Honorary Tiger: The Life of Billy Arjan Singh

Duff Hart-Davis

Description

Popularly known as India's latterday Jim Corbett and 'tiger man', 87-year-old Billy Arjan Singh is by any standards an extraordinary man. At Tiger Haven, his home in a magical spot on the edge of the jungle in UP, Singh's experiments with bringing up three orphaned leopards, and also Tara, a tiger cub that he imported from a zoo in England, shot him into both limelight and controversy. His aim was to see if Tara's instincts would make her revert to the wild when she became mature. They did, and over the years, she produced four litters of cubs, thus proving his contention that it is possible to supplement dwindling wild stocks with zoo-born animals. But when it was discovered that the tigress had Siberian genes in her ancestry, he was accused of having introduced a 'genetic cocktail'into the jungle. Undeterred, Singh remained a champion of the forest and its denizens. It was almost entirely due to his advocacy that in 1973 the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, authorized the creation of the Dudhwa National Park. Now, in his eighties, comes recognition for his efforts. In March 2005, he received the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation award - a global honour administered by the World Wildlife Fund, that serves to recognize outstanding contributions in international conservation. In this affectionate biography, the British author Duff Hart-Davis tells the story of a man absolutely dedicated to the cause of animals, who has given fifty years of his own life to their conservation.

Sujets

• Naturalists
• Environmentalists
• Tigers
• Biography
• Arjan Singh
• Environmentalism
• Natural history
• Wildlife
• Environment
• Tiger
• Cat
• Wild Life
• Animals
• Autobiography
• Cats
• Jungle
• Nature
• Billy

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 31 décembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351940722
• Langue: English

Extrait

About the book
Popularly known as India’s latter-day Jim Corbett and ‘tiger man’, 87-year-old Billy Arjan Singh is by any standards an extraordinary man. At Tiger Haven, his home in a magical spot on the edge of the jungle in UP, Singh’s experiments with bringing up three orphaned leopards, and also Tara, a tiger cub that he imported from a zoo in England, shot him into both limelight and controversy. His aim was to see if Tara’s instincts would make her revert to the wild when she became mature. They did, and over the years, she produced four litters of cubs, thus proving his contention that it is possible to supplement dwindling wild stocks with zoo-born animals. But when it was discovered that the tigress had Siberian genes in her ancestry, he was accused of having introduced a ‘genetic cocktail’ into the jungle. Undeterred, Singh remained a champion of the forest and its denizens. It was almost entirely due to his advocacy that in 1973 the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, authorized the creation of the Dudhwa National Park.
Now, in his eighties, comes recognition for his efforts. In March 2005, he received the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation award – a global honour administered by the World Wildlife Fund that serves to recognize outstanding contributions in international conservation.
In this affectionate biography, the British author Duff Hart-Davis tells the story of a man absolutely dedicated to the cause of animals, who has given fifty years of his own life to their conservation.

