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Meet Pushparaj: The prince of Maharashtra's Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve
Young Pushparaj is a charismatic tiger who strides proudly through his 600-square-kilometer territory, one of India’s leading tiger reserves and home to nearly 120 of these powerful creatures
- PUBLISHED: Tue 16 Jun 2026, 6:00 AM
He strides by nonchalantly, not even bothering to look at us with our telescopic zoom lens cameras focused on him. Pushparaj (known as Pushpa) is named after popular character Pushparaj (or Pushpa) in the 2021 Telugu film, Pushpa: The Rise (played by popular star Allu Arjun).
But the three-year-old tiger, son of the legendary Xylo, known as ‘the king’ of Tadoba’s buffer zone, is busy looking around for prey and has no time for us mere mortals.
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Pushparaj walked by a mere 20 feett from me and a few other wildlife photographers at the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district on Saturday evening, as we went about clicking him noiselessly, experiencing the majestic walk by this emerging Royal Bengal tiger, one of about 115-plus located in the sprawling, 1,725-sq km reserve, about 800 km from Mumbai.
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The young Pushparaj has emerged as a charismatic tiger, who strides proudly in his territory. The 600 sq km reserve, Tadoba, is one of India’s leading tiger reserves and home to nearly 120 of these powerful creatures.
India today has about 3,700 tigers, accounting for about 75 per cent of the world’s total wild tiger population. But experts feel that the tiger population in the country has reached a saturation point and facing challenges relating to space for setting up their territories.
While poaching cases are coming down in India, tigers are facing problems relating to competition with others of their kind, with resident tigers reluctant to let go off their territories to dispersing ones. Fights often break out between the tigers, with a few killed by the dominant ones.
But the rising number of tourists to these sanctuaries is also a cause of worry for the authorities. Recently, a viral video revealed the harassment that tigers face in places such as Tadoba.
Scores of motorists got out of their vehicles to film a tiger that was passing by on a road within the reserve last year. A sub-adult cub was trying to cross a road when several motorists stopped their vehicles and approached the creature with their mobile phone cameras.
A TATR official said cases were registered against some of the motorists for coming out of their vehicles and disturbing the tiger from its path. In fact, while going around the area in Chandrapur district, this correspondent came across many people moving around in a frenzied manner, in a bid to ‘capture’ a tiger on camera or just to watch it.
Last year, following a court’s observation, the forest department cracked down on the use of mobile phones at tiger reserves and wildlife sanctuaries, banning the carrying of the gadgets in forests and sanctuaries.
Fortunately, the order is being strictly followed in Tadoba (and many other sanctuaries in India), where mobile phones are banned. Visitors are also warned not to get off vehicles in forests and sanctuaries to interact with tigers.
But there are always people violating such orders, wanting to watch or ‘capture’ a tiger as it quietly goes about its task in the jungles, without making a fuss. Sadly, such steps distract tigers, leopards, bears and other creatures that go about their normal chores, resulting in chaos.
Even with the ban on mobile phones in sanctuaries, this correspondent noted the obsessiveness of many visitors to ‘hunt’ for tigers in vehicles aggressively chasing the poor creatures going about their usual tasks.
