Tiger Tales - ripping yarns from the days of the Raj

Tiger hunting from elephants in India, 1890 (courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Readers of these chronicles will know about my fascination with the pioneering days of forestry in India in the days of the British Raj. The early Indian foresters did not get everything right - for example it took nearly fifty years for them to realise that a ‘fire exclusion policy’ can never work in grassy and sub-tropical forests. But systems were developed at that time that led the way for the adoption of the first forest conservation programs across the English-speaking world. They were also times of adventure and romance.

When the first journal of forestry was published in India in 1875, the editors invited stories about ‘travel and shikar’ (hunting wild animals) as well as technical articles on forestry management. They wanted a journal that reflected the full range of the interests of potential readers.  

Foresters responded, and over the years The Indian Forester journal contained many thrilling and blood-curdling stories of canoe trips down torrential rivers, hikes into remote mountains, confrontations with fearsome beasts, and adventures in which shikar took centre stage.

I admit I find it hard to read some of the stories about shikar, as shooting the beautiful animals of the forest does not appeal to me; especially I cannot see it as a form of sport. But these stories provide an insight into the culture of the Englishman abroad in Victorian times. And I do understand that it was an expectation, even a responsibility, for the Sahib (as the local forester usually was) to protect local villagers from attacks by man-eaters. So, while I do not support hunting (as sport), nor do I judge 19th century hunters by today’s ethical standards or cultural constructs.

A Ripping Tiger Tale

A good example of a dramatic story of shikar was published in The Indian Forester in 1880, prosaically entitled ‘How I Shot a Tiger in a House’. The writer identifies himself only as R.M. and his companion simply as M. The adventure is told with tremendous sang-froid and is so much in the style of the ‘ripping yarn’ as to be almost a self-parody. It is also liberally sprinkled with Hindi dialect, but this adds rather than detracts from the atmosphere of bold adventure.

The opening of the story finds a district forestry officer (RM, the storyteller), working on a report in his office, when suddenly he hears a shout from outside: "Sahib, bagh ka khubr aya!" [“Sahib, news of a tiger comes!”]

He goes on:

... these words, so often heard, but never without a thrill of expectant pleasure, came from a chup­rassie, almost as keen in the search of shikar as his master. I was sitting in my sanctum deep in one of those many reports which leave a forestry officer less time than of yore for shooting; but considering the protection of life and property to be of paramount importance, the report in this instance had to wait.

The messenger was ushered into the office, and RM soon heard the particulars. There was a tiger in a jungle village about 10 miles away, and it was not merely in the village but had taken possession of one of the houses. A cow had been killed, and a man had been mauled. What, RM asks, could sound more promising? He quickly gives orders for elephants, howdah and rifles to be readied, and fires off a “chit” to his friend M, who he describes as a right good fellow, including a proper love of shikar.

“Dear M” he writes, “Tiger in a house waiting to be shot. Will you come?”

M, evidently a man of few words replies: "All right."

A Sahib in his howdah, rifle at the ready, mahout guiding the elephant

R.M. is concerned because he is aware that the village in question is surrounded by heavy jungle, a place where only a week earlier he and M had shot a tigress. This animal had killed and eaten four village cows before they had tracked it down and despatched it. However:

Expedition was everything, so I galloped off to our Police lines, some two miles distant, and ordered out sowars to hunt up [our] elephants, with instructions to the mahouts to proceed direct to the village without coming in for our howdahs, which we sent on carts to a … point where the elephants could pick them up without having to go out of their way.

Soon they came up with their elephants and an excited group of villagers. The villagers assured RM and M that the tiger was still in the village, an assurance that RM remarks is ‘almost too good to be true’. Then:

We now got into our howdahs. Mine was on [my elephant] Maula Bux, a grand makna, on whose head not so many days before I had been seated [when we encountered] one of the most lively tigers that I have had the pleasure of shooting. M. was on dear staunch old Lal Peeari, whose deeply scarred trunk bears witness to her plucky encounters with the tiger tribe.

