The legacy of Jim Corbett in India

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http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/features/article3118843.ece

The remarkable legacy of Tiger Jim

Jim Corbett devoted much of his life to hunting big cats. But the park he

created in northern India may now represent the tiger's best hope of

survival in the wild. By Andrew Buncombe

 

Thursday, November 01, 2007

 

" I was shooting with Eddie Knowles in Malani when I first heard of the tiger

which later received official recognition as the 'Champawat man-eater'. "

 

So begins the opening chapter of Jim Corbett's first and probably most

famous book, Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Published initially in 1944 and with a

foreword by Lord Linlithgow, Viceroy of India, the book details Corbett's

Boy's Own-style exploits in the jungles of northern India and helped cement

his reputation internationally as a hunter, animal-lover and adventurer. It

was translated into 27 languages and is still widely available today.

 

But more than half a century after his death, another part of Corbett's

legacy is being recognised as being of far greater importance, as the tigers

he hunted and loved face their most pressing battle for survival against the

unprecedented encroachment of mankind.

 

Indeed, Jim Corbett National Park, which the hunter-turned-conservationist

helped establish in what is now the Indian state of Uttaranchal, is home to

one of only two genetically viable tiger populations in the entire country.

 

" We have managed to keep it that way, " said Brijendra Singh, honorary warden

of the reserve and a member of India's National Board of Wildlife, which is

meeting today in Delhi to discuss the fate of India's tigers. " The main

challenge we face is the encroach of population and the loss of habitat. We

can deal with the poaching, but there have to be places [set aside]for

tigers. "

 

By the time Corbett helped establish the park in 1936 - the first national

park in India - he already had a near-legendary reputation in the country as

a man who would track down and kill man-eating tigers, those animals driven

to despair by injury, hunger or whatever other urges, and which had turned

upon humans. Between the years 1907 and 1938, usually hunting on foot and

alone, Corbett hunted and killed at least a dozen such tigers, allegedly

responsible for the deaths of more than 1,500 people. The first man-eater he

shot - the Champawat tiger, of which he wrote with such passion and

eloquence - was said to have killed more than 436 people.

 

And yet Corbett was slow to categorise a tiger as a man-eater and was loath

to tarnish the reputation of the emblematic great cat as an evil creature. "

A man-eating tiger is a tiger that has been compelled, through stress of

circumstances beyond its control, to adopt a diet alien to it. The stress of

circumstances is, in nine cases out of 10, wounds, and, in the 10th case,

old age, " he wrote in the preface to Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

 

" Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers

have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to survive,

they are compelled to take to a diet of human flesh. "

 

Mr Singh said: " In the 1920s and 1930s the shooting of tigers was a big

sport, but it was done with bait tied for the tiger. It was not really

sport. The tigers were getting decimated by all these sportsmen. Corbett

realised that they would not survive. "

 

Corbett sought to spread the word about the threat to the tigers by

establishing both a magazine and two organisations - the Association for the

Preservation of Game in what is now Uttar Pradesh and the All-India

Conference for the Preservation of Wild Life. The magazine was only to run

to three issues but around the same time Corbett was asked to help establish

a park in which tigers and wildlife would be preserved. That reserve - first

named the Hailey National Park - was established in the area where Corbett

had earned his fame.

 

But when the National Board for Wildlife meets today, the Prime Minister

Manmohan Singh will be told that India's entire population of tigers

probably ranges between 1,300 and 1,500. In addition to Corbett'sestimated

80 tigers, the only other genetically viable population is contained within

the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. Many experts believe that for all

the efforts India has made, it will require a miracle for the tiger to avoid

extinction.

 

It is not as though successive governments have done nothing. In 1973 -

alarmed by the results of India's first tiger census which reported there

were just 1,827 animals in the country - the government of Indira Gandhi

established Project Tiger. The project - launched at the Corbett National

Park - set up nine special tiger reserves based on the idea of a buffer

system in which tigers would be protected from human populations. Today

there are 28 such reserves.

 

But experts say that since the assassination of Mrs Gandhi in 1984,

subsequent governments have done less to protect the animals. Most recently,

many campaigners argue, the passing of the Recognition of Forest Rights Act

- a piece of legislation that gives impoverished communities legal access to

forests - is setting up scenarios for countless more clashes between humans

and tigers.

