A Girl, a Tiger and a Very Strange Story begins with the opening lines of Sarah Hester Ross’s Savage Daughter. They are not decorative. They are a key. Within the next few pages, Paro Anand introduces Junglee, and the lyrics suddenly make sense.
‘Junglee. That’s what she was called. Not because it was a bad thing.’ In her world, the word means one who lives in the jungle, and she does. Her hair flares like wildfire, her eyes shift between sun, moon and stars, and she moves ‘like a river… that does not know how to feel tired.’ The song’s refusal, ‘I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice,’ finds its embodiment here. What the lyrics announce as defiance, the prose renders as instinct.
By opening the book with those lyrics and then introducing Junglee in such elemental terms, Paro Anand creates a seamless transition from song to story. Junglee becomes the ‘savage daughter’ of the forest. The word ‘junglee’, reclaimed and redefined, mirrors the song’s insistence on reclaiming what society often fears or diminishes in girls.
Junglee belongs to a Pardhi family that lives and moves through the forest as a nomad. One evening, after losing her way, a sudden and violent storm sweeps through the forest, forcing Junglee to spend the night alone in the branches of a tree. When morning comes and she returns to the spot where her family had been camping, they are gone. At the same time, a tiger cub has also been separated from his mother in the storm and wanders the forest in confusion. Junglee hopes the mother will return just as she hopes her own family will come back for her. When neither does, Junglee is left to survive on her own, while also caring for the cub she names Raunaq.
Whether Junglee will be reunited with her family, and whether Raunaq will find his mother, forms the heart of the story. The idea of a young girl and a tiger cub being forced to live and grow together is both unusual and compelling. While the story begins lightly, it gradually reveals deeper meanings, the possibility of understanding between human and animal without spoken language and the idea of coexistence with a creature humans fear.
The story captures a deeply touching bond between a child and an animal. Through this relationship, the second half of the narrative brings attention to a serious and often ignored issue, the lives of the Pardhi community, a nomadic community in Central India which has been historically associated with poaching due to a loss of traditional livelihoods and persistent social stigma. Once skilled hunters who assisted royals and the British on shikaar (hunts), they were branded as criminals by the British under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, which made their traditional way of life illegal. Junglee, a Pardhi girl herself, protects a vulnerable tiger cub, even though her community is blamed for hunting such animals. Her desire to go to school remains unfulfilled because she has no formal identity, no secure home, and no access to opportunity. By weaving these realities into a children’s story, the author addresses injustice with great sensitivity, offering a compassionate portrayal that invites readers to question easy judgements and reflect on the lived realities behind social labels. The author does not present people as inherently wrong; instead, the story shows how poverty, exclusion, and lack of choice can push individuals into morally complex situations.
Told as two sides of the same story, the narrative structure transcends the conventional boundaries of children’s literature. Junglee’s story is told in prose while Raunaq’s story, by contrast, is shown through Priya Kuriyan’s graphic panels. This division is meaningful; it allows readers to experience the world in two ways, through human words and through animal feeling. Moving between the two, the story builds quiet emotional depth, where even small gestures, a glance, a pause, a step forward, carry weight and feeling. Kuriyan’s illustrations are expressive, often without words, showing fear, tenderness, and trust with great clarity.
The text and image create a beautiful reading experience, one that draws in children through imagination and stays with adults through its calm understanding of loss, care, and connection. Children who love animals and adventure will be drawn to the bond at the story’s centre; adults and educators will appreciate the way the book introduces difficult social issues without losing tenderness. It’s both a wilderness tale and a humane study of marginality, a book that gently asks what we owe to one another. The story instills hope and faith. It will leave you wishing for a safer, better world for all those who live here, and it will make you believe, just a little bit more, that such a world is possible if only we look at each other with the same open heart that Junglee offers to her beloved Raunaq.
Shagun Tomar is a graduate in Political Science from Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, Delhi, and is pursuing her Master’s in Political Science at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi.