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INTRODUCTION

UNLIKELY HUNTERS

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the most prolific serial killer of human life the world has ever seen stalked the foothills of the Himalayas. A serial killer that was not merely content to kidnap victims at night and dismember their bodies, but also insisted on eating their flesh. A serial killer that, for the better part of ten years, eluded police, bounty hunters, assassins, and even an entire regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas.

A serial killer that happened to be a Royal Bengal tiger.

Specifically, a tiger known as the Man-Eater of Champawat. Far more than an apex predator that occasionally included humans in its diet, it was an animal that—for reasons that wouldn’t become apparent until its killing spree was over—explicitly regarded our species as a primary source of food. And to that end, this brazen Panthera tigris tigris hunted Homo sapiens on a regular basis across the rugged borderlands of Nepal and India in the early 1900s with shocking impunity and an almost supernatural efficacy. In the end, its reported tally added up to 436 human souls—more, some believe, than any other individual killer, man or animal, before or since.

Despite its unusual appetites and hunting prowess, however, surprisingly little has been written about the Champawat. And when the odd mention of the tiger does crop up, it is more often than not as a curious footnote to a broader article on human–tiger conflict, or as a gory bit of trivia from The Guinness Book of World Records. The fact that a single tiger was able to take such an immense human toll over such a long period of time is rarely presented as a subject worthy of historical scrutiny or academic study. It seems like a good story, and nothing more.

And admittedly, it is a fine story, and it is tempting to present it simply as such. It is universal in its appeal and almost literary in its Beowulfian dimensions: a man-eating creature that terrorizes the countryside, repeatedly evading capture, until a hero appears who is brave enough to track it straight to its lair. It is a timeless campfire tale, simple and hair-raising in the way all such yarns must be. Who wouldn’t want to hear a story like that? One that speaks to the most primal and deeply ingrained of all human fears?

But there is another story to be told here as well, and while certainly hair-raising, it is anything but simple. The events that transpired in the forests and valleys of the Himalayan foothills in the first decade of the twentieth century were not a series of bizarre aberrations. They were in fact the inevitable result of the tremendous cultural and ecological conflicts that were shaking the region—indeed, the world—at that time, affecting man and animal alike in unlikely ways, and throwing age-old systems chaotically out of whack. Far from some pulp fiction tale of man versus nature or good versus evil, the story of the Champawat is richer and much more complex, with protagonists at odds with even themselves.

Beginning, of course, with the actual tiger. Bengal tigers do not under normal circumstances kill or eat humans. They are by nature semi-nocturnal, deep-forest predators with a seemingly ingrained fear of all things bipedal; they are animals that will generally change direction at the first sign of a human rather than seek an aggressive confrontation. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, a change so profound and upsetting to the natural order was occurring in Nepal and India as to cause one such tiger to not only lose its inborn fear of humans altogether, but to begin hunting them in their homes on an all but weekly basis—a tragedy for the more than four hundred individuals who would eventually fall victim to its teeth and claws. This tiger ceased to behave like a tiger at all, in important respects, and transformed into a new kind of creature all but unknown in the hills of northern India’s Kumaon district, prowling around villages and stalking men and women in broad daylight.

Then there is Jim Corbett, the now-legendary hunter who was finally commissioned by the British government to end the Champawat Tiger’s reign. To many, even in present-day India, he is nothing short of a secular saint, a brave and selfless figure who risked life and limb to defend poor villagers when no one else would. To others, particularly academics engaged with post-colonial ecologies, he is just another perpetrator of the Eurocentric paternalism that defined the colonial experience. Each is a fair judgment. The whole truth, however, is far more nuanced, as one would expect when it comes to a deeply conflicted man whose life spanned eras, generations, and eventually even empires. Jim Corbett was a prolific sportsman who, upon achieving fame, hobnobbed with aristocrats and used tiger hunts to curry their favor. But he was also a tireless advocate for wild tigers and devoted the latter part of his life to their conservation—as evidenced by the sprawling and magnificent national park in India that bears his name to this day. Yes, he did come to enjoy the trappings and privileges of the English sahib, servants and sport shooting and social clubs included. But as the domiciled son of an Irish postmaster, foreign-born and considered socially inferior, he was also keenly aware of what it meant to be colonized—by the very people he enabled and admired. And he did love India, above all its people, even while playing an unwitting part in the nation’s subjugation.

Which brings us, inevitably, to colonialism itself—a topic far too broad and multifaceted for any single book, let alone one that’s concerned primarily with man-eating tigers. Yet it is colonialism, undeniably, and the onslaught of environmental destruction that it almost universally heralds, that served as the primary catalyst in the creation of our man-eater. It may have been a poacher’s bullet in Nepal that first turned the Champawat Tiger upon our kind, but it was a full century of disastrous ecological mismanagement in the Indian subcontinent that drove it out of the wild forests and grasslands it should have called home, and allowed it to become the prodigious killer that it was. What becomes clear upon closer historical examination is that the Champawat was not an incident of nature gone awry—it was in fact a man-made disaster. From Valmik Thapar to Jim Corbett himself, any tiger wallah could tell you the various factors that can turn a normal tiger into a man-eater: a disabling wound or infirmity, a loss of prey species, or a degradation of natural habitat. In the case of the Champawat, however, we find not just one but all three of these factors to be irrefutably present. Essentially, by the late nineteenth century, the British in the United Provinces of northern India and their Rana dynasty counterparts in western Nepal had created, through a combination of irresponsible forestry tactics, agricultural policies, and hunting practices, the ideal conditions for an ecological catastrophe. And it was the sort of catastrophe we can still find whiffs of today, be it in the recent spate of shark attacks in Réunion Island, the rise of human–wolf conflict on the outskirts of Yellowstone, or even the man-eating tigers that continue to appear in places like the Sundarbans forest of India or Nepal’s Chitwan National Park. In the modern day, we have at last, thankfully, come to realize the importance of apex predators in maintaining the health of our ecosystems—but we’re still negotiating, somewhat painfully, how best to live alongside them. And that’s to say nothing of the far more sweeping problems posed by global warming and mass extinction, exigencies that have arisen from very much the same amalgamation of economic mismanagement and environmental destruction. Apex predators are generally considered bellwethers of the overall health of the environment, and at present, with carbon emissions on the rise and natural habitats diminishing, the outlook for both feels disarmingly uncertain.

Which is why this particular story of environmental conflict is not only relevant, but urgent and necessary. At its core, Jim Corbett’s quest to rid the valleys of Kumaon of the Champawat Tiger is dramatic and straightforward, but the tensions that underscore it contain the resonance of much larger and more grievous issues. Yes, it is a timeless tale of cunning and courage, but also a lesson, still very much pertinent today, about how deforestation, industrialization, and colonization can upset the fragile balance of cultures and ecosystems alike, creating unseen pressures that, at a certain point, must find their release.

Sometimes even in the form of a man-eating tiger.