Call of the wild

An excellent collection of striking visuals and text, Treasures of Indian Wildlife, brought out by the Bombay Natural History Society, is a reminder of the fast-diminishing wealth of birds and animals. It can serve as a wake-up call to preserve the diverse flora and fauna in our country before the balance of nature gets distorted, writes Lieut-Gen Baljit Singh

Front cover: Black-capped Kingfisher Halcyon piletta (Boddart). Painted by John Gould & Henry C. Richter

The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), founded in 1883, is the oldest and the most reputed organisation in Asia devoted to the conservation of India’s rich faunal and floral diversity through field investigation, research, education and spread of awareness. In the span of over 100 years, the Society has amassed a vast collection of natural history objects, some very rare. A rarity is one of the eight skins in the world of the now extinct pink-headed duck.

Treasures of Indian Wildlife is the pick of colour paintings of our birds and animals by the world’s foremost artists. The chosen narrative-texts are from the society’s journal (now in its 100th vol), gazateers and books in its collection, many of which are now classics in this discipline. The result is a compelling anthology which has two distinct elements—an engrossing text and distinctive illustrations—and can be enjoyed independent of each other. The two "treasures" are not inter-related, for all illustrations have their own descriptive text.

The 122 pages of narrative chronicles not just the spectrum of India’s fauna and flora but also provides fascinating glimpses into the early times of our rural settlements. We get acquainted with their problems, prospects, social customs, superstitions, legends and folklore. To a perceptive reader, many articles and excerpted passages would be a poignant requiem to our wildlife.

Imagine hunting lions in Punjab in 1833 after a leisurely breakfast and mounted over the well-padded hunting elephants of the Marquis of Hasting, in an area which is now in Haryana. In a subsequent article, we learn heart-broken that the lion was fully exterminated from NW India and Punjab by 1842.

Another article’s title sums up both the abundance and the steady persecution of the tiger and much of other wildlife beginning 1837; "Goruckpore Terrai, where Tigers were ‘Plentiful as Blackberries’: Before the march of civilisation."

An account, written in 1891, of "The Sagacity of Langoors" makes the reader wonder why a similar symbiotic-gene was not gifted to mankind? A village woman leaves a three-month-old child asleep under a huge tamarind tree. When she returns after performing her chores, the child is nowhere to be seen. Villagers start searching for the child and one of them looks up on a tree and notices a female langoor holding the child tenderly to her bossom. There was something in the eye-contact between the langoor and the child’s mother which made the latter pull back the other searchers. Promptly, the langoor alighted gingerly to the ground and replaced the child (still asleep) on the very spot, where the mother had left it! The female langoor had probably sensed some lurking danger and wanted to protect the hapless infant as she would her own baby! Would homo sapiens display such concern for the beleagured wildlife today?

Man wants to simply vanquish all other life forms. There is the story from The Times, London dated July 4, 1874. A merchant sail-ship somewhere between Car Nicobar and Madras spotted the hump of a huge marine animal basking in the sun, harmlessly. As the ship drew closer, the Captain mindlessly shot at it. The infuriated giant squid in an instant knocked the ship on to its side, clambered on to it and sank it. A ship passing by saw the entire sequence and rescued five survivors from its crew of eight.

The writer had checked with the National Maritime Museum, Llyods, Shipping, the General Register of Shipping and Seamen and other likely sources at London but found no such previous record. However, there were stories from Newfoundland of similar ferocity by large squids, if attacked. The agent provocateur is almost always man.

When John Gould died on February 3, 1881, he was the undisputed illustrator and publisher of the most magnificent and extant work on birds ever to have been created. The BNHS has in its collection six of the 15 volumes of Gould’s Birds of Asia. There are just no other art forms or artists who can capture the essence of the ‘complete’ bird as Gould did in his paintings. Little wonder that of the 76 full page colour illustrations in the book, 62 are from John Gould’s creations. But the two-page spread of the tiger with his prey (a male blue bull) painted by William Kuhnert is mesmerising. You can’t have enough of it just as you cannot turn away from Gould’s pair of Monal pheasants on the title page in double-spread, or his Black-capped kingfishers on the book cover. Marg publishers have perhaps created an unassailable bench-mark in production.

“Cheetah.” Drawing by H. Weir. Routledge’s Picture Natural History by the Rev. J.G. Wood, engraved by the Dalziel Brothers, 1885. To the memory of the now extinct Indian Cheetah and with concern for the many species of Indian wildlife under threat of extinction.

The average reader may well wonder at the absence of works by Indian artists. By the time the BNHS was founded in 1883, works of Indian masters in this field had been siphoned off, through purchase or plunder, to either the private collections of philanthropists or museums in Europe and USA. The descriptive-text to the sole reproduction from the Akbar Nama says it all: "Emperor Akbar Hunting with Cheetahs. An illustrated copy of the Akbar Nama is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London..... it bears the signature of his son Jahangir and a seal of great-grandson Aurangzeb. During the decline of the Mughal Empire this Akbar Nama fell into the hands of one Ahmed Ali Khan in 1793. It was purchased by Major-General John Clark, the commissioner of Oudh in 1896 and was acquired by the museum from his widow.... the manuscript contains 117 paintings illustrated by 56 (Indian) artists".

The rich collection of black-and-white reproductions fall in two categories. Those dealing with wildlife are mostly from the works of Lt Col R A Sterndale (Denizens of the Jungle 1886) and Major-General Douglas Hamilton (Records of Sport in Southern India 1892); all executed by the authors themselves. For the flavour of peoples, places, monuments, common daily chores, and countryside the pencil drawings by James Forbes from his Oriental Memories 1812-14 are matchless. What evokes nostalgia aplenty is "Fattypore Sicri", drawn by William Purser, sketched by Captain Robert Elliot, from Views in India, China and the shores of the Red Sea, Vol I, 1835.

During the first half of the Vietnam war in the mid 1970s, when the Vietnamese had had to pull North under pressure of the US military jagarnaut, they were compelled to live off the land. Ho Chi Minh, their undisputed leader, recognising the significance of forests and wildlife as an irreplaceable national asset, decreed that one-third of all forests will be off-limit to all Vietnamese, come what may. We too had fought for Independence over protracted decades but regrettably we in India had no visionaries in this mould. While we became a sovereign nation on August 15, 1947, by November 1947 the last three surviving cheetahs in the wild had been driven to extinction. And extinction is for ever.

Fiftynine years after Independence, we have about 175 species of birds and mammals facing varying threats of extinction. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to save the tiger. Let us support him whole-heartedly. For if the tiger is saved, most of the other threatened species would axiomatically get a new lease of life. A good time to recall the words of wisdom of the Red Indian Chief Seattle, written in 1854 in a letter to President Franklin Pierce of the USA: "What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone man would surely die from a great loneliness of spirit. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

Treasures of Indian Wildlife will be a prized possession for any book-lover and a wake-up call for Indians to safeguard and cherish these "treasures."

Photos from Treasures of Indian Wildlife, edited by Dr Ashok S. Kothari & Dr Boman F. Chhapgar. Published by Bombay Natural History Society and Oxford University Press. Produced by Marg Publications for the BNHS. Pages 216. Rs 1900

HOME