A Girl, A Tiger, and a Very Strange Story

Paro Anand & Priya Kurien

Reviewed by Samantha Kokkat and Jennifer Thomas

This illustrated book by two of the most celebrated creators in the children’s literature landscape is one of the only stories examining lives in the Pardhi community from a mainstream publisher. The book offers a window, albeit a problematic one, for children reading from caste locations that hold power.

Publishing Date: 2025 ISBN: 9789360455545 Pages: 245 Publisher: Puffin India, an imprint of Penguin Random House Categories: Illustrated Fiction | Social Justice | Inter-Species Relationships

A Girl, A Tiger and a Very Strange Story (Puffin, 2025) is likely one of the very few stories about the Pardhi community from a mainstream publisher. Narrated in a novel multi-modal format through alternating text and illustrations, the book grew out of celebrated author Paro Anand’s work with the Pardhi community. Illustrations by Priya Kuriyan, an equally acclaimed name in the industry, make the text accessible. The book is reminiscent of Anand’s earlier graphic novel 2 (Scholastic, 2016) in its format, and also reminded us of Boy, Bear by Adithi Rao (Duckbill, 2021) in how a marginalized community (the nomadic Madari community) and the vocations they engage in are depicted.

The protagonist of Anand’s book is an eleven-year-old girl from the Pardhi community, and the book follows the relationship she forms with a tiger cub when both youngsters are left behind in the forest by their families with no information about the latter’s whereabouts. Initially, the child is not alarmed that she is alone because she is able to fend for herself in the forest. But it is a different story with the tiger cub, who was still being nursed by his mother, and there begins a bond between the two lonesome characters.

The story is narrated in alternating points of view: that of the child, whose life we experience through the third-person narrator who narrates in prose, and that of the tiger cub, Raunak, whose point of view is seen through Kuriyan’s illustrations. While the choice of narrative style felt suitable in depicting the points of view, we felt that the author and illustrator missed the opportunity to move the plot forward through the illustrations. What we read in the text is largely what we see in the illustrations, giving the novel the quality of an illustrated book rather than a graphic novel. The growing bond between the child and the tiger cub is conveyed with the aid of the illustrations—many panels showcase the cub’s eyes to portray how the two youngsters communicate across species barriers. However, the narrative failed to strike an emotional chord with us as readers. Unfortunately, we were neither moved nor invested in this bond.

We shared the book with a 14 year-old reader, D, who frequents one of our libraries. She shared that she loved the book’s theme and the social location of its protagonist, but felt that it was a simplistic read, even though the world it opened out to her was altogether new. Complexities in the narrative and format may have made the book accessible to younger readers, while retaining layers for emerging young adult readers. 

Just as it is for D, what makes the book distinct for us is its setting, theme, and characters, as much as the style of narration. Little attention has been paid to the Pardhis and other denotified tribes by the big publishers before this, and this gap in Indian children’s literature is glaring. D could not recall the titles of any books featuring Adivasi stories (though she said she has read some in the library), except for books on forms of tribal art. 

But it is important to acknowledge that independent publishers like Muskaan have been working with denotified tribes and continue to do so. Pardhi Rule (Muskaan, 2019) by Tasvir Parmar and Swati Addanki is a book that grew from this long, immersive association. Parmar is also the founder of the grassroots NGO Majal that works with the Pardhi community. Paro Anand’s work with the Pardhi community, on the other hand, took place in association with the World Wide Fund for Nature, a leading global conservation organization, to try and bring Pardhi children into the mainstream of education to open up other avenues of income generation for them.

However, when the story begins, we are not told that the child is from the Pardhi community, and in fact this information is not conveyed to the reader until we are well into the book, which makes it difficult to understand the sociological location of the text. For the first fifty or so pages, it feels like the story could be set in any forest and the child protagonist could be a member of any nomadic community, and as adult readers working with children, we wonder what a child reading from outside the community, like us, would make of it. At no point in our conversation did D name the Pardhi community, the narrative of the book was generalised and viewed as an Adivasi story. Could such a reading from its intended audience have been avoided by more thoughtful choices in writing?  

This choice is made even more problematic by how the book begins. “She was a nomad, a gypsy,” the narrator says to refer to the protagonist who has been named Junglee. The sociological connotations of words such as “gypsy” and “Junglee” seem to have been forgotten in this narrative—derogatory words that need to be used with care (or not used at all). The Hindi translation of the PickleYolk book Nangu Nangu Naach (Eklavya, 2028) by Richa Jha was rejected by a Korku community in Maharashtra because the protagonist’s grandmother refers to her as Junglee. D seemed to have been indifferent about these words when she read independently, but when asked was quick to share that these terms are not respectable.

In another case that ignores colonial and neo-colonial realities, we see the book opening with lines from a 2020 song Savage Daughter by an American musician of TikTok fame: “I am my mother’s savage daughter/The one who runs barefoot/Cursing sharp stones/I am my mother’s savage daughter/I will not cut my hair/I will not lower my voice.”