While crossing the river, I slipped the cartridges into my express and my Westley Richard’s No. 12, two of the best weapons out, and as we ascended the opposite bank, eager were the looks in the direction of the village in possession.

Villages, by-the-bye, you do not find in this part of the country; that is, not in the ordinary acceptation of the word. There are only small clusters of homesteads, two or three homesteads making a little hamlet. Several such hamlets, with the surrounding bamboo clumps, were scattered along the edge of the jungle near the river. Close to one of them we saw some hundreds of people sitting and watching the deserted hamlet, i.e., deserted by all but the tiger; this hamlet consisted of some four or five Bengali bharries, four or more mat-walled thatched houses, surrounding a small court-yard being the ordinary form of a bharrie.

A 19th century village in the Indian jungle – comprising thatched houses and sheds constructed mainly of grass and bamboo

RM continues:

Great was the excitement of the people as we came up, longing to be revenged on their enemy; bad enough they thought it to have a cow now and again carried off as it grazed near their homes; but for a tiger to leave the jungle and take up his abode in a village was rather too much, and they were eager to see him killed. As for his being in the little hamlet, of that they had no doubt; they had kept watch on all sides, and he could not have got off unseen.

Our modus operandi was quickly settled, a howdah on opposite sides of the hamlet, the beating elephants around it. M took up his position on the side we first approached, a likely looking gully between two houses taking his fancy as a natural line of retreat for the tiger if we turned him out; I went on the opposite side.

RM then gives a lengthy description of how he searched the village for the tiger, using his elephant to progressively pull down the little huts and dwelling houses.

At last the cow shed was reached … I proceeded to pull down its outer wall; this done showed the cow lying dead with a wound in its throat, otherwise untouched, but there was no tiger! Then came further search and more pulling down of sheds, but still no tiger! I was now convinced that the tiger must be in one of the dwelling houses.

Reaching the last in the row of dwelling houses … the elephants began pulling the walls down.  Just as the last bit of wall was pulled down:

The mahout pointing into the room called out "there is the tiger." Hardly were the words on his lips, when clean out of the house, over the half wall and on to the elephants, leapt a magnificent tiger, such a leap, with loud angry roar flaming extended jaws, showing his glistening ivory teeth.

Round flew both elephants. Maula Bux, had he been alone, would never thus have shown his stern to an enemy, but the other elephant swerving, elephant-like he followed suit. There was no bolting. The wall of the opposite house brought them up sharp. Long to describe, it was the work of a moment. As we wheeled round I managed a flying shot—was there ever a more glorious opportunity for a flying shot—a flying tiger mid-air 'tween house and elephants.

Our movements were, however, too rapid for accuracy of aim, as all those will understand who have experienced what it is to find yourself suddenly taken off your feet by the unexpected swerve of an elephant, and to feel yourself and rifles knocking about your howdah in most unpleasing confusion.

Still, unsteady as my aim was, a miss was impossible with the huge beast only an inch or two from the muzzle of my rifle, and though nothing could have stayed him from bounding onto the elephant’s back, he did so with an express ball in his stomach, which so touched him up that though in his rage and agony he still bit a piece clear out of the guddy, within an ace of the mate’s [mahout’s] squat. He rolled off as quickly as he was up and crawled off with a deep groaning roar between two walls. A second shot was impossible; he was out of sight before I could have fired, even if I had regained my balance.

