No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Man-Eater in History

by Dane Huckelbridge

Corbett studiously avoided “politics” in his writing, and he often presented a considerably more sanguine vision of colonial life than history can account for.

Like so many colonial narratives, both in the Old World and the New, his accounts of living and hunting during the Raj do conveniently elide over some of the uglier facets of the experience.

In a place like Champawat, on the other hand, the rebellion might as well have been yesterday, and the sight of an armed “Englishman” leading loyal “native” troops into town would have been not only disarmingly familiar, but downright upsetting.

Champawat was where the Kurmavtar, or the turtle incarnation of the god Vishnu, had originally manifested itself, and the surrounding valley had served as the seat of the once-mighty Chand dynasty for more than five hundred years.

Unlike the Shah kings of Nepal, who had carefully cultivated their hunting partnership with the Tharu, rewarding loyal beaters and elephant handlers with monetary gifts and lal mohar land grants, the British in India—and to an extent the subsequent Rana dynasty in Nepal—relied heavily on “volunteer” beaters who were in actuality anything but.

At least one, as Corbett was soon to learn, had lost both of his sons and his wife—essentially, his entire family, wiped out by a single man-eating tiger.

There have been numerous explanations for his lifelong bachelorhood posited over the years, and some of them may even hold water, although the most obvious is likely the truest of all: the man simply preferred to be alone.

while in the end he may never have felt completely a part of either British or Indian society, he would finish his life beloved by both.

His early efforts laid the groundwork for the establishment of India’s first protected tiger reserves, as well as the Project Tiger conservation initiative launched by the Indian government in 1973.

estimates put the population of wild tigers across all of Asia at close to four thousand. It is a precarious number, and the species is still gravely threatened.

When the forest is seen not as an obstruction to be cleared, but rather as a crucial resource to be preserved, a convincing incentive becomes apparent. And when it comes to guarding and maintaining the health of a forest, there is no better partner than a wild tiger.