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The rhino was writ large on the seals found in various sites of the Harappan culture. It adorns more than forty of these and is pipped to the post by the elephant only, which is found on fifty-five seals.
Since the script of this ancient civilization has yet to be deciphered, we do not know the animal’s significance. But it does establish the animal’s western most range from c2500 bce or earlier onwards.
In early India, Greek travellers reported unicorns from c300bce onwards. Kumargupta I hunted rhinos and struck gold coins commemorating his prowess in the fourth century ce. In medieval India, Abu Rahim Albiruni, who spent several years in the Punjab c1030 ce, noted its presence in north India in large numbers. Muhammad Ibn-Batuta recorded its presence in the Punjab c1332ce.
Babur hunted rhinos near the Swat river on entering India in 1511 ce and again at Bigram near Peshawar in 1526. Baburnama, his autobiography, records that there were many in the region, and Jahangir hunted one near Aligarh in UP in 1624. It appears that by this time the rhino numbers were depleting drastically. In 1769, Col Jean-Baptist Gentile visited Nawab Sujaud-Daula’s Court at Faizabad and drew maps of the areas of Awadh. In these, he depicted rhinos all over.
But, by the time the British got down to their shikar and habits of recording everything they saw in writing, the rhino was confined to the Terai regions of United Provinces (approximating to present day Uttar Pradesh), Nepal, Bhutan and the Bengal Presidency, which would now include West Bengal, Bangladesh, Assam and other states of North-East India. Though they had encountered the rhino soon after their arrival in Bengal, among the earliest somewhat detailed accounts of the animal is found in Capt. Thomas Williamson’s Oriental Field Sports published in 1807, fifty years after the Battle of Plassey, which established the East India Company as a temporal power on the subcontinent. While Williamson recounts shikar events, he also notes that the animal is no longer found east of the Ganges; presumably he means some regions of present-day Bangladesh and beyond. This may not be accurate, but it was certainly indicative of the animal’s plight. ‘Maori’—James Inglis— an indigo planter in north Bihar on the border of Nepal, writing of his experiences there before the 1857–58 revolt, recorded that the Rana rulers of Nepal did not allow anyone to hunt rhinos and they alone shot them. Capt. J.H. Baldwin, writing about the same time, recorded that the animal was found on the Sharda River in Nepal, Pilibhit and Gorakhpur districts, ‘but it is now extinct there or nearly so’.
Col Alexander A. Kinloch followed soon thereafter. Writing in 1866, he recorded that the rhino had become extinct around Jalpaiguri due to being hunted and large tracts of forest having been cleared for tea plantations. In the Bhutan doars and in Assam, where there were heavy ‘reed’ (elephant grass, Penninsetum purpureum Schumach) ‘occasionally several congregate in one covert’. F.G. Aflalo produced a book in 1904 for ‘sportsmen’ describing various sports available to the British in the empire. In this lexicon, he noted that around 1860, the animals were numerous and several could be hunted in a single day but ‘owing to indiscriminate slaughter of both sexes and all sizes, their numbers have been terribly reduced.’
The threats to the rhino’s existence were manifold, such as destruction of habitat, poaching by local people for its body parts to be used as charms or for their presumed medical properties, and indeed hunting by both Indian and British ‘sportsmen’. The latter are fairly well recorded, and a couple of examples will suffice. Lord Curzon went to the Nepal Terai in a previously unplanned visit and bagged two rhinos in a day’s shoot. The Rana rulers of Nepal regularly mounted grand shikar camps for themselves and for their important guests. In 1911, a special shikar was organized for King George V.
Over a period of ten days: 645 elephants were used, and a bag of 18 rhinos, 30 tigers and 4 bears was secured. While several British officers and ‘boxwallahs’ hunted, Indians were not far behind. Writing in 1910, the forester Sainthill Eardly-Willmot noted that the rhinos had become very rare in Bengal Terai: ‘[The] Maharaja of Cooch Behar who was a keen sportsman and [consequently as a result of his shikar] the head of game had become insufficient for his sporting pursuits [in his state territories].’ The implication being that the maharaja, having finished off the game in his state, was now predating in British Indian territory. This is not surprising. Maharaja Nripendra Narain Bhup Bahadur ruled over his state with an area of 1318 sq. miles. He records in his own memoirs that on one occasion, he shot five rhinos in a day’s shoot.
In his shikar career between 1871 and 1907, i.e. a period of thirty-six years, he had shot 207 rhinos along with 365 tigers, 311 leopards, 48 gaur and 438 wild buffaloes! Here was a maharaja who was diametrically opposite of his brother princes, the three nawabs of Junagadh at the other end of the British Indian empire, who went out of their way to protect their lions.
But he was not alone in the field. E.P. Stebbing, writing in 1920, noted that the railways and increasing number of sportsmen were the cause of the rhino’s decline. Better communications facilitated by the railways had their own ramifications. It will be evident that the rhino was in serious decline for a while by then and the British government was alive to the threat. Permits for rhino shikar became scarce, a fact not lost on sportsmen. R.D.T. Alexander and A. Martin–Leake recorded in 1932 that it was very difficult to obtain a permit to shoot a rhino which was ‘as it should be for any rare or near extinct animal’. In reality, the government had virtually banned rhino hunting around 1905, though some shikar continued. That the rhino was headed towards extinction was evident.
Excerpted with permission from India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History. Published by Vintage Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House
