Spotted, striped and gleaming in the sun. That’s how Mike Pandey recalls his first encounter with whale sharks.
He was about nine at the time.
A school of the giant fish were following the steamer in which he, his parents and his younger brother were travelling, on their week-long journey from Kenya to India.
“I was spellbound by their size. My brother and I tried feeding them pieces of bread. They swam along with the steamer from the second day onwards, but were gone by the time we reached Porbandar.”
Years later, he would see them again, in Porbandar.
It was the late-1990s and the fish were being slaughtered along the Gujarat coast. “Their liver oil or grease was used to waterproof boats, and it was used in boot polish,” Pandey says. “Exporters were selling the meat to some South-East Asian countries.”
Pandey spent months shooting footage in Gujarat, and in 2000, released Shores of Silence, his film on the mass slaughter. It would win a Wildscreen Panda Award, known as the Green Oscar. It would do a lot more.
The film led to a ban on the killing of whale sharks on Indian shores; they were declared a protected species.
It is one of the many times Pandey has used his lens to fight back. The many times have added up, over the years. He has helped change laws, helped people view the same picture differently. He has won three of those Green Oscars in the process.
Earlier this month, Pandey, 75, was awarded the 2024 Jackson Wild Legacy Award, in recognition of his visionary work as a conservation filmmaker.
Previous recipients include Jane Goodall and David Attenborough. “Mike is celebrated for his powerful and hard-hitting films that have led to five legislative changes in India, including the protection of whale sharks globally, vultures, horseshoe crabs, and elephants,” the citation states.
It was quite unreal, being felicitated on a stage that had honoured his heroes, Pandey says. “When I got the news, I wondered if it was fake,” he adds, laughing. “The award has been humbling. It is validation of my work, and the work of those who speak up for wildlife and nature. And it is a response to the million times I have been asked, ‘Oh but what do you get out of this work you’re doing?’”
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“Take only what you absolutely need” and “Don’t hurt any living being” were the two philosophies that Pandey’s mother, teacher-turned-homemaker Shanta Devi, lived by. It’s what she taught her children.
In many ways, he owes his love for wildlife and nature to his parents, and to his childhood in Kenya, he says.
He was born in Nairobi and grew up near the Nairobi National Park. He and his brother Ishwar Pandey would listen for the lions calling out to each other at night. His father, Bansh Dev Pandey, a police officer, would take them across in the evenings, to watch the lions, zebras and giraffes. “We also saw the Masai people live in harmony with the wild,” Pandey says.
Then, when he was seven, his paternal uncle Rajdeo Pandey gifted him a Kodak Brownie box camera, and taught him to develop his own images. “I took that camera with me everywhere. Watching magic erupt on film enthralled me,” he says.
While his father dreamed of him becoming an aeronautical engineer, Pandey decided to also pursue filmmaking. He studied both in the UK, attending filmmaking classes in the evenings. “When the time came to choose a career after college, my father asked me to follow my heart,” he says.
On his return to India, one of his first projects was Guru Baba Nanak, a documentary on Guru Nanak, made with Khushwant Singh as advisor. Pandey briefly dabbled in Bollywood, working as second unit director and director of special effects on films such as Razia Sultan (1983; starring Dharmendra and Hema Malini) and Ghazab (1982; starring Dharmendra and Rekha).
“Razia Sultan’s director, Kamal Amrohi, was headed to London to shoot a special Turkish bath scene featuring Hema Malini, as it needed special effects. I told him I’d shoot it for him at a fraction of the cost,” he recalls.
Pandey did eventually shoot the scene, which shows Malini emerging from the bath, as steam from the hammam envelops her. “The steam had to rise 12 feet high and, at the same time, stay away from her face. I had to use a hair dryer and a newspaper fashioned into a funnel to keep the steam away from her face, but keep it swirling around her,” he says, laughing. “Amrohi called it ‘technology ka karishma (the miracle of technology)!’”
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Bollywood didn’t feel like the right fit. Pandey returned to Delhi.
In 1973, he had registered a company called Riverbank Studios, hoping to create enough films about conservation and wildlife to constitute a career.
He began to work in this direction, making nature films for Doordarshan, Films Division, the union environment ministry, state tourism and forest departments, and the Border Roads Organisation. Later, he would also make films for BBC, the International Federation of Red Cross, International Union for Conservation of Nature, and World Bank.
His first major turning point would come only two decades later, when assigned to shoot a three-to-five-minute film on the capture of wild elephants in Surguja, then in Madhya Pradesh (now in Chhattisgarh).
A number of elephants and humans had died there. Roads were being closed in the evenings, in a sort of man-animal-conflict-induced curfew.
On the day he arrived with a crew of five, Pandey set off alone to explore the area, and came upon an elephant that looked like it had been trapped and beaten, lying on the ground.
“The giant was dying. I could see his honey-brown eyes. He was in pain. I felt so helpless that despite warnings from locals, I touched his forehead. His eyes moved and locked with mine. I was transfixed,” he says. “I touched his forehead with my head. Slowly, the light faded from his eyes.”
He felt something shift in him then, Pandey says. The animal had had no voice; it couldn’t protest, or tell its side of the story. All it had likely been looking for was food and water. “What was his crime? I made a silent promise then that his death would not go in vain. I would try my best to question what we’re doing to this Earth.”
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Pandey and his team stayed on for over a month and turned the five-minute short into a 50-minute film.
The Last Migration (1994) captured a 42-day wild-elephant-capture operation, explored the excessive deforestation in Bihar that had driven the herd to Surguja, and traced the man-animal conflict that had then broken out.
The film won him his first Green Oscar; he made news as the first Asian filmmaker to win the award. The experience of making the film redefined him, he says. The elephant never left him.
He had also found his mission; this is what his camera could do.
In 1999, Pandey began to anchor the Doordarshan show Earth Matters, which morphed into Dharti Kare Pukaar; new episodes are still being made and broadcast, in one of the longest-running such series in the country.
In 2004 came the film The Vanishing Giants, a sequel to The Last Migration. It won him his third Green Oscar, and it led to a ban on cruel, outdated techniques of trapping these animals in India.
Two years later, Broken Wings (2006) traced how the veterinary drug diclofenac was killing vultures who fed on cattle carcasses injected with the pharmaceutical.
Timeless Traveller (2003) focused on the horseshoe crab, found on the coast of Odisha and crucial to shore biodiversity. These crabs were being smuggled off the beaches and sold abroad; their blood was in demand for medical testing and research. The film was used to lobby for their protection; they were declared a protected species in 2010.
Pandey is currently working on a film about mangroves, and on an eight-part series titled The Green Planet… In Crisis.
Through all these productions, he says, the aim has been to confront the viewer with a question: Why are we plundering everything that sustains us?
“There might have been a time when we destroyed natural resources out of ignorance,” he says. “But now, the way we’re preying on the environment and wildlife, wiping out forests, polluting air, water, soil… This is consumeristic, mindless greed. We no longer know how to only take what we need. Nothing satiates us.”
