The Wildest Sport of All

by Prakash Singh

  Frankly this book is about the tiger. You might have noticed it is also about guns, their highly ingenuous bullets and about much else that the age of hunting tigers brought about.

  Any account of shikar remains incomplete without an anecdote or two about intrepid hunters, their rifles and ammunition and the other talents that this distinguished body of men invariably possessed and utilized till these ended with their careers and those times.

  Some years before the time I describe, one man combined most of these attributes. The late Maharaja Captain Gopal Saran Singh of the erstwhile Tikari Raj in Gaya, Aurangabad and Jehanabad districts of Bihar was indeed a hunter of many parts. He won the Le Mans world car race few years in a row between the two Great Wars. And he was a good hunter. One property from where he drove out to have close encounters with tigers was till late located in Dehra Dun.

  His guns were legendary. The tigers he shot were mostly at close range, often in long grass, at the end of the charge that the first shot from his double-barrelled rifle would deliberately induce. In such cases, he shot mostly sitting over the mud-guard of a sturdy, late-twenties Ford Model A. Those who knew him at such moments recall a typical comment of grim victory that he invariably voiced, his words expressing amongst other things a tone of disbelief at the ease with which the tiger had died, denying him an interesting enough time. But to the onlookers and companions his method was nightmarish. My old friend, Wing Commander Amanullah Khan, also from Dehra Dun, who was a stripling at the time, recalls that on one shikar he shot and brought the tiger crashing down two paces away from him sitting rather indifferently above the front fenders of his Ford. The rifle with emptied chamber was loosely held as he never did have the time for more than two shots. The odd thing is that his custom-built, favourite light-bore tiger hunting rifle was sighted for just thirty metres on purpose.

  In this particular instance, as Amanullah fondly relates, the events occurred in the following manner. With Amanullah and Bacchu Singh, his head shikari, sitting in the back of the Model A Ford, Maharaja Gopal Saran Singh had driven down to a grassy tract in the Doon where a tigress had been sighted. Early in the beat, the maharaja deliberately injured the slinking tigress in the tall grass. This caused it to charge through the dense cover, ‘And how she came!’ recalls Amanullah.

  When it was less than ten metres away from them, the maharaja shot it with his remaining bullet. It collapsed, hurtling to death, almost colliding with the Ford’s prow and his feet. The maharaja, continuing to sit upon the bonnet and without taking his eyes away from the dead tigress, seemed almost surprised and said to his shikari who had been standing in the back of the car, ‘This one seems to have died.’

  Amanullah recalls these words for the distinct note of disbelief in them. Perhaps the maharaja had been expecting more sport!

  His guns, like the man, were legend. Here is an example from his younger days. Fighting alongside the British against Germany in the trenches of France, he used a .275 bore double express rifle. This fact came to light only after he had returned to India. The matter was hushed up by the British and the maharaja got away unscathed. The events, as they occurred, tell the tale.

  The two armies faced each other in their respective lines of advance and defence holed up in trenches for bloody months on end. On the German side odd facts began to come to light. Some of the soldiers’ corpses bore identical bullet wounds. A single shot was found to have entered each head, drilling right through the heavy helmets dead centre of every forehead. When more and more such kills were discovered, the German high command thought it fit to look into the matter. They found that their troops so killed had been shot by a high-velocity special light bore rifle. This was against the regulations. After identifying the particular sector of the British lines from where the unknown marksman was sniping away, the Germans alerted their soldiers to remain as concealed as possible in the safety of the trenches in that sector. But wherever a careless helmet showed even for the slightest time, a dead German would slump down killed outright, shot through his helmet and head.

  The German high command complained to the rules of war committee in Switzerland and ultimately at the League of Nations. In the interest of both sides, the British were asked to check the deadly sniper and stop the random killing. Another necessary correction pertaining to the type of rifle to be used in future by both sides was incorporated into the regulations of warfare. Weapons of only a certain calibre, without sophisticated sporting gun-sights, were made the standard. Further, expanding soft-nosed high-velocity bullets were banned from use for the opposing armies. The .303 rifle that was selected for use was to fire only hard-pointed, solid-nosed bullets that accorded the soldier even when hit a fighting chance of survival as it was far less damaging than the expanding projectiles. Thus came into acceptance the trusty Lee Enfield .303 rifle that had been first manufactured in 1899: so ubiquitous in both the Great Wars and still very much in use seventy-five years after its inception. The marksman remained untraced till the end. Needless to say, the maharaja of Tikari, with his .275 bore double express rifle, had been billeted with the British troops in that very sector, as it was later discovered. The soldier-maharaja came back home to his jungles, hunts and other guns and rifles that he sported with, to almost everyone’s great relief!

  The late maharaja of Surguja is famed for having shot upwards of a thousand tigers; the nawabzada of Tonk, six hundred. The invaluable thing about these facts is that they might seem hard, almost criminal in the affairs of the jungle at present. Their importance lies in the claim to international fame in the annals of wildlife. The experiences and the lessons that these gentlemen went through are and will always be the foundations of the forest services’ lifestyle.