 

" This humbug of human beings and tigers being able to live together does not

work, " said Mr Singh. " He ends up killing your cattle or killing you and

then you want to kill the tiger. There are only very few places where humans

and tigers live together and in those communities the people know they risk

losing their animals to the tigers. "

 

That is something that Corbett certainly knew well. Born of Irish ancestry

in 1875 in the Himalayan foothills town of Naini Tal, Corbett was his

parents' eighth child. His father was a postmaster and while the Corbetts

were not impoverished, they were not wealthy. Corbett left school at the age

of 17 without having completed his senior years and soon afterwards took a

job with the Bengal and North Western Railways. His first job was as a fuel

inspector based in Manakpur.

 

Corbett's time increasingly became taken up with dealing with man-eating

tigers that were terrorising local populations. He also famously tracked and

killed a leopard - known as the Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag - that for

10 years had attacked pilgrims visiting Hindu shrines in Kedarnath and

Badrinath.

 

Yet as his awareness of the plight of the tigers and other wildlife grew, so

did Corbett's efforts to raise awareness of the issues confronting the

animals. He travelled around schools and societies, lecturing about the

tiger and the need to preserve it for those generations to come.

 

" If you read just one of his books you will see that it was not a bunch of

stories about hunting tigers; it is about compassion and love towards the

great cats - he called the tiger 'a large hearted gentleman with boundless

courage', " said Jerry Jaleel, director of the Jim Corbett Foundation, a

Canadian-based non-profit group that helped to repair Corbett's grave in

1994.

 

" Hunting continued in India until 1970, but the conservation movement

started by Corbett caught on, and when Indira Gandhi became prime minister

of India, she wholeheartedly supported the creation of Project Tiger, which

still continues in India. If Corbett hadn't started this conservation

movement 75 years ago, the tiger population would have diminished long ago. "

 

Corbett also became increasingly interested in photographing the animals. As

he wrote in the final chapter of Man-Eaters of Kumaon: " Apart from the

difference in cost between shooting with a camera and shooting with a rifle,

and the beneficial effect it has on our rapidly decreasing stock of tigers,

the taking of a good photograph gives far more pleasure to the sportsman

than the acquisition of a trophy; and further, while the photograph is of

interest to all lovers of wild life, the trophy is only of interest to the

individual who acquired it. "

 

Mr Thapar said: " He had a box camera with which he would take his

photographs. He was the first to film white tigers.

 

" He watched [the tiger]; he understood how it lived. He was a true master of

the language of the forest. "

 

Perhaps surprisingly for a man born and raised in India and who was so

associated with the country and its wildlife, Corbett left around the time

of its independence in 1947. He and his sister, Maggie - neither of whom

ever married - moved to Kenya where he continued to write about the plight

of the tigers. They lived in a cottage called Paxtu, once occupied by Lord

Baden Powell and located in the grounds of the Outspan Hotel in the town of

Nyeri, 100 miles north of Nairobi.

 

In February 1952 he was at the now legendary TreeTops Hotel in Nyeri on the

night that Princess Elizabeth learned that her father, King George VI, had

died and that she had succeeded to the throne.

 

With typical aplomb, Corbett wrote in the hotel's guest log: " For the first

time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a

Princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling

experience she climbed down from the tree next day a Queen - God bless her. "

 

Three years after King George's death, Corbett himself died, after suffering

a heart attack. At the time of his death, aged 79, he was near completion of

his sixth book, entitled Tree Tops. A year later, the park he helped

establish in India was renamed by the authorities in his honour.

 

Since then, Corbett has been honoured further. In 1968 one of the last six

remaining sub-species of tiger - the IndoChinese Tiger - was renamed after

him. It is now properly known as Panthera tigris corbetti, or more simply

Corbett's tiger.

 

But if Corbett's real concern was about the future of the tiger, rather than

his own reputation, then it is the park in Uttaranchal, located close to the

foothills were he grew up and where he came face to face so many times with

the remarkable animal, that is his truly lasting contribution. As India

struggles to find a way to save its last remaining tigers, the Corbett

National Park is a rare place of refuge for these remarkable animals.