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April 20 - April 22, 2022
To be able to live alongside tigers and communicate with them was seen as the mark of an effective gurau. When royal Nepalese hunting parties, both Shah and later Rana, came through the terai to hunt tigers, they never did so without asking a local gurau for assistance, as it was understood that only he had the power to summon the great cats from the forest.
To the Tharu, the tiger was never a monster to be exterminated, but a force of nature to be harnessed and understood.
The key to maintaining their own sustainable way of life in the terai was to keep a certain healthy balance between forces that were ostensibly at odds. The Tharu relied on wild deer and boar as a source of meat, but both would eat their crops if their numbers became too great. Tigers solved the problem nicely, keeping the ungulate population robust but not excessive.
because the Tharu also depended on the forests and grasslands for building materials and animal fodder, they were even further inclined to keep ecosystems both productive and intact. This in turn preserved ungulate populations, which further nourished the tiger population . . . and so on. It was a delicate balancing act of sorts, a chain without a beginning or end, that linked together the humans, the flora, and the fauna of the terai.
Prithvi Narayan Shah, the founder of Nepal’s Shah dynasty. Between 1743 and 1768, from his home base in the mountain kingdom of Gorkha, he conquered neighboring kingdoms one by one, eventually combining them into a single, unified state whose borders more or less correspond to modern-day Nepal.
The Shah rulers of a nascent Nepal initially saw the terai wilderness of their new kingdom as a potential source of agricultural expansion, and they actively encouraged the Tharu to increase their taxable farming output through land grants and incentive packages for local communities. But it did not take long for the Shahs to realize there were even more pressing reasons to keep the forests and grasslands of the terai uncultivated and intact, and that the Tharu people were far more useful as guardians of the forest than as destroyers of it.
The reasons behind this tactical about-face are complex, but high among them was the preservation of a species whose role in the subcontinent cannot be underestimated, particularly in the preindustrial era: Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant.
In Nepal, there are records going back to at least the sixth century B.C. of state-sponsored elephant management, as evidenced by a report of a Licchavi king named Manadeva who built a bridge across the Gandaki River solely for the transportation of hundreds of war elephants.
With males reaching weights in excess of 5 tons, with maximum shoulder heights approaching 12 feet, and with trunks that contain more than 40,000 muscles, the Asian elephant possesses awesome strength coupled with tremendous dexterity. For constructive purposes, these traits could easily be harnessed to fell timber, haul stone, erect columns, and steady walls—all of which were necessary for the infrastructure and ceremonial needs of an expanding kingdom. For destructive purposes—well, when it came to warfare, there wasn’t much a mounted elephant couldn’t do.
Able to achieve speeds of up to twenty miles per hour, and covered with a hide that could absorb dozens of arrows and musket shots alike, a trained war elephant was more than capable of breaking even the most stubborn of enemy lines, trampling infantry and skewering cavalry horses on its bladed tusks.
There was, however, one facet to elephant husbandry that lent a tremendous amount of import to the preservation of the terai: the animals were difficult to breed in captivity.
As elephant handlers nonpareil, the Tharus came to be replied upon by the Shah dynasty for keeping the kingdom’s supply of elephants well stocked, and always at the ready.
The Tharu, along with their royal visitors, even developed a uniquely Nepalese technique for corralling tigers, known as the “ring” hunt. It involved using dozens of elephants to surround a tiger, before finally entrapping it behind a solid wall of trumpeting tuskers.
By 1757, that grip was secure, and the Company had begun controlling its most lucrative trade routes with its own private army, effectively making it the de facto ruling power for much of Bengal—much too close for comfort for the Nepalese kings to the north, and vice versa. As the Gorkha kingdom, under the rule of Prithvi Narayan Shah, gobbled up more and more rival territory to form a unified Nepal, a showdown between the two regional powers became all but inevitable.
The identical malarial parasite that kept most Nepalese hill tribes out of the lowland jungles could just as easily repel invading Britons.
the land itself was a natural fortress. The wild grasses could grow in excess of twenty feet, making them all but impassable for anyone not mounted on an elephant. The floodplains were a literal quagmire, sucking in men and machinery alike. And the surrounding jungles were purposefully left wild and without roads, which made navigating their tangles next to impossible for any outsider.
