Hazaribagh: Once the abode of tigers, now an example of the ‘empty forest’ syndrome

Thirty-three years later, and seven years before tiger hunting would be banned in India, in another spring, in another land, more than a thousand kilometres away from the cool greens of the Shivaliks, a hunter was hot on the heels of a massive tiger that had been leaving “tracks almost the size of soup plates”. This giant, too, was no man-eater, though much like the Bachelor he, too, liked a few buffaloes every now and then. When the hunter, a maverick man named Syed Askari Hadi Ali Augustine Imam, finally saw the tiger for the first time, he described him as the size of “a polo pony”. This tiger too met his end, almost in the exact manner as the Bachelor – a bullet to his head that went through his skull.

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SAHAA Imam, or ‘Tootoo’ Imam, as he was popularly known, was a spiry wrinkled nonagenarian in the twilight of his life by the time I first met him in 2012. He had arguably been, for a better part of the century, the most flamboyant character in the otherwise quiet and quaint town of Hazaribagh in Jharkhand. Son of Justice Syed Hasan Imam, president of the Indian National Congress in 1918, and India’s representative at the League of Nations in 1923, this former racer, hunter, sports-car aficionado, and equestrian had been christened ‘Tootoo’ by the virtue of the fact that as a child he had travelled with his family to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt to see the tomb and the sarcophagus of King Tutankhamun. A complete Anglophile, Tootoo, for a lot of townsmen, was the last “gora saheb” the British forgot to take back when leaving India.

The black-and-white photo of the Bachelor of Hazaribagh, the tiger that was shot by SAHAA Imam. (Courtesy: Raza Kazmi)

As I waited for him in the drawing room of his sprawling bungalow, I was immediately drawn to a moulded, fading black-and-white image of a dead tiger with some people huddled behind it, kept atop the fireplace mantle. As I peered at it in the dimly-lit room, I was stunned. This had to be the largest tiger I had ever seen, with a head of absolutely unreal proportions. I had seen the famous photo of the Bachelor of Powalgarh, lying prostrate at Corbett’s feet, umpteen times. I had no doubt that the behemoth I was looking at outmatched him. I christened him ‘The Bachelor of Hazaribagh’.

Imam had shot our Bachelor, in the spring of 1963, in the forests of the northern escarpment of Hazaribagh plateau, not too far from his home. “When we examined him I could scarce believe my eyes. I have seen no tiger before or since with a head of the size he had. The rifle shown along the beast’s body is my .470 and will give scale to the picture. He had a mane on the top of his neck. In the picture, this looks like an enormous bulge of muscle on the neck. He had tremendous “mutton chop” whiskers”, Imam recounted in his book Brown Hunter (1979). “I believe this to be the biggest Indian tiger ever shot considering body length only [which was 7 ft 5 inches] and excluding the tail.”, wrote Imam while noting that this tiger had a curiously short tail.

“I am quite deaf you see, could you speak louder?” said Tootoo uncle in his very British accent as I shot a barrage of queries about the photograph and the tiger at him. “That tiger, could you tell me more about him?” I repeated while gesturing towards the photo frame on the fireplace mantel.

His sunken eyes suddenly widened, accentuating the thousand wrinkles on his face further and he extended his shrivelled hands to draw his walking stick. With a gentle heave, he gingerly got up. “Come with me,” he said and slowly walked me to a wall where hung a wired skull, evidently of a big cat. “This is him,” he rasped.

He went quiet momentarily, almost as if to muster all his strength. Then, he began speaking animatedly, recalling the story of our Bachelor, with generous gesticulations of the hand. Of the hundreds of wild tigers he had seen all over India – from Assam to Kumaon, the Western Ghats to the Eastern Ghats – and even Nepal during his decades of hunting, no tiger, he asserted, came even remotely close to being as immense as the Bachelor of Hazaribagh. With a twinkle in his eye, he recounted his life as a young man, his Santhal hunter friends, and the days and nights spent tramping the forests with them in the wildlife haven that Hazaribagh was.

“It’s all gone now, all gone,” he finished as abruptly as he had begun, the light going out of his eyes, his spindly frame hunching over once more. I escorted him back to his sofa, where an old decaying trophy-head of a tiger shot by him in the hill adjoining his bungalow stared down at us. Imam passed away in 2018, a few months shy of his 98th birthday.

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“The Kul [tiger] has been gone for many years now. Pothiya [leopards] are also no longer heard of. All the large wild animals that we once had in plenty disappeared over the years,” said Lambu, one of the last “native shikaris” – a term used by the British for the Adivasi trackers and hunters whose jungle-craft was the key to any hunt – alive today, waving his hand towards the forests at a distance as he warmed his feet over the dying embers of a fire.

