Subhan and I: My Adventures with Angling Legend of India

By Saad Bin Jung

Saad Bin Jung hails from the erstwhile royal families of Bhopal, Pataudi, and the aristocratic family of Paigah of Hyderabad so it was natural that he grew up with cricket and love for wildlife in his blood. But what was not normal was the streak of independence and a desire to remain far from the maddening crowd, hugging the solitude of nature. Born in Delhi in 1960, educated in Hyderabad, Saad flirted with cricket for a few years where he achieved international recognition, but a prolonged illness at the tender age of twenty saw him walk out of the game and take to conservation and wildlife with great passion.
He has dedicated his life in finding solutions to the man–animal conflict. In his endeavour to conserve wildlife, he has created awareness against ills that plague rural Indian society and has provided vocational training to the locals of the areas he worked in (near Bandipur, Nagarhole, and Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary of Karnataka), giving them hope and a way to make a legitimate living. He was a member of the Wildlife Advisory Board of Karnataka for a few years.
He is an author having written Wild Tales from the Wild, a columnist writing on cricket and ecology for the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle, a conservationist, an angler, and a photographer, He runs a very successful jungle resort Bush Betta near Bandipur, an angling camp in the heart of Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary, and a top-of-the- line boutique and exclusive wildlife camp on the banks of Kabini river near Nagarhole National Park (also known as Rajiv Gandhi National Park) called The Bison, all of which he had founded.
He lives with his wife and two children at The Bison in Karnataka.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Nov 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9789351940326

Book preview

1

Subhan: My Mentor

Mchumia juani, hulia kivulini.

(He who earns his living in the sun, eats in the shade.)

–A Swahili saying

Subhan’s world was nothing other than life in a hot cauldron: blistering days and warm nights with buzzing mosquitoes, scampering rats, slithering snakes, marauding elephants, and the smell of fish. And he loved it.

The night of April 1960 was hot as usual. The boy had not grown much in size but what he lacked in weight he made up for in spirit. He was by now all of eight years. He had just returned from the fields with his mother, who asked him to go down to the river and catch a few jalebi, eel, and genda for supper.

Subhan delighted in these night forays into the jungle albeit it was but a few hundred yards from his house. He felt excited about being alone in the complete darkness of night, in the middle of a dangerous forest. He knew that elephants never drank from the Arkravati and had been told time and time again that they preferred the sweet trickle of the Madivalla Nalla to the tasteless and bland waters of the Cauvery. In the dry season, having drunk their fill from holes dug in the sand they would amble along the dry river bed of the Arkravati, feeding off the reeds until they reached the mighty Cauvery to bathe. These animals were dangerous and great care had to be exercised when venturing within their midst.

The Arkravati was barely a dribble in April, insufficient to even hold fish bigger than a few centimeters, especially those that Subhan’s mother loved to boil and then throw into a pungent red chilli-garlic curry. The little ones that were caught near his house were jalebi which could only be fried and eaten whole, more as an appetizer than a meal. He would have to hunt in the wash of the Cauvery as the water bore up the Arkravati, pushing back the now small stream by a few hundred metres. This wash held fish of respectable size as they escaped from the large predators found in the Cauvery and slept in comparative safety in the half foot of run-in water. It was these fish that he was after. The eel ranged anywhere from 6 inches to 1.5 feet. Immature murrel could be caught in the submerged reeds. Genda, which taste excellent when deep fried, would stand transfixed by the light of the torch as they were scooped up in a basket.

Subhan shouted out a fond farewell to his mother, picked up his cloth, a bar of soap, a torch, and a bamboo basket and departed to get home some dinner. No sooner had he left his house that the inky blackness of a moonless night enveloped him. The moon would rise later and he would walk back in the comparative safety of its radiance. For now he would need to be careful. Apart from cobra, krait, and Russel’s viper, the area is abounded with the deadly saw-scaled viper, which is a terrible little, aggressive snake that can leap up to a foot or two and drive its large fangs into the upper portion of the body, resulting in a vicious haemotoxic and neurotoxic poison being injected into it. Death, and that too a painful one, was then a certainty! He also knew that unlike its cousin, this unassuming snake would not move away from the vibrations of his light steps thudding in the soft soil.

