Heading in the Right Direction: The Spiritual Movement Saving a Gentle Giant

The day began as usual for Ganeshbhai Devjibhai Varidum. The 54-year-old fisherman was on a trawler off the coast of the western Indian state of Gujarat, and the Arabian Sea was turbid, as it always is in this region.

But as he and his crew drew up their enormous net, he suddenly spotted something. “I saw some black spots near the surface, and then a massive shadow.”

They had mistakenly caught a whale shark, the largest fish in the world and one that fisherfolk in Gujarat are no strangers to. Up to 40 feet in length and an inveterate migrator, the whale shark is as long as a city bus, and probably clocks as many, if not more miles. Caught as bycatch in Varidum’s trawling net, the fish thrashed about, getting increasingly entangled.

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Twenty-five years ago, the giant animal would have been killed, towed to the shore, and its extensive oil reserves used to waterproof fishing boats. But Varidum did something extraordinary: He cut the net, which would have cost him upwards of $2,500, to free the shark. “Just imagine, this is the largest fish in the world and it comes to our shore […] that’s something, right?” he says. “Watching it go free gave me peace of mind.”

Found in tropical waters in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, whale sharks might be dauntingly large but they are known as the sea’s gentle giants. They feed on plankton and tiny fish on the water’s surface simply by opening their huge mouths, swallowing water and passively filtering small creatures with their mesh-like gills.

Their interactions with humans are peaceful and curious, but they face a number of manmade threats the world over, including finning, bycatch, vessel strikes and climate change. In India, whale sharks migrate, feed and reproduce along both its eastern and western coasts. And until the late 1990s, the shores of Gujarat were ground zero for whale shark hunting. The fish did not even have a name in the local language (fishers simply called them “badi macchli,” or big fish) but their fins, oil and even meat were lucrative commodities.

In 2000, Shores of Silence, a documentary by Indian filmmaker Mike Pandey, highlighted this carnage. The film, and advocacy by the Indian delegation at the 2002 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in Santiago, led to a greater control over trade in whale shark products. Vivek Menon, co-founder of Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), was in the delegation and instrumental in this advocacy.

Some specific progress had already been made in India. In 2001, for example, the whale shark became the first fish to be accorded the same protection and status as tigers and elephants under the Indian Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. But Menon and his team soon realized that laws alone could not protect the mammoth fish — they needed to somehow change the attitudes of the fishers themselves.

In response, the Trust started a conservation program in 2002, and their first breakthrough came about, believe it or not, thanks to a spiritual guru.

Morari Bapu (born Moraridas Prabhudas Hariyani) is a Hindu spiritual leader whose sermons on the life of the Hindu god Rama have attracted millions of followers, especially in his home state of Gujarat. When the WTI team told him about whale sharks there, he began urging his listeners to protect the fish in his sermons.

Bapu likened the fish to divinity, and drew a parallel between the whale shark coming to the coast of Gujarat to breed and the traditional custom of married daughters returning to their maternal home for childbirth. Somehow, the idea resonated, and the whale shark went from being nameless in the local language to becoming the “vhali,” or beloved one.

“Bapu made me realize that the whale shark is the largest fish in the sea but it never harms anyone,” Ratilal Bamaniya, an elected leader of a fisher village on the Gujarat coast, says. “So why should we harm it?” Varidum is more heartfelt: “The whale shark is like my daughter. If she hurts, I hurt.”

With financial backing from the Indian corporate giant Tata Chemicals, and support from the Gujarat Forest Department, the WTI’s conservation program took off. The state began observing November 20 every year as Whale Shark Day (its international equivalent is observed on August 30), taking parades with life-size whale shark effigies through the streets and celebrating rescuers as conservation heroes.

In 2006, the forest department introduced a compensation scheme to pay fishers for net repairs after whale sharks have been released unharmed — a simple but vital recognition of the role fishing communities play in protecting whale sharks but which isn’t always possible if their livelihoods are at risk, given cutting nets to free stranded whale sharks can cost hours of lost fishing and hundreds of rupees in damage. To document these releases for compensation, WTI has distributed over 1,500 waterproof cameras to fishers, helping establish a shared data repository.

More than compensation, however, it seems fishers have come to be motivated by the respect and public attention that each rescue elicits. Bamaniya, who coordinates rescues with WTI and the Gujarat Forest Department, says proudly that his tiny village set five whale sharks free in 2025, and that each rescue made it to domestic press as well as social media.

Varidum, who has been involved in seven whale shark rescues, says that people in his village look up to him. “I feel that [rescuing whale sharks] brings me closer to God,” he adds.

In 2011, WTI and the Gujarat Forest Department began to track whale sharks using satellite telemetry, and have tagged 11 individuals so far. This was a scientific milestone as their migration patterns along the Indian coast and as far as the Somali coast and the Maldives had not been mapped before. One whale shark tagged off Gujarat spent more than 100 days journeying over 4,000 km, crisscrossing India’s western seaboard from Gujarat to Kerala and the Lakshadweep Islands before returning home.

WTI surveyed 1,703 fishers across 118 landing sites across India and identified five new aggregation hotspots for whale sharks outside Gujarat. “We realized that we’d have to somehow protect the whale shark all along its migration route,” says Professor B.C. Choudhury, executive trustee and principal investigator of aquatic projects at WTI.

WTI’s subsequent launch of the Whale Shark Conservation Project in Kerala and Lakshadweep in 2017 has been challenging but quite successful. Unlike Gujarat, where the forest department was so supportive, the Kerala state government does not offer compensation for net damage.

“We also haven’t found Kerala’s version of Morari Bapu yet,” says marine biologist Sajan John wryly. John is WTI’s lead in Kerala, and spends his days educating fishers about the need to conserve whale sharks. For him, the fact that they have accomplished 51 rescues in Kerala since 2017 is an achievement. “The mindset is slowly shifting with every rescue,” he says. Across the state, 257 awareness sessions, where lifesize models of whale sharks are a big draw, have reached more than 204,000 fishers and over 100,000 children.

And on International Whale Shark Day 2025, the project expanded to Goa, where the state government announced fishers could receive 75,000 Indian rupees (approximately $815) in compensation for lost or damaged nets.

“Until we first saw a newborn whale shark in these waters, we had no idea the fish travels along the Western seaboard to breed on the Gujarat coast — even though Morari Bapu had somehow built a whole story around it in his sermon two decades ago,” Bloch says, gazing across the Arabian Sea. “I’m glad he was right.”

Scrolling images courtesy of Shane Myers Photography / Shutterstock and Wildlife Trust of India.