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Literature

Shikar tales from the Sunderbans
Khaleel Mahmood

I was born in Sialkot, in what used to be called West Pakistan. As a boy I lived for some time during the early 1960s in Chittagong due to my father being deputed to then East Pakistan. Unlike Tahawar Ali Khan, the author of these 1950s shikar tales of the Sunderban forests, I was not fortunate enough to see the famed mangrove forest at that time. Though I have been given to understand now from Bangladeshi acquaintances that the forests have been sadly depleted, in every sense of the term, by human encroachment and criminal activities, in my boyhood it represented a dangerous and unknown territory, into which human beings ventured at risk of life and limb. I remember my father had a Pathan orderly, an avid shikari who spent the larger part of his spare time diligently cleaning and oiling his beloved shotgun and rifle, but who, despite heartfelt requests, was not permitted by my father travel into the Sundarbans in search of maneaters.

Tahawar Ali Khan, as his book Maneaters of Sunderbans (published from Lahore in 1961) demonstrates, was a sporting man of a very different mettle. Until the literary editor of this paper requested me, and was kind enough to courier me a copy, to comment on this book I confess that I was unaware of its existence. I enquired casually of some Pakistanis here in New York about the author, but unfortunately the trail of Tahawar seems to have disappeared into the mangrove-rooted mists of time. It seems that his family after immigrating from India in 1947 settled in the Gulbarg area of Lahore, and his sons are known to have shared their father's taste for shikar. In the book's introduction Tahawar describes his own father as being "a renowned hunter (and) master of jungle craft" who was "transferred to Lakhimpur in the wild Kheri district bordering Nepal in Himalayan foothills." It was here that the boy Tahawar was schooled in the jungle trade by an uncle, learning to stalk and shoot big game in the tall elephant grass.

Tahawar first came to the East Pakistan as "a roving journalist" in 1956, and fell in love with its "rich forests and...mighty rivers." He was later included as a member of a "shooting party" arranged in honour of the visiting Prince Abdul Reza Pahlavi of Iran. This experience gave him his first exposure to the Sunderbans, and in 1957 and 1958 he came back, armed with not only hunting gear but also cameras, which accounts for some accompanying photos in the book.

The Lakhimpur-Kheri district of Tahawar's shikar boyhood is in Uttar Pradesh, where hunting was traditional in the more notable Muslim families. It is not far from the legendary Jim Corbett's hunting grounds of Garhwal-Kumaon, and it is perhaps natural that Corbett's shadow looms large over Tahawar's book. In fact, some may say, a little too large. Tahawar not only doffs his beret to the great white shikari many times in the book, but also fashions large parts of his shikar yarns after Corbett's style, specially where he impart jungles lore to readers. Where Tahawar differs from Corbett is in the setting. Hunting maneaters in the mangrove forest (he shot two maneaters, having been asked to do so by the Forest Service) is a very different thing than doing it in Corbett country:

"The Sunderbans is not scrub forest in open country where hills, alleys, ravines and isolated clumps of trees provide unmistakable landmarks for direction-finding. It is dense jungle where all trees more or less look alike, and there are no hills or ravines to guide you. The creeks make you change direction very often till you don't know where you are, and -- most important of all -- you don't know where the tiger is. For the same reasons, you seldom know whether you are travelling with or against the wind in the forest, and this is a factor that gives the maneater a big advantage over you."

It is this very different shikar terrain - swampy, watery, humid, with shifting tides and overcast skies, peopled by honey gatherers and wood cutters - that gives Tahawar's shikar tales of the Sunderbans such a different feel. The Royal Bengal Tiger, from the time of the travelling French priest Francois Bernier (Travels in the Mughal Empire 1656-1668), had a reputation for ferocity, and it was still living up to it when Tahawar roamed the Sundarbans in search of it, leaving behind only the heads of its victims after eating the rest of the body. There are some photos in the book which are not for the squeamish!

With the hindsight of the tragic history of Pakistan, it was gratifying for me to read how much Tahawar came to love the forest: "Sunderbans! Spewed up by the impatient sea and set like a unique emerald upon its sapphire breast! The dense forest, dark green and mysterious; the luxuriant trees, half-veiled by purple shadows; the beach, gleaming like polished silver; the wrinkled turquoise, blue ocean, breaking on its shore in tumbling, foam-crested, sun-spangled waves..." He came to know the chars, channels, islands and khals intimately, and got along well with the forest's inhabitants and the Bengali forest trackers and rangers. Tahawar thus has left behind a unique chronicle, in words as well as in photos, of how the Sunderban forests in then East Pakistan seemed to one man during that now lost, and politically troubled, era.

He was also unavoidably a man of his time, and therefore readers may note that the language of his book is shot through with an outdated British idiom, which is perhaps the result of a mission school upbringing as well as the fact that hunting tigers in India and Pakistan in the mid- to late '50s, barely a decade after independence, was still a tradition left over from the British colonialists. Another thing to note is that, unlike the later Jim Corbett, who evolved into a naturalist and wrote some of the first passages about the flora and fauna of Naini Tal, Tahawar unfortunately did not record, except in passing, the Sundarban's stupendous variety of natural life. One wishes that he had done so. It would have made a rare account of a magical natural wonder that much more valuable.

Khaleel Mahmood is a Pakistani expatriate in New York. He is a retired doctor/volunteer at a community health clinic and amateur naturalist.

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Get off the chair away from the desk and get out in the bush and enjoy life.

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