The man-eaters of Kumaon

It is never a bad idea to prepare for a trip to Kumaon by reading the most famous book of all written about the region. I began at the beginning, reading again Jim Corbett’s story The Champawat man-eater. Whenever I read it there is an underlying memory of myself as a child, prone on my stomach, reading through this breathlessly, half wanting to hide in terror. Now I notice the little descriptions, some of which I recognize from personal experience.

… a covey of kalege pheasants fluttered screaming out of [some bushes] …

[I] asked the villagers if they could direct me to where I could shoot a ghooral (mountain goat).

… but eye-witnesses are not always reliable, whereas jungle signs are a true record of all that has transpired.

In the soft earth round the spring were tiger pugmarks several days old, but these tracks were quite different from the pugmarks I had seen, and carefully examined, in the ravine in which the woman from Pali village had been killed.

… one of those exasperating individuals whose legs and tongue cannot function at the same time.

A bed of Strobilanthes, the bent stalks of which were slowly regaining their upright positions, showed where, and how recently, the tigress had passed …

The hill in front of me, rising to a height of some two thousand feet, was clothed in short grass with a pine tree dotted here and there …

In the 1940s, when the book was published as an almost instant international best-seller, the conventions for transcribing words from Indian languages to the Roman script were slightly different. Nowadays one would write about the khaleej pheasant and the ghoral, although local dialects still have the same fluidity as ever, and a case could be supported for the older transliterations.

The book was adapted into a Hollywood movie, about which Corbett had the most delightful comment, “The best actor was the tiger.” In his final years the most famous shikari in India joined his voice with those of other conservationists. Independence was then still a novelty, and his words had the opposite effect to what he would have liked to have achieved. It is good to see that his reputation has slowly risen again, like the bent stalks of a bed of karvi.