  Before he passed away, Kunwar Narendra Singh had said, ‘My own experiences of tiger shooting are indelibly a part of me. I love the animal parks and the memories they bring back, whose thrills I have never forgotten.’

  In the streams of the Jim Corbett National Park abounding with promise for those who hunt with rod and reel, the presence of larger animals like tigers and elephants lurk sometimes all too real. Everything was so perfect soon after the park first came into being. One reason was that the powers that be at the time decided to take some of those who had hunted in various ways and in most seasons in the wild there into confidence. They were consulted officially by that far-sighted arm of the government. Raja Chaitendra Singh helped set up the park, contributing his keen knowledge of the sporting lands to delineate its outer and inner limits, helping to encompass the places most suitable as habitat for the animals.

  These remarkable efforts, where they have not been disturbed by glaring imbalances in the life of humans, have grandly succeeded; even to the extent of changing the very habits of the animals that were once hunted.

  Earlier a tiger would charge with unerring certainty, rampaging with aggressiveness, or slink away sensing danger from human beings, whose capability to kill it had all but fathomed. Now it will move away on its own from human beings, often at a distance, or when lightly clapped away or shouted at. Other habits have changed, too, as I have noticed. But there are, and will be, exceptions.

  The need is to keep these projects and allied parklands running successfully. The king of beasts, even as it wades through the depth of a concourse of mountain rivers, is unmindful but fully aware of you and your family deep inside tiger country, watching him from an open jeep. He steps with care on the submerged round stones, emerges with the controlled gusto of his gait from the water to the hot, sun-baked shelved bank, suddenly slowing, snapping out of its struggle with the coursing currents of the river, overcome at that instant with a nagging sense of alarm from your watching presences.

  Then the tiger stands and looks at you across the river. Seconds pass. In olden times, it might very well be aggravated enough to charge at you, bounding over and through the bed of the stream – but this is many years later. The tiger suddenly turns away, utterly dismissive, beginning to ga
mbol over the rising riverbank, suddenly to pause before the straggled growth of lantana in its way. A fluid step away from the tangled growths and it strikes out through a cleared level shelf of tall forests, away from you all, continuing to hunt effortlessly.

  In these times, as I have mentioned before, the tiger is in for a bad spell. All said, the forests contain enough resources to pay their way through any project meant for their welfare, whose monetary returns should enrich a cash-strapped country’s treasury manifold. With so much in the way of funds that forest assets can generate, efforts at continuing the existence of these projects and parks should not pose much of a challenge. The tiger deserves the world’s undivided attention. I have written about the sighting of a brown-hued tiger, chocolate-furred over large parts of the paleness sidelong under the length of the body. I have laughed along when someone who heard of it became facetious enough to ask, ‘Did the tiger eat too may chocolates?’ But I stand vindicated.

  That he was joking at my expense was clear. What I did not realize then was that he was hitting closer to the mark than intended as that tiger’s different colour had remained a mystery to us. It was only a good decade after we had first seen it in the Doon valley forest that I discovered a similar tiger had not only been sighted but classified and named!

  In deference and tribute to the renowned hunter and naturalist Col. Jim Corbett of Kaladhungi in the Kumaon, zoologists the world over had classified this sort of tiger in 1968 as a different breed. Sightings had been in Indo-China jungles. They had named it the Panthera tigris corbetti.

  In the mid-nineties, in the hot forests of the Simlipal range in Odisha, solitary tigers were observed with large black patches from which serrated, incomplete dark stripes shot out distinctly separate from the more usual yellow-and-black over the frontal visible parts. More than such specimen one were sighted; the second was photographed and the results published in a leading national English daily.

  The Doon Club

  The Wildlife Preservation Society of India.

  A host of relatives and companions mentioned specifically, or in passing, in this book of reminisces, especially the late Major Kunwar Ravindra Singh of Doonga for some of the illustrations.

  The household of Narauli in the Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh. A clear first among equals of the region.

  My wife and son; without their support the publication of this book would not have been possible.

  The illustrious line of bygone aristocrats who lived in the Doon, my thanks especially to the late Amir Mohammed Osman Khan, widely respected wildlife expert.

  My close friend – the late Kr. Rajbir Singh, ‘Ronnie’, of erstwhile Tikari Raj in Bihar, for the anecdotes that helped develop interest in the reading of this book. Also, my thanks to Mr D.C. Kala’s very readable biography of Corbett, in which he has disclosed the facts concerning Panthera tigris corbetti – a revelation for Kr. Narendra Singh, as it explained some of the mystery of the chocolate-coloured tiger that years earlier his companions and he had seen in the Doon valley.

  Prakash Singh was born in Kursela in the Katihar district of Bihar in 1951. He was educated in Patna and New Delhi and now lives where he was born. This is his first book.

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  First published in India in 2015 by

  HarperCollins Publishers India

  Copyright © Prakash Singh 2015

  P-ISBN: 978-93-5177-054-1

  Epub Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 978-93-5177-055-8

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  Prakash Singh asserts the moral right

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