The past is a different country
By Manohar Malgonkar

THE past is a different country. To me it seems a memorable statement but alas, I don’t remember who made it. What I am surprised at is that it has escaped inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

How unfamiliar does the past seem as depicted in books, and I am not thinking about the changes brought about by scientific advances; jet travel and antibiotics and the Internet. I am thinking of how drastically our ways of judging human behaviour have changed. Many things that in pre-Independence India would have been viewed with horror have become the staples of our news media: four-letter words, raw sex, homosexuality. What would, for instance, the Victorians have thought of a minister of the government reported as "picking up a man... in a park known as a gay hangout," and the subsequent resignation of that minister? Ron Davies, Welsh Secretary in Britain’s present government did just that, and no one was particularly scandalised, or expressed shock and outrage.

But paradoxically, at least in one instance, the contrary is just as true: something which we today react to with shock and dismay was not only a perfectly normal pastime in times goneby but an activity to be looked upon with favour and extolled, a hallmark of maleness, and sport of the nobility.

The hunting of wild animals: Shikar.

There was a time when that was how man survived, by killing the animals of the wild and eating their flesh. But even after man began to grow crops, hunting survived and became the principal occupation of the warlike races. The heroes of our epics have been prodigious hunters. Valmiki’s Ramayana begins with a hunting scene and later, the killing of a stag is a major plot-twist in it: When Rama’s wife, Sita has set her heart on her husband getting her the stag with the golden skin which she had seen, Rama confides to his brother, Lakshman: "If I cannot catch it alive, I can bring it down with an arrow and give the skin to Seeta."

Wild animals were a part of nature’s abundance; they were there in such astonishing profusion that to kill a few of them for food or even because your wife fancied its glowing pelt was perfectly in order. Why, it was one way of keeping their number down to maintain some sort of balance. If you ate the flesh of animals, as most Indians other than Brahmins and the Vaishyas did, what was the difference between killing a backyard pig or lamb to killing a black buck or chinkara?

And when venison tasted so good:

In ancient times, the entire Indian subcontinent must have resembled an unimaginably vast safari park, predominantly a land of wild animals only sparsely dotted about with human habitations. But unfortunately, neither the Puranas nor the epics tell us much about what animals were there, in what sizes and numbers. Some species must have ceased to exist, and those that have been left seem to have gone on shrinking. In the museum of Vikram University in Ujjain, there is a skull of an elephant they found buried in the riverbed of the Narmada. It is so huge that it is difficult to believe that elephants once grew to that size. Then again, some of the earlier British hunters have mentioned tigers which were 12 feet long.

Even though wild animals were always hunted, for food or sport, it is not likely that the weapons of medieval times such as bows and arrows and spears could have kept their numbers from increasing. That is why it is quite likely that there were just as many wild animals in the India in the days of the sultans as there had been in the days of Rama.

It is only after gunpowder had been invented and firearms began to be used that wild animals began to be killed in large numbers. There are vivid pictures of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir treating himself to a tiger round-up. When the Mughals went tiger-hunting, they seem to have killed them not in ones and twos but by the dozen.

These tiger hunts and, in particular the number of tigers caught in the round-ups for the Emperor, sitting on an elephant, to shoot them, are corroborated in Manucci’s account of such a hunt during the reign of Aurangzeb.

Nicolao Manucci, a boy of 14 living in Venice, sneaked himself as a stowaway in a ship about to set sail, and after a year or so, landed in Surat. He spent the rest of his life in India, and his book Storia de Mogor is a firsthand account of the land and its people, their manners and customs, and above all the landscape. He saw things with the eye of the stranger, and he is a faithful recorder with a gift for vivid descriptions.

A year or two after his arrival, Manucci, who was still in his teens, travelled from Surat to Burhanpur. He describes the countryside as being lush with vegetation, with many large tanks and dark forests and on his way he saw wild animals in a bewildering variety, deer large and small, bison, a profusion of bird life such as peacock, ducks and wild fowl.

Later in his book, Manucci describes a tiger-hunt. It seems that they employed hundreds of buffaloes and men equipped with nets to round up tigers in small enclosures about the size of a cricket field, for the emperor, (Aurangzeb) riding on an elephant to pick them out one by one with a rifle. Here, too, he speaks of tigers in numbers.

Fast forward to 1837, to the palmy days of the East India Company, a merchant enterprise that had conquered the whole of India. Tigers are already getting rare, but of other wildlife there seems to be just as much as in the past. Here is Fanny Eden, the sister of the Company’s Governor- General, Lord Auckland, on a tiger-hunting expedition.

February 24: They have found no tigers, brought back quantities of spotted deer.

February 25: Peacocks flying in every direction, herds of spotted deer starting at every step..... and wild hogs. They found a tiger and wounded him. One rhinoceros.

In the end they did manage to kill nearly a dozen tigers, and Fanny, much to her horror and disgust, actually saw one being killed.

And finally to another diarist, this time at the high noon of the Raj, 1921, when the heir to the British throne was being introduced to what would one day be inherited by him: the Empire. One of his party was a callow naval officer, just turned 20, Lord Louis Mountbatten. The Royal party was passing through Rajasthan.

"Wednesday, December 7, I wanted to go after black buck but did not know the native name for it so I made a face like a black buck, held up both my arms for horns."

This pantomime his tracker seemed to have understood. He managed to lead Mountbatten to a herd of black buck which, however, "got wind of us and cantered away while I blazed away at the leaping bucks, missing of course."

Luckily for Rajasthan’s wild- life, there were no jeeps in those days. The point I wish to make is that, all throughout history, killing wild animals was looked upon with approbation, a hallmark for a man’s masculinity, a sport of the nobility, and that even Jawaharlal Nehru was caught up in its mystic when he, too in his twenties went on hunting trips, as he describes it in his autobiography:

"I once succeeded in killing a bear in Kashmir." But his enthusiasm for shikar, never really more than lukewarm, suddenly ended one day when he wounded an antelope. "The harmless little animal fell down at my feet and looked up with its great big eyes full of tears. Those eyes have often hunted me since."

Venison, anyone?