The sixth of those nine children, Christopher William, grew up to follow in his father’s martial footsteps—likely because there were few other realistic options available for a domiciled colonist of Irish descent. For those of English birth and aristocratic lineages, opportunities in the civil service and officers’ corps abounded; for a fatherless young man of lowly rank, however, enlisting was perhaps the best way to ensure a roof over one’s head and three square meals. He was able to climb the ladder slightly, however, and was chosen to be trained as a junior medical officer, achieving by the age of twenty the rank of assistant apothecary with the 3rd Troop of the 1st Brigade, of the very same horse artillery with which his father had once served. He would see action in the First Afghan War of 1839, and even earn a medal for distinguished service in the Kabul campaign. The work was not highly skilled—much of it, in fact, would have consisted of holding down wounded patients and hacking off limbs—but it was a step up from the sort of “cannon fodder” roles on the colonial frontier that many young men of his background were destined to fill. Christopher William Corbett would go on to serve with distinction in the East India Company’s various expansionist endeavors, including the Sikh wars, for which he was awarded the Sutlej Medal in the Aliwal campaign in 1846, and later in the Punjab campaigns, where he served as a hospital steward in the Bengal Army. He was briefly married and fathered three children, although his wife, like so many others unsuited to the foreign diseases and rigors of colonial life, passed away in her early twenties. A heartbroken Christopher William soldiered on.
Of all the horrific campaigns and battles Christopher William would witness, one in particular would have a lasting impact on his own life, and those of colonists in India as a whole. To the British, it was known simply as “The Mutiny”; to Indians, it would eventually be heralded as the First War of Independence. To all parties involved, it was an exceptionally violent conflict, marked by bloody insurrections and even bloodier reprisals. What began in 1857 as a relatively minor disagreement regarding gun grease—local Hindu and Muslim sepoy troops employed by the East India Company were offended by rumors that the lubricant contained beef and pork fat—would ignite a hidden powder keg of colonial tensions, culminating in an open insurgency. Some groups, such as the Sikhs and Pathans, remained loyal to the British. Others—particularly those aligned with dynasties such as the Mughals that had suffered the most under British rule—sought violent retribution. And while rebellions broke out in scattered locations across the whole of India, in the northern frontier the fighting was especially fierce, and atrocities were committed wholesale by both sides. On several occasions, the “mutinous” sepoys shocked British sensibilities by massacring the colonial populations of entire towns—the Siege of Cawnpore and the Bibighar Massacre were two of the most horrendous examples—and the British troops responded in kind with their own campaign of slaughter and terror. Villages were ransacked, entire towns were burned, and suspects were killed indiscriminately. The true scale of the carnage is difficult to describe, let alone imagine, although the following eyewitness account of the British attack on the rebel town of Jhansi at least hints at the horror:
Fires were blazing everywhere, and although it was night I could see far enough. In the lanes and streets people were crying pitifully, hugging the corpses of their dear ones. Others were wandering, searching for food while the cattle were running mad with thirst . . . How cruel and ruthless were these white soldiers, I thought; they were killing people for crimes they had not committed. . . .
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. . . .
The spasms of violence that the rebellion set off would affect colonial families all across India, and the Corbett clan was no exception. Christopher William served throughout the conflict, and managed to survive it, although others close to him were not so lucky. His younger brother, Thomas Bartholomew, was captured in Delhi during the Siege of Red Fort, tied to a tree near its gates, and burned alive for all to see. And the first husband of the woman whom Christopher William would later go on to marry—Mary Jane Doyle—was killed at the Battle of Harchandpore. According to surviving accounts, he was pulled from his saddle and hacked to pieces in combat, while Mary Jane and her children were suffering through their own trials miles away, trapped and on the verge of starvation in the Siege of Agra.
The Rebellion of 1857 was eventually put down, although India and the Corbetts both would be forever changed. In the smoldering aftermath of the uprising, the British Crown took it upon itself to impose full, martial control over India, and Christopher William took it upon himself to ask the freshly widowed Mary Jane Doyle, who had survived the siege at Agra, to be his wife. She said yes, and he decided he’d had quite enough of fighting for the British. In 1858, the newly married Christopher William retired from army life and took up working for the postal service instead. The pay was minimal—particularly given that he now had a total of six children from previous marriages to support—but being hard up for money surely sounded better than being hacked to pieces or burned at the stake. He worked as a postmaster in the towns of Mussoorie and Mathura, until a transfer in 1862 finally took him to the picturesque hill town of Nainital. With its shimmering lake and pine-capped peaks, it was a lovely place to raise a family—although at its high elevation in the foothills of the Himalayas, also unbearably cold in the winter. Upon the advice of District Commissioner Sir Henry Ramsay—the same Sir Henry Ramsay who would initiate many of the controversial forestry regulations of the 1860s and ’70s—Christopher William saved his rupees and built a small Irish-style stone cottage at Kaladhungi, on the edge of the terai at the base of the hills, where the family could stay during the cooler, non-malarial months of the year. With a little extra income coming in from real estate ventures—Mary Jane had a knack for such things—and a reputation in the community as something of a town leader, Christopher William surely took pride in what he had accomplished, and some comfort in the fact that the Corbett family was finally established.
