Review: Suryawanshi's Snow Leopard Memoir — SkimNews
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- Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, an Indian conservationist and mountaineer, publishes his first book — a diary-like account of counting and mediating conflicts over snow leopards across the Himalayas and Gobi desert, deliberately stripped of the romance of Western quest narratives.
- Suryawanshi traces his path from growing up in Aurangabad in the Deccan Peninsula to ecology after reading George Schaller's The Year of the Gorilla in the city public library, positioning himself as an Indian writer interrogating who gets to tell nonhuman stories.
- Up to 70% of snow leopards' diet is livestock, per the book, driving lethal clashes with herders — a Spiti Valley herder recounts shooting a snow leopard and dumping the carcass in a river, while villagers in Kibber adopted a sick cat and named him Rancho after a Bollywood character.
- Suryawanshi and the Snow Leopard Trust bitterly opposed the IUCN's 2017 downgrade of the species from "endangered" to "vulnerable," alleging flawed science and "racial power dynamics and colonial legacies" in Western conservation research.
- Women herders are identified as the snow leopard's fiercest opponents because they tend livestock yet do not benefit from compensation schemes; one local woman asks the author: "why don't you marry one of your snow leopards?"
- The book takes a gentle swipe at Peter Matthiessen, retracing his Nepal route and noting that the mythologizing of the snow leopard has fueled mass tourism — including a resort proposal from Nepal's richest man, who owns an instant noodle company.
- Unlike the leopard, the snow leopard can purr but cannot roar, is most closely related to the tiger, and uses an "absurdly bushy tail" as both a balancing limb and a shawl in its high-altitude range from India to Russia.
Why it matters: The memoir reframes the snow leopard from a literary trophy to a contested, livestock-killing carnivore dependent on herder goodwill — making the 2017 IUCN downgrade not just a taxonomy dispute but a flashpoint over who controls conservation science. For readers tracking India's wildlife policy, the book argues that effective protection hinges less on Western NGO narratives and more on compensating the women who actually lose goats.
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