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March 3 - March 14, 2023
Indian shikaris, who tended to be lower-caste Hindus of limited means, were recruited from every province to help eradicate the tigers of India. Driven by a pursuit for liquid currency to survive in the colonial system, they generally complied.
Between 1875 and 1925, over eighty thousand tigers were slaughtered for government bounties—and those were just the kills that were officially recorded.
When Britain took India as a colonial possession, it did far more than simply introduce a new power structure or administrative policy—it effectively turned the entirety of its foreign possessions into an engine of revenue, which meant exploitation of natural resources on a massive, multifaceted scale.
by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the sal forests of northern India were in serious decline due to over-logging.
special reserve forests were set aside for the colony, with the aim not of saving India’s wildlife or protecting its ecosystems, but of preserving its viability as a source of construction lumber.
he essentially kicked many indigenous Tharu and Pahari people out of them—people who had lived in a relatively harmonious, even symbiotic relationship with the forest for centuries—to ensure that the colonial government had a total monopoly on the harvesting of the wood that remained.
To the neighboring Tharu and assorted Kumaoni hill tribes that relied on the forests for their livelihood, this severance from their ancestral birthright was tantamount to the extirpation of the American buffalo to the Plains Indians; it totally altered their way of life, and threatened their continued survival.
The tribes did not take such attacks sitting down, and although Corbett elides over it in his writings, anger over forestry practices and even full-scale revolts and wildfires lit in protest were not uncommon in the first decades of the twentieth century.
attributed a drastic increase in predatory leopard attacks in Almora to “wholesale destruction of game such as sambhar, gural and kakar,”
a sudden rise in wolf attacks recorded in nearby Allahabad in 1906—a local pack carried off eighty-six children that year, compared to nineteen the previous one—was attributed to “the growing scarcity of game in the district and to the consequent laps into bad habits of individual wolves.”
In a surprisingly prescient and sensitive editorial published in 1908 titled “A Wronged Animal: Justice for the Tiger,” The Times of India made the case—no doubt scandalous at the time—that the tiger was “not only a harmless but a useful member of Indian society,” and that the colonial government was “oblivious to the really valuable services the vast majority of tigers render to the Indian cultivator—services unsullied by wrong doing or even intimidation.”
tigers traditionally had kept wild deer and pig populations at levels that prevented them feeding on the crops of villagers.
the predators helped to maintain a sustainable balance for those whose lives depended upon the forest,
Among the small farmers I spoke to, both Tharu and Pahari, all expressed an appreciation for predatory cats for protecting their fields from boar and deer.
Why would a colonial government bent on populating a sparsely inhabited region and pushing economic productivity through the roof care about the delicate balance among tigers, wild ungulates, and forest-dwelling locals, when all of the above could be wiped off the face of the earth and replaced with field after field of cultivable and taxable land?
The comparison between thirteenth-century Sherwood Forest and a nineteenth-century Kumaoni forest may seem a stretch, but there are surprising and undeniable similarities: a foreign colonial government imposing forestry restrictions on its native-born subjects, rising taxes that encourage agricultural and pastoral expansion, and mounting bounties put upon the apex predators that stood in their way.
opportunities for the native-born in the colony, particularly those of Irish descent, were few and far between—and
Colonial attitudes had shifted since the early days of the Raj, and this evolution of the British colonial mentality had transformed the relationship between the colonial state and its subjects.
The Indian population was generally prohibited from keeping weapons on hand or gathering without permission,
A justification was needed to explain why a diminutive island half a world away was controlling a totally foreign subcontinent,
“The White Man’s Burden.”
The true purpose of colonialism never wavered—to exploit a foreign land’s resources in the interest of the metropole.
they envisioned themselves as harbingers of “enlightenment” and “civilization” to peoples that were, in Kipling’s own words, “Half-devil and half-child.”
In the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, most segments of Indian society were prohibited from having guns or weapons of any kind, without a difficult-to-obtain permit.
If rural Indian populations had become helpless in the face of apex predators, it was largely because colonial policy had rendered them as such.
in both prints, the fleeing Indians are unarmed, while the British portrayed have guns at the ready—which is quite possibly the only part of the illustrations that’s historically accurate.
In 1909, a W. J. Jeffery 0.475-caliber high-velocity hunting rifle sold for around thirty-five pounds in London—this at a time when many indentured Indian servants were making the equivalent of around one pound per month.
a 0.256-caliber Mannlicher, would have cost the same indentured servant an entire year’s salary.
