Hunting cats that became the hunted: Life & death of the cheetah in India

Thereafter, Divyabhanusinh, a hotelier by profession who has been instrumental in the attempt to get the cheetahs to India, took a deep dive into the subject, the result of which was a book published a decade later: The End of a Trail: The Cheetah in India (1995), an exhaustive history of the animal in India, from prehistoric times to its extinction.

With the cheetah project taking off in India, the author decided to bring the story to date. The Story of India’s Cheetahs is a revised edition of out-of-print The End of a Trail, with reworked and new text.

The Story of India’s Cheetahs describes in detail an animal which, because of its resemblance to the hound, was for long “believed to be a dog-cat, a connecting link between felids and canids. However, it is a cat, a highly specialised one, evolved for prodigious speed. According to the tradition of Indian falconers, it could soar and was classified with birds of prey! It is the swiftest mammal on terra firma,” writes Divyabhanusinh.

In India, cheetahs were captured and trained to hunt. References to coursing with the cheetahs go back to the 12th century. In the court of Akbar, says the author, a collar of precious stones and a drum roll when it was taken out to hunt, pointed to the elevation attained by it. “Yet it was interference by humans with its life, habitat and prey that spelt doom for this cat, the ultimate royal pet,” he writes.

The Story of India’s Cheetahs reproduces prehistoric cave paintings that feature the animal — one in Kharvai and the other in Karad, both in Madhya Pradesh. After scouting Sanskrit texts and examining the Sultanate period, the book moves to the time of the Mughals, where it finds a mine of information. The Akbarnama contains accounts of Akbar hunting with cheetahs, and Jahangir’s autobiography is dotted with mentions of similar expeditions. A painting from the period shows Akbar hunting with a trained cheetah; another has a hunting cheetah on a cart drawn by a pair of blackbuck, its prey.

The British had little interest in hunting with the cheetahs. For them, they were objects of shikaar, to be flaunted as trophies — and they “did not heed the warning signals of how their bloodsport would push several of the great animals of the subcontinent towards extinction,” writes Divyabhanusinh.

In December 1947, Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo of the erstwhile state of Korea in what is now Chhattisgarh, shot three male cheetahs that are generally believed to have been the last of the species in India.

Now that cheetahs from Africa have found their way into the Indian jungle, Divyabhanusinh examines the project to introduce them, and addresses the debate over it. “It is time for the country to restore to nature what rightfully belonged to it,” he maintains.