These days nobody in the state of Odisha can rightly guess what fresh wonder tomorrow's newspaper will bring. Not long ago the television screens and front pages lit up with a piece of news fit to make a grown man sit down. Five foreign visitors had been caught on our soil. Not diplomats, mind you, not some multinational's traveling capitalists — five orphaned baby orangutans.
Naturally the question arose: how does a creature with no Indian citizenship, no passport, no Aadhaar card to its name, cross an ocean and turn up in Odisha? Ordinary folk figured it was the plain, unglamorous work of international wildlife smugglers. But the political intellectuals who keep a perpetual vigil on social media were not about to accept anything so simple. In their view this had to be a conspiracy of some depth, or else a ruling party's inventive new strategy for political gain.
The moment photographs of the five orangutan babies went public, one detail seized everyone's attention: their color. Their coats were a pure saffron, or orange. That was all the hint the nation's cartoonists and satirists needed to send their imaginations galloping. The internet caught fire within the hour. Some declared the creatures to be the ruling party's newest brand ambassadors, or perhaps regional chiefs of some foreign wing. Here were exotic great apes, dressed in the ruling party's beloved saffron, apparently flown in direct from the forests of Borneo to campaign for a "saffron revolution" across India. In a country where governments rise and fall over cows, cow-dung, temples, and — above all — colors, the discovery of a creature in pure saffron was no small matter. Even the opposition grew privately anxious, wondering whether the ruling party would use these orange-coated animals to shore up its Hindutva vote bank still further. In politics nowadays, after all, anything is possible. Perhaps, in time, these orangutans might even be granted honorary party membership. If men of the donkey, jackal, dog, and sheep persuasion can rise to become leaders, why not an orangutan?
Watching the grave, dignified faces of the five orangutan babies on social media, certain opposition voices began spreading the claim that the animals had clearly undergone rigorous training at some RSS branch from birth, and that their saffron hue was itself their finest political credential. Bringing orangutans to Odisha, they said, was merely political theater — proof of how the double-engine government labors for Hindu dharma and Hindutva.
But to tell the truth, these poor orangutans have no connection whatsoever to our country's politics, ideology, or eternal faith.
Yes, their ancestor Sivapithecus was certainly Indian. Some eight to eight-and-a-half million years ago, climate change made it impossible for Sivapithecus to remain in India any longer. The climate shifted, the forests shrank — nature itself seemed to say, "Gentlemen, there's no more room here!"
From there Sivapithecus migrated to Southeast Asia, and its descendants settled in that region and across the eastern Indian archipelago. In time, only the ancestors of the orangutan survived, while every other great ape in Southeast Asia and the eastern Indian islands vanished.
Yet today, having arrived in India — the birthplace of their ancestors' ancestors — these orangutans find their natural color compared to a political flag and themselves dressed up as party workers. In truth, there is no political reason hidden behind their saffron or orange coloring. There is, instead, a remarkable strategy for surviving nature's merciless battlefield. Just as our country's leaders wear white homespun to hide their genuinely black dealings, orangutans are born wearing this orange coat to hide themselves from enemies in the forest. In English this is called camouflage. Scientists spent long years sitting in laboratories, running about, tearing their hair out over stacks of books, to uncover this secret — for scientists, after all, have nothing better to do than waste time uselessly. The very thing our politicians and their party faithful grasped in an instant — that an orangutan's coat is a party's sacred color — took these foolish scientists hundreds of years to work out.
This takes us back to the nineteenth century. There lived a British gentleman named Alfred Russel Wallace. Being a citizen of Britain, which had plundered half the world, he had no worries about money — nor, for that matter, had he quarreled with his wife. For some reason or other, Wallace left home and took to wandering the deadly, dense forests of Borneo. There he looked up one day and saw enormous saffron-colored orangutans sitting in the treetops, leisurely eating fruit. His first thought was: surely a creature this brightly colored, in a forest this green, should be spotted from a great distance in no time at all — so how do they survive? But he was astonished to notice that wherever sunlight failed to reach, in the upper reaches of the canopy, this orange color vanished entirely. Much as an influential man who has committed some enormous financial fraud flees abroad and disappears from the long arm of the law, becoming impossible to trace, so too did the orange vanish. Without sunlight, the orange absorbs the available light and appears almost black or earth-toned. Wallace was delighted, and duly recorded a great discovery in his diary.
The research was later carried forward by another remarkable scholar, Dr. Biruté Galdikas. This courageous woman pitched her tent straight into the Bornean jungle in 1971 and spent more than fifty years away from her own family, living among nothing but orangutans. While our country finds it hard enough to keep a coalition government standing for five years without a single quarrel, this woman studied the society of orangutans and great apes without hesitation for half a century. She discovered that, in the deep shade of the forest, the orangutan's saffron hue is its true suit of armor — no political armor at all.
Just as certain men don saffron robes in the name of religion, top a head with a peaked cap, grow a long untrimmed beard or wear some religious emblem round the neck, disguising all their sins and corruption beneath the costume of a holy man, so too has nature dressed these innocent creatures in saffron. The purpose is singular: to throw dust in the hunter's eyes, to spare them easy detection, and to grant them a safer chance at survival.