Although Subhan wanted to preserve the life of his torch battery for fishing, he understood that using the light at such times was the difference between getting bitten or not. He shone the torch every few seconds and then switched it off once he had discerned that the next twenty yards were a stretch of safety.

The Arkravati river was shallow and the water warm. He lay down in the sandy tub and bathed thoroughly, listening and paying attention to every sound that he could hear. His father had taught him the language of the jungle: a rapid plop-plop in the water meant that fish were being pursued and were jumping out to avoid being consumed by larger predators. One did not have to be an Einstein to deduce that this was a good place to fish for the larger denizens of the fish world. The ‘did-you-do-it’s relentless screeching was a certain signal that something was disturbing the red-wattled lapwing; perhaps a large animal that it did not trust beside its eggs. If the wind was right, the rumbling of the stomach juices of a pachyderm could be heard for nearly a hundred yards, but it was always the breaking of branches that was a sure sign of elephants. Elephants have a weak digestive system and are only able to digest 50 per cent of the food they eat and therefore have to shove huge amounts of food into their bellies. As both grazers and browsers, and most of the time with barely sufficient graze on to sustain their needs, they revert to browsing off trees and bushes. The sudden flight of the peacock, the harking of a barking deer, the honking of a sambar, or the rapid ‘keeoow’ of a spotted deer all signify possible danger.

Time and again Subhan had been warned that getting too close to the Cauvery was ill-advised because the crocodiles which gave man a wide berth in daylight might mistake him for food at night. Although there was nothing that he could do about it, the ever-existent threat from a leopard that would pick up the odd child every now and again always hung over his neck. It hung over every young child’s head when he walked a jungle trail at night. If it needed to kill a human, it would; escaping this determined spotted fiend was too well nigh impossible.

The grating of this elusive cat halted Subhan on his tracks that night. He stopped to discern its movement. He knew that it was not hunting because the hunter never exposes its presence and depends upon the element of surprise. His father had drilled one simple lesson into him: in pitch darkness shut your eyes and pick out the sounds. Practice over a period of time would finetune this sixth sense, and he did exactly that.

The steady breeze had gathered momentum. Standing still and trying to decipher every little sound that came his way convinced Subhan that there was no danger in the direction in which he wished to travel. Barefoot, he moved soundlessly towards the thundering river.

He wondered why his father had not returned. By the time he reached the sandy shores of Sangam he discovered that the Cauvery had receded. The Krishna Raj Sagar Dam on the river had been constructed way before independence. The Cauvery and the Kabini rivers were virtually a highway for a fish like mahseer before that.

Subhan was aware that fishing for big fish, especially as it was nearing the end of April, would be slow and his father might even spend the entire night out in the jungle. The unusually low water level, which was excellent for fishing from January to March, was not so in the hotter months, pulled Subhan a few hundred yards downstream, closer to the thrashing white water. It was not the river that worried him because at this point it was still too shallow—the crocodiles preferred deeper pools. The danger lay in the thick bushy jungle that came down the hill across the Arkravati and met at the confluence of the rivers. The creaking bamboo spooked him. He realized that great care would need to be exercised as wild elephants loved this place.

Behind him, over the Madivala hills, rose a perfect silver orb which flooded the valley with its beautiful pale halo. Keeping both his ears open for danger, Subhan entered the foot-deep cooler wash of the Cauvery, switched on the torch, and proceeded to snatch a bagful of fish in minutes. Just as he was about to retire he saw the dark snake-like body of a foot-long murrel dart under a thick bunch of reeds. Realizing that it was his younger brother Basha’s favourite fish to eat, he instinctively started after it. Before he knew it the colder water had come up to his thighs. Not overly perturbed he shoved his hand below the reeds and felt the fish slime away between his fingers and head for another thicket 15 yards away. He followed it without thinking. The river here was deep and he had to stick to the left shore. He got to the reeds using the natural light available and shone his torch to see the murrel sulking in a shallow pool. He smashed the basket down on it and knew he had succeeded when he felt the fish hitting the sides of the wicker. He allowed a few seconds to pass and then reached down and firmly seized the delicious fish in his small hand and slung it into his cloth bag.

