International Tiger Day: Meet Mohan, World's First White Tiger, Who Fasted Every Sunday
3/8
Mohan was more than a pet; he was treated like royalty. According to historians, Mohan was cared for with the same respect and attention as a prince of the Baghel dynasty. The palace staff even referred to him as 'Mohan Singh'. Interestingly, Mohan was known for his unusual habit of fasting on Sundays. No matter how much the King tried to persuade him, the tiger would only consume milk on those days. (News18 Hindi)
Mohan also had a playful side; he loved football. Over time, the palace began to feel less like a home for a wild animal and more like a kingdom where Mohan reigned. As he grew older, Mohan fathered a new generation of white tigers. He had three mates, one of whom was named Radha. On October 30, 1958, Radha gave birth to four white cubs: Raja, Rani, Mohini, and Sakeshi - the world's first naturally born white tigers. (News18 Hindi)
Mohan's lineage continued to grow. In total, 34 cubs were born from Mohan, out of which 21 were white. His legacy extended far beyond Rewa, with many of his offspring sent to zoos across India and abroad. However, despite this success, white tigers eventually disappeared from Rewa. The very land that gave the world its first white tiger lost its connection with them. (News18 Hindi)
Mohan passed away on December 19, 1969, at the age of 19. He was buried with full state honours in the gardens of Govindgarh Fort, where a mausoleum now stands in his memory. His death marked the end of an era, and years later, his last known descendant in Rewa, a white tiger named Virat, died in 1976. (News18 Hindi)
According to historian Dr Mukesh Yengal, in 2016, efforts to revive Mohan's legacy were reignited. Thanks to the initiative of Minister Rajendra Shukla, the Maharaja Martand Singh Zoo Dev White Tiger Safari was established in Mukundpur, Govindgarh. It marked the return of the white tiger to its homeland. A white tigress named Vindhya was brought in, bringing hope and pride back to the land of Vindhya. (News18 Hindi)
Interestingly, the existence of white tigers in India predates Mohan. Historical texts like the Akbarnama mention that Mughal Emperor Akbar hunted two white tigers in 1561. Yet, it was Mohan who carved a special place in history, not just as a rare animal, but as a symbol of Rewa's royal legacy and India's rich wildlife heritage. (News18 Hindi)
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
12 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Review: From the King's Table to Street Food by Pushpesh Pant
Whenever I've heard Pushpesh Pant speak about food, whether in a three-hour Aaj Tak radio episode or from beneath the shade of a tree in Sunder Nursery, I always picture him with a mouthful of gulab jamun, mid-sentence. It's as if he's chewing on metaphor and syrup at the same time, swaad lagaake. This is not a complaint. It's a particular talent of talking as though the act of remembering is indistinguishable from the act of tasting. Every corner in this book is filtered through desire, rumour, and what the body once wanted at 4 PM in 1972. Fasting and feasting in Delhi's Jama Masjid market (Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times) Pant's great trick is that he does not try to prove a thesis (which he admits early on), he makes the reader feel the absences around which his city has always existed. You can feel the smoke of a missing kabab stall, the sweetness of a jalebi you can no longer find, the way someone once said, 'Yeh asli nihari hai' — and how no one says that anymore. 406pp, ₹699; Speaking Tiger This is not history as chronology. It's history as residue. Pant resists the academic impulse to flatten food into a stable 'object of study.' Instead, he treats it like an unreliable narrator which is part witness, part fabulist. He walks the reader through Mughal durbars, refugee kitchens post-Partition, and 1980s buffets in government guest houses with the same tone: curious, never conclusive. It's a tone I find strangely ethical. He does not lie. He simply doesn't pretend to know more than he does. 'Who's to say what is authentic anymore?' is the book's real question. And when the book refuses to solidify meaning makes Pant's writing feel ungovernable by typical non-fiction standards. A lesser writer might have lined up recipes, wrapped them in context, and added footnotes like garnish. Pant gives you traces. He gives you longing. And then he tells you that history, especially food history, is made of exactly that. This is where the book's revisionist quality emerges, not in the overwriting of old narratives, but in the refusal to grant them authority in the first place. From the King's Table to Street Food doesn't 'correct' history. It walks past it. Pant's loyalties are not with the court, the archive, or the textbook. They're with the forgotten halwai. The refugee daughter-in-law who invented a new biryani out of what she had. The rumour that this particular nihari joint used to serve the emperor's cook. All unverifiable. All valid. What's interesting is how political that stance is. Pant doesn't need to say, 'Food is political.' He shows you a city rearranged by displacement, war, plague, economic migration, caste. And he shows it through a single sentence: 'We must also remember that many of the so-called traditions of Delhi's food are hardly older than 175 years.' That's a statement which dismantles the fantasy of some eternal, static culinary identity. It tells you that Delhi, like its food, has been in motion forever. Even the Mughal nostalgia is handled with a wink. Pant clearly respects the imperial kitchens, but he's far more interested in what came after the empire broke. He's interested in the mutability of taste, in the way food adapts to new economies, new arrivals, new needs. In that sense, he's doing something quite radical: shifting the centre of Delhi's food story away from empire and toward entropy. The real protagonist of this book is change. You can see this in how Pant writes about sweets. Ghantewala's sohan halwa is more than just dessert, it's a ghost. It's a way to think about what happens when legacy stops being edible. Pant's nostalgia is forensic. Memory, in this book, is always being poked, disbelieved, laughed at. 