Corbett’s life had been anything but easy: He’d given up on his dreams of becoming an engineer and dropped out of school as a teenager to help provide for his family; he’d spent more than a decade on his own at isolated frontier outposts, where men dropped like flies from cholera and malaria, and where human intimacy was an abstract notion at best; he’d lived through ample poverty, heartache, and suffering.
The Pahari hill tribes, much like the Tharu in the lowland terai, relied heavily on the forests for fodder, food, and fuel. The British, in attempting to preserve their crucial timber interests in Kumaon, had essentially declared most wooded areas as protected forests, and off-limits to all but British loggers and sportsmen.
A century before, a village like Pali might have possessed the weapons and the martial know-how to stop such an animal—spears, nets, poisoned arrows—but by 1907, a full fifty years after the armed uprisings of 1857, such weapons had long since been taken from them by the colonial government.
The people of Pali were deeply traumatized, as one would expect of a population that had lived for days with the striped specter of death hovering constantly over them. They had seen someone they loved ripped from a tree and dragged screaming into the forest;
A young girl and her older sister had been attacked while cutting grass the year before, with the elder of the two being carried off into the forest. But the experience had so traumatized the surviving sister—she had actually chased the tiger with a sickle until it turned to roar back at her—that she was either unable or unwilling to talk about it.
A pattern, however, presented itself: women and children were making up a disproportionately large percentage of its victims—an unsettling realization for anyone, let alone a man who had essentially been raised by his widowed mother and older sisters.
it was usually the responsibility of the young women and children to go into the surrounding forest—often in direct defiance of government forestry regulations—for the crucial tasks of gathering firewood and animal fodder.
Jim Corbett had mentors who taught him the art of survival in the forest. His cousin, Stephen Dease, an amateur naturalist, gave Jim his first gun, a derelict muzzle-loader, in exchange for helping him collect specimens of local birds.
“When in the jungles, never speak of a tiger by its name, for if you do, the tiger is sure to appear.”
The expert shikari and once-proud Thakur, the headman of his village, fell victim to the same cycle of substance abuse and addiction that plagued so many indigenous communities displaced and dispossessed by the forces of colonialism.
The community lost a village elder, one of the last true shikaris with a native knowledge of tigers, and Jim Corbett lost a father for a second time.
Its evolved hunting methods seemed to resemble more closely those of an Amur tiger of the Russian Far East than a Royal Bengal—it patrolled a very large area, covering a huge swathe of eastern Kumaon, and it never seemed to stop moving for very long.
the Champawat adopted this strategy specifically to avoid the hunters who sought it.
It did not kill faster or more effectively than other tigers, nor wantonly, for that matter—its weekly hunts were more or less on par with what any wild tiger would accomplish. But rather, this tiger was almost impossible to find, let alone stop, and it had continued killing, unhindered, for a long stretch of time.
the fact that most locals were prevented from owning firearms, certainly didn’t help.
In the past, when villages had the weapons and knowledge to stop a tiger themselves, and when regional maharajas still had the authority and means to assist, it would have been a problem solved at the local level.
Confounded, Corbett asked if they had attempted to stop the tiger. Indeed, they had—the men from the group sprinted to the nearest village to gather reinforcements, including several poachers who had unlicensed guns. The assembled rescue party, now fifty or sixty in number, followed the blood trail along the length of the valley, banging drums and firing muzzle-loaders in the air as they did so, hoping to scare the tiger away from its victim—which they actually were able to accomplish.
Hunting it effectively would mean shedding the old Anglo-Saxon mythos, the need to confront Grendel alone in its lair, and instead think—and hunt—like a Kumaoni.
No, it was not Jim Corbett’s tiger to hunt. It was their tiger to hunt. All of them, as Kumaonis.
the following eyewitness account of the British attack on the rebel town of Jhansi at least hints at the horror:
Not only did the English soldiers kill those who happened to come in their way, but they broke into houses and hunted out people hidden in barns, rafters and obscure, dark corners. They explored the inmost recesses of temples and filled them with dead bodies of priests and worshippers. They took the greatest toll in the weavers’ locality, where they killed some women also. At the sight of white soldiers some people tried to hide in haystacks, in the courtyards, but the pitiless demons did not leave them alone there. They set the haystacks on fire and hundreds were burned alive. . .
Striking, perhaps, is the author’s incredulity and mild outrage at the fact that a people living beneath the yoke of a foreign power have the audacity to procure weapons for any reason, let alone self-defense.
