Belinda Wright is the founder of Wildlife Protection Society of India, a New Delhi-based organisation working on issues of wildlife protection and wildlife law enforcement. She spoke with Rainmaker about her childhood that was spent in the company of animals, and her dynamic parents.
"I was born in Calcutta and I had an absolutely fantastic childhood. I was sort of curious and I loved going to the bazaars and the streets of north Calcutta. Every single moment my parents could get away, we went to the jungles. I had a very exotic and wonderful time. I heard tigers roaring from a very early age. I was apparently conceived in the jungle, and when I was three months old, I had my first trip. My mother was a very prominent conservationist. They were originally hunters even though people find that very hard to believe these days."
Ms. Wright's father, Robert Hamilton Wright, was a businessman. He was also born in Calcutta, and he was six or seven ("tiny!") when he was sent to England to boarding school. "Because the distances were so much, he did not visit England as often as I did. He was in Cambridge when the war broke out, and then he came back to India and became a businessman. As Independence had happened, he became a boxwallah. He did all the wrong things for this day and age - he was in mining and engineering, and he headed a British company and later bought his own company with other partners. My mother was a good housewife, and playing tennis, and whatever else they did."
In 1968, the whole family was turned upside down by a famine in Bihar. The Wright family had some property and tented camps there and Ms. Wright's mother, Anne Wright mother got completely absorbed by that. She went around gathering volunteers and vehicles, and raising funds from all the companies in Calcutta, and set off on an "amazing convoy".
"She took my dog, which I was furious about. In this incredible drought, her life turned around. Her aim and objective was to help the wildlife because nobody was focusing on that. She was setting explosives to build wells and get the water out. She would then cut big oil drums in half to build water troughs for the animals. The animals would hear these jeeps coming and they would walk out of the forests. She saw leopards drinking with sambar and she said, 'my God, how could I ever touch a gun again'. And of course, there were poachers as well, and she started an anti-poaching thing to protect the animals that were coming out to drink. And this experience set her on a completely new course of her life. She was one of the founders of WWF India, and became a very close friend of Indira Gandhi. I was very young at that time, but I observed all this and it was fascinating and I learnt a lot from those days."
Her childhood, prior to the Wildlife Protection Act, was spent in a house full of animals. She had a white headed wood duck, which was virtually extinct in India. "Years and years ago, some had been sent to Gerald Durrell's place in England and they bred very well. Some of these ducks were shipped back and they ended up in my bathtub. And this was quite a regular occurrence. Eventually they went up to Assam and a breeding colony was started and half of them were released." As a child, her family also kept a tiger when she was "about six or seven". The family also raised a lion and a leopard. "We had a red panda, sarus cranes, and mongooses walking in and out of the house - as did the horse, and we had an elephant, but the elephant was the only thing that we didn't keep in Calcutta."
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Aditya Kumar for Studlaw.mp4by RainmakerIndia258 views
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