Suhas Premkumar regularly encountered frogs while growing up in the town of Shikaripur in Karnataka’s Shimoga district. “Frogs coming into our kitchen was a day-to-day story,” says the Bengaluru-based filmmaker, photographer and naturalist whose film Little Planet: A Tale of Frogs premiered in the city on March 2 at the Dr. Ramdas M. Pai Convention Centre at MAHE, Yelahanka.

Suhas Premkumar
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

However, his deep fascination for the animal came much later, catalysed by his obsession with another animal: the snake. “I used to take photos of snakes, and since snakes come out searching for frogs, we started observing the latter too,” he says. “That is how they slowly began getting into my mind and heart.”

Coorg Yellow bush.
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

By 2015, he realised that he wanted to do more to raise awareness about these small animals that are “so vulnerable” and play a crucial role in maintaining ecosystem balance but are still not thought about or spoken about enough, believes Suhas. That proved to be the starting point for the conception of Little Planet: A Tale of Frogs, a film born out of a single but crucial question: what would it take to highlight the importance of frogs, the unsung heroes of our ecosystem? “The best way to reach people is by telling stories. That was how this journey began,” he says of the film, which took nearly a decade to make.

Uperodon Species
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

The snake rescuer

Even though snakes were the portal through which Suhas entered the world of wildlife, he grew up terrified of them. “If somebody said ‘snake’, I would run away,” he says. However, an encounter with a cobra during his 10th grade changed all that. “Our dog, Tiger, was looking down and barking at something,” he recalls. That something turned out to be a cobra, which appeared to be having a face-off with the dog. “It went on for almost an hour; the snake wouldn’t let the dog go, the dog wouldn’t let the snake go,” says Suhas, who then went to the local santhe in Shikaripur to bring home a snake charmer.

Malabar Gliding Frog.
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

The charmer, he recalls, picked up the snake and tore it apart, immediately killing it. “It was very disturbing and gruesome,” he remembers, adding that the incident gave him nightmares long after. Then, while visiting his grandmother in Mysuru a month later, he met M.S. Balasubramania, popularly known as Snake Shyam, a snake rescuer in the city. “I saw him rescuing a small cobra, picking it up and putting it in a bag. So, I asked him why he was doing this,” he says. Snake Shyam told him that the world was not just for humans to live in and that snakes were among the most misunderstood creatures, who didn’t bite to kill humans deliberately but to defend themselves.

After this revelation, “whenever I went to Mysuru, I would meet Snake Shyam, understand the snake and go with him for rescues. That is how I developed a passion for wildlife, especially snakes,” says Suhas, who, over time, began rescuing snakes himself, his very first rescue being an olive keelback, a rare and harmless watersnake, found primarily in South India. “I took one-and-a-half to two years just to research snakes, understanding which ones were venomous and non-venomous…how to handle a snake…what went into rescuing a snake,” he says.

Uperodon species
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

Photography and more

In 2006, Suhas moved to Bengaluru to join Infosys BPO in Electronic City. “The campus has a lot of snakes: keelbacks, rat snakes, cobras. Since people knew that I rescued snakes, the facility manager often called me to do that,” he says. And even after he stopped rescuing snakes in 2011 or 2012, his fascination for the reptiles refused to die. “I used to go in search of them in the jungle, wanting to introduce myself to the species found in the Western Ghats, which are very different from what you see in Bengaluru,” he says. “I would search for snakes in their natural habitat, just to see what they were doing, and then take photographs of them,” adds Suhas, who has been wielding a camera for over 25 years.

Amboli Bush
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

In 2011, after winning an award for one of his photographs from National Geographic, he plunged entirely into the world of wildlife, becoming a certified naturalist and eco-volunteer. During this time, he also worked with the Karnataka forest department to create wildlife documentaries and conducted nature education camps and workshops, mostly in and around the Sharavathi area. In 2014, he began working on his first documentary, Namaami Aranyaka, which captures the journey of a forester in Honnavara before moving on to others, including Namma Shola, which focuses on the unique shola forests of Kuduremukha and Dipterocarpus bourdillonii, a film documenting the efforts of the Karnataka Forest Department to save a critically endangered tree species.

