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March 3 - March 14, 2023
while there is no way for this young man to know the full implications of what he has done, the terror he has unleashed, the lives he will have indirectly ruined, he must surely have an inkling, with those roars reverberating through the still air and damp leaves of the sal trees, that in the pulling of that trigger, he has created a monster.
But there is another story to be told here as well, and while certainly hair-raising, it is anything but simple. The events that transpired in the forests and valleys of the Himalayan foothills in the first decade of the twentieth century were not a series of bizarre aberrations. They were in fact the inevitable result of the tremendous cultural and ecological conflicts that were shaking the region—indeed, the world—at that time, affecting man and animal alike in unlikely ways, and throwing age-old systems chaotically out of whack.
Bengal tigers do not under normal circumstances kill or eat humans. They are by nature semi-nocturnal, deep-forest predators with a seemingly ingrained fear of all things bipedal; they are animals that will generally change direction at the first sign of a human rather than seek an aggressive confrontation.
And he did love India, above all its people, even while playing an unwitting part in the nation’s subjugation.
Yet it is colonialism, undeniably, and the onslaught of environmental destruction that it almost universally heralds, that served as the primary catalyst in the creation of our man-eater.
the Champawat was not an incident of nature gone awry—it was in fact a man-made disaster. From Valmik Thapar to Jim Corbett himself,
modern comparison of dimensions reveals that Bengal tigers in northern India and Nepal today are actually larger on average than their post-Soviet relatives farther east.
tigers eat leopards too,
stigma against tiger victims is very much alive and relevant.
And when tigers actually materialize and do attack, relatives of the victims are often similarly avoided. “Tiger-widows,” as they’re unceremoniously known, can be considered unholy or tainted, and at times face abuse from in-laws as well as general ostracism in the community.
The truly great man was not he who could kill a tiger, but rather he who could make peace with it, and good use of its fangs and its claws.
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.
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,
In 1911, King George V and a party of British nobles took part in a traditional Nepalese “ring” hunt in Chitwan at the behest of the Ranas, and over the course of 10 days bagged a total of 4 sloth bears, 18 rhinos, and 39 tigers. Such shoots were commonplace in Nepal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Steps to remove this obstruction appeared as early as 1854, when 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.
This affected their rights as citizens, and gave the upper hand to any higher-caste hill dwellers who might happen to deal with them in matters of land or labor.
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.
the existing kamaiya labor arrangements of the time amounted to what most would call indentured servitude, in some cases even slavery. Land grants to jimidar were usually birta, or hereditary, which fixed this new social structure firmly into place.
The land was being handed over to the hill-dwelling elite in exchange for political favors, and they in turn could develop it however they chose.
The diverse forest resources that had traditionally sustained the Tharu became increasingly unnecessary to the Rana, and the wild populations of deer, elephants, and tigers they had helped to keep in balance were pushed aside to make way for farmland.
The legendary tiger hunter Kenneth Anderson recorded man-eaters in the 1950s with ranges that covered the gamut from 100 square miles to 600 square miles, and Jim Corbett himself described one man-eater as having a range of 1,500 square miles.
The Victorian literature of the day was obsessed with the idea of the “wild child” and the “noble savage,” particularly ones with European lineages like Tarzan and Hawkeye. In Jim Corbett, a man who had spent most of his life scouting and hunting through the local forests with indigenous shikaris, well-heeled Britons like Eddie Knowles no doubt imagined they saw some of those romantic notions played out in real life.
As a young boy, not so very long after the death of his father, he was walking alone in the forest when he stumbled right into a large Bengal, peering out at him from a plum bush. The tiger could have easily made a meal of the young Corbett with nothing more than a swipe of its claws, but it did not—it merely watched him inquisitively for a moment with its piercing golden eyes before melting away, back into the forest. It was something he would never forget.
Do not cut down the forest with its tigers and do not banish the tigers from the forest. The tiger perishes without the forest, and the forest perishes without its tigers. Therefore the tigers should stand guard over the forest and the forest should protect all its tigers.
A legend originating in the northeastern state of Nagaland tells how man and tiger were both born of the same mother, and emerged as spirits through a pangolin’s den.
