Corbett’s writings

When King George VI passed away, his daughter and heir Elizabeth was holidaying in Kenya. The manner in which the news of the King’s death was relayed to her in far-away Kenya was captured in an iconic scene in ‘The Crown’. Guarding her treetop hotel where she was spending the night was Jim Corbett. In fact, it was Corbett who penned the now-legendary line in the visitor’s logbook of the Treetops Lodge:

For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen

Last week, our office organized a team retreat in a resort adjacent to Corbett National Park in Ramnagar. For company, I carried with me Corbett’s ‘Man Eaters of Kumaon’ and ‘My India’. In addition to being a record of his exploits with the gun tracking man-eaters, his writing gives us a peek into the India that existed a century ago. I couldn’t help but take notice of the references to the might of the Raj, its bureaucracy represented through Patwaris, Range Officers and Divisional Commissioners (something that we Indians have managed to keep alive even today!), the vice-grip of caste in the Indian village, the looming presence of malaria, cholera and tuberculosis and the overall unhurried pace of communities living in the Himalayas.

It is hard to reconcile the fact that despite losing hundreds to each of the man-eaters mentioned, there was hardly any serious village-led effort to track and shoot down the predators in his tales. Our epics are chock-a-bloc with kings hunting down tigers in the forests. Is it the fatalism of Hindus or their true veneration of the gun-toting Sahib that created a Corbett?

All said and done, Corbett comes out as a nice likable guy in his writings who was genuinely in love with India. His writings reminded me of the other Anglo-Indian man of letters from the hills – Ruskin Bond.

PS: The 1952 edition of ‘Man-Eaters’ had illustrations by Raymond Sheppard which can be checked out here.