In 1995, Geeta Seshamani witnessed a sloth bear bobbing up and down in the middle of the Delhi-Agra highway. “The poor bear was being dragged along by a coarse rope that was threaded through his bleeding and infected muzzle while his ‘owner’ begged money off the tourists,” she says, with anguish in her voice.
The horrific practice of the Dancing Bear—as it was referred to since the bear jumped up and down in pain when their handlers (from the Kalandar community) tugged at the rope—struck a nerve with Geeta. It involved piercing a hot iron rod into the soft muzzle of the bear cub, after which a rope is threaded through it, which is then used to make the bear ‘dance’.
The dancing bear act began around 400 years ago when a nomadic community entered India from Persia and performed tricks to entertain Mughal emperors. Over the centuries, the emperors and kingdoms disappeared, but the ‘dancing’ bear trade…