However, the halcyon days were not to last. Regrettably for the Corbetts, the family’s fortunes would once again take a downturn. Christopher William, who had survived battles and skirmishes and rebellions galore, would be killed at a relatively young age instead by a degenerative heart condition that had gone undiagnosed for years.* But not before fathering nine more children—the youngest of whom, almost thirty years after his father’s death, would find himself walking with Martini-Henry rifle in hand into what was not only the hunting grounds of the deadliest tiger in history, but also one of the last true hotbeds of anti-colonial sentiment in India. Memories of the rebellion persisted in the Corbett household—Jim’s older brother Tom had been named after Thomas Bartholomew, the uncle who had been burned alive by rebels in Delhi—and Jim would have known that Champawat had been one of the epicenters of conflict in the United Provinces. During the uprising, Kalu Mahara, one of the rebellion’s principal leaders in the northwest, had rallied the people of Champawat and its environs to his cause, promising independence for Kumaon after almost seventy years of combined Nepalese and British domination. Capitalizing on decades of simmering resentment, Kalu Mahara organized a militia from among the Pahari hill tribes and began leading guerrilla-style attacks against the British barracks in Champawat’s vicinity, including fortifications at Lohaghat, and even the much larger station at Almora. Caught off guard by the violence, colonists living in the area fled alongside a tide of other refugees to the relative safety of Nainital, farther west. The Briti
sh troops, though initially scattered by the attacks, were eventually able to regroup, and with the help of reinforcements from neighboring towns managed to stage a series of effective counterattacks. In fact, it was Commissioner Ramsay, the old acquaintance of the Corbett family, who was in charge of organizing the forces to put down the rebellion. In the end, Kalu Mahara’s campaign failed, and he was arrested along with many of his fellow “mutineers.” Accounts vary as to what happened next—some say he was executed, others claim an angry mob freed him from his prison cell in Almora. Either way, his cause had been crushed, and with it, the dream of an independent Kumaon. But if memories were long in the Corbett household, they were even longer in Champawat—a place where thousand-year-old temples were actively venerated, and ancient battles still celebrated in song—and Kalu Mahara’s sacrifice was not forgotten. Anti-British sentiment, though common throughout India, ran especially high in the region.
Of course there was more to that animosity than the fate of one folk hero, and one can easily find its more immediate sources in the draconian laws that were passed in the rebellion’s wake. At least some of the people’s resentment would have stemmed directly from the government’s general prohibition of firearms—a state of affairs that had been officially in effect since the Indian Arms Act of 1878, passed after the rebellion to severely regulate the possession of weapons among the Indian population. The inevitable result, particularly in more volatile frontier districts like Champawat, was the clandestine possession of illegal guns. Granted, the sort of technologically advanced, high-velocity rifles available to British colonists were difficult to come by, so most contraband weapons were outdated and of poor quality—the sort of weathered muzzle-loaders that Jim Corbett himself had first hunted with as a boy. Some of these weapons were indeed used for the illicit purposes the Crown feared most; the vast majority of unlicensed guns, however, would have served far more pedestrian purposes, akin to those of Corbett’s old friend and mentor Kunwar Singh. Namely, the procurement of wild game from the forests, protection against dacoits, and as insurance for livestock and kin against the rare incursion of a problematic predator. Not that such weapons were generally very effective against a five-hundred-pound tiger charging at forty miles per hour, but they were better than nothing—which was still what the vast majority of the population had on hand. Guns were, regardless of their legality, considered a highly valued asset in Champawat’s frontier culture.
