Nagpur: hunting
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A brief history
Shishir Arya, April 10, 2023: The Times of India
From: Shishir Arya, April 10, 2023: The Times of India
On a pre-summer afternoon in the early 1970s, a jeep comes to a screeching halt in front of a house in Byramji Town, an elite locality of Nagpur that also had the Tatas’ bungalow. Kids playing in the lane gathered near the vehicle and were awestruck to see a huge tiger lying in the trailer.
“SK Chitanvis, my father’s friend, had shot the beast. He had stopped at our house while returning from the jungle,” remembers theatre director Vikash Khurana, who was a schoolboy then. “It must have been easily 8-foot-long,” he says. More than five decades later, others in the area, all in their 60s now, remember going to Khurana’s house to see the tiger.
Chandrakant Deshmukh, a licensed weapon dealer, also recalls his father killing a tiger somewhere near Kondhali, some 80km from Nagpur and driving around the city displaying the big cat.
It was the pre-1972 era, when hunting was a sport and dead animals were trophies. Nagpur, which is now projected as the tiger capital, was the hunting capital in those days.
Most entry gates for tourism safaris now were hunting blocks at that time. Ranging from 20 to 100 square miles, a block could be booked for a month for Rs 50. Shooting a tiger attracted a royalty of Rs 500. In today’s money, for the price of 8 safari tours of three hours each in Tadoba or Pench forests, a person could rent an entire block all for himself for a month and even shoot a tiger.
A reader’s letter from TOI archives reveals that in 1889 a block could be hired for Rs 50. There was a separate charge for taking in an elephant for the shikar.
Offices of Air India agents had pamphlets of shikar companies to woo foreign tourists to shoot game.
Alwyn Cooper Co was a prominent name, run by the family of senior Congress leader Vidyacharan Shukla, a close confidant of Indira Gandhi. Nawab Asaf Ali of Porla near Gadchiroli also ran a renowned shikar company. There were others like Rao Naidu and Co, and Hunters and Hunters.
Elite families in the city would go for personal hunting trips. Some only responded to calls by locals to eliminate a tiger. Even middle-class people would cycle to nearby thickets and shoot a deer or black buck.
“I kept one bullet in the chamber and two in the magazine of my . 366 bore Mauser rifle, aimed leaning on the jeep’s front seat and fired a shot at the tiger hiding behind the trees. It hit on the shoulder bringing the animal down,” says Mohammed Qasim Haroon, an 80-year-old excitedly enacting a gun’s recoil, forgetting that his surgery to install a pacemaker is due in some days. This was at Harda Road in Betul district of Madhya Pradesh, he says.
Unlike the tigers, the hunters are now a breed approaching extinction. Except Haroon, TOI only found individuals in their 60s or 70s who had only accompanied their father or seniors to the shikar.
“My father shot his first tiger at the age of 18. Once an assistant pointing the searchlight froze in fear as the tiger roared. My father held a gun in one hand and a light in the other to shoot the tiger,” recalls Chandraprabha Khandekar, daughter of SK Chitanvis. He would only shoot man-eaters, she says.
“My uncle Haji Abdul Hamid was an avid hunter. Once he shot a deer. When he returned to thespot after a futile search for the carcass, he saw a man sitting there wiping blood from his leg. That left him shaken and he gave up hunting,” says Ejaz Shami, a healthcare professional.
‘India has to offer the hunter (of gun or camera) the most unique and coveted trophy of all, the tiger,’ reads the brochure of Nawab of Porla’s company. The leaflet had minute details of how to go about a shikar. It could happen sitting on machans or by stalking the tiger, the latter a rare method though.
Another method was to go around in a jeep and look for a tiger in the night by waving powerful searchlights. “We could only see the eyes glowing. The height above the ground and size of the eyes indicated whether it was a deer or a big cat,” remembers Govind Daga, who accompanied his father on hunts.
Foreign guests were accompanied by company sharpshooters called ‘gentlemen shikaris’. Often the ‘gentleman shikari’ would bring down the tiger and guests would believe they made the kill,” quips Asaf Ali’s son Mir Yusuf Ali. Late Salam Patel is a name recalled by most veterans. He shot over 30 tigers, says Ali’s son Tabrez.
“The Nawab had killed 83 tigers and wanted to kill the 84th with a . 22 calibre, the smallest bore, but passed away before that,” says his brother Afsar Ali. Soft-nosed bullets with rounded heads were used to hunt animals as these expanded inside the body and caused the maximum damage.
Ajay Patil, a politician, recalls how his father shot three tigers in a row thinking the same beast had come back after being hit. Builder Balbir Singh Renu remembers his uncle felling a tiger with a single head shot of his 12 bore gun.
Harshavardhan Dhanwatey, now a conservationist, speaks of his father shooting the man-eater tigress of Degma, close to Hingna, near Nagpur. “It was reported in the Illustrated Weekly,” he says. Marine engineer Noel Diaz has the story of Archie Blades, a man with one disabled arm, shooting a tiger that had mauled him.
Hyderabad’s Shafath Ali Khan, engaged to eliminate Avni, the problem tigress of Tipeshwar in Yavatmal, says Central India was the favourite hunting ground for his family. “I was in school when my father booked Ballarpur block. I wanted to shoot a bison, but Wildlife Protection Act came into force in the middle of our expedition and I missed the bison,” he says.
Khan argues hunting was not free and it could only happen under strict government control, and helped control the tiger population, preventing man-animal conflict that is being witnessed nowadays outside protected forests.
Free shipping of skins, heads
To preserve shikar trophies, Van Ingen in Mysore was favoured. The animal was skinned right after the hunt by village cobblers. The skin was shipped free by airlines, to promote shikar.
