Known affectionately as “Carpet Sahib”, Jim Corbett, the great hunter-turned-conservationist, who is still considered one of the best storytellers across genres, loved the forests of India and the animals and humans who shared his backyard. “Always be brave and make the world a happy place for others to live in,” were the last words Jim told his beloved sister Maggie in a letter before he died. Since we faced a microscopic monster recently, more wily and more deadly than the man-eating tiger, in the Covid-19 virus and all its mutations, Corbett’s last words to his sister Maggie to become a braveheart and continue to fight the good fight for a better planet, speak to generations across puddles and ponds.
Born of British parents, Willam Christopher and Mary Jane Corbett, on July 25, 1875 in Kaladhungi in the Kumaon hills and nurtured on the verdant foothills of the Himalayas amid loyal and hardworking hill folk, tigers, elephants and India’s most prolific wildlife, Jim Corbett, as he is popularly known, grew up in the family Gurney House to become a much respected and loved White sahib, whose best friends as we see through his litany of books were the hardy men and women of the soil, often hungry and poor but with an exceedingly expansive heart and intuitive knowledge of the forest. His mother had 13 children and Jim was a great shoulder of support for her, his father having died when he was just six. He completed his study at the Oak Openings School, afterwards combined with Philander Smith College in Nainital.
Perhaps no other conservationist, hunter, wildlife enthusiast has written so extensively and so compellingly about “the hunt”. Rigour, tightness and a trenchant focus and a brain that was extraordinary in the way it remembered minute details during a dangerous expedition alone —oftentimes, sitting in a dug-out hole in the ground, coupled with a striking paucity of style made me an addict to his recollecting innumerable hunts in his many stories.
My mother was an “armchair hunter” as my father often teased her, and I grew up not with bedtime stories of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood but my mother’s calming voice reading to me Corbett’s stories about how he sat up on a machan on a treetop for nights in freezing rain, trying to rid the terrain of either the Man-eater of Rudraprayag, a leopard who had claimed over 300 victims in just eight years between 1918 and 1926, or the Mukteshwar Maneater, a tigress. I will never forget my mother’s voice reading those true stories about simple and courageous farmers like Sher Singh and the brave Kunwar Singh, and the little girl Puthli. It seems appropriate that people endearingly called him “Carpet Sahib” (a pidgin way of pronouncing Corbett). All through his life, he helped them in whatever way he could: by building a home here or financing a temple there, or momentarily aiding a poor herdsman at the edge of a forest, he put up a barrier against a cattle-lifting tiger.
Corbett responded to a request by the government of the United Provinces, now the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, to shoot man-eating tigers and leopards that had killed people in the villages of the Garhwal and Kumaon states. During the hunt, Corbett would sometimes walk 40km a day in the forest, and his achievement in shooting the man-eaters earned him the admiration of the people residing in the villages of Kumaon.
But Corbett helped protect them mostly from man-eating tigers and leopards, ensuring that an old widow’s only hope, a son, was saved, or a 13-year-old herdsgirl like Puthli could drive her father’s cows home at twilight after grazing in the jungle without being killed. Although he was British and considered superior by the ruling Whites and the locals, Corbett himself never once propagated this attitude in all his 70-odd years in India.
Mostly, it was his informal friends that he was comfortable with. He confessed to a certain discomfort in formal Western attire, as starched collars were not his preferred mode of dress. He was a lord of the jungles of India. That was one of the reasons he stole my heart. He loved India and unabashedly referred to it as “My India”, which featured as the title of one of his books. When he moved to Kenya at the sunset years of his life, his many friends tried to dissuade him. But he felt disappointed at the treatment already being meted out to Whites who stayed after Independence. He was apprehensive of being treated as a second-class citizen, as many of his ilk were.