The wounded tiger retreated to the nearby gully, at first out of sight. Then:

… finding that the land in which the tiger now lay ran up some little way on my side, and was then blocked by a shed, I left the court-yard and had this shed pulled down. This done, my mahout could by stooping over his elephant's head just see the tiger; I was too high up to do so. We then backed till at last by leaning over the howdah I could catch a glimpse of the dark outline of something which the mahout said was the tiger. It was difficult at first in the darkness of the gully to make him out, but my eye getting accustomed to it, I presently detected the heavy rise and fall of the dark mass; it was his painful breathing, and being sure that it was my friend, I let drive at what I supposed must be the position of his head. My elephant was steady as a rock, and the sudden start and angry growl told that the shot had gone home; still however his side heaved, so again I fired; he did not rise, but seemed to drag himself just out of my sight and by doing so showed himself to M, who was keenly waiting for him. A shot from M's rifle gave him his quietus.

The killing of the tiger was greeted with great rejoicing from the hundreds of observers who had come from adjoining hamlets to watch proceedings and then study the dead animal. Having measured the tiger, RM and M then went to the neighbouring hamlet to see the man who had been mauled:

We found it was a young fellow, whose curiosity prompted him to get a near view of a tiger, and who accordingly, when the inhabitants ran off leaving the tiger in possession, went back and climbed to the ridge of a roof whence he commanded a view of the cow shed in which at that moment the tiger was. No sooner was he on the top of the roof than the tiger spotted him, and with a spring was up by his side. Before the young fellow could throw himself off the roof the tiger's claws were in his right arm and the back of his head; the weight of the tiger however made the thatch give way, and while he slipped back into the court-yard the man fell back on the other side of the house and managed to get off. He was very badly wounded, and it seemed doubtful at first if he would live; however, we carried him into the station, and thanks to the skill of a clever surgeon, he was cured in a couple of months.

Reading this story, I fancy that most modern readers would, as I did, experience mixed emotions. On the one hand, the tiger was merely doing what tigers do: hunting for food, making the most of easy kills, and defending itself when threatened or attacked. And it is easy to understand the desire of the villagers to be rid of such a dangerous predator, threatening their lives and livelihoods, and occupying one of their houses. Wildlife conservation had no priority amongst Indian villagers back then.

But there is an unsettling ambiguity about the work and the outlook of the hunters. Mostly it seems to me they were interested in the whole thing as sport, more so than the exercise of a civic duty to protect a native village. The casual way in which they get their elephants to pull down the houses is particularly revealing, as is RM’s concluding remark: “Such, dear reader, is a day's tiger shooting, and if by chance you have never tried it, I can only say do so when you get the opportunity… ”

In casting a judgement on all this it also needs to be remembered that many of the first appointments to the Indian Forest Service had been army officers, there being no pool of trained foresters to call upon. The Indian Army at the time actively encouraged its officers to hunt wild animals, as it was believed this prepared them for the sort of cool courage needed in battle. This notion would have been taken with them by soldiers taking new jobs in the forest service.

Hunting was also a preoccupation with the British aristocracy, including royalty. For example, when the British King (and Emperor of India) George V visited India in 1911 he was taken on a three-day hunting expedition. The party killed 39 tigers, 18 rhinoceros and sundry bears. The King personally accounted for 24 of the tigers.

A contemporary sketch showing King George V in a machan, slaughtering tigers

My lasting impression, however, is that while the sort of ripping yarn as related by RM, would  have been of only passing interest to Army officers and Sahibs of the 1880s, who would often hear this sort of thing in the Mess and at their clubs, it would have been a sensation in a Victorian-era London illustrated magazine. This was a sure-fire incentive for recruitment to the Indian Forest Service of men from the riding/hunting/Army classes, or of boys leaving school looking for a life of adventure and romance.

Cover of an 1889 London illustrated paper advising of a ripping yarn within

The adventure of Mr and Mrs Smythe

It was not only the menfolk of the Raj who indulged in shikar. I have read an admiring account of Miss Ribbentrop, daughter of India’s Conservator of Forests, who while on holiday “had some fine sport”, shooting a tiger, a panther and a stag.

And then there is the hair-raising story of forestry officer E.M Smythe and his wife, as recounted in the Empire Forestry Journal of 1926:.

