He was captured as a cub in 1951 by Maharaja of Rewa,whose hunting party in Bandhavgarh found a tigress with four 9-month-old cubs, one of which was white. All of them were shot except for the white cub.
The cub was subsequently captured and was housed in the unused palace at Govindgarh in the erstwhile harem courtyard. The Maharaja named him Mohan. Determined of procuring more white cubs – for the lure of one enchanted the hunters more than anything else – the Maharaja had Mohan breed with their ‘royal consort’ Begum, who was a normal coloured wild tigress. However, even after three attempts, the duo failed to procreate a white cub, and all the cubs born were of normal colour.
In 1953, Mohan was bred to a normal-coloured wild tigress called Begum (“royal consort”), which produced two male orange cubs on September 7, one of which went to Bombay Zoo. In 1955 they had a litter of two males and two females on April 10 (which included a male named Sampson and a female named Radha), all normal-coloured. On July 10, 1956 they again had a litter of two males and two females, which included a male named Sultan who went to Ahmedabad Zoo, and a female named Vindhya who went to the Delhi Zoo and was later bred to an unrelated male named Suraj. Once again, the breeding experiments failed to yield a single white cub.
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