Through my teens and twenties, when I began to visit the forests and read about his single-handed exploits, where he came face to face with a man-eater more than a few times, I was struck by his fearlessness. Much later in life, I was to learn that this was a courage that stemmed from total honesty and a strong sense of selflessness. It is well-known in the forests of the Kumaon that his trackers and his machan builders were released by Corbett when the sun was still high in the sky in man-eating big cat terrain so that they could reach home safe and sound. Compassion and kindness bound him to the hill folk who adored him and were ready to give their life for him. Corbett had trained himself to spend moonless nights alone, sometimes having forgotten to bring along his torch or even his flask of hot chai.
The young Corbett was given a rifle at the age of 10 when he was in school, a fateful year in his life when he learned to control fear. It was also the age when he shot his first leopard, with his loyal dog Robin at his side. At 17, when he finished school, he went to work as a supervisor in the Indian Railways, always ready to lend a hand to lay a rail track.
In all, he wrote six books about his jungle adventures and about his quest to preserve the pristine flora and fauna of India, which were fast becoming the fodder of quick industrialisation in the 1930s and 1940s. He later also became a businessman (“a not too willing one at that”, he once said), and a member of the Municipal Board of Nainital, one of the jewels in the crown of Indian hill stations.
As early as when he was a strapping 30-year-old, Corbett realised that the irresponsible shooting of wildlife was taboo. He resolved fairly quickly never to shoot an animal except for food or if it was a dangerous beast. But the crunch came one day when he was in his 50s, when, having taken three officers of the Raj on a duck shoot, he was sickened by the insensible slaughter of 300 birds.
An avid photographer throughout his life, he perfected it in his later years when he depended more on his camera to shoot than on his rifle. Jim had a caring heart (although unlucky in love), and he had tremendous willpower (many were the nights he spent watching the “kill” of a man-eater, drenched to the bone in winter rain, or shaking with malaria). A perfect shot, he is known to have killed a leaping man-eater as close as three feet away.
He never sought the limelight, but he was publicly honoured by the government of India before and after Independence. In 1957, his house at Kaladhungi was made into a museum, and the sanctuary was renamed Corbett National Park.
The greatest armchair thrillers for me will always be Man-eaters of Kumaon, The Temple Tiger and More Man-eaters of Kumaon, My India, Jungle Lore, and The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. In his last book, Tree Tops, published posthumously, Corbett recounts an interesting vigil where he spent a memorable night guarding Princess Elizabeth (later Queen), who was visiting. Born in the heyday of the British Raj when all state visits were highlighted by a tiger shoot, Corbett was to become a pioneer of conservation in Asia. Today, tourists, wildlife enthusiasts, and scholars from abroad stay at the same spot of earth where one of the earliest conservationists in India had walked.
Hollywood tried riding on the coattails of the success of Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon, turning it into a Hollywood film starring Sabu, Wendell Corey, and Joe Page, but the movie deviated wildly from Corbett’s stories and made up an imaginary tale. It was a flop, and Corbett is believed to have commented, “The best actor was the tiger.” A few days after he completed writing his sixth book, Tree Tops, Corbett died of a heart attack and was buried at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Nyeri, Kenya. Both Martin Booth and D.C. Kala have written compelling biographies of Corbett.
I find as I ferret out the rich memories of staying in circuit houses and forest guesthouses during a fortnight every winter, with my parents, through my youth and childhood, I can almost hear my mother’s voice reciting the tale of the strapping young man, tip-toeing through sal forests alone, his senses fully alert, for a surprise attack from the dense undergrowth from anywhere.
The fact that Corbett was brave enough to understand that it was time to rethink the urgent need to transform from hunter to preservationist and that he implemented this change with single-minded honesty, made him stay on top of my list of a handful of heroes. I do so wish more parents would introduce their children to Corbett’s books. Reading the stories together would not only make the forest come alive but would ever so gently instill the art of good writing in a young person.
Julie Banerjee Mehta is the author of Dance of Life and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College, is literary columnist for t2 and conceptualises and curates the Rising Asia Literary Circle