Bull frog male
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

The tagline for the well-known coffee chain Café Coffee Day is “A lot can happen over coffee”. It indeed did for Suhas – the idea for Little Planet: A Tale of Frogs evolved over a conversation at one of its branches. “I had a lot of friends who used to come to my camps, so I called for a meeting and told them my idea: to do a film about snakes and frogs,” he says. However, he soon realised that frogs needed more attention because “there are very few people working on frogs,” says Suhas, who credits Bengaluru-based ecologist Gururaja K.V., who has been researching frogs for over twenty-five years, for expanding his interest and knowledge of these tiny animals.

Frogs, according to him, are highly threatened and particularly vulnerable to climate change, pollution, being run over by vehicles on roads, habitat loss and degradation and even being hunted for food. Unfortunately, people don’t consider them charismatic animals, often curling up their noses in disgust when encountering frogs. “The whole world is behind tigers, but who talks about frogs?” he asks. “Frogs have only been fillers in most documentaries, and this was something I wanted to change. They don’t deserve to be fillers; they are the main characters.”

Star eyed tree frog
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

Entering a little planet

Monsoons in the Western Ghats or Sahyadris, like anywhere else in the country, are a life-affirming affair, deeply intertwined with the survival of both humans and non-humans. Little Planet, which was filmed in this mountain range, a globally recognised biodiversity hotspot and home to many endemic species, begins by highlighting the importance of this season. Then, we are introduced to the film’s main protagonist, Paddy, a male Indian bullfrog (Hoplobatrachus tigerinus) who comes out to mate during the monsoon showers.

The film goes on to document this journey, chronicling how Paddy changes colour from olive to vibrant yellow, sings loudly and relentlessly through the season and wrestles with other males in paddy fields to establish his dominance – all in an attempt to woo a female of his species. Male bullfrogs, like males of many other animal species, are not always successful. But Paddy’s hard work pays off. He finally gets the attention of a female bullfrog, with whom he engages in a mating ritual called amplexus, a behaviour exhibited by some animals that fertilise externally. “The Indian Bullfrog is very common in India and other Southeast Asian countries, so we had not thought that this had to be the hero,” says Suhas.

Resplendent shrub frog
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

However, it is also the biggest frog in India, one that is often smuggled, primarily to Goa, where “jumping chicken”, as it is famously referred to, is in high demand as a culinary delicacy. “I wanted to create awareness about them by showing their activities. When it comes to bullfrogs, the changing colour is the biggest spectacle, and it happens only two or three days a year,” he says of the film that started with being crowd- and self-funded; co-producer Raj Gore chipped in towards the end. “The shooting was over in 2023, and we spent 2024 in post-production,” says Suhas, who has also edited the film.

Indian Bullfrog
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

Weight of environment

In addition to the bullfrogs, the film highlights the lives of multiple other fascinating characters: a supple bright-green Malabar gliding frog that uses the webbing between its toes to float away from predators, a male night frog looking after the eggs of the female he sired with and a yellow bush frog whose eggs hatch directly into froglets, without going through a tadpole stage. “This film is my love letter to the Western Ghats and a plea to every viewer to stand up for the smallest voices in nature,” says Suhas, who is deeply grateful to several people, including his wife, Jhansi, Raj Gore, his field and post-production team members, IFS officer Vasanth Reddy K.V. and Dr Gururaja K.V. for having supported him on the journey.

Mating bullfrogs
| Photo Credit:
Suhas Premkumar

Little Planet, which was submitted to multiple national and international film festivals, has won numerous awards so far, a trend he hopes will continue. Suhas also wants to travel from one end of the massive Western Ghats to the other to create awareness about these unsung heroes by screening the film and talking about frogs at various places, a project he calls Rally of Frogs, and is actively looking for financial support for the same.

“We are also planning to get the narration of the film translated into Kannada, Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil to connect to the audience of the respective languages,” he says, pointing out that the whole intention of the film, after all, was to get frogs their deserved ecological and conservation status. “The Western Ghats has been a part of me since childhood, but it was only when I began filming that I truly understood the fragility of its ecosystem,” he says. “Frogs, so small and unassuming, carry the weight of our environment on their tiny shoulders.”