We were staying for Christmas in a good shooting forest [writes Mr. Smythe] and one night there was a kill by a tiger in one of the best small beats in the area. So my wife and I went off to the beat, and I fixed up two machans [tree hides], my own in front, and her's about 40 yards to the right and behind, thus avoiding the risk of ricochets. Her machan was in the first fork of a tall, cylindrical tree, 14 feet from the ground, the tree being 4 or 5 feet in girth. Just in front of my machan was a patch of heavy narkal grass about 25 yards in diameter, and there was a good deal of grass and undergrowth all round. Soon after the beat started, I heard ... the tiger roar twice. About three minutes later, I heard it coming through the narkal grass, and presently it broke cover at a fast slouch.

My weapon was an H.V.404 Jeffery magazine rifle, with which I have killed several tigers. I had four cartridges in the magazine and chamber and some more loose on the machan. As the tiger broke, I fired and missed, and it rushed back to the narkal. Presently the [beaters] came up to the narkal, and almost simultaneously the tiger again broke cover, this time at full gallop with a terrific roar. I fired at it going away on my left and again missed. The beast went by my wife's machan at the gallop about 30 yards from her and as soon as it had passed her, she fired and hit it about six inches or so above the heart and just below the spine. This stopped it, and it rolled over roaring.

At this point in his story, Smythe remarks that ‘here the incredible part of the story begins’. He is not exaggerating:

The tiger, mad with rage, turned round, saw [my wife] in the machan, and made for her, climbing the tree for all the world like a huge domestic cat, with its forearms almost encircling it. Up it went vertically under her machan and as I turned round hurriedly I knocked the loose cartridges out of my machan to the ground. As things were, I had no option but to take the risk of hitting my wife. I fired at the brute when it was half-way up the tree, but only grazed it. As I looked down to work the bolt and reload, I realised I had one cartridge left, and looking up again I saw my wife standing up in the machan with the muzzle of her rifle in the tiger's mouth (his teeth marks are 8 inches up the barrel) and he was holding on to the edge of the machan with his forepaws and chin. In this position she pulled the trigger and ... had a misfire.

You must realise that at least two-thirds of the tiger's weight was now on the machan, for except for his back claws, he was hanging out from the tree by the width of the machan, which was rocking violently from his efforts to get on to it. The next thing I saw was my wife lose her balance and topple over backwards, on the side away from the tiger. The beast did not seem to notice her disappearance, and as I again aimed at him I saw him still clawing and biting the machan. The timber was almost bitten through, and the string torn to shreds. I fired my last available cartridge, and by the mercy of Heaven the bullet went true. It took the tiger in the heart and he crashed over backwards on to the ground immediately below the machan, where he lay hidden from view in the grass. I did not know at the time that he was dead; nor, of course, did my wife. All I knew was that my wife had disappeared from the machan on one side of the tree and the tiger on the other, that I had no cartridges left, and that I was helpless for the moment to give any further assistance.

Mrs Smythe now chips in with her account:

When I fired [her second shot], the tiger turned round and saw me, and immediately dashed roaring towards my tree. I thought he was galloping past, but suddenly realised he was climbing up, and only just had time to stand up in the machan before his great striped face and paws appeared over the edge, and his blood and hot breath came up at me with his roaring. I pushed the barrel of my rifle into his mouth and pulled the trigger, but the rifle would not go off. Then I really did feel helpless and did not know what to do. We had a regular tussle with the rifle, and then I saw his paw come up through the bottom of the machan. In stepping back to avoid it, I must have stepped over the edge of the machan, as I felt myself falling. I thought I was falling into the jaws of the tiger, and it flashed through my mind: surely I'm not going to be killed like this. I never felt hitting the ground at all, and the next thing I knew was that I was running through grass and over fallen trees, wondering when the tiger would jump on me.

