Legendary Tigers of India
Channel: S3
TX Time: 18h00
Genre: Wildlife, Documentary
In the jungles of north-western India there is a magical fort that has stood for more than a thousand years.
For centuries, rulers battled over its control. Today, it's home to the most filmed, most studied and most famous tigers on Earth.
This is their story, told by the man who's devoted his life to keeping them alive.
There are more wild tigers living in India than anywhere else in the world and Ranthambhore, with its lakes and forests, rich with prey, is one of their most important strongholds.
Fifty years ago, these tigers lived like ghosts: barely heard, rarely seen, they were creatures that emerged only in the depths of night.
Centuries of hunting had driven them into hiding.
Then, in the early 1970s, there was a ban on hunting and the country's laws were changed to protect Ranthambhore as a pioneering tiger reserve.
It transformed the tigers' fortunes.
Back then Valmik Thapar was living in Delhi, a documentary filmmaker in his early twenties with no knowledge of wild tigers.
When his first marriage collapsed he needed to escape the city and one afternoon he just walked out of his house, leaving everything behind and caught a train to Ranthambhore.
It was a whim that changed his life.
He fell in love with the beauty of the place and, with the help of the park director, Fateh Singh Rathore, Valmik saw his first Ranthambhore tiger.
They called her Padmini.
Tiger family life revolves around the female and Padmini was the first of five tigresses that have become like family to Valmik.
Through them Valmik has learnt more than perhaps anyone else on Earth about wild tigers.
He has charted their births, lives and deaths; he has watched as family members have been slaughtered for their skin and bone and, not once but twice, seen the clan's numbers almost entirely decimated by poaching.
But today, the population is growing and there are more tigers in Ranthambhore now than ever before in living memory.
For this film, Valmik has collated 50 years of his archive (together with that of friends, colleagues and family members) to tell a dramatic, intimate and magical story of half a century of tiger life.