Completely immersed in the chase, he forgot the most basic lesson of them all; he had stopped listening. That was when he heard that terrifying scream his father had taken such care to warn him against. He felt his body go numb with cold as the beast charged.

***

Abdul Jaleel had seen a beautiful girl, Fatima Bi, better known to her family as Pyari Bi at Anekal when visiting his cousin. He stayed on in the village to pursue her. They fell in love and married. Within a year she had delivered their first born: Hussain Bi. Jaleel did odd jobs to make two ends meet, yet each day while working as a labourer he dreamt of the Cauvery and the jungles. He loved to fish and was thrilled at the thought of spending time in the jungles amongst dangerous animals like elephants, leopards, sloth bear, and crocodiles. Each day he would promise himself that he would leave this life and start out on his own.

Coming home one hot summer day, disgusted with the way people treated the casual labour of his area, before anyone could explain to him that the life he was choosing was not only going to be hard but extremely dangerous, he packed his meagre belongings, asked his beautiful, spirited wife to make a carry-sling for their child, and departed for the river.

Pyaari Bi longed to get out of the village, away from the ugly politics of their family, far from people who drank, gambled, and smoked on a daily basis. Although they had never discussed moving, she was extremely happy when she received marching orders.

The next morning, in the heat of May, they left everything behind; left everyone behind. Jaleel, Pyari Bi, and Hussain Bi caught the bus to Kannakapura en route to Doddahalli, Uyyamballi, Sangam, and the river. The bus would only take them to Egnore. They spent the night at Kannakapura and arrived at the last stop at noon the following day. There being no usable road for public transport after Egnore, they walked the 14 kilometres to Sangam.

It was blazing hot but Jaleel pressed on and after four hours they arrived at the confluence. Under the shade of a large peepal tree, he threw a plastic sheet on the ground, and whilst his wife made ragi balls and tamarind water curry he walked along the Cauvery and absorbed the incredible harsh beauty of the landscape. For a fleeting moment he doubted the wisdom of his decision to move the only two people he loved into this ruthless environment, but the emotion of being in the land of his dreams soon erased all such doubts from his young mind.

That night they slept on the sands. The next morning, he asked Pyari Bi to ensure that they had all that was required for cooking. Once satisfied, having checked his fishing gear which consisted of a net and hooks ranging from small to very large fishing line between 10 and 150 lbs, they departed, walking along the river shore looking for a suitable place to camp.

They crossed the rapids of Untignta and proceeded uphill even as the river burst forth with all its might into a terrifying gorge with white water and deep pools. Looking down on to the throbbing waters, Jaleel’s every instinct told him that this was a place of big fish. As they carried on downriver, the water only became rougher. He wondered how he would pull out a big fish if he ever hooked one.

Soon they came to Mekhedaatu. Jaleel stood on top of a smooth rock and surveyed what he saw below. The entire river was being pummelled into a narrow gap formed by hard granite walls that closed in to just a few feet on both sides. The water sprang forth from the rocky embrace with such force that it carved the rock into a smooth wall. Chemical reactions had cut smooth circular tunnels into the granite. As he descended into the gorge, to the left he saw a huge cave but decided against staying in it. It was deep in the gorge and would be too claustrophobic.

He let his gaze travel down river and to his amazement realized that the entire river was being swallowed by a mighty rock. He named this place ‘Jainkal’ after the honey-combs hanging on the gorge walls.

They continued walking, and just before the Cauvery entered the huge whirlpool of Makrimadu, on the left bank, under the shelter of a cave, he established camp. The place was called Moolakada. The black charred rock, burnt by the thousands of meals that had been cooked on it would tell its story to the tourists who would fish the area for years into the future.

