No Beast So Fierce

by Dane Huckelbridge

  Valmik Thapar took note of this correlation in India’s Ranthambore Park in the 1970s—after tiger hunting was totally banned by the government, the number of tiger attacks fell steeply. A more compelling, and exact inverse, case study for our purposes is one first documented in the Russian Far East in the 1990s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, desperate economic circumstances forced many locals to increase their visits to the forest, both for the hunting of food and the poaching of Amur tigers. The end result was an unprecedented and drastic rise in tiger attacks over the next two decades—many of which were retaliatory attacks directed at hunters who had fired upon tigers. In one of the more incredible cases, recorded in 2004, a Russian poacher spotlight hunting from an all-terrain vehicle discovered a tiger and took a shot—the tiger immediately charged the vehicle, leapt on top of it, and fatally mauled the unwise hunter. And even when tigers did not directly retaliate against trigger-happy hunters, they sometimes got their “revenge” at a later date. Wounded, bullet-riddled tigers became relatively commonplace in the frigid taiga forests of the Russian Far East, and unable to hunt their natural prey, they turned their attentions toward the slow-footed creatures who had injured them in the first place. A tiger in Russia’s Primorye Province that had been disabled by a poacher’s bullet in 1997 seemed, based on journalist John Vaillant’s excellent reporting, possessed by a personal vendetta: it found its human attacker’s house, waited patiently for him in the snow, and proceeded to kill and eat him upon his return. The wounded tiger would go on to kill and eat one more victim, and attack an entire group of local officials who were seeking to end its spree. When the tiger was finally dispatched with assault rifles and its body studied, it was found to have absorbed over the course of its life an extraordinary amount of lead—in addition to the lethal shots that had just been fired, the tiger had a festering flesh wound on its left forepaw, the buckshot from two separate volleys lodged in its right leg, a steel bullet from another rifle stuck deep in its flesh, and a widely dispersed peppering of bird shot throughout its body. And whether it was from a primitive form of feline revenge, or simple hunger, it was no surprise to anyone involved that a cat treated as such by humans might turn that aggression back upon them. Just like the Champawat, this Amur tiger was not born a man-eater—it was turned into one.

  Essentially, what occurred in the Primorye Province in the 1990s was happening on a larger scale across India throughout the nineteenth century. Tiger hunting, a ritualized activity that had once been the sole domain of kings, instead became a common form of diversion for colonials. Almost every British officer desired to “bag” a tiger. The Indian shikar became the equivalent of the African safari for colonial visitors, and no tour of the subcontinent was considered complete without 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. The slaughter of tigers had begun, with the arrival of the British, on an unprecedented scale. 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. The infamous Colonel Nightingale could claim at least three hundred tigers to his name, shot across the Hyderabad region in just a few years, and 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. And these are just a few examples—the field manuals and sporting journals of the day are brimming with similar exploits, full of braggadocio and mocking contempt for the Indian tiger. Not surprisingly, 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.

  Perhaps even more of a catalyst for human–tiger conflict, however, was the practice of bounty hunting. 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. Prior to the East India Company’s assumption of power in Bengal in 1757, bounties placed upon animals had been virtually unknown. Within just a few decades of British conquest, however, bounties on any species deemed unwelcome or unnecessary were commonplace. And tigers, at the time, were most unwelcome indeed. 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. A tiger could fetch a considerable sum for the average colonial subject, as described in this account from Oriental Field Sports, published in 1807:

  The death of a tiger is a matter of too much importance to be treated with indifference. The Honourable East India Company, with the view to prevent interruption to the common courses of business, and to remove any obstacle to general and safe communications, bestow a donation of ten rupees, equal to twenty-five shillings, for every tiger killed within their provinces. The Europeans at the several stations situated where the depredations of tigers are frequent, generally double the reward. Besides the above allurement, the sale of the skin, claws, &c. often amounts to nearly as much more; forming in the aggregate a sum which, in a country where an ordinary person may board, lodge, and clothe himself comfortably for ten shillings monthly, may be considered quite a fortune. Under such a forcible temptation, the shecarrie repairs to the place; and being guided by the peasants best acquainted with the jungle wherein the tiger is concealed, he proceeds to search for the carcase.

  Such bounties would not only persist but grow throughout the course of the nineteenth century, and even well into the twentieth. Between 1875 and 1925, over eighty thousand tigers were slaughtered for government bounties—and those were just the kills that were officially recorded. It’s likely that many more tigers were taken, be it for sport or to protect livestock or simply to sell their body parts.

