Mahi Miri: The Forgotten Hero Behind Kaziranga

A wooden signboard stands in a nondescript location by National Highway 37 — now renamed National Highway 127 — barely five kilometres east of the Bagori sub-beat forest office of Kaziranga National Park. Etched on the signboard are three words, “Mahi Miri Tower”, with an arrow pointing to a narrow road filled with grass and fallen leaves. The road leads to a hillock, upon which is an abandoned concrete tower. The hillock, locally called ting or tila, is named after Mahi Chandra Miri (or Mahi Patir Miri). He was the forest officer responsible for conducting the first field survey of these forests in the 1930s and organising them into a protected area, paving the way for a future wildlife sanctuary in Kaziranga. Though these forests were declared a game sanctuary in 1916, Miri played a crucial role in convincing the local people to accept the idea of a protected area. As an indigenous man of the Mising tribe, he successfully garnered local support from members of the Mising and Karbi tribes. He also tapped their intimate knowledge of the landscape to survey the forests.

Miri was one of the first two people from Assam to be selected for the Imperial Forest Service. Upon receiving training at the forestry college in Rangoon in 1929, he was appointed Extra Assistant Conservator of Forests in Kaziranga. In the 1930s, Miri built a camp on the hillock to keep an eye on the game sanctuary. The hill offered an excellent view of the verdant landscape of Kaziranga beneath.

“In the 1970s, the hillock was named after Mahi Miri, and a concrete tower was erected decades later,” says Johan Doley, Mising activist and executive member of the Mising Autonomous Council. “But not only has the tower fallen into disuse, but Miri’s contribution in promoting conservation in Kaziranga has also been largely forgotten. It’s a dishonour to him,” he says.

When Miri arrived in Kaziranga to manage the game sanctuary and promote conservation activities, he faced enormous challenges. In his book The Wildlife of India, Edward Pritchard Gee, a British naturalist and tea planter based in Assam, wrote that at the time, Kaziranga was “all swamps and leeches”. In such an inaccessible landscape, in the absence of roads, Miri took up the challenging task of surveying the landscape and organising it and laying the foundations of what would become a wildlife sanctuary in 1950 and eventually a national park in 1974.

In the mid-1930s, the pressure of poaching peaked. It reached such an extent across Assam that foresters removed 40 rhino carcasses without horns from Manas Reserve Forest in a year. Poaching camps were widespread around almost all waterbodies inside Kaziranga. A J Milroy, the erstwhile conservator of the Assam Forest Department, stepped up measures to stop poaching. He deployed a platoon of Assam Rifles troops in Manas Reserve Forest to stop rhino and elephant poaching. Milroy was also instrumental in bringing Miri to Kaziranga. After years of hard work put in by Miri, Milroy, and other foresters, Kaziranga was opened to visitors for the first time in 1938.

Another major hurdle in stepping up conservation measures was to convince the local villagers — most of whom belonged to marginalised tribes who had historically depended on the forests for their livelihood — to accept the idea of a protected area. Kaziranga comprised reserved forests as well as public commons that the local people frequented for everyday needs such as collecting firewood and grazing cattle. In Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000, historian Arupjyoti Saikia has pointed out that tribal communities depend on the forest for “[E]veryday requirements, namely, grazing, shifting cultivation, collection of firewood, or fishing inside the forests...the peasants collected fishes, mostly as their daily food requirements and also for their petty trade with the help of locally developed traps”. Conservation measures often curtailed their traditional rights to the forests, leading to conflicts between local tribal residents and foresters. For instance, the Annual Progress Report on Forest Administration of Assam, 1897-98, noted, “Five Miris [Misings] were sentenced to one year’s rigorous imprisonment and fines of Rs 30 each for assaulting and obstructing a forester”.

Miri played a critical role in gaining the trust of local residents in Kaziranga. “Miri had the advantage of being a Mising tribesman and thus was in a position to empathise with the tribes in Kaziranga,” Mising activist Doley says. He was known to have refused leave during the monsoon floods, choosing instead to stay back to help locals deal with the seasonal deluge. “Miri cared equally for the local communities as he did for the wildlife,” Doley says.

In Kaziranga, Miri met Chandra Phukan, a renowned Assamese dramatist, writer, actor, and social reformer. Like Miri, Phukan was an ardent nature enthusiast and penned several poems celebrating the wilderness of Kaziranga. In a poem, Phukan wrote of Kaziranga, “ekhoni dhuniya thai, etiyau bhugulot naam pora nai” (a beautiful place, not yet mapped into the world’s geography). “Phukan and Miri worked together to popularise the idea of wildlife conservation among the residents of Kaziranga. That was one of the earliest attempts to create public awareness about conservation in Assam,” says Ramani Kanta Deka, a conservation writer and former administrator from Kaziranga.

Miri was a determined forester with remarkable grit. He and his colleagues cleared out hundreds of poacher camps, sometimes at great risk to their own lives. Their efforts to keep poachers at bay relied on the local people’s cooperation. Miri played an instrumental role in building a strong relationship with the villagers living on the borders of Kaziranga. Villagers would alert him if they had any information on the movement of poachers.

Miri also supervised the capture of the first live rhino in Kaziranga, which was later sent to a zoo in the US. This was a controversial practice, even by the standards of his time. But it is worth noting that Miri was part of a colonial forest administration taking only the first strides in wildlife conservation. (Official records say between 1939 and 1950, the Assam Forest Department supplied eight rhinos to various zoos in the United States, Europe, and Africa.) In 1939, Miri reportedly contracted blackwater fever while serving in Kaziranga and passed away aged 36.

Naturalist Gee mentions that the energetic leadership of AJ Milroy and Miri gave Kaziranga Game Sanctuary a remarkable facelift. Gee called Miri “the man who put Kaziranga on the world map”.

Notwithstanding Miri’s immense contributions towards the early conservation initiatives in Kaziranga, he’s become a mere footnote in the history of the world-renowned national park. Assamese author Dileep Chandan wrote in his novel Kazirangar Ballad, “When Mahendra Mohan Choudhury was the chief minister [of Assam], he dedicated that peak to Mahi Chandra Miri...The government thought it had done enough by putting the Mahi Miri signboard.”

Time and again, the lives and actions of Assam’s marginalised tribes have been portrayed as detrimental to conservation. Even official conservation discourses have accommodated such views: a 2005 UNESCO-IUCN-WII technical report described Mising and Karbi communities as antagonistic to the park’s values, saying they were “still to come to terms with the creation/declaration of the additional areas of the park”.

Activist Doley says that the recognition of Mahi Miri’s contributions towards Kaziranga could be a big step towards breaking the stereotype of tribals as antagonistic to conservation.

Photo sources: Mahi Miri profile, anti-poaching camp.