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| Audubon’s “White Heron” |
Nature has always formed a major part of the visual representation of India. In the 17th century, during the reign of Emperor Jahangir, Mughal painting focused quite considerably on studies of birds, flowers and animals. A couple of centuries later, the tradition continued in the works of the Company school, the Daniells and in others. Artistic license was to be expected as such art aimed primarily at being pleasing and not necessarily correct in scientific and other details.
But there were exceptions, as is evident from the amazing work of the artist-naturalist, John James Audubon. The son of a prosperous French sea captain, he had emigrated to America in 1803 to avoid being conscripted into Napoleon’s army. In his art, he was soon able to come up with a solution to the “enduring conundrum” of wildlife artists: in order to make his subject look life-like, Audubon would shoot it and then thread wires through the body so as to manipulate the neck and feathers to resemble what he remembered from nature. And indeed his paintings of the Magnolia Warbler and the Brown Thrasher (both 1829) fighting off a snake that is about to attack its eggs are fine examples of mixed media art that were nevertheless remarkably true to life.
Audubon continued his work of identifying new species and became more of a legend after his death in 1851; in 1886, The Audubon Society, the first bird-preservation organization in the United States of America was formed, thus honouring a remarkable man who was able to combine a certain artistic sensibility with hard-nosed scientific observations.
A few years later, as the civil-servant-cum-ornithologist, Allan Octavian Hume, was settling into retirement in England, Sálim Moizuddin Abdul Ali was born to Zeenat-un-Nissa and Moizuddin, one of nine children. This was in Bombay in November 1896. On being orphaned, the brood “grew up under the loving care of a maternal uncle, Amiruddin Tyabji, and his childless wife, Hamida Begam”. Amiruddin was one of the earliest Indian members of the Bombay Natural History Society, and after an unusual sparrow with a yellow patch on its throat had fallen prey to young Salim’s airgun, he sent him off to meet Walter Samuel Millard, a British entrepreneur and naturalist who was honorary secretary of the Society and editor of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society.
It was in 1908 that a nervous adolescent entered the “quaint old single-storeyed building through its solid teakwood portal”. He need not have been so fearful at the thought of “meeting a full-grown sahib face to face”, as Millard not only identified the bird as a Yellowthroated Sparrow, but also took Salim on a conducted tour of many reference cabinets full of stuffed specimens. “The fortuitous incident with the Yellowthroated Sparrow,” wrote Salim Ali in his autobiography, aptly named The Fall of a Sparrow, “opened up undreamt of vistas for me”. In fact, it was the beginning of a long life of dedication to and involvement with Indian birds and ornithological experiences.
Salim Ali joined St Xavier’s College, Bombay, but soon dropped out and went instead to Tavoy in Burma to look after the family wolfram mining and timber interests there. He was at home in the forests and soon honed his skills as a naturalist and hunter. He came back to India in 1917, got an honours degree in Zoology, and, in the following year, married a distant relation, Tehmina. That a mere degree was not enough was evident when he failed to get recruited as an ornithologist with the Zoological Survey of India and a few years later, he went to Germany to train at the Zoological Museum of Berlin University.
Employment continued to be difficult and the couple went off to Kihim, a coastal village near Bombay. Salim began to study the Baya Weaver and his published findings finally gave him an entré into the field of ornithology. The rulers of several princely states got interested in his work and he was hired to undertake bird surveys in Hyderabad, Cochin, Travancore, Gwalior, Indore and Bhopal. He wrote, “my chief interest in bird study has always been its ecology, its life history under natural conditions and not in a laboratory under a microscope. By travelling to these remote, uninhabited places, I could study the birds as they lived and behaved in their habitats.”
Such travel often meant living under canvas for several days. For camps, first introduced by Warren Hastings when he was preoccupied with settling land revenue in Bengal, became a part of life for not only the government official, surveyor and engineer engaged in the business of the Raj, but also of the explorer, itinerant photographer, shikari, botanist and ornithologist. Though he certainly did not have an elaborate camp-life experience, Audubon too spent weeks at a time in the wilderness tracking birds; the Daniells, Allan Octavian Hume and others had surely set up camp many times during their trail of discovery.
One of the photographs from the travels is of the camp for Salim Ali during his bird survey in Hyderabad. It shows him, Tehmina and others seated in front of their tent, while cooks, khalasis (tent crew), khitmadgars (table servants), jamadar (sweeper) and others stand at a respectful distance. The second tent is perhaps that of the kitchen and dining room. Ali probably placed a folding desk outside the main tent where he wrote up his notes. He often marvelled at the “termite-like speed and orderliness” of the little army of the efficient and trained camp staff.
Though in later life he became committed to conservation, Salim Ali reiterated that “for a scientific approach to bird study, it is often necessary to sacrifice a few, ... (and) I have no doubt that but for the methodical collecting of specimens in my earlier years — several thousands, alas — it would have been impossible to advance our taxonomical knowledge of Indian birds... nor indeed of their geographic distribution, ecology, and bionomics”. Audubon would surely have agreed with him.
Salim Ali regarded his period of bird surveys — 1930 to 1950 — as the most productive, and indeed, he was an extremely prolific writer. In 1935, he was commissioned by the BNHS to write a guide to the commoner birds of India. Tehmina (she died a few years after) “had a remarkable ‘feeling’ for colloquial English prose style and ironed out stilted passages to make for pleasanter reading”.
The Book of Indian Birds was (and continues to be) a huge success. The first edition of 3,000 copies appeared in 1941 and was printed on imported art paper with one illustration per page, being the pioneer in colour-illustrated books on the subject. The illustrator was Jamshed Irani and it was priced at Rs 14! From the fifth edition onwards, revisions were introduced with the discovery of more species, covering 280 in its 12th edition. Irani’s illustrations were replaced by those of bird artist Carl D’Silva while G.M. Henry illustrated Indian Hill Birds. Soon, the days of one-illustration-per page were over.
Salim Ali continued to be a prodiguous writer almost till his death, his charming and informative autobiography being among his last works. Yet, for him, as also for Hume and other ornithologists, the role of illustrations was primarily functional: visuals were essential for correct identification by the bird-watcher and naturalist. They did not have to be works of art where background, habitats as well as the bird were integral to the composite whole. Perhaps things may have been different if the ornithologists in question had been also gifted artists in the Audubonian mould!
