Review: Hero of Kumaon by Duff Hart-Davis
A lucid and engaging survey of Jim Corbett’s life and experiences leavened with well-curated excerpts from his writing
This book has little new to say about the life of Jim Corbett, and yet, to the uninitiated reader, that may be its most entrancing aspect. If you know nothing about the man and are curious, then this book should work well to whet your appetite for reading about man-eating leopards and tigers, the Kumaon and Garhwal mountain ranges, the temperament and pluck of hill folk, the spirits of the Himalayan mountains, local traditions and superstitions, and the colonial attitude towards hunting. It’s a lucid and engaging survey of the man’s life and experiences leavened with well curated excerpts from Corbett’s writings. It chronicles Corbett’s origins, his growing up in the Himalayas, his Irish ancestry and love for Kumaon. Though this 256-page condensation on the career of the hunter-forester turned preserver-forester is framed in a linear textbook like fashion, the prose is far from stodgy. Still, one might ask why this biography was needed at all when there is already an acclaimed best-selling biography on Corbett, Jerry A Jaleel’s Under the Shadow of Man Eaters. In the foreword, the author proclaims, “the most recent British biography of the author came out in 1986, but it included little of Corbett’s own writing, and only a brief mention of the Corbett National Park and Project Tiger, the Indian government’s last-ditch attempt to save the species… my aim is to take the reader into the jungle, as far as possible in Corbett’s own words.”
It is clear this book is meant for a non-Indian audience. But, really, if one wanted to know about Corbett, why not read the man than approach this seeming biography, which is a survey of his life? Still, there are several nuggets. Readers of Corbett may be unaware of his very early ability as a boy to climb trees, imitate bird and animal sounds, to either coo or growl when the occasion demanded, or his time working for the railways in Banaras, becoming an efficient railways manager at Mokameh Ghat, one of the busiest ghats at that time. His deep love for the hill folk he lived with and worked for, his fluency with local dialects of Hindi, and the contribution of his sister Maggie to his fame, are less known. He once got besotted with a bright young English girl, less than half his age. So desirous was he, he travelled all the way to Edinburgh three years later to find she’d just been betrothed. He chose lifelong bachelorhood. His sister was his closest friend, editor, home keeper and intellectual colleague.
Even if this book exhibits an author in love with his subject, it needed to have done more to either say something new or pursue threads and angles relatively less explored or deepened contextualising some of the prevailing and changing attitudes regarding hunting, forestry and the confusions regarding them during the later stages of British rule. What stops this from becoming a substantial biography is Hart-Davis’ eschewing even a modicum of criticality. The author refuses to raise queries like, what may have been some of Corbett’s shortcomings or blind spots? What was his view of colonial rule in India and why? In one letter before the onset of freedom and Partition, Corbett reflects on the good things about British rule, the order that would get disrupted, and the communal mayhem it was unleashing.
Even if Hart-Davis wasn’t writing an academic dissertation, and even if his stated purpose was drawing readers into a succinct summation of Corbett’s life, he needed to have some argument to make, or a golden thread to string through the length of the book. For example, who were Corbett’s critics? How was his transformation from a wildlife killer to a preserver understood? Maggie and Jim lived their last days in Kenya at the height of the Mau Mau uprisings, and he (in)famously conducted an expedition for the future queen Elizabeth. What view did contemporary Kenyans hold of the Corbetts? Hart-Davis refrains from asking questions that may have meaningfully complicated the subject matter in a germane way, adding more heft to his account, while keeping it light, readable and brief. A book of this nature, inviting the general reader on a Corbett adventure, ought to have had a patina of scholarly rigour gently dabbed onto its narrative canvas to keep its Corbett fanboy syndrome in check.
Rahul Jayaram is an independent teacher and writer in Bangalore.
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