Gentle Giants of Gujarat
“My first memory of whale sharks is when I was 10 years old, traveling from Mombasa to Bombay via Porbandar on a ship,” recalls Mike Pandey, an Indian wildlife filmmaker who was born in Kenya. He had seen these majestic creatures—the world’s largest fish—swim alongside his ship during the weeklong journey in the Indian Ocean. This early encounter—fleeting yet unforgettable—would later become the compass for a lifelong journey of recognition and resistance.
Decades after, when a middle-aged Pandey drove along the Gujarat coastline asking people about the “big fish”, no one knew what he was talking about. How could such a magnificent creature not have a local name? It boggles the mind. The absence of a local name was not just linguistic—it signaled a deeper invisibility, a species unrecognized even as it brushed against daily life. How could a creature so vast, so visually arresting, so unmistakably present—year after year—remain unnamed along the very coast it visits? It defies belief.
Finally, a builder of fiber glass boats in Bhavnagar described the beautifully patterned fish and said that in some villages, people hunted it on occasion. Locals did not eat the fish, but they used oil from the liver to waterproof wooden boats. Perhaps the boat-builder was unaware of more recent developments: From 1991 onwards, whale sharks had been killed in large numbers in Gujarat, fueled by the demand for their fins and meat in South-east Asia and Europe. In any case, after the chat with the builder, the quest began in earnest.
In 1998, Pandey sighted his first whale shark in the murky waters of the Veraval harbor. As large as a trawler, the fish lay cut open. Two men who had clambered on were hacking at its insides. It was a gruesome sight. As life ebbed out of the hapless fish, Pandey remembers making a silent pledge: he would save the gentle giants of the Gujarat coast.
That would take some doing. Saving a species begins with seeing—without flinching and without turning away.
Like the blue whale, the migratory whale shark, or Rhincodon typus, which inhabits both tropical and warm, temperate seas feeds largely on plankton. It does not attack humans, but people eat its meat. In China, for instance, it has been dubbed “tofu shark”; shark fin soup is a prized delicacy in Chinese cuisine. The fish can live up to one hundred years but produces offspring only once every few years. Overfishing, which can push populations of this species to ruinous lows, remains the biggest threat to its existence.
By the turn of the 20th century, there was an international market for different parts of the whale shark—a set of fins alone could fetch close to $1,000. In Gujarat, the middlemen had moved in for the kill. The fish did have a local name, “barrel”—after the plastic drum used to haul it ashore. Yet scientists Pandey spoke to maintained that whale sharks did not visit these shores, so the slaughter could not be happening.
The camera became a witness, a tool of reckoning in a place where silence had long enabled slaughter. Pandey’s crew went about filming the hunting of the whale shark. In 2000, the resulting documentary “Shores of Silence” won the Wildscreen Panda Award, the equivalent of the Oscar for natural history films. One year later, after intense lobbying, the Indian government banned the killing of whale sharks.
That was not all. Recognition, once sparked, rippled outward—across borders, across bureaucracies, across the conscience of a global community. At the gathering of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 2002, even as the conference was winding down, the panel agreed to a re-vote on whale sharks. After watching Pandey’s documentary, an overwhelming majority voted to put the fish on a list of species not in immediate danger of extinction, but in need of trade restrictions in order to ensure their survival.
In India, the whale shark was already on a par with the charismatic tiger, as far as legal protection goes. But protection on paper means little if the name itself remains unknown, if the story hasn’t yet reached the shore. Three years into the ban, a survey along the Gujarat coast showed that even in Veraval, the hub of the whale shark fisheries, few knew of its status.
A “Save the Whale Sharks” movement was launched in Gujarat in 2004, to change attitudes towards the fish that visits its shores from September to May. Conservation here was not just ecological—it was cultural, linguistic, spiritual. The campaign was a joint venture of the Wildlife Trust of India-International Fund for Animal Welfare (WTI-IFAW), Tata Chemicals Ltd and the Gujarat Forest department.
Morari Bapu, a spiritual leader revered by many in Gujarat, became a campaign ambassador. At the launch, he spoke about the tradition of nonviolence and the idea of honoring guests. Warming to the theme, he equated the visits of whale shark to a beloved daughter coming home to give birth to her child. The metaphor of the daughter reframed the whale shark not as a resource, but as kin—worthy of welcome, not extraction.
This metaphor became the theme for a street play which featured a fisherman, a potential hunter of whale sharks, whose pregnant daughter comes home to deliver her baby. The plot linked the fate of the fish and that of the daughter, so ultimately the fisherman resolves to save and protect both. The play did what policy could not: it made the whale shark personal, urgent, beloved.