Mrs Smythe was rescued by their mahout, Bisharat Ali, who had rushed up on his elephant “regardless of wounded tigers” when he heard the shots and the roaring tiger.  Mr Smythe now takes up his story:

One of the [beaters] was calling out that he could see the tiger, and it was lying dead ...so when a supply of cartridges arrived, I went up cautiously and verified his statement, recovered my wife's hat and rifle, and went off with her to the bungalow, leaving the [beaters] to bring in the tiger.

This is a plain unvarnished account of an incident which must, I think, be unique in the annals of tiger shooting. At least I have never heard of a lady being hurled out of a high machan by a climbing tiger, and her husband killing it while it was up in the air with his last bullet.

Mrs Smythe was unhurt, apart from sundry bruises, but I was not surprised to read at the conclusion of their story that the Smythes decided it would be a long time before they went tiger shooting again.

Finally, a word on Jim Corbett

For an alternative to these ripping yarns about shikar, and shooting for sport, I turn to the legendary jungle-wallah Jim Corbett. He wrote several wonderful books about his days in India, tracking down and shooting man-eating tigers and leopards that were terrorising villages in Himalayan India. I have both of Corbett’s Maneaters of Kumaon and The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag in my bookshelf. The stories are simply told, well-written, understated, replete with jungle lore and redolent with Corbett’s deep respect for the Indian people and Indian wildlife.

Jim Corbett with a tiger whose career as a man-eater he has terminated

The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag climaxes with Corbett shooting a leopard which had killed one hundred and twenty-six people and terrorised an area of 500 square miles for eight years. Eventually Corbett shoots the leopard while it is attacking a goat tethered beneath the tree in which Corbett has sat all night in wait.

When daylight comes he tracks the leopard by a trail of blood and eventually finds it lying in a gully, dead. Eschewing the ripping yarn style of story-telling, Corbett writes:

... I scrambled down off the road and, taking up the trail on the far side of the rock, followed it for fifty yards, to where the leopard was lying ...

No marks by which I could identify the dead animal were visible, even so I never for one moment doubted that the leopard was the man-eater. But here was no fiend, who while watching me through the long night hours had rocked and rolled with silent fiendish laughter at my vain attempts to outwit him, and licked his lips in anticipation of the time when, finding me off my guard for one brief moment, he would get the opportunity he was waiting for of burying his teeth in my throat. Here was only an old leopard. who differed from others of his kind in that his muzzle was grey and his lips lacked whiskers; the best-hated and the most feared animal in all India, whose only crime —not against the laws of nature, but against the laws of man—was that he had shed human blood, with no object of terrorizing man, but only in order that he might live; and who now with his chin resting on the rim of the hole and his eyes half-closed, was peacefully sleeping his long last sleep ...

Corbett describes the leopard of India as ‘the most beautiful and the most graceful of all the animals of the jungle’ and when cornered ‘second to none in courage’. I love the admiration and respect he has for tiger and leopard, and it did not surprise me to read that later Corbett moved on from hunting to become an ardent advocate for the conservation of Indian wildlife. His sense of responsibility to ordinary village Indians, and his writing and beliefs about wildlife are a wonderful counterpoint to those of the “sportsmen” who killed for fun and recorded their adventures with gung-ho enthusiasm.

What of the tiger in India today?

Like most Indian wildlife the tiger suffered cruelly from over-hunting, loss of habitat and poaching (tiger skins are still immensely valuable on the black market). They were once widespread all over India and Burma, numbering in (who knows?) perhaps hundreds of thousands, but by the end of the 20th century, the number in the wild had become so small they were considered endangered and ‘vulnerable to extinction’. However, bans on hunting, a crackdown on poaching (although this is still a problem to this day) and the creation of special ‘tiger reserves’ (including India’s first national park, appropriately named Corbett National Park) have resulted in a resurgence in their numbers over the last 30 years or so.

I expect most people will be happy if this trend continues, perhaps not including anyone caught with a wounded tiger, "mad with rage", coming at you up the tree in which you are crouching.