Call of the wild

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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.

 

 

Emperor Akbar hunting with the Cheetahs.

From the Akbar Nama

An illustrated copy of the Akbar Nama is in the collection of the Victoria &

Albert Museum, London. Akbar had a large number of hunting leopards in his

Cheetah-Khana. This painting by Sarwan shows Akbar hunting spotted deer and

blackbuck with the help of cheetahs (c.1590). All the details, including the

armour, tent walls, and animals, are rendered with painstaking care.

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.

 

Grass Owl

 

A grassland owl, resembling a Barn Owl in size and structure, with dark eyes and

whitish facial disc bordered by a dark brown ruff. Above, dark brown minutely

spotted with white; below, white with scattered brown spots. Tail largely white

and buff, cross-barred with brown. Legs very long and tightly feathered and in

the words of Dr Salim Ali, " as if clad in underpants or churidar paijamas! " In

flight it looks white with brownish patches. Sexes alike. Crepuscular and

nocturnal. Spends the daytime standing bolt upright and dozing amidst tall

grass, flying a short distance when disturbed and dropping into the cover again.

Food: chiefly field mice, locusts, grasshoppers and cicadas, and also small

birds. Resident, from Uttar Pradesh east to Manipur; E. and SW India.

 

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. "

 

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050904/spectrum/main1.htm

 

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

 

 

 

 

Dr.Sandeep K.Jain

 

 

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