Jungly Jim

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In 1989 my nephew, Kalyan, then in Class XI at Delhi, visited us at IIT KGP for a week. He is now an MS (Ophthalmology) working for the NHS in England. When I met him last in 2010, 21 years later, he said that all he remembers of his KGP visit is the thrill he had reading Jim Corbett's Man-Eaters of Kumaon in my bookshelf.

I am not surprised.

In 2004, I was attending the marriage of one of my nieces at Madurai and was late for lunch. And found that my young cousin, Ravi, the younger son of my literary uncle, BRK, was in the crowd and had just finished his lunch. He was working as Manager, SBI, in AP and he was glad to see me, since we are both great story-tellers and vie with each other. He came to me and said: "I am just returning from a fortnight's holiday in Kumaon. My friend who is working in Naini Tal offered to drive me around in his car to all the places I read about in Jim Corbett's books."

I then dragged him by hand to the Dining Hall where I sat down pretending to have my belated lunch and made him sit by me in a guest chair, and asked him to tell me all.

I could understand his enthusiasm for the trip since I read Corbet's books in my teens when I didn't even know how to pronounce Kumaon...its spelling looked so exotic to our towns Nellore, Ponnur and Visakhapatnam. And, as I was reading those stories I was visiting all those places with strange and mellifluous names: Naini Tal, Champawat, Powalgarh, Haldwani, Kaladhungi, and a dozen others.

Ravi didn't disappoint and held me spellbound with the details of his trip, till everyone was looking for us an hour later. But, as expected, towards the end of his tales he got depressed and told me that the whole trip was sort of a spiritual anticlimax. I could have warned him not to go to any place that held you in thrall when you read about it, but it was too late.

One day when I was sitting in his Qrs, SDM was gloating about the Acceptance Letter he received from Annals of Physics (NY) saying it was one of the toughest problems he had set about to solve (Volume Element of SU(4) maybe). And then he remarked: "I feel like Jim Corbett who said at the end of one his successful encounters with a ravaging man-eater that nothing compares with the momentary satisfaction one gets when something hard is attempted and is done well."

That was SDM on Jim...and the man-eating-problems he himself had killed.

All of Jim's tales have the same plot...nothing unexpected in the last scene. A man-eater is hunted for days and killed. But each of his tales can be read and reread many times decades apart. The interest is not so much in what is written as how it is written. There is that clean prose that runs like a jungle stream, rippling here and there, but smooth otherwise. And the man writes from his first-hand experiences, not fiction. And he has this 'gentle' humor (as Supratim once put it) that acts as butter on toasted bread.

Here is a sample:

"It is a popular fallacy that all man-eaters are old and mangy, the mange being attributed to the excess of salt in the human flesh. I am not competent to give any opinion on the relative quantity of salt in human and animal flesh; but I can, and I do assert that a diet of human flesh, so far from having an injurious effect on the coat of man-eaters, has quite the opposite effect, for all the man-eaters I have seen have had remarkably fine coats."

Here is another:

"The three rocks were at a distance apart that an Olympian athlete could, if he had a good run, have taken in a hop, skip, and jump, and which I had seen leopards do in three graceful bounds. The tiger had just accomplished the first jump safely as I poked my head over the edge, but he bungled the second jump, and as his feet shot off the slippery rock he went heels over head into the deep and broken water. The noise from the water prevented me from hearing what he said, but I could guess what it was for I had myself slipped on that self-same rock while trying to cross the river dryshod. On the far side of the broken water there is a short beach of dry sand. Floundering out on this beach the tiger shook himself and then lay down and rolled over and over, drying his beautiful rich winter coat in the hot sand. Then getting on to his feet he shook himself for a second time and walked quietly away to whatever place he was making for, without let or hindrance from me, for in the jungle it is not considered cricket to molest an animal that has provided entertainment..."

And on man-eating tigers vs leopards:

"In the case of human beings killed by carnivora, the doubt is often expressed as to whether the animal responsible for the kill is a tiger or a leopard. As a general rule---to which I have seen no exceptions---tigers are responsible for all kills that take place in daylight, and leopards are responsible for all kills that take place in the dark. Both animals are semi-nocturnal forest-dwellers, have much the same habits, employ similar methods of killing, and both are capable of carrying their human victims for long distances. It would be natural, therefore, to expect them to hunt at the same hours; and that they do not do so is due to the difference in courage of the two animals. When a tiger becomes a man-eater it loses all fear of human beings and, as human beings move about more freely in the day than they do at night, it is able to secure its victims during daylight hours and there is no necessity for it to visit their habitations at night. A leopard, on the other hand, even after it has killed scores of human beings, never loses its fear of man; and, as it is unwilling to face up to human beings in daylight, it secures its victims when they are moving about at night, or by breaking into their houses at night. Owing to these characteristics of the two animals, namely, that one loses its fear of human beings and kills in the daylight, while the other retains its fear and kills in the dark, man-eating tigers are easier to shoot than man-eating leopards."

About fear, Jim says somewhere, after regularly watching the wild celebrations of whole villages tormented by man-eaters, that the sudden removal of great fear and great pain are equally celebratory.

Jim, like many cricketers, is also superstitious and writes about his conviction that during his days and nights in hot pursuit of a wily man-eater he knew his task would be accomplished the day he happens to kill a venomous snake on his way.

There is a hint of the guts and fairness of Hemingway in the tales of Jim. That the man-beast encounter should be a fair game and there ought to be an equal chance of the animal winning, Hemingway elaborates in his very readable tome on bull-fighting: "Death in the Afternoon."

And our naughty Dorothy once asked her idol, Hemingway, what he means by guts; to which he replies famously: "Grace under pressure."

And, this cautionary quote from Jim:

"There is, however, one point on which I am convinced that all sportsmen---no matter whether their point of view has been a platform on a tree, the back of an elephant, or their own feet---will agree with me, and that is, that a tiger is a largehearted gentleman with boundless courage and that when he is exterminated---as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support---India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna."

And lastly, a hint of RKN's humor (from wiki):

"In 1948, in the wake of the success of the book Man-Eaters of Kumaon a Hollywood film, A Man-Eater of Kumaon, was filmed...This was a typical Hollywood production. The film did not follow any of Corbett's stories; instead a fictional new story was made up. The film was a flop, although some interesting footage of the tiger was filmed. Corbett is known to have said that, 'The best actor was the tiger.' "

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