It was in these very forests around his village, Jarwadih, that the Bachelor of Hazaribagh was shot at a place called Chunakhan. Lambu, a Santhal Adivasi – a tribe whose hunting skills have been the stuff of legends – was a permanent member of Tootoo’s team of trackers and had been instrumental in bringing Bachelor to the gun. But that was then. In the decades that followed, the wildernesses of Hazaribagh and Powalgarh that birthed the two Bachelors would traverse two vastly differing trajectories.

SAHAA Imam, better known as Tootoo, in his bungalow in the twilight of his life. (Courtesy: Raza Kazmi)

The forests of Powalgarh, now an eponymously named conservation reserve, continue to reverberate with the roars of the tiger. Abutting the famous Corbett tiger reserve, they still harbour among the highest densities of wild tigers in the entire world. Moreover, Powalgarh’s forests are an integral part of Uttarakhand’s massive tiger landscape that spans across the Shivaliks of Dehradun district in the west to Nainital in the east, beyond which it merges seamlessly into the Terai tiger landscape of Nepal and Uttar Pradesh.

The home of Hazaribagh’s Bachelor, however, withered away long ago. It has been decades since the tigers’ roar fell silent not just across the forests of Hazaribagh, but the entire length and breadth of the Chota Nagpur plateau, of which Hazaribagh was an integral part. Tigers were practically wiped out across Hazaribagh’s forests by the late 1980s, and the last resident tiger of the forests of Hazaribagh Wildlife Sanctuary disappeared in 1994. Poaching was the primary reason. The destruction of wildlife, however, didn’t stop at tigers.

Hazaribagh was once famed across Chota Nagpur not only as the land of thousand tigers, but also as the preeminent stronghold of the sambar deer, the primary prey of the big cat. The abundance of prey-species in Hazaribagh allowed it to harbour a very healthy population and diversity of predators – leopards, very large packs of wild dogs, as well as wolves. However, within a decade of the tiger’s disappearance, Hazaribagh’s forests had been emptied of all its sambar deer, and the cheetal deer were reduced to a few dozen animals.

With them disappeared the predators — leopards and wild dogs. With the forest department turning a blind eye, rampant bushmeat hunting wiped out nearly all medium and large mammalian fauna across Hazaribagh. It was a complete collapse of the food chain. Today, the 186.25 sq. km.

Hazaribagh Wildlife Sanctuary, once the beating heart of Hazaribagh’s larger wilderness that spanned more than 3,000 sq km, is a classic example of the “empty forest syndrome” that afflicts nearly all of Jharkhand. Apart from wild boars, and a rare barking deer, a few captive deer and nilgai in an enclosure at Rajderwa – named so after the hunting lodge of the Raja of Ramgarh who once owned this forest as his private hunting reserve – is all that the sanctuary has to show for its ungulate fauna. A few of these captive-bred cheetal were released into the sanctuary in recent years but it hasn’t made any difference to the steady ecological decline of the forest.

However, while the roars of the tiger and sawing of the leopards might no longer echo through the forests of Hazaribagh, these forests have not been quiet. On quiet days, one can hear the massive crushers from the many stone quarries that persistently chip away at the edge of the forest right outside the wildlife sanctuary, leaving behind ugly barren craters in their wake.

One can also pick up the constant drone of vehicles as thousands of them whiz through the newly-constructed four-lane expressway that cuts through the heart of the sanctuary. Elsewhere, in many of the district’s forests, one can hear the distant booming blasts emanating from lands that were once cloaked with forests but are now hollowed out for the “black gold” that lies in their belly. Thousands of large Hyva trucks tar hinterland forest roads black with coal dust.

The patch of forest which once pulsated with the call of the Bachelor of Hazaribagh in the early 1960s now trembles with the ceaseless tremors of convoy after convoy of heavy coal-laden Hyvas passing through it during the day and into the night.

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I re-read the words of F.B. Bradley-Birt, a British bureaucrat, who had described Hazaribagh thus more than a century ago – “This is the garden of Chota Nagpore, and that the motto over the old gateway of the Emperors at Delhi might well be written of Hazaribagh: ‘If there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here.’ No sooner had I read this excerpt that a little voice suddenly whispered the words of Late Tootoo uncle into my ears — “It’s all gone now. It’s all gone”.

Raza Kazmi is a Jharkhand-based conservationist and wildlife historian