Among the Warli tribes north of Bombay, a wedding cannot be consecrated nor fields planted without first paying tribute to the tiger god Vaghadeva.
tigers appear not as foreign enemies, but as natural allies in keeping the earth both fertile and safe. Their power is something to be respected, and if possible, harnessed,
maintaining balance between the forces of life and death, darkness and light. A world without tigers would be a void, a place of pestilence,
Some royal families, like the Tamil Chola dynasty, which ruled much of southern India between 850 and 1014, even went so far as to appropriate the tiger as their official emblem, featuring it on their coins and banners.
the Sultan of Mysore was clothing himself completely in tiger stripes, and displaying to his enemies a banner that decreed “The tiger is God.”
In its early manifestations, the Mughal bagh shikar had minimal effect on tiger populations or the habitats in which tigers lived. Held at widely dispersed forests on a rotating schedule, and conducted primarily with bows and spears, these hunts were never intended to deplete the tiger population or rid a region of predators.
Even a prolific hunter like Jahangir, who served as emperor between 1605 and 1627, reputedly was careful to kill game at a sustainable rate. In the first twelve years of his reign, he was reported to have killed eighty-six lions and tigers—a hefty sum, admittedly. But when one considers the annual average, it comes out to about seven kills a year. As long as the hunting sites were regularly moved, local populations of tigers could be easily replenished.
The tiger held a different implication for the British than for the Mughals and other Indian rulers.
The mechanical device with its haunting organ depicted an actual event—Hugh Munro, the only son of a British general who had defeated Tipu’s own father in a previous Mysore rebellion, had been killed by a tiger while hunting with friends on the Bay of Bengal in 1792.
The triumphant tiger represented all the innate, unyielding ferocity of a native-born Indian king, exercising his divine right to repel a foreign invader, while the wailing British officer represented—well, a wailing British officer.
Whereas the kings of India had regarded the tiger as a powerful yet benevolent manifestation of their own royal mandate, the British viewed the very same animal with suspicion and disdain.
while the hunting of tigers had once been an affirmation of identity for India’s ruling class, it became under the British a sort of ritualized reenactment of the colony’s subjugation—the
To kill a tiger was to vanquish all that was deemed alien and dangerous in India; the act itself made the country safer, and a little more like England. The existence of tigers in the wild was viewed, both symbolicall...
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To a Mughal king or a local maharaja, the idea of actually exterminating tigers would have been preposterous. To hunt tigers was their divine right, a sacred ritual of affirmation; to remove all the tigers from the Indian landscape would have imperiled their own identity.
In 1769, tigers in the forests around Bhiwapur were said to have claimed over four hundred victims, causing an entire village to be abandoned.
more than fifty years after poor Hugh Munro, the British general’s son, succumbed to stripes on the Bay of Bengal in 1792, some seven hundred people a year were still being killed by tigers in the state of Bengal alone.
Poisonous snakes, for example, consistently killed twenty times as many people in India as tigers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
VENOMOUS
There are similar accounts of villages banding together to use nets and even poisoned arrows to get rid of problematic tigers—something the British, who generally lived in cities and bungalows far removed from any actual threat of tiger predation, had the audacity to critique as unsporting.
Apparently they saw more valor in butchering tigers at scale, using high-powered rifles from an elephant’s back.
Just like the Champawat, this Amur tiger was not born a man-eater—it was turned into one.
In terms of tiger pelts, single European hunters accomplished over just a few bloody hunts what had taken Mughal emperors like Jahangir a lifetime to achieve.
In the year 1872 alone, a colonist named Gordon Cummings killed a total of seventy-three tigers along the Narmada River Valley. Another named William Rice shot 158 tigers in Rajasthan over the course of four years.
George Yule, a member of the Bengal Civil Service who hunted prolifically in the mid-nineteenth century, stopped counting after he had single-handedly bagged four hundred tigers.
with every officer or high-level administrator doing his best to bring home a tiger skin, many a poorly aimed shot was fired—which would have left the country crawling with wounded, aggressive, and starving tigers ready to sink their teeth into human necks.
Colonial elites may have hunted tigers for sport, but many more of their subjects hunted, poisoned, and trapped them for money—a direct result of the monetary rewards the colonial government placed on all sorts of “vermin,” which tigers were officially categorized as for much of the nineteenth century.