The use of glaringly problematic adjectives continues in the book after this. The Pardhi children are referred to as a “steaming mass of little brown dusty humans;” their fights were “physical, animalistic almost.” Children and adults came out of the fights with “scratches, bites and bits of torn hair.” The older boys would turn while running with Junglee “to find her snapping at their heels, like a jackal or a wild dog.” None of this is said with malice by the narrator, but we were led to wonder if this is the language of respect and if an author writing from the inside would perceive and present the Pardhi community in a similar light.

What does it mean to hint that a child protagonist is a savage gypsy? What allows the author to name the child Junglee? As we go through the book, it becomes clear that the author intended to cast the word “junglee” in a different light, not as a marker of lack of culture, but to simply mean someone who lives in the forest. The intention may have even been to reclaim the word in a sense. But can someone who inhabits worlds that are so distant from the Pardhi community’s lived realities ethically reclaim derogatory words? The child protagonist rightly says towards the end of the book, “You call us poachers, gypsies, wild and like animals,” while addressing townspeople and police officers, and leaves the reader to wonder why the narrator uses the exact same words to describe the child. It is not as if the child was unaware of the political implications loaded into these words in the beginning of the book.

Possibly well-intentioned, there were also signs of romanticization in the use of language: “She (Junglee) and her people had no home to call their own. They were nomads, but they never felt they were homeless…the whole world was their home. At the very least, the forest surely was. Here they were completely at home, and they felt that the forest was as much at home with them.” The Pardhi children’s lives, the narrator writes, “flowed much like the rivers and streams they often walked along.”

The illustrations too carry some of these stereotypes. The child protagonist is shown to have shabby hair and wears the same clothes throughout the course of the novel, set over the course of more than a year. Granted that the child is stranded and won’t have a change of clothes, but there is also little reference to her cleaning herself up, possibly something that was omitted to not take away from the pace of the narrative, but problematic considering the child is called dusty when the story begins.

There is a degree of flatness to the framing of the character, which kept us from being moved by the problems the story depicted. Early on in the book, the reader is told that children form very close relationships across familial lines in the child protagonist’s community. “The children were everything to each other—schoolmates, friends, neighbours, cousins, and most of all, brothers and sisters…she did have a biological mother and father—they were the main ones. Then there were others whom she also called mother and father, even though they weren’t really.” But we see little reference to these characters in the story, and get to know little about this child’s life beyond what is strictly needed for the narrative. The child, who is highly aware of the hostility between the forest officials and her community, aspires initially to be a forest officer. Is this because the child feels powerless and hopes to gain power for herself and her community by attaining this position of power? It is unclear, but plausible.

As the story progresses, we see more layers and nuance being added that make the book worth reading. We see the mental dilemmas that the child carries. Could her community, who often undertake poaching of tigers for subsistence, have something to do with the disappearance of her beloved cub’s mother? The struggles of a community who are not offered or allowed any legal sources of revenue-making and are then criminalized for poaching tigers are portrayed in the book, as is the mental makeup of the larger urban society and media that ascribe high value to wildlife at the risk of completely devaluing the lives of marginalized and oppressed communities. But this litany of problems is presented to us almost to teach and enlighten, without being able to strike an emotional chord that a good work of fiction can. There seems to be more telling than showing, and when we read the book we weren’t sure if it would continue to stay in the mind of any child once they shut the book. However, D shared that she would recommend the book because of how different the story is, but with the caveat that some portions of the resolution and the support the protagonist received from villagers and officials was not believable and unlikely to happen in the real world. 

The book, we were happy to note, does not offer a neat, happy ending. The climax is authentic, and therefore, for a reader of privilege who might only be accessing literature produced by mainstream publishers, the book, irrespective of its problems, opens a window. But the window unfortunately seems to be framed and fashioned by an external, dominant, and urban gaze. The only aspect of the story D did not enjoy was the ending, though she said she understood the truth of it. The authenticity of the ending seems to have been disturbing for a child with privilege; it is telling that the experiences depicted in the rest of the book did not trouble her. 

In the acknowledgements to the book, Anand writes about her experience of working with children of the Pardhi community in the Panna Sanctuary: “The experience taught me that people are not innately evil, though sometimes, circumstances can be cruel, leading them to act in morally questionable ways.” After everything that the author shared in the book, one wonders why the onus of moral digression and acquired evilness is placed on the Pardhi community, and not rather on the people and a system that alienates, disrespects, and severely oppresses them and their children.

Further Recommendations

1. Bama, Pongal (Muskaan, 2023)
2. Gogu Shyamala, Tataki Wins Again and Braveheart Badeyya (Mango DC Books, 2008)
3. Mohammed Khadeer Babu, Head Curry (Mango DC Books, 2008)
4. Mohammed Khadeer Babu, Nuaiman, et. al, Untold School Stories (Mango DC Books, 2008)
5. P.Y. Balan, Sara Joseph, et. al, The Two Named Boy and Other Stories  (Mango DC Books, 2008) 
6. Rinchin, The Uprising (Muskaan, 2023)
7. Siddhartha Sarma, Year of the Weeds (Duckbill, 2018)
8. Simran Uikey, Going to School Alone (Muskaan, 2019)
9. Shivani Taneja, Somaru Misses Home (Muskaan, 2019)
10. Tasvir Parmar, Pardhi Rule (Muskaan, 2019)