Jim Corbet National Park: Carpet Sahib & The Ghosts

Jim Corbett, unanimously associated with man-eaters as well as a national park, was a hunter-turned-conservationist, who believed, very firmly, that ‘a tiger is a gentleman’ and that tigers turn rogue only if wounded and are unable to hunt for some reason. Oddly enough, the most terrifying of his man-eaters were tigresses who had lost their teeth, were injured by porcupine quills or had cubs to fend for.

July 25 was the 150th birth anniversary of Corbett, an Englishman who many secretly wish had not left India for Africa on the winds of Independence, where he ended up guarding Queen Elizabeth on her honeymoon.

Despite this defection, as some might call it, Corbett’s ghost apparently still lingers in the hills of his home. Security men guarding his home have reported strange blue lights at night, which are seen moving in the darkness where no light should be. The result of these stories led me to create a series of children’s books based on Corbett’s ghost roaming the forests of Kumaon and doing what he did best—protecting people from tigers and tigers from people. There was one stray leopard in the set—perhaps appropriately because Corbett only tackled two leopards in his man-eater hunting days and always said that leopards preferred not to face people, unlike tigers.

Corbett himself had quite a few brushes with the supernatural—the strange moving lights on a sheer rock face where no one could possibly have been while hunting for the Talla Des man-eater, for instance. Or, the churail’s (banshee’s) scream from a deserted village while perched on a tree which only he and the night creatures heard. There is also the odd incident that took place when, while hunting the Champawat tigress, he was given a bungalow to stay in but was forced out onto the veranda by some unseen terror during the night despite very real danger from the man-eater. The next morning, he moved in with his men in a tented accommodation.

Something about Corbett lends itself to the supernatural—or perhaps nature does that. He was known to have walked alone through the jungles at night at a time when they were teeming with tigers and bears, and emerged unscathed. He also, according to legend, insisted on shooting a snake before he set out on a hunt. But then, those who walk with nature will say that there is something that goes beyond the everyday as far as jungles and the creatures who live in them are concerned. This is why tigers and jungles have found their way into temples and the mantras of worship.

When I encountered a man known as ‘Carpet Sahib’—the affectionate pseudonym Corbett had earned—I had just about read Man-eaters of Kumaon and terrified myself into shivers at night. But once I started getting involved with the world of tigers and stalking beasts, a very natural sort of path started opening up in front of me—the coexistence between humans and the wild that Corbett had instinctively understood. That animals do not attack unless provoked or wounded by careless humans and that big cats can be surprised by human beings or even terrified by people on bicycles if they meet them unexpectedly.

It wasn’t just that I turned him into a ‘ghost who walks’, I came to discover that he might have approved had he been alive. It was a combination of compassion, sympathy and courage in a world filled with superstition where a group of men could allow a tiger to carry off a woman and watch as she prayed for help or where a little girl could walk her buffalo to her uncle’s house down a road where grown men were afraid to walk.

Add to that the fact that Carpet Sahib had his own magic with a pen—Man-eaters of Kumaon, published originally by Oxford University Press, continues to be a bestseller. Part memoir, part record of people’s lives, the book talks about how people react when their lives are under the shadow of a man-eater, which is not normal under any circumstance. This includes times when he himself was being hunted or when he went out at night with an abscess which he was certain was going to burst and kill him, armed with his .450-400 Jeffery, without allowing his men to accompany him, for their own safety. As we know, he recovered. He wrote about India much in the way Rudyard Kipling did. For him, the Great Game was hunting man-eaters and making the fields safe for people and other animals. He put his marksmanship down to the fact that he grew up in the hills, as nimble as a goat, learning to read the signs of nature. He did not attend his book launch in America; a tiger cub did for him.

When he left India with his sister Maggie, he gave his property to his tenants so that they could lead their lives in peace and contentment—for the son of a postmaster, he had made a lot of money along the way and the national park that was named after him brought the gift of tiger tourism to the region and is hopefully helping to develop the area. Project Tiger has certainly been successful, though poachers and other problems exist.

What I retained, apart from the jungles of the night, was the pseudonym Carpet Sahib—though recently someone wrote that it referred to Corbett’s unerring marksmanship in the Kumaoni dialect. That, of course, remains to be verified. Carpet Sahib makes for a nice ghost guardian in my children’s books that The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) started to bring out from 2013, which even wound their way to the Sundarbans since ghosts have the happy facility of being anywhere they choose!

In the course of writing the books, I decided, naively as most writers do, that I had a special connection with the hunter. And yes, there is a story to that. I was invited to the Kumaon Literary Festival for the launch of my second book in the series—The Leopard in the Laboratory—and I found the region dotted with dry rocky riverbeds that seemed strangely familiar.

On a dawn safari, under the most uncertain of conditions, Carpet Sahib sent a tiger to cross the road in front of my jeep —at least I thought he had since none of the other celebrated authors got to sight one. But that was not all. At one of the last dinners, I caught the buzz of a ‘man-eater’. I followed the buzz and discovered that a tiger had strayed from the buffer zone into a field and attacked a woman who had stumbled on it. I remembered being shown a pugmark close to the resort before setting out on the safari and wondered whether that belonged to the same tiger. There was talk over the glasses, of calling in a hunter because the tiger was very certainly dangerous. It felt like I had walked straight into Man-eaters of Kumaon.

What happened after that I don’t know. I hope the Forest Department rescued the tiger before more people were hurt. I went back to the pages of my books and Carpet Sahib’s ghostly exploits, having thanked him profusely for that glimpse into his world.

Anjana Basu is a Kolkata-based advertising consultant and author. Her recent works include the Jim Corbett children’s series and Translating for Rituparno