Having found a place for his family safe from the marauding elephants—he settled down to a life in the jungles. He cut bamboo on the fifteenth day after full moon, aware that it would then be safe from termites, and constructed a shelter that extended out of the cave. With thatched coconut fronds, he laid a waterproof roof.

Having found a shelter, he began fishing, and very soon not only was he catching enough for the pot but was able to take three to four kilos every day to Sangam to sell. He was filling the coffers of the family and for the first time in their lives, they were able to live beyond the day, secure that they would at least get a proper meal for the coming week at least. That was more than most families in the entire taluk could boast of.

The forests of the Cauvery Wildlife Division are semi-deciduous and bushy. The area is known to be sensitive, and the forests infested with elephants on either side of the river were accorded complete protection since 1882 when they were declared a sanctuary by the erstwhile ruler of Mysore. Besides as war elephants needed great spaces to move, corridors for easy access to other forests were also established. Animals could easily come up to Bannerghata, a mere 16 kilometres from Bangalore, without disturbing humanity and vice versa.

H. H. Maharaja Sri Sri Chamarajendra Wodeyar X Bahadur, Maharaja of Mysore, GCSI, ascended the throne of Mysore in 1868. A man of remarkable wisdom and foresight, he had reasoned then that large animals like the elephant, requiring copious amounts of water and feed, would depend upon the waters of the mighty river in summer. Whether his original conservation plan had included the ichthyofauna of the river, more specifically the protection of the mahseer is not clear but the benefit of doubt must necessarily go to him for he and his descendants have proved without doubt that they are men of enormous intellect, passion, and action in terms of conservation and protection of the jungles, rivers, and wildlife. Once the area was declared a sanctuary, the forests and the river got the much required relief from hunters and fisherman alike.

The genius and foresight of the rulers of Mysore is still being appreciated by the forest managers of independent India. Today, although the corridors linking the forests surrounding the Cauvery have been eroded, this wildlife sanctuary provides the only source of water in summer for miles around and this attracts animals from far and wide.

Throughout history, those who have shown courage by taking extraordinary decisions in their lives and accomplishing things out of the ordinary have been well respected. This was the case with Jaleel and his family. Within a matter of a few months, Jaleel’s fame spread far and wide, and one evening as he was preparing to return to their camp, he heard a car grinding its way up the hill. What surprised him was not the sound of the car reverberating in the gorge but the baying of dogs.

He headed for home and saw a white man, with five dogs, scrambling down the gorge. They met at camp. The old man stayed the night and partook dinner of rice and fish curry. The dogs were fed by the servants who had brought their food with them. Jaleel soon discovered that the man was from Ooty and aptly named him Ooty Dorai.

Ooty Dorai had a curious request. He wanted to do nothing but spin for selund. Jaleel offered him the pools of Mekhedaatu, Moolakada, and Makrimadu, and soon Dorai was reeling in fish larger than he believed existed. The more he caught the richer Jaleel got. The foreigner’s tip was sufficient to see them through not the days but the year itself.

Ooty Dorai came every month and caught his fill of selund, with Jaleel guiding him and allowing him the use of his campsite. Soon tents were purchased and a fully-fledged camp was established.

After a year, as Pyari Bi was heavy with her second child, Dorai insisted that Jaleel move his family out of the jungle and into a house at Sangam which he got built.

It was here, five years after Partition that on 26 October, Subhan was born in the valley of the rivers called Sangam. The ‘Traveller’s Bungalow’ stood out bravely, as the lone building in the precinct. The other inhabited shed was just a mud-walled shelter with coconut fronds forming a waterproof roof that the Dorai had arranged for the family.

Sangam was a hamlet named after the confluence of the two rivers on the banks of which this incredibly beautiful hamlet took a slow birth. Its sands lovingly lead the Arkravati into the embrace of the mighty Cauvery. Fatima Bi who was also called Pyarima by her near and dear ones, called out to her husband with love and tenderness, ‘Ji suniye, zara kaatne ka to dey dijiye’ [please listen... give me the thing for cutting]. As his first born, Hussain Bi, a beautiful little girl of two looked on in awe, Abdul Jaleel held his son in his arms and cut the umbilical cord with a brand new blade that he had bought and repeatedly boiled for the occasion. He named his son Subhan in the hope that he would, one day become famous and lend pride to the family name. He then bathed him in the whispering waters of the Arkravati.

