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Journalism of Courage
Hidden somewhere in my bookshelves, lurks a tattered copy of Jim Corbett’s ‘Man Eaters of Kumaon’ with its ferocious cover, looking a bit like it has tangled with a man-eater itself. I must have first read this book while in school, decades ago, absolutely gob-smacked by Corbett’s courage and determination.
It’s scary enough to just walk into the jungles at night, where there are no predators – there are still mysterious creakings and rustlings and whisperings that can make you jumpy and nervous. And here was this man, setting out alone at night, looking for a possibly hungry man-eating carnivore in its own domain. For Corbett, an eight- or nine-mile walk before breakfast to get partridge for the pot was par for the course and he could spend the night sitting up in a tree and say he had a very restful, comfortable sleep (And here you fuss when your toes stick out from the sheets).
No wonder, now there appears to be more written about Corbett than he wrote himself. Every facet of his life and character has been analysed and described in detail. But I only realised the true talent of Corbett when I started writing about nature myself and still wonder about it: his incredible power of observation and the ability to describe a location or scene in such detail that it was like staring at a photograph of the place. Yes, when you know that, you are probably being stalked by the very animal you are hunting. Your senses go into hyper mode. You have to laser gaze at every rock, every bush, every tree and every blade of grass that has been unnaturally bent. Your life could depend on it. After the fatal shot has been fired and the animal is lying supine at your feet, the sense of relief must be tremendous.
Now birders and others who like to write about nature are told that they must, at all costs, take a notebook into the field and take down notes on what they see as they see them (agreed, these days, people probably just use their mobiles to take pictures). If you wait to go back home and then start writing (which is what I tend to do), you will be leaving out a lot of detail – the mind erases or, worse, shape-shifts experiences.
As an experiment I tried the notebook-jotting gambit once. On one birding trip, I kept my notebook and pen handy, walked along the trail for about five minutes, stood still and then took down what I could see and hear all around me. And then walked ahead a little distance and repeated the procedure. Of course it was tedious. Very. But because I had to take down stuff, I looked so much harder and saw so much more. And after an hour, I must have had at least 20 pages of notes. An easy way to check on how much you may miss, if you don’t make immediate notes is to walk the same
trail, get home, have breakfast maybe, and then write your notes… They’ll be much shorter and minus a lot of detail. Unfortunately, this was a one-off experiment that didn’t develop into a good, sound habit, simply because juggling a notebook, pen, binoculars, camera and lenses all at the same time, and all hanging around your neck, quickly became a pain.
But I seriously doubt that Corbett whipped out a notebook and began scribbling frantically details of the hunt minutes after having taken down an animal that was notorious and responsible for god knows how many human deaths. He wrote from memory – probably weeks if not months after the hunt in question. It may just be that when you’re hunting such an animal, every detail of the hunt is permanently etched in your brain, which obviously doesn’t happen when you are out casually birding. So the recall is much easier.
And it seems that Corbett’s recalls were near-perfect accurate. Corbett bloodhounds have followed the trails he has described and found them to be nearly pin-point accurate: a disfigured tree, a strange rock, a gully are all still exactly where he described they would be.
Ah, you may say, ‘Perhaps these days having a powerful sense of observation is superfluous: we have digital cameras that can document everything, second by second, at no great cost at all.’ So why bother? Just point and shoot and, later on, you can describe the picture.
What you lose out with such an approach is the one-to-one experience of observing close every hair, every gorgeous tint in every feather, every expression on the face and glint in the eye of the creature you are looking at. And once, having clicked your picture, you will be unable to describe what you’ve clicked because you were too busy taking the picture and making sure your camera settings were correct.
Description apart, Corbett was a master storyteller (not of the Kenneth Anderson kind). And he wrote as though he were talking to you; there was no writing for writing’s sake here.
Sure, there are Corbett detractors and trolls and those who hold him partially responsible for the dreadful carnage tigers faced at the hands of shikaris and poachers after he left India, and before the Wildlife (Protection) Act came into being in 1972, by spotlighting the ‘large-hearted gentleman.’ But if we want our young to develop an interest in, and empathy with, nature and wildlife (so imperative today), his books ought to be part of the syllabus: Guaranteed, they will not send students into deep coma.