  With nearly anyone who could get their hands on a gun taking potshots at tigers, it’s no wonder that the incidence of wounded, aggressive animals increased. The tiger population may have begun falling, but incidents of tiger attacks would only rise, as amateurs ventured into the forest in greater numbers, and more tigers were left limping through the undergrowth, riddled with bullets and injured by traps.

  A surge in tiger hunting among Europeans and Indians alike may have been a contributing factor to the rise of man-eaters in India, but it wasn’t the primary culprit—not by a long shot. What truly drove hungry tigers out of the jungles and into the villages was far less exciting, but significantly more deadly. 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. And in few places would it prove as profound—or as lethal—as in Kumaon.

  The place where the Champawat would truly make its mark.

  * * *

  Unlike the British territories in Bengal, the lands composing the Kumaon division had never been under the direct control of the Muslim Mughals. The various princely states that made up the territory were variously consolidated and broken up again by a series of shuffling dynasties over the centuries—the last of which was the Hindu Shah dynasty of Nepal, who conquered the kingdom of Kumaon as part of their consolidation of the Nepalese state in 1791. The cultural differences were all but negligible between Kumaon and their holdings in western Nepal, with the same Tharu people inhabiting the lowland terai, and similar Pahari tribes to be found in the middle hills. In short, in terms of territorial acquisition, it seemed to make sense. The Nepalese expansion across the
Sharda River was short-lived, however—the British East India Company, which had not forgotten the disastrous campaign of Captain Kinloch in the terai in 1767, finally got their revenge and some much-coveted Gorkha territory with the Anglo–Nepalese War of 1814. The British were more savvy this time around, and after a series of stinging defeats, the Nepalese finally agreed to hand over their lucrative trade routes with Tibet, as well as one-third of their total territory—including Kumaon. In one fell swoop, the British had added a substantial chunk of northern real estate to their rapidly expanding holdings in India. Following the Shah dynasty’s capitulation, Kumaon was incorporated into British Bengal. In 1835, in recognition of the difficulties of governing such a vast territory, however, Kumaon became part of a new colonial state called the Northwest Provinces. Initially, the people of Kumaon had welcomed the British, as they saw them as a means of shedding Gorkha rule—which they certainly were. The people of Kumoan were less enthused, however, when it became clear that the British had no intentions of leaving. The new colonial government of the East India Company quickly began exploiting the region and its resources in ways the Gorkhas had never dreamed of. While there was a brief but bloody Kumaoni uprising as part of the larger “mutiny” of 1857, the rebellion was crushed by British forces, and a new draconian system of direct government oversight was put into practice. The English Crown had won full control of the region, and it proceeded to do what it did best: squeeze the land for all it was worth. Which meant depleting the natural resources of Kumaon on an epic scale, and making its farmland as productive as possible. Making it “civilized,” as it were.

  Under the new British Raj, the formerly lax agricultural oversight of the Gorkhas was overhauled. Spearheaded by Sir Henry Ramsay, who served as the commissioner of Kumaon from 1856 until 1884, this agrarian revolution meant a drastic increase in the amount of land put to the plow, and the number of people toiling in the fields. The agricultural population grew by 13 percent in 20 years, and the amount of cultivable land increased by 50 percent in the last 4 decades of the nineteenth century. By encouraging the settlement of land and crop rotation based on the Kharif, or monsoon, the government was able to take what had been a ragged, sparsely populated collection of bhabar hills and marshy terai valleys and turn it into something of a regional breadbasket, producing rice, wheat, barley, and mandua to supply a growing colonial population and further enrich the government’s coffers with tax revenues. Terraced slopes and alluvial valleys provided much of the bounty; however, in rocky areas where the soil was poor, canals supplied irrigation, and in lowland regions where malaria was prevalent, tenant farmers from the hills would sow crops when the season allowed, then return to their high-altitude homes to wait out the mosquitoes. This maximization of arable farmland continued into the twentieth century, with jaw-dropping increases in grain production. From 1901 to 1911, the number of acres cultivated for rice in Kumaon rose from 70,239 to 400,623—a leap that was made possible thanks largely to irrigation, which increased for all farming from 169,602 irrigated acres to 357,419 acres in that same time span. These new irrigated lands were fed by a total of some two hundred miles of canals that in turn allowed southern rice strains like basmati and hansraj to be grown in the dryer, northern climate. Wheat, barley, and corn production also saw significant growth in this time, while the total amount of uncultivated land—timber excluded—decreased from 1,608,119 acres to 900,280 acres during that decade.