Dr. Galdikas further proved that orangutans are, in fact, deeply peaceable creatures who prefer to keep themselves hidden among the branches. They hold no processions down the highway to celebrate their saffron color, chant no slogans, and never start a religious riot with some other species of ape over whose color is supreme.
Then came another significant finding. In the 1990s, a scientist named Gerald Jacobs began research into animal eyesight — the power of the eye itself. How a creature sees, and how it distinguishes color, remains one of nature's great mysteries. Much as Indian voters seem to go suddenly blind the moment an election arrives, unable to see a single flaw or weakness in a candidate, seeing everything instead in the lovely green hue of promises, so too are the forest's fiercest hunters — tigers and clouded leopards — born blind to a certain range of color. In scientific language this condition is called "dichromatic," or two-color, vision. Put simply, these mighty predators can never tell the difference between red and green. To us humans, an orangutan's coat looks as bright saffron as a particular ruling party's flag; to a tiger, that very same color looks no different from a dry, earth-toned leaf, or even a green one. The poor tiger lies below, belly hungry, looking up, and sees nothing but leaves and more leaves. Up above, the orangutan gentleman sits on his branch, reaping the full benefit of his saffron coat, munching fruit in blissful contentment, quietly laughing to himself at the tiger's foolishness below. This, one might say, is nature's finest diplomacy — or politics. The enemy believes all is well, while the entire game plays out right before his eyes, and he can grasp none of it.
In our modern age, scientists have proven this beyond all doubt using computers and advanced cameras. Researchers in visual ecology at the University of Bristol built a computer simulation of a predator's eye and found that, indeed, within a leaf-green forest, the orange color disappears completely. This modern research made one thing entirely clear: orangutans did not knowingly choose this saffron color, nor did any particular political ideology inspire them to become saffron-hued, nationalist apes. It is simply an ordinary struggle for survival in the forest, a plain biological necessity. But here is the irony: in a country like India, and especially in our own Odisha, this very color has become the greatest problem facing these five innocent orangutan babies. Had they remained in their native Bornean forest, that color might have saved them from a tiger's jaws; but the moment they set foot on Indian soil, they could not escape the sharp eyes of the satirists and the politicians. No doubt they now sit in their zoo enclosure, discussing among themselves in their own tongue: "Good heavens, we were given this color to hide from enemies in the jungle — but in this astonishing country, instead of concealing us, it draws everyone's attention." Had they known from birth how much demand there is for saffron in India, and how the mere sight of it sets people off on politics, they would surely have chosen some more neutral color. White, perhaps, or black — anything nobody would think to drag into politics for no reason. Whatever the case, the tale of these orangutans teaches us that nature's game and man's politics are both, in their own ways, curious things. What preserves life in one place becomes, for no good reason, a subject of ridicule in another. These poor great apes must surely be praying that this political climate of ours cools down soon, so they may return safely to their natural home. An orangutan's color is meant to help it vanish into the forest canopy — not to turn it into a newspaper headline.
But suppose these poor orangutans survive Odisha's political storm and make it back to their native Borneo — would they even be safe there? Not in the least!
In India they may be branded party workers, saffron propagandists, or the ruling party's political brand ambassadors; but back home in Borneo, another great trial awaits them — the monster called palm oil, and mankind's bottomless stomach and pocket.
In the dense forests of Borneo and Sumatra there may be no rallies, no shouting matches between government and opposition, but day and night one can hear the terrible screech of the chainsaw.
Nature-loving mankind is clearing thousands of hectares of Borneo's ancient rainforest to make way for palm oil plantations, so as to manufacture its chips, biscuits, soap, cream, and junk food. The very orangutans trying to vanish from their enemies' eyes by sitting up in the branches, relying on their saffron coats, now find mankind felling the tree itself, roots and all.
Alfred Wallace and Dr. Biruté Galdikas proved through their research that an orangutan's saffron coloring protects it from the eyes of tigers and clouded leopards, on account of the animals' dichromatic vision. But science, poor thing, could never have calculated that in the eyes of Borneo's timber mafia, industrialists, and bulldozer operators, only one color truly registers — the green of banknotes!
Against the iron teeth of a bulldozer, nature's camouflage is entirely powerless. As the bulldozers charge in like demons, setting the forest alight, orangutan mothers clutch their babies to their chests and flee in terror from tree to tree. It is at such moments that wildlife smugglers shoot the helpless mothers dead, pack the orphaned babies into wooden crates, and sell them into the international black market. This is precisely how these five visitors crossed international borders and arrived on Odisha's soil, becoming, for our inventive politicians and netizens, a delightful tale of "saffron politics"! Viewed impartially, then, there is no corner of the earth where these poor orangutans may find peace.
Back home in Borneo, mankind is stealing away their home. Here in India, mankind is busy making politics out of their color. In Borneo they are sacrificed to palm oil; in Odisha they are declared new propagandists for the Hindutva vote bank.
Borneo's forests are not safe today. If the felling continues at this pace, within a few decades orangutans will vanish from Borneo altogether. Perhaps, sitting in their zoo cage, these five orangutan babies are praying quietly in their hearts: "Oh Lord, save us from Borneo's timber axe — and if not that, then deliver us from the pens of India's inventive politicians, cartoonists, and trolls!"
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