ROLI BOOKS
This digital edition published in 2015
First published in 2005 by The Lotus Collection An Imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd M-75, Greater Kailash- II Market New Delhi 110 048 Phone: ++91 (011) 40682000 Email: [e-mail] Website: www.rolibooks.com
Copyright © Duff Hart-Davis, 2005
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eISBN: 978-93-5194-072-2
Cover Design: Arati Subramanyam
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD
ONE Death in the Jungle
TWO Born Killer
THREE Learning the Ropes
FOUR Farmer
FIVE Eelie and Prince
SIX Harriet and Juliette
SEVEN The Cubs are Born
EIGHT Enter Tara
NINE Tourists
TEN Maneaters
ELEVEN Rhinos and Others
TWELVE Fighting On
THIRTEEN Looking Ahead
G LOSSARY
B IBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
M y principal debt is to Billy himself, who answered questions with exemplary patience, and shared his great knowledge of Indian wildlife with the utmost generosity. His sister Amar Commander, equally patient, contributed many amusing anecdotes about family life. I am hugely indebted, also, to his sister-in-law Mira, whose exceptional skill as a hostess has made Tiger Haven a wonderfully comfortable place to stay. It is very sad that her husband Balram – Billy’s younger brother – did not live to see this book published.
I am particularly grateful to the following for their help:
Amanda Aspinall, Lady Sally Aspinall, Simon Bazeley, Rahul Brijnath, Lisa Choegyal, Priya Commander, Simon Commander, Ashish Chandola, Jim Edwards, Aqeel Farooqi, Sarah Giles, K.K. Gurung, Arabella Heathcote-Amory, Sunil Jaiswal, Dilip Khatau, Chuck McDougal, Tom Maschler, Nicky Marx, Johnny Moorehead, Hari Singh Nat, James Osborne, Lucy Peck, Mary Plage, Bittu Sahgal, George Schaller, Toby Sinclair, (late) Mahindar Singh, Mukuljit Singh, Xenia Singh, Haik Sookias, Valmik Thapar, John Wakefield, Colin Willock, Belinda Wright.
FOREWORD
T his is the story of a man who has devoted nearly fifty years of his life to the welfare of India’s big cats. Billy Arjan Singh’s fame as a champion of tigers and leopards has travelled far beyond his native shores: he is known as a latter-day version of the legendary hunter-naturalist Jim Corbett. But I suspect that many people who have read his books imagine him to be rather dour. Always, it seems, he has been at loggerheads with corrupt and inefficient forest officers, always seeking to defend the tiger and the leopard against the ever-increasing pressures of human population. His sheer commitment may make him appear arrogant, argumentative and excessively serious.
In fact he is none of these. There is no doubt that he cares passionately about animals, and he is as fearless in standing up to human opponents as he is in walking the jungle armed only with a stick. Yet that is only what one might call his professional persona – and in some ways his behaviour is uncannily like that of a big male tiger. He has often said that the jungle animals seem to treat him as a kind of honorary tiger – and that is what, over the years, he has become.
Out in the forest he has ceaselessly patrolled his chosen range, repelling human intruders with explosive roars; but at home he is a gentler being altogether: just as a male tiger chivalrously allows his own cubs to feed with him on a kill, so among his family and friends Billy is modest, self-effacing and endowed with almost childlike charm. He treats women with old-fashioned courtliness, inspires fierce, lifelong loyalty in his associates, and has a strong, rather mischievous sense of humour.
Once when staying with him I stumbled against a small table in the sitting room, provoking the immediate taunt, ‘Anything else you’d like to kick over?’ Another time, I was stricken by a severe stomach upset, and spent most of the night in and out of the bathroom, so that, come first light, I was in no shape to go out for my customary jog in the jungle. I certainly did not feel like meeting the big tiger who was master of the range immediately behind the house.
At about 6 a.m. Billy began his normal routine of weight-lifting, clanking away on the flat roof above the terrace while the air was still relatively cool and the dense overnight mist was beginning to thin. During a break he came to tap on my window and said accusingly, ‘Duff, you idle beggar. Why aren’t you running?’
‘I’ve been poisoned by something I ate,’ I told him.
‘Oh, God!’
‘I’m on the mend, though. I’ll join you later for a cup of tea.’
So at seven I hauled myself up, got dressed and crept outside into the low-slanted early sunlight. At once Billy started up again.
‘You ought to be running by now,’ he teased me.
‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘But I didn’t feel I could cope with the big tiger when I was in that state.’
Whereupon he crooned in his jungly voice, ‘No – but you could have shat in his face and run like hell.’
That was Billy all over. When not exasperated by the futility and venality of Indian bureaucrats, he is full of such nipping jokes – but it is the animals and their fate that obsess him, and it is to the wild creatures of India that he has given the best years of his life.
Gloucestershire, January 2005
D UFF H ART -D AVIS
ONE
DEATH IN THE JUNGLE
O n the evening of 12 January 1980 a labourer who had been working on the road through the Dudhwa National Park, on India’s border with Nepal, failed to return to the park headquarters. By the time a search party set out into the forest on elephants, darkness had fallen, but although the rescuers claimed to have seen two tigers mating near the spot where they thought the man should be, and fired off a volley of shots,they found no trace of him. They were convinced that he had been killed by a tiger – and sure enough, when they returned in a jeep next evening, they spotted his body lying in the undergrowth beneath the tall, straight trunks of the sal hardwood trees. Yet it was not until the third day that they recovered the corpse – and then they found that only the genitals had been eaten.
On that third day the park authorities sought the help of Billy Arjan Singh, who lived (and still lives) at Tiger Haven, the house he built on the edge of the forest two miles west of the park headquarters. A short, sturdy man, then sixty-two, with an immensely powerful physique built up by regular weight-lifting, Billy had spent the past twenty years acting as a voluntary wildlife warden, battling to protect the creatures of the reserve. During that time he had established an international reputation as one of India’s leading conservationists, and in 1976 he had been presented with the World Wildlife Fund’s Gold Medal for saving an important herd of swamp deer – the first Asian to receive the award.
Nobody questioned his dedication to Dudhwa’s wildlife, or his expert knowledge of tigers; yet on his home ground he had often been in conflict with officers of the forest department who ran the national park, for their standards of honesty and endeavour by no means matched his own.
The worst cause of friction was a unique experiment which he had initiated nearly four years earlier. In September 1976, with the direct support of the Indian prime minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, he had brought out a three-month-old female tiger cub from Twycross Zoo in England, with the aim of rearing her in and around his house and releasing her into the jungle. His intention had been to show that it should, in theory, be possible, to re-stock tiger reserves with animals bred in captivity, and his experience with Tara had vindicated him completely: having grown to maturity, loose about his home, the tigress responded to the call of her kind and departed into the jungle, where in due course she mated with a wild tiger and began to produce litters of cubs.
The trouble was that her return to the forest in January1978