  The march toward productivity that Commissioner Ramsay initiated extended beyond agriculture, and included the management of forests as well—not as nature reserves, or even as game reserves, but primarily as a source for the vast amount of timber needed to build the colony’s burgeoning railroad infrastructure. As in the American West, the railroad opened up the frontier and allowed new settlements to prosper, albeit at the expense of the colony’s timber supply. Ironically, Jim Corbett himself was employed by the Bengal and North Western Railway, which was devouring the very forests he loved above all else. The industry’s appetite for timber was due largely to a tremendous increase in the production of railway sleepers, and the sturdy sal trees, so crucial to the ecosystem of the region, fit the bill nicely, as they were uniquely suited for India’s climate. Yet by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the sal forests of northern India were in serious decline due to over-logging. A British nautical journal published in 1875 reports:

  The sal forests of Upper India might be shown (according to the report of Mr. Webber, of the Indian Forest Department) to be even in worse plight through reckless cutting and utter neglect. There were in 1830 probably 4,000 square miles of purely sal forests along the foot of the Himalayas, beside those in Central India, available to Government . . . yet now, the East Indian Railway has been obliged to import pine sleepers from Norway, sal being scarcely procurable.

  Realizing the sal forests were all but destroyed, the savvy colonial government again decided something needed to be done to protect its crucial timber supply. Under the Indian Forest Act of 1878, 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. As commissioner, Sir Henry Ramsay was a vigorous proponent of such measures in Kumaon, and he is often credited with “protecting” the district’s forests. This is true in that 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. His policies of forest management, if one can call them that, would live on well after his tenure was over. In the same ten-year period between 1901 and 1911 in which the productivity of rice and other crops exploded, the total area of forests set aside for the harvesting of timber surged tremendously as well, from 174,142 acres to 3,781,503 acres. 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 hunting and gathering, the grass cutting, and the animal grazing that had defined their sylvan existence were all at once severely restricted. 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. Essentially, the few sal forests of the terai and middle hills that remained intact were transformed into fenced-in tree farms, places totally off-limits to anyone but loggers and officials, where deer and other ungulates were seen as a threat to young trees, and where tigers—well, unless they were at the end of a sportsman’s rifle, tigers had virtually no use at all.

  And even the assorted deer species that were not driven off through habitat destruction and poaching often fell victim to fresh waves of disease. Rinderpest, in particular, was common in domesticated cattle and goats, and with the influx of livestock and cattle stations that occurred in Kumaon in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that the disease drastically affected the ungulate populations in nearby forests. A doctor’s 1894 account of rinderpest, penned in the Kumaoni hills, takes note:

  The malady is very commonly observed in the buffalo, amongst which it is very fatal. The yak also suffers from a very severe form of the disease, as do all his crosses with the cow, and it is very fatal in them . . . Antelope also suffer from the disease, as do cervidae generally. The gooral and kakar, or barking deer, have been seen dying in large numbers from the disease in the Himalayas.

  In fact, a severe outbreak of rinderpest was recorded in Kumaon between 1899 and 1900 by an animal specialist engaged in inoculation—he attributed its spread to sheep and goats from the lowlands at the “foot of the hills,” which according to him
, “is seldom free from the disease.” The foot of the hills, incidentally, would have been precisely where a normal tiger would have sought its prey. Similar plagues occurred repeatedly across northern India in the late 1800s and early 1900s, involving rinderpest, hoof-and-mouth disease, cholera, even anthrax. In some parts of the region, they wiped out the wild deer populations completely.

  With the profound changes taking place in Kumaon’s agriculture and forestry—as well as parallel policies instituted around the same time by the Ranas across the border in Nepal—the emergence of a tiger like the Champawat was not merely possible, it was, perhaps, inevitable. The grasslands where chital deer thrived were being put to the plow; the forests where sambar and gaur made their home were being logged at an unprecedented rate and drained of their biodiversity; the local people, who had lived sustainably alongside these places for millennia, were suddenly deprived of much of their livelihood and forced to sneak into the forest at night like bandits, stealing animal fodder and poaching game. Of course something was bound to give, not just with tigers, but with predators in general. And indeed, it did.

  A government report from the United Provinces covering wild animals in 1907 and 1908 attributed a drastic increase in predatory leopard attacks in Almora to “wholesale destruction of game such as sambhar, gural and kakar,” all of which resulted in “a serious diminution of the natural food supply of tigers and leopards.” Similarly, 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.” And according to that same report, the total number of fatal tiger attacks in Kumaon—just those that were recorded by the government, mind you, for there were surely many more—jumped by 500 percent in that year alone. This last statistic was almost certainly caused by the Champawat, a tiger whose own bad habits put the wolves of Allahabad to shame.