Complete, exam-ready answers to every question in NCERT Vistas Chapter 2 “The Tiger King,” including the “Before you read” question and the five questions printed in the margin of the story, followed by Reading with Insight, all in the book’s order.
1 Before You Read and In-Text Questions
Q. What is the general attitude of human beings towards wild animals?
Answer: This is a warm-up question for discussion, so answers will vary. Most people admire wild animals, fear them, or see them as something to be used: for sport, trophies, entertainment or profit. Very often the animals’ own right to live is forgotten. The story that follows is a satire on the conceit of those in power, and it also shows the cruelty of this attitude toward animals: a Maharaja kills tiger after tiger only to satisfy his own vanity and to defeat a prophecy, until the tiger population of his state is wiped out.
Q. Who is the Tiger King? Why does he get that name?
Answer: The Tiger King is the Maharaja of Pratibandapuram, whose long title includes “Sir Jilani Jung Jung Bahadur.” At his birth the astrologers foretold that his death would come “from the Tiger.” To defeat this fate he began to hunt tigers, banned anyone else from hunting them, and vowed to kill a hundred. His tiger-killing is what earns him the name “Tiger King.”
Q. What did the royal infant grow up to be?
Answer: The crown prince “grew taller and stronger day by day.” He was brought up entirely in the English way: he “drank the milk of an English cow, was brought up by an English nanny, tutored in English by an Englishman, saw nothing but English films.” When he came of age at twenty, the State, which had been with the Court of Wards, came into his hands, and he became a ruler obsessed with tiger hunting, determined to kill a hundred tigers to prove the prophecy wrong.
Q. What will the Maharaja do to find the required number of tigers to kill?
Answer: When the tigers of Pratibandapuram run out after he has killed seventy, he decides to get married. He asks the dewan to draw up statistics of the tiger populations of the different native states and to find a girl from the royal family of a state with a large tiger population. The dewan finds such a bride, and on every visit to his father-in-law the Maharaja kills five or six tigers, until ninety-nine tiger skins adorn the walls of his palace.
Q. How will the Maharaja prepare himself for the hundredth tiger which was supposed to decide his fate?
Answer: He becomes intensely anxious and extremely careful, remembering the warning that “even after killing ninety-nine tigers the Maharaja should beware of the hundredth.” When sheep begin to disappear from a hillside village of his own state, he announces a three-year exemption from all taxes for that village and sets out on the hunt at once. He refuses to leave the forest until the tiger is found; as the days pass, his fury grows, many officers lose their jobs, and he orders the dewan to double the land tax.
Q. What will now happen to the astrologer? Do you think the prophecy was indisputably disproved?
Answer: The Maharaja believes he has killed the hundredth tiger, so by his reckoning the astrologer should now keep his word, burn his books and “become an insurance agent.” By this time, however, the story calls him “the late chief astrologer,” so nothing can happen to him. The prophecy is not disproved at all. The Maharaja’s bullet actually missed the tiger, which one of the hunters then killed, so the hundredth tiger was never killed by the Maharaja. In the end a wooden toy tiger chosen as a gift for his son gives him the splinter wound that kills him: “In this manner the hundredth tiger took its final revenge upon the Tiger King.”
2 Reading with Insight
Q. The story is a satire on the conceit of those in power. How does the author employ the literary device of dramatic irony in the story?
Answer: Kalki satirises the conceit of the powerful through the Maharaja’s obsession with completing a tally of a hundred tigers, treating the deaths of a hundred animals as a matter of personal pride rather than any real concern. Dramatic irony runs through the story’s climax: the reader and the hunters both know that the Maharaja’s shot at the “hundredth tiger” missed, and that the animal only fainted from shock, while the Maharaja himself proudly believes his vow is genuinely fulfilled. The hunters, to protect their own jobs, quietly finish the tiger off themselves rather than reveal the truth, so the Maharaja lives out the rest of his short life still conceited about a victory that never actually happened. This gap between what the reader knows and what the Maharaja believes exposes his conceit even more sharply than a direct statement could.
Q. What is the author’s indirect comment on subjecting innocent animals to the willfulness of human beings?
Answer: Kalki never states his criticism directly; instead, he shows a hundred tigers hunted purely to satisfy one man’s superstition and pride, with no thought given to the animals themselves. The tiger population of his own state becomes extinct, and the tiger farms run dry even in his father-in-law’s kingdom, simply to complete a personal tally. Even the story’s ending underlines this: it is not a tiger’s strength that finally kills the Maharaja, but, as the book puts it, “the hundredth tiger took its final revenge upon the Tiger King,” through a lifeless wooden replica. By making the human cost (the Maharaja’s own death) come from the same obsession that caused the animals’ deaths, Kalki indirectly comments that such wilful cruelty towards wildlife ultimately turns back on the very people who practise it.
Q. How would you describe the behaviour of the Maharaja’s minions towards him? Do you find them truly sincere towards him or are they driven by fear when they obey him? Do we find a similarity in today’s political order?
Answer: The Maharaja’s minions are driven by fear, not sincere loyalty. The dewan objects to doubling the land tax, but when told he may resign, he secretly brings in an old tiger from the People’s Park in Madras to save his own position, not out of any genuine wish to help his king succeed. The hunters, on discovering that the Maharaja’s shot missed, choose to deceive him because “they could lose their jobs,” and one of them kills the tiger himself. Even the shopkeeper who sells the wooden tiger inflates its price out of fear of punishment rather than honesty. None of these figures act out of real respect for the Maharaja; each protects himself first. This pattern is not unique to Pratibandapuram: even today, people in positions of power are often surrounded by subordinates who tell them what they want to hear rather than the truth, out of fear of losing their position, exactly as happens throughout this story.
Q. Can you relate instances of game-hunting among the rich and the powerful in the present times that illustrate the callousness of human beings towards wildlife?
Answer: (This is an open, discussion-based question inviting the student’s own examples.) Modern instances of similar callousness include trophy-hunting expeditions where wealthy individuals pay large sums to hunt endangered animals such as lions, elephants or rhinos purely for sport and to display trophies, and cases of powerful or influential people using their status to hunt protected species illegally without facing real consequences. Like the Maharaja’s hundred tigers, such hunting is rarely about necessity; it is about status, personal satisfaction and demonstrating power over nature, which is exactly the attitude Kalki satirises in this story.
Q. We need a new system for the age of ecology: a system which is embedded in the care of all people and also in the care of the Earth and all life upon it. Discuss.
Answer: (This is an open, discussion-based question.) The story shows what happens under the opposite of such a system: an entire tiger population is wiped out to satisfy one man’s personal ambition, with no thought given to the animals’ survival or the ecological balance they maintain. A system built on the care of all life would instead treat wildlife as something to be protected and lived alongside, not exploited for personal pride, recognising that human wellbeing and the health of the natural world are ultimately connected rather than separate concerns. The Maharaja’s own downfall, brought about indirectly by his obsession with tigers, can even be read as a reminder that treating nature carelessly rarely leaves the wrongdoer entirely unaffected.
Questions 4 and 5 are open-ended discussion questions with no single fixed answer in the book. Support your own view with a clear example and connect it back to the story’s own events, as shown above, rather than writing a generic essay unrelated to the chapter.