When Dipak Barua, a 35-year-old farmer, steps out into his backyard and shouts “ Aah, aah! Kol khabo aah, ”(come, eat some bananas) a strange event unfolds. There is a rustle in the trees, and I can see a big, furry creature, striking black but for a squiggly white unibrow, climbing down an areca palm. It is a male western hoolock gibbon, India’s biggest primate and one of two ape species that rarely ever leave treetops. I stand there transfixed, I can’t believe my eyes: a hoolock so close and clear. He climbs half way down the tree, takes the bananas from Barua’s hand and quickly vanishes up the tree trunk. Now two other gibbons are following suit.
I am in Barekuri village in Assam’s Tinsukia district. Barekuri, means ‘twelve times twenty’ and is a cluster of many small villages clumped together to form a big one. And hoolocks have been living in this village for as long as Barua can remember. “They were there during my father’s time, and my grandfather’s too,” he says. Here, the hoolock gibbon has indeed coexisted peacefully with human beings for over a hundred years. The shy animal ventures out of its forest habitat, and makes itself quite at home in the gardens and orchards here.
Some are fed by people, and are even considered ‘part of the family’. Many respond to human calls, climbing down from their perch to feed. Needless to say, they have become quite the tourist draw too.
But not all these stories end well. Feeding wildlife is never desirable for either the animals or people. We do know of golden langurs routinely fed by tourists in Guwahati’s Umananda island. But this changes behaviour in primates and impacts their health — biscuits and cake can make them obese and their proximity to humans makes them vulnerable to infections including the flu, and can sometimes lead to conflict too.
Particularly tragic is the story of Kalia, a female gibbon, orphaned by poachers, who was adopted as an infant by Bhupeshwar Ningda in Ketetong village in Tinsukia. Kalia would feed on biscuits and bananas, often spending the whole day in the village, walking around on two legs just like she saw the humans do. Her favourite pastime was grooming members of the Ningda family and playing with the village dogs. But two years ago Kalia was killed by a resident after she bit his son. Her last rites were however performed according to Buddhist traditions in the village.
Culture connect
The hoolock has a deep connection with Assamese culture, finding place in songs and folklore. I still remember a nursery rhyme from my Assamese textbook when I was five: Hollow uthil tokow gosot, logai khodou modou/ Jou jou ke poril niyor, hol jolou jopou! (The hoolock hops up the palm tree, quite a ruckus makes he/ In rushes come down the dew, and now he’s all slovenly!) — this was the first time I had heard about the hoolock. I couldn’t have dreamt then that I would, as a primatologist, get up close and personal with one in Barekuri.
Idu Mishmis in Arunachal Pradesh believe the gibbons to be their ancestors. It is considered a bad omen to kill one, and so it is never hunted here.
A female hoolock
In Meiteilon Manipuri, the ape is known as ‘ yongmu’ or black monkey. Legend has it that once a young girl from the Malangmei clan decided to run away from home because she was called lazy. And when she wandered into the forest she turned into a hoolock and never returned to the village. Manipuris too regard gibbons as their totem animal.
In Meghalaya’s Garo hills, the sacred groves are safe sanctuary to the arboreal animals. People regard them their ancestors. Many residents of Selbagre and Rensangre villages have trained as guides to take tourists into the forest to show them these beautiful creatures.
But the gibbons face serious threats — and not just from their interaction with humans. Listed today as ‘endangered’ by the IUCN, their population has dwindled by 90% in the last 30 years because of their increasingly fragmented habitat. In the 1970s, Assam along with Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura, Arunachal, Manipur and Nagaland supported as many as 80,000 individuals, but today only about 2,600 survive.
Hoolocks are particularly vulnerable because of their almost exclusively arboreal existence. They rarely ever come down to the ground, and move through the tree canopy through ‘brachiation’ or a form of movement in which they swing from their long arms. They can travel distances of 1.6 km every day in search of food, largely fruit, sometimes even lichen. So any fragmentation in the forest canopy could potentially be fatal: roads, farms, tea gardens.
My hope for the children of tomorrow is that they continue to see the ‘man of the forest’ in the wild, and not just read about their marvellous antics in textbooks.
When not working in the forest, the writer loves to cook from YouTube recipes.
