FW: Billy Arjan Singh obituary by Rohit Brijnath

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Tuesday, January 05, 2010 7:28 PM

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Billy Arjan Singh obituary by Rohit Brijnath

 

 

http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorial-views-on/editorials/Billy-s-pugmarks/Art\

icle1-493756.aspx

 

Billy's pugmarks

Rohit Brijnath

<http://www.hindustantimes.com/Search/Rohit-Brijnath.aspx>

January 04, 2010

First Published: 21:15 IST(4/1/2010)

Last Updated: 21:17 IST(4/1/2010)

 

In the forests of India there is mourning. Billy Arjan Singh, an old

tiger, is dead. Fortunately, he has gone to his own paradise, an animal

heaven where only some humans are allowed entry. And so there he is,

reunited finally with his dog Elie, leopards Prince, Harriet and Juliet,

tigress Tara, monkeys Elizabeth Taylor and Sister Guptara, his fishing

cat Tiffany. With them, Billy will be home.

 

The two-footed Billy, 92, spoke for the four-footed unheard. He argued

on behalf of those who inhabited the jungles and asked only to live. To

say he was India's finest tiger conservationist (winner of the World

Wildlife Fund gold medal), sounds silly because it is not a contest. It

is a calling, an empathy for the natural world. There is a wonderful

photo of him, wearing a cap, with a bird sitting on it. Was the bird

tired, disoriented, who knows, but maybe it knew: this man I can trust.

 

Billy was extraordinary, a writer of books who seemed to emerge from one

written by Hemingway. We were distantly related and I went occasionally

to Tiger Haven in Uttar Pradesh's Dudhwa National Park where this

fascinating character lived. A bow-legged, badly-dressed, wind-breaking,

well-read hero. A committed man with a Charles Atlas handshake,

courteous with women, brusque with the ignorant, owner of a humour dryer

than London gin, cornering me about boxers and batsmen because he

admired

athletes.

 

He was strong, in muscle and belief. As the morning mist clung to the

trees, you could hear metal clinking. Billy was lifting barbells and

this was fitting for he was an unbending man. He once locked poachers

into a granary where his python, the harmless Monty, snoozed in the

rafters. Animals surrounded him. In the evenings, Tom Dooley the peacock

would come twitching by and the elephant, Bhagwan Piari, her eye fixed

adoringly on him, would gulp chapatis thicker than dictionaries.

 

The conservationist's life is of disappointment. He is going to be

defeated, he can only delay some extinctions.

 

Populations are exploding, man has forgotten his place, he wants the

animal's domain too. Billy's life was struggle.

 

He sweated for the revival of the swamp deer, battled to turn Dudhwa

into a sanctuary, experimented with rearing leopards and a tigress in an

attempt to rehabilitate them into the wild.

 

His hiccuping typewriter produced wildlife papers, he wrote books, drove

to Delhi to pester officials. His persistence won Indira Gandhi's

admiration, and she wrote in 1973 to the UP chief minister: " It is easy

to come by armchair conservationists, but rare indeed to find a man with

the dedication and perseverance to act in support of a cause he loves. "

He was crusty, cantankerous, unwilling to compromise.

 

It was the only way and the wrong way: to save the tiger required

obstinacy, but it hardly helped with officials. He talked of tigers,

with deep affection and terrible sadness. He wore a devotion I have

never seen. Once a hunter, he put down stakes in a jungle after World

War II and never left. Just lived there among the coughing leopards.

Studying, tracking, fighting, protecting. Every single, damn day for a

lifetime. Sometimes, as he trudged into the forest, I wondered: what are

the rewards for such men? Just one fresh tiger pugmark imprinted in the

dust to reassure him not all were gone?

 

Legacy is not easily defined. But we can say of Billy that he was a

first and an original, a tiger explorer who built an entire life around

a single cause. Like Salim Ali with his birds, he was unique. He saw the

tiger as the apex of the food chain, wherein a healthy cat population

meant a healthy jungle. To save this species was akin to saving it all.

 

Billy taught us this, he taught us there was a little of William Blake

in him, writing: " ... the stentorian bugling of the swamp deer, the

urgency in the rutting bray of the cheetal, the lilting crow of the

jungle cock, and the clarion call of the peacock, all combine to make up

the pulsating rhythm of the great forest " . He taught us this animal was

worth fighting for, worth marching against governments for, worth giving

to charities for, worth sitting still for an hour to see it for a

second.

 

He taught men that devoting a life to the tiger was worth it, helping to

spawn a generation of conservationists. So I give quiet thanks for

Billy. And for people like Ulhas Karanth, Fateh Singh Rathore, Valmik

Thapar, Bittu Sahgal, Ashok Kumar, Belinda Wright, Raghu Chundawat. All

those who fight for the tiger, and fail, and fight more.

 

I last saw Billy three years ago, sunken into a chair, fading, his

spirit tattered but not extinguished. Even to the end, I suspect, he

feared not for himself, but for his forest companions. So many whom he

saved, so many he could not.

 

Rohit Brijnath is a Senior Correspondent with The Straits Times,

Singapore

 

The views expressed by the author are personal