The most vivid historical example of the protective barrier that the wild terai could provide was the disastrous 1767 campaign of Captain George Kinloch, just prior to the Battle of Kathmandu—also, incidentally, the battle that finally established the Shah dynasty’s dominion over a unified Nepal.
The two powers coveted control of the same lands, and Captain Kinloch responded with typical colonial bravado, assuring his commanders that “from Sidley to Nepaul, the road is reckoned extremely good . . . there is no Rivers to be crossed, nor any hills to be passed.” His plan was approved, and with some 2,400 men, he set off from India to defeat his Gorkha rivals to the north. And while he did not immediately meet any uncrossable torrents or unscalable mountains, he did come face-to-face with the hard realities of the terai.
the whole time, the bitter deluge never stopped. Kinloch had unknowingly marched his men straight into a death trap, and what followed over the next three hellish weeks included mutinies, bouts of malaria, and thirteen straight days of famine.
SUCKS TO SUCK
The local “Chaudhary” headman whom Kinloch had commissioned to supply his men with grain essentially abandoned them, and in regards to the rest of the forest-dwelling Tharu, Kinloch would write, “So extremely troublesome were the Jungle people now become, that had a man only fallen a few Yards behind the rest, he was sure to be cut off in a most cruel manner.”
the wilderness of the terai and its indigenous inhabitants stopped them, and this was not lost on the Shah dynasty. From that day forward, an informal alliance was formed—one that would only be reinforced during Nepal’s second altercation with the British in 1814, when the Tharu and the terai once again helped protect Kathmandu from outside invasion.
Much of the terai may have been wilderness, but it was a managed wilderness, and the Tharu were the ones best suited for farming it, populating it, and stewarding it in a sustainable way. The Shahs certainly liked grain revenues, but they prized their wild elephant herds, vast tiger-hunting reserves, and impenetrable tracts of malarial borderland just as much.
And in a surprising display of open-mindedness for a dynasty of Hindu kings, they even worked within the indigenous belief system of the Tharu to manage village life,
The royal decree is telling not only in that it endows a local Tharu spiritual leader with considerable control over terai wilderness, but that it also deems the management of tigers and wild elephants as essentially spiritual matters, something only a gurau is fit to do.
In reconstructing that period, it becomes clear that the Tharu’s relationship with the Shah kings, much like their relationship to the forest, was symbiotic and mutually beneficial.
The terai served a strategic purpose, and the Tharu were its natural custodians. It only made sense to keep both intact.
an ambitious young upstart from a prominent Nepalese family, Jung Bahadur Rana, took advantage of inner turmoil within the Nepalese government and seized power in a coup. After orchestrating the Kot Massacre—a bloodbath in which he and his brothers trapped and killed some forty members of the court in the royal palace—he expelled King Rajendra Bikram Shah and assumed total control of the government, installing the king’s son Surendra Bikram in the throne as a powerless puppet of the new Rana regime.
One of the Ranas’ first orders of business, upon deposing the Shahs and solidifying their grip on Nepal, was to improve relations with the British in India.
Bad idea
While the Shahs had garnered their independence through fierce military aggression, the Ranas sought to preserve it with tactful diplomacy. This inevitably meant strong ties with the British to the south.
The Ranas would return the hospitality and friendly overtures of the British by supplying their own “Gurkha” troops to help quell rebellions that cropped up in northern India, and by extending invitations to participate in royal Nepalese tiger hunts.
It was a tradition that would carry on well into the twentieth century, culminating in an incredibly opulent hunt organized for Queen Elizabeth II in 1961, an undertaking that involved the construction of a virtual city in the middle of the terai.
Such shoots were commonplace in Nepal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the customary bagh shikar, or royal tiger hunt, transforming from a sacred ritual the Shah kings had once used to strengthen local alliances with the Tharu to a means for the Ranas of cementing foreign relationships with colonial powers.
With the new Rana dynasty in power, the British in India not only had a military ally in Nepal—they also had an enthusiastic partner in trade. The Ranas actively encouraged exchange with their new friends across the border, seeking to enrich their coffers and emulate the economic policies of their neighbor—basically, to “modernize” and “optimize” their ancient economy.