'Memory tends to play strange tricks as you grow old and revisit old haunts, remembering them very differently,' he writes. That's the closest thing to a thesis this book can be. That is to say food is a memory device, and memory is unreliable on purpose. Here's what that does, formally. It frees Pant from the burden of being correct. He doesn't need to prove which dish came first, who made it, or where the cardamom was sourced. He needs only to make you believe that someone once cared enough to make it in the first place. And that someone else remembered it differently. The city's foodscape, then, becomes a series of layered misrememberings. It's history told in gossip, grief, appetite, and spice. There's also something about the way Pant treats 'Delhi' as a signifier. The term 'authentic' loses all structural integrity. There is no stable origin. Only imitation, translation, and habit. He quotes generously, from cooks, vendors, family members, friends. 'Who's to say the street food we eat today isn't more honest than what the royals dined on?' he asks. The question is rhetorical, but the provocation is real. What if the greasy paratha on your plate tonight has more to say about Delhi than the feasts of Shah Jahan ever could? Let's pause there. That sentence 'more honest' is doing heavy lifting. What does honesty mean in the context of food? Purity? Origins? Intention? The paratha you eat today in Moolchand isn't less authentic than the one your grandfather ate, it's just a different version of the same desire. Which is perhaps the book's deepest claim: that taste is a theory of history. And when taste changes, so does everything else. To speak of food, Pant reminds us, is also to speak of gaps — of what is no longer eaten, or no longer made the same way. One of the more haunting threads in From the King's Table to Street Food is his unspoken obsession with disappearance. Foodways are how a people remember themselves, and when they vanish, so does a particular version of history. Pant never mourns these losses directly. But he circles them. He writes around vanished eateries the way one speaks about old friends no longer seen. No judgment. Just absence, noted. We get a map with missing neighbourhoods, a route that doubles back on itself. We also get an ethnography of hunger. What people in Delhi craved at different moments in time. What they missed. What they insisted on reinventing. This insistence is key. Delhi's foodscape, as Pant sees it, is not a static inheritance. It's a constant improvisation. He gives the example of how Mughlai cuisine was repurposed by post-Partition Punjabi refugees. What was once slow, courtly, ceremonial became fast, fiery, and practical. Nihari, korma, and qorma changed hands. Changed oils. Changed meanings. The migrants who arrived from Rawalpindi and Lahore had different needs, different tongues. They didn't preserve Mughal recipes, they mutated them. This is culinary history as lived resistance in the kitchen. We then collectively arrive at a conclusion: food as adaptation. Not nostalgia. Not restoration. Not even survival exactly but a kind of semi-conscious synthesis. His prose mirrors this ethic. It lifts phrases from old Urdu poets. It riffs on colonial gazetteers. It quotes hawkers. It also speculates. This can make for an uneven reading experience. There are moments where the digressions pile up. A description of a long-lost kachori leads to a historical aside, which leads to a personal memory, which leads to a speculation about Persian influences and you feel the chapter is more compost than essay. But even this, I'd argue, is the form doing its work. Pant is essentially letting things rot. Break down. Ferment. That's what food does when left alone, and that's what language does when released from a thesis. Still, the absence of critical friction can feel like a missed opportunity. For all its richness, the book rarely addresses power directly. Caste is mentioned only glancingly. Class appears more often, but often as background. And while Pant is certainly aware of these forces, his inclination is to observe, not intervene. This reluctance feels generational, maybe even aesthetic. It seems his eye is trained on continuity, not rupture. But sometimes, I wished he'd push harder and ask who gets to narrate this city's food stories, and who disappears between bites. There is also an irony in the book – Pant is both an insider and an outsider to his own material. He is a trained academic, but he distrusts academia. He is a Delhiwallah, but one who arrived in the city as a student from the hills. His nostalgia is earned, not inherited. And that makes him unique to write this kind of book. Author Pushpesh Pant (Courtesy the publisher) What stays on the tongue long after the meal is over. What stories repeat themselves in different accents. What dishes resurface years later under new names. This, I think, is the radical heart of the book. It's not about preserving Delhi's culinary past. It's about showing how the past lives on in distortion, in mishearing, in new combinations. So what does that make this book? A field guide to edible memory? Perhaps. By the end, you do not know more about Delhi's food history. But you know how it might have felt to eat your way through it. You know how the city might have smelled on a humid day in the 1960s. You know why someone once said the chaat at Bengali Market was 'what love tastes like when it breaks your heart.' You know that history, too, can be eaten and that its aftertaste is often more vivid than the event itself. And maybe that's enough. Or maybe it's everything. Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