With the play becoming a hit in the fishing villages, the fish known as “barrel” became vhali, meaning “dear one”, which was the name of the daughter in the play. A 4oft inflatable whale shark, which served as the backdrop, drew in the crowds. Inland, too, kids loved the life-sized model of vhali. They touched it and wanted to know more about the fish.
Porbandar, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, was the first to adopt the whale shark as its mascot. Other coastal towns, including Veraval, followed the lead. In September 2004, a whale shark accidentally caught in the nets of a trawler off the coast of Dwarka was the first beneficiary of the awareness drive. The owner of the trawler, Kamlesh Chamadia, knew what he had to do. “It is such a gentle fish that it remained still even when it was entangled in the nets,” he had said in an interview, “our crew had to climb over it to cut some parts of the nets to release it.”
Freeing vhali came at a cost to fishermen. The obvious one was the price of the fishing nets, which was close to Rs 25,000. Then there were incidentals: the massive fish displaced the catch of the day, and the rescue was intricate, time-consuming work involving the labor of many. The rescue was not just logistical—it was a moral choreography, a collective act of care.
Most fishermen did the right thing. Their sacrifice—of nets, time, and catch—was a quiet revolution, one that rewrote the relationship between livelihood and life. Policy began to catch up with practice, acknowledging that compassion often comes at a cost. In 2006, the government came up with a scheme to compensate fishermen for the damage to the fishing nets. But a forest official would have to be summoned to the scene of the rescue to inspect the evidence. Waiting for the official would increase the trauma of the trapped animal and lower its chances of survival. Technology became a bridge between urgency and bureaucracy, allowing care to be documented without delay. In 2012, the conservationists began distributing tamper-proof cameras to fishermen. They could self-document the event and make claims.
After the compensation scheme kicked in, fishermen in Gujarat have rescued close to 700 whale sharks, some of which were newborn pups. The WTI research team, which presented the data at a prestigious whale shark conference last year, believes that nearly all rescued fish survived the trauma. They lived, if you will, happily ever after.
“India is most likely the world leader in releasing whale sharks caught accidentally,” says Simon J. Pierce, a marine biologist who is also cofounder of the Marine Megafauna Foundation, a research and conservation organization formed with the goal of saving whale sharks from extinction.
“Scientific efforts from Wildlife Trust of India to monitor the movements of whale sharks after they are freed are hugely important,” he says over email. The whale shark’s invisibility beneath the waves demands a new kind of seeing—scientific and sustained. Unlike whales, which are mammals, whale sharks, which are fish, don’t have to come up for air periodically. As they dive deep, their journeys are largely invisible to humans. Feeding mobs, consisting mostly of male whale sharks, do gather along certain coasts annually, but where do the males and females meet? Where are the favored breeding grounds?
With a better understanding of the creature’s movements and its life stages, conservationists can come up with better strategies to save this species migratory across national boundaries.
Rescue operations offer researchers a chance to pin satellite tags onto the fish’s fins. The devices track and transmit data about the depths to which the fish dive, the distances they cover. Right now, a whale shark tagged by the WTI team is making its way towards Africa. Sajan John, head of the marine division at WTI, says his field team also conducts off-shore surveys of free-swimming whale sharks. They scrape tissue samples from the entangled fish for genetic testing. Scraping tissue from a living giant is an act of reverent science—intimate, careful, necessary.
Every bit of data helps. Data becomes advocacy, and advocacy becomes protection—if the world is willing to listen. Last year, Pierce led the team whose efforts saw the recognition of the whale shark as a globally endangered species. Since then, he says, all available scientific data on the sharks’ movements and biology have been collated to support a nomination to list the species that as threatened with extinction and requiring strict protection.
The name “Vhali” can’t fill a stomach or repair a torn net.
If that nomination is approved this October, it could lead to enhanced protection for whale sharks in a number of countries in the Indian Ocean where no conservation plans are in place. The fate of vhali may hinge on a vote cast ocean away—a reminder that recognition must be global to be lasting.
Passing a law to halt whale shark fishery, however, is only the first step. Protection without enforcement is a hollow promise; recognition must be lived, not just legislated. The species, for instance, is protected under Chinese law, but there is, Pierce says, a large unmonitored catch of whale sharks—estimated to be hundreds of sharks per year—in the South China Sea. This is a major threat to whale sharks in that region and potentially further afield.
In Gujarat, the killing of whale sharks may have stopped — attitudes and behaviors changed. But clearly, much more remains to be done elsewhere. One coastline has learned to welcome its gentle giants. Now, the rest of the ocean must follow.
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