Legacy of conservation, from royals to commoners

IT is a rum thing, but it is often the to the highest degree fertile hunters of state of nature creatures who turn over into their fiercest defenders. Their reasons run from base selfishness – if we hunt every last wild animal down, there will not be any left for us to hunt – to a deep love and respect for wildlife and forests developed over long years of getting to know both intimately. To the latter category belonged the great tiger hunter from Nainital, Edward James ‘Jim’ Corbett, whose 150th birthday was celebrated last week, on July 25.Beginning in 1885, when he shot his first leopard for sport as a boy of 10, Corbett would go on to shoot 19 tigers and 14 leopards, all documented man-eaters. Alongside, however, his thoughts turned to conservationism, especially once he had gotten himself a camera in 1921, and began to enjoy the pleasures, and the risks – the early cameraman had to get much closer to his target than the rifleman – of capturing tigers on film. He wrote for the newspapers, denouncing trigger-happy marksmen intent on denuding the Indian jungle of big cats, authored books that lionised the tiger while narrating, in exciting, minute detail, his accounts of tracking and killing man-eaters, and advocated with local administrators to create protected forest areas.Corbett’s sustained efforts paid off in 1934, when the governor of the United Provinces, Malcolm Hailey, established India’s first National Park, the 300 sq km Hailey’s National Park, which we know today as the Jim Corbett National Park.But the Mysore royals had stolen a march on Carpet Sahib (Carpet was the Kumaoni mispronunciation of Corbett). Three years before Hailey, Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar had marked off 90 sq km of forest for the Venugopala Wildlife Park (today covering a whopping 900 sq km, known as the Bandipur Tiger Reserve), as part of a conservation process that had begun three decades earlier. In 1901, the 17-year-old Maharaja, horrified at the indiscriminate killing of big cats, which the royals themselves had taken great pleasure in, introduced a landmark piece of legislation called the Mysore Game Laws, 1901, which severely restricted hunting and fishing.Happily, Mysore continued to lead the conservation charge post-independence as well. In 1952, when the Government of India constituted a Central Board for Wildlife, it was Nalvadi’s successor, HH Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, a crack shot who had himself killed man-eaters and rogue elephants, who was appointed Chairman. In 1973, when the central government launched Project Tiger, the wildly successful conservation program that has more than doubled the tiger population in the Indian forest over the past half century, Bandipur was one of the first nine tiger reserves to be picked to implement it.More excitingly, Bangalore had its very own Corbett – the hunter, writer, and conservationist of Scottish extraction, Kenneth Anderson. A full 35 years younger than Jim, his story reads like an uncanny echo of his idol’s, except on two counts – Anderson’s beat was the south Indian jungles, which he wrote about with much love, and he never got the national fame he deserved. According to government records, this old boy of Bishop Cotton Boys School shot eight man-eating leopards and seven tigers between 1939 and 1966 (in 1972, India’s Wildlife Protection Act comprehensively ended hunting, poaching and wildlife trade, bringing much relief to the animals). In his nine cracking books of shikar stories, from Nine Man-eaters and one Rogue (1954) to Jungles Long Ago (published posthumously in 1976), Anderson writes with great charm and verve of his ‘hunting escapades’.Today, the city’s many world-class wildlife photographers and filmmakers continue the conservation legacy, shooting, with great love, not just the tiger, but every other animal, bird, insect, and tree that we share space with.(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)