NDTV
a day ago
- NDTV
School Holidays In August 2025: Check Full List Of Festive And Regional Breaks
Full List of School Holdiays In August 2025: Compared to June and July-when schools usually reopen after the long summer vacation-August brings a greater number of holidays for students across India. This month features a total of 11 holidays, many of which are tied to national and cultural celebrations. Festivals like Raksha Bandhan, Janmashtami, Ganesh Chaturthi, and Independence Day infuse the month with a sense of tradition and festivity, giving students a refreshing break. Here's a complete list of holidays students can expect in August 2025: Date Day Occasion August 3 Sunday Weekly Holiday August 9 Saturday Raksha Bandhan August 10 Sunday Weekly Holiday August 13 - 17 Wednesday-Sunday Jhulan Purnima August 15 Friday Independence Day August 16 Saturday Janmashtami August 17 Sunday Weekly Holiday August 24 Sunday Weekly Holiday August 26 - 28 Tuesday - Thursday Onam August 27 Wednesday Ganesh Chaturthi August 31 Sunday Weekly Holiday Raksha Bandhan (August 9) The first major festive break in August is Raksha Bandhan, celebrating the bond between brothers and sisters. Sisters tie a "Rakhi" on their brothers' wrists, and brothers vow to protect them in return. It is widely observed in schools, colleges, and government institutions in many states. Jhulan Purnima (August 13-17) Spanning several days, Jhulan Purnima honors the divine love of Radha and Krishna. The festival is primarily celebrated in West Bengal, Odisha, and other parts of eastern India. Independence Day (August 15) India celebrates Independence Day on August 15 to commemorate freedom from British rule in 1947. The day typically includes flag hoisting ceremonies and cultural events across schools and institutions. Janmashtami (August 16) Janmashtami, marking the birth of Lord Krishna, is celebrated in almost all Indian states. The holiday may fall on the preceding or following day depending on local customs and traditions. Onam (August 26-28) Onam is Kerala's grand harvest festival, centered around the return of the mythical King Mahabali. The celebrations include floral designs (pookalam), feasts, and cultural activities. Many schools in Kerala remain closed, particularly around Thiruvonam, the main day of the festival. Ganesh Chaturthi (August 27) Ganesh Chaturthi celebrates the birth of Lord Ganesha, and is observed with devotion and public festivities in Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Telangana, and other states. Students may also enjoy a long weekend from August 15 to 17, depending on whether their schools remain closed on Saturday (Janmashtami). These holidays offer students valuable time to rest, catch up on assignments, revise for upcoming exams, explore hobbies, or even take short trips with family. Note: Holiday schedules can vary depending on your region, school, and local customs. Students should verify the exact holiday list with their school authorities or teachers.
News18
4 days ago
- News18
International Tiger Day: Meet Mohan, World's First White Tiger, Who Fasted Every Sunday
The year was 1951 when Maharaja Martand Singh spotted a white tiger in the Bargadi forest of Sidhi. Captivated by its unique appearance, the King decided to capture it. Once caught, the white tiger was brought to the royal fort of Govindgarh. From wild jungle to royal palace, Mohan's life changed overnight. With striking white fur and piercing blue eyes, the tiger became a centre of attraction, not just for the king but for everyone in the palace. (News18 Hindi) 3/8 Mohan was more than a pet; he was treated like royalty. According to historians, Mohan was cared for with the same respect and attention as a prince of the Baghel dynasty. The palace staff even referred to him as 'Mohan Singh'. Interestingly, Mohan was known for his unusual habit of fasting on Sundays. No matter how much the King tried to persuade him, the tiger would only consume milk on those days. (News18 Hindi) Mohan also had a playful side; he loved football. Over time, the palace began to feel less like a home for a wild animal and more like a kingdom where Mohan reigned. As he grew older, Mohan fathered a new generation of white tigers. He had three mates, one of whom was named Radha. On October 30, 1958, Radha gave birth to four white cubs: Raja, Rani, Mohini, and Sakeshi - the world's first naturally born white tigers. (News18 Hindi) Mohan's lineage continued to grow. In total, 34 cubs were born from Mohan, out of which 21 were white. His legacy extended far beyond Rewa, with many of his offspring sent to zoos across India and abroad. However, despite this success, white tigers eventually disappeared from Rewa. The very land that gave the world its first white tiger lost its connection with them. (News18 Hindi) Mohan passed away on December 19, 1969, at the age of 19. He was buried with full state honours in the gardens of Govindgarh Fort, where a mausoleum now stands in his memory. His death marked the end of an era, and years later, his last known descendant in Rewa, a white tiger named Virat, died in 1976. (News18 Hindi) According to historian Dr Mukesh Yengal, in 2016, efforts to revive Mohan's legacy were reignited. Thanks to the initiative of Minister Rajendra Shukla, the Maharaja Martand Singh Zoo Dev White Tiger Safari was established in Mukundpur, Govindgarh. It marked the return of the white tiger to its homeland. A white tigress named Vindhya was brought in, bringing hope and pride back to the land of Vindhya. (News18 Hindi) Interestingly, the existence of white tigers in India predates Mohan. Historical texts like the Akbarnama mention that Mughal Emperor Akbar hunted two white tigers in 1561. Yet, it was Mohan who carved a special place in history, not just as a rare animal, but as a symbol of Rewa's royal legacy and India's rich wildlife heritage. (News18 Hindi)