With the revolts of 1857 still vivid in the collective British imagination, however, the idea of an armed Indian populace was a frightening prospect, even half a century after the fact. While Europeans were exempt from such measures, acquiring a legal firearm, even for defense of livestock or protection against wild animals, was difficult under the terms of existing legislation. In 1905, an article in The Times of India recorded a total of 8,901 new licenses for firearms, issued in accordance with the Indian Arms Act of 1878. This number may sound substantial, but one must consider that the total population of India at the time was verging on 300 million—effectively, the percentage of the population with legal access to firearms was minuscule, intended by design to be virtually nonexistent. And from another article in The Times of India, dated April 15, 1907, it becomes clear why that number was kept purposefully so low:
Diligent students of newspapers in this part of the world can hardly fail to have been struck by the fact that fire-arms are now being frequently used in the commission of crime, says the “Englishman.” They have been produced in the case of riots, and within a few days no less than three cases have been reported of persons shot dead by others who ordinarily should not have been in the possession of rifles or guns. When a Maharaja, particularly a friend of Europeans and officials, is shot from behind a hedge and the Police Superintendent of a District has a bullet whistling over his head, the time has come to enquire by what means criminals or fantastic persons on this side of India manage to possess themselves of fire-arms . . . All this points to the fact that a demand for weapons has suddenly arisen in Bengal. One would naturally like to know why. Some people will find no hesitation in accepting the reply that the demand has been caused by those Bengali newspapers and other preachers of sedition, who proclaim that the people of this country ought to perfect themselves in military exercises and the use of arms.
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. It is a view tinged with paranoia, but not without at least some basis in reality, as without a doubt, there was no shortage of individuals in Bengal who had implicitly good reasons for resenting the British Empire, and even better ones for wanting to defend themselves from it. Of course, Kumaon was not in Bengal, but concerns similar to those expressed in the article would have no doubt been shared by the colonial government and population. And as Jim Corbett was soon to discover, contraband guns—although generally of poor quality—were indeed owned in considerable numbers, in Champawat in particular. It’s difficult to imagine, however, that Corbett, a lifelong resident of Kumoan who was well versed, nay, steeped in both the history of the 1857 uprising and the illicit gun culture of the region, did not have at least some idea of the type of place he was stepping into.
Of course, he says little on the subject in his account of the hunt, which is not surprising—Corbett studiously avoided “politics” in his writing, and he often presented a considerably more sanguine vision of colonial life than history can account for. Which isn’t to say he lied or stretched the truth—the man was known for both his humility and his honesty, by Indians and Englishmen alike. It’s more a question of reading between the lines. 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. A sort of selective memory, one might even say, where the horrors of a tiger attack are vividly remembered, while the horrors of colonial violence are conveniently (or perhaps even necessarily) forgotten. Regardless, however, of what is included and what is omitted in his accounts, one has to assume that Corbett was well aware of Champawat’s historical relationship with the government, and of the people’s deep mistrust of foreigners such as himself. Descending upon the town with his companions in formation, he was a long way from the manicured cricket greens and sunny tea parlors of Nainital—a town largely unscathed by the violence of fifty years before. 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. The sort of glares Jim Corbett likely encountered on its outskirts may have been relatively novel for him, but they would have been all too familiar to his grandfather Joseph, from his days back in the bitter lanes and crumbling shanties of County Antrim. All across Kumaon, in both the hills and the terai, government forestry regulations and labor policies were causes for popular resentment; in Champawat, however, massacres and mass executions were still part of living memory. It very well may have dawned on Corbett that a man-eating tiger was not necessarily the most immediate threat to his safety. If northern India could be compared to Northern Ireland, Champawat was its West Belfast—and Jim Corbett, regardless of his intentions, was entering it as an armed emissary of the colonial British government.
As he crested the ridges on the outskirts of town, curling along the rims of the first terraced fields, edging along the ancient stones of the Baleshwar Temple, it must have occurred to Corbett that unlike those in Pali, it would take much more than a display of trick shooting at ghoorals to win over the people of Champawat. For unlike Pali, Champawat was no diminutive village—it had a population of several thousand. And the town itself was of no small historical significance. According to devout Hindus, Champawat was where the Kurmavtar, or the turtle incarnation of the god Vishnu, had originally m
anifested itself, and the surrounding valley had served as the seat of the once-mighty Chand dynasty for more than five hundred years. Champawat’s days as a religious and municipal capital had long since passed by the time Corbett marched through its figurative gates, although the town’s richly painted facades and elaborately carved balconies would have attested to its former glory.*
Its residents were proud and defiant, if weary of living for the better part of four years alongside a tiger that devoured their loved ones on a regular basis. The curious arrival of Corbett and his miniature army of followers must have surely brought them to their windows and doors, perhaps even coaxed a few contraband muzzle-loaders out from beneath floorboards or straw piles. Who did this scrawny Englishman think he was, marching into their town with a ragtag bunch of illiterate hill people, and six turbaned dandies from Nainital?
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