In the decades following the Rana assumption of power, trade with India blossomed, with the western border serving as a primary point of transit, and British Kumaon becoming a mercantilist hub. A range of products were traded, including dyes, textiles, spices, metal, and cattle. But the two major articles of export from Nepal to India are telling indeed: timber and rice.
The transformation of the terai from wild frontier to national breadbasket was already well underway by the 1870s. Naturally, this meant an increased clearing of forests and cultivation of grasslands—both of which had a profound effect on the region.
this transformation also changed the traditional relationship between the indigenous Tharu and the central government, and hardly in a positive way—it effectively robbed the people of their autonomy and of their stewardship of the land.
Ugh. Same as fucking always
the freshly empowered Ranas decided to institute the Muluki Ain, a legal document that imposed a state-decreed caste system upon the Nepalese, and relegated the Tharu to the inferior, impure status of masine matwali, or “enslaved alcohol drinkers”—a legal designation that would persist for more than a century.
in 1861, the Ranas imposed a system of land management called the jimidari. The new local headman, or jimidar, could potentially be a chaudhari from one of the more elite Tharu families, although the title was increasingly being granted to the high-caste Brahmins from the hills, especially friends and relatives of the Ranas. Essentially, it was cronyism in its purest form.
“Recruit” may not be precisely the right word, as the existing kamaiya labor arrangements of the time amounted to what most would call indentured servitude, in some cases even slavery.
The old system had broken, and the old allegiances were gone—under the 104-year rule of the Ranas that followed, only three lal mohar land grants would be given to Tharus in the terai, compared with the dozens they had received during the reign of the Shahs.
The effects of this transformation would ripple out, destabilizing the culture, the land, and its animals alike—not as profoundly as the truly ruinous changes that would occur with the chemical eradication of malaria in the 1950s, but damaging nonetheless.
A formerly seminomadic people engaged in hunting and gathering, while also practicing only a minimally invasive form of forest agriculture, were for the first time becoming tied to the land as indentured servants—essentially, a rural peasantry aimed not at small-scale subsistence farming, but at producing an exportable and commodified surplus.
The eventual physical effect of this cultural shift was a breaking up of the formerly continuous ecosystem of the terai, and replacing it with restricted pockets of residual wild habitat. It is true that the Ranas maintained traditional hunting reserves for tigers, including those in Chitwan, Bardia, and Shuklaphanta, and that they engaged in tiger hunting on a massive scale, in elaborate hunts designed to demonstrate their authority, and later, as we well know, to curry favor with foreign guests. And the Tharu would indeed continue to work at the hattisar in such places, patiently awaiting
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The lives of tigers became imperiled once they ventured into the cultivated lands that lay beyond the reserves—their safest bet was to steer clear of the farmland and villages altogether, and stay hidden in the strips and patches of wild forest that remained.
wild tigers are unbelievably territorial. Males in particular, although females are hardly generous when it comes to the sharing of their space. Unlike African lions, which figured out at some point in their evolutionary past that working together in prides made chasing down prey on the open savanna much easier, jungle-dwelling tigers have always gone it alone, relying more on stealth to find food than on social relationships.
The size of an individual tiger’s territory can vary widely, depending on the availability of prey and the sex of the cat. But in nearly all cases, the space required has the potential to push the boundaries of what a tiger...
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when tigers resort to man-eating, ranges can expand even farther in their quest to find available human prey. Although tigers can and do settle in a particular area if the hunting proves especially good, finding that area can take them on long and winding treks.
in the Russian Far East, where natural prey is generally far scarcer than India or Nepal, Amur tigers regularly have ranges that extend into the hundreds of square miles, some so large that the cats seem more like perpetual wanderers than settled predators, forever prowling the frozen night beneath burning stars.
tigers need room to maneuver, and they’re seldom willing to share that space once they find it. Which is why even a slightly fragmented natural habitat can be highly problematic.
There is so much competition for territory, older tigers frequently get mauled by younger rivals seeking to establish themselves in an area. The clashes are especially fierce among territorial males, who will stand on their hind legs and commence shredding each other with their foreclaws and fangs, until one of the combatants either dies or flees.
