Edward James Corbett, better known as Jim Corbett, a British hunter who became a famous conservationist and writer, was born in Nainital, now a town in the state of Uttarakhand’s Kumaon region. He died on 19 April 1955 in Kenya.
His parents, Willam Christopher and Mary Jane Corbett, had come to Nainital in 1862, where Christopher had the job of a postmaster.
Christopher died when Jim was young, following which an older son took over as Nainital’s postmaster. Jim, meanwhile, developed an early fascination for the dense wilderness of Kumaon and life in the jungles. He also learnt the dialects of the region and got to know the local people well. He soon knew how to identify most species of birds and animals in the region, and also grew into a self-taught tracker and hunter.
He later worked with the railways and as a shipment contractor in various places in India, including Punjab and Bihar, for two decades. Government officials and villagers often asked him to get rid of tigers and leopards who had turned man-eaters and were terrorising villages in Kumaon, Garhwal and elsewhere. He would take leave from work to track and hunt the big cats.
Hunter and animal-lover
In about three decades, he shot more than 30 man-eaters, most of them tigers that had killed over a thousand villagers. The Champawat tiger was the first big cat he killed.
Corbett realised that it was a serious injury that usually forced a tiger to become a man-eater. As he once wrote, “Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to survive, they are compelled to take to a diet of human flesh.”
Though he killed tigers he respected them the most—he famously called the tiger “a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage”—and as India approached independence, he was worried about their very survival.
Similarly, about the leopard he once said, “Those who have never seen a leopard can have no conception of the grace of movement, and beauty of colouring of this, the most graceful and the most beautiful [of animals] in our Indian jungles.”
Towards the end of the 1920s, Corbett also started filming tigers on a camera.
He would give lectures on the importance of preserving India’s flora and fauna.
Corbett wrote several books, among them the famous The Man-eaters of Kumaon and Jungle Lore.
A few months after India became independent, he sold his house and settled in Kenya, where he died on 19 April 1955.
A cherished legacy
Jim Corbett is regarded as a leading conservationist during the Raj. A fine writer, he wrote dozens of books that are a treasure of first-hand information on several aspects of Indian wildlife and one man’s passion for it.
Uttarakhand’s famous Jim Corbett National Park was named in his honour. A new sub-species of tigers was also named after him. Just outside the Jim Corbett National Park, Chhoti Haldwani, the village often frequented by the British legend, has emerged as a tourist destination.
Looking at his legacy as a hunter and writer, Namita Gokhale wrote in the Outlook magazine, “Corbett loved his birthplace and saved many human lives while risking his own in pursuit of man-eaters. . . . Because he is remembered as a tiger hunter and conservator, it’s often forgotten that Jim Corbett was an exceedingly fine writer. His clear prose had empathy and compassion for both human and animal life. The descriptions of forests and wildlife were written with experiential knowledge and lucid lyricism. That’s why his books have endured, and continue to enthral new readers.”
Also on this day:
1957 — Mukesh Ambani, Indian business tycoon and chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited, was born
1968 — Arshad Warsi, Hindi film actor, was born
1977 — Anju Bobby George, Indian athlete, was born
Reference:
- Wikipedia
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