the Field
Text and Photographs by Anupam Singh Sisodia
MUGGER-MAN IN DISGUISE
“It was just a palm-sized baby; in
four months it has grown to almost half
a metre now,” Baba informs me, using
his amputated forearm as a reference
to the size. Donning a scarlet kurta with
a mustard-coloured lungi and a pair of
hawaai chappals that are about to give
up, Sitaram Das, aka Baba, leads me to
a mugger Crocodylus palustris, which
is reportedly basking in a paddy fi eld.
Baba’s looks can be deceiving as there’s
more to what meets the eye. He can be
a Baba and a sought-after naturalist in
a matter of sentences.
We’ve been in the fi elds for hours
now but there’s no trace of the mugger
yet. While Baba strides forward withease, I struggle to keep up. “It is a
lethargic animal that gets tired easily
and sometimes it takes days to move,”
he quips, indicating that we may be
moments away from fi nding it. “Six
months ago, during the summers, a
female mugger had laid around 20
eggs. It takes about two months for
the eggs to hatch,” he adds. During
our conversation, Baba casually passes
on a great deal of species specifi c
behavioural and nesting observations.
The knowledge, attained in the wild
through many years of observation,
would perhaps impress the likes of John
Thorbjarnarson even more. Inquisitive
as I was, I asked about the people whowere specially trained a few years ago
to perform this task. “I don’t know,
perhaps they’ve been trained to be
scared,” he jokes.
We are in the Kotmi Sonar village
of Chhattisgarh in the Janjgir-Champa
district, 150 km. northeast of the state
capital, Raipur. ‘Kot’ means a fort and
‘sonar’ is a goldsmith. Since there
exists a plethora of Kotmi villages in
Chhattisgarh, the suffi x sonar was
attached to distinguish this village (more
so because the infl uential family here
were goldsmiths). The Kotmi Sonar Fort,
as referred to in ancient scriptures is a
‘Mrid durg’ (Mud Fort), identifi able by
mud ramparts (Prākār) surrounded by