Jaleel and Pyarima had five children in all: Hussain Bi, Subhan, Basha, Gulshad, and Praveen, each with a gap of around two years between them. All except the first girl were born at Sangam. Pyari Bi loved them all but she knew all along that Subhan was special. Aware that for an unsuspecting child, danger lurked around every bush, especially in jungles full of elephants and poisonous reptiles, Subhan was not allowed to accompany his father, and would instead tag along with her. She was a small-built, lithe lady and always smelt of musk rose. With her younger son, Basha, slung across her back, she would work along with Hussain Bi for a daily wage of fifty paise a day. It was not for the money but for the fun of being out with her friends as they ploughed the fields and picked the coconuts together, gossiping about the many things that women gossip about. If urban women letch at metro males in tight trousers and look forward to consummating their catch in a car or some shady flat rented for the purpose, the village damsels stare from behind bushes in open lust at the males squatting in the open air toilets of rural India, planning their moves in the depths of the sugarcane fields. If urban women discuss the sizes of their lovers’ private parts in hushed, giggly overtones over a kitty lunch, rural ladies openly castigate the deficiency of the man’s organ in the open village in a free-for-all drunken brawl. If urban woman is class conscious, their rural counterparts are not only super class conscious but brimming with extreme prejudice about other castes.

Subhan’s family is Muslim, and not having a caste barrier to contend with, his mother revelled in the comfort of being an élite of the village. Not that there were many to compare with for by now their hamlet consisted of mere six hutments. Being part of the elite clan is not what you think. To a city dweller it spells wealth, a house with servants, cars, and money to splurge but at Sangam it merely means that the family is fed well.

Hussain Bi’s cousins were spread far and wide, with a few even working in distant places like Mysore and Bangalore. They would write to her regularly asking her to come and work with them and she would refuse every time. They would never know just how much she loved the dry and harsh summer and enjoyed harvesting the ragi and cleaning its stalks on the Sangam-Doddahalli dirt track or even how much she loved sitting outside their house in the evenings listening to the sounds of the jungle.

The fields and the jungle were laid bare by the wrath of the sizzling heat. Pyarima enjoyed the sweat running down her face for she knew that heat meant low water in the Cauvery and more fish for the household. She loved her husband deeply. He made her feel special. Not only would he take care of the family but was sensitive to her needs. Unlike the other men of the halli (village) who always got home drunk, smelled of the sweat from their daily labour, Jaleel would return home freshly bathed, smelling of flowers. Whilst the others ordered their wives to spread their legs for animalistic, selfish satisfaction, Jaleel would cuddle her and seduce her with freshly drawn date palm tree nectar. Her friends complained that no sooner had their husbands ejaculated they would fall back in drunken stupor and snored the night away, oblivious that their women also needed to be satisfied. Jaleel instead bought them a large mosquito net, freeing them from the bites of pesky insects, and made love to her for hours, and only after her satisfaction he would satisfy his own enflamed desire.

Jaleel was a robust man. Fiercely independent and free from fear, he would roam the jungles with ease. He knew the forest as well as anyone else but he knew the waters so well that people accepted him to be the best fisherman on the Cauvery. His knowledge was born from years of experience spent fishing on the river. He had used fish, crab, ragi, wheat, corn, fruit, leaves, snails, worms, insects, grubs, parts of beef, lamb, venison, and chicken as bait. Over the years he had worked out the type of lure favoured by the various fish. He had fished through the year and knew the behaviour of fish in high—cold and low—warm water. Cat fish, selund, malli, and murrel were plucked with ease from the deep pools. He had finetuned the art of catching the largest of the mahseer, Karnatik Carp, nakta, and labeo cuvier. He would stalk the shallow waters and spear the basking rohu. When he felt lazy, he would walk through the tributaries and fill his basket at night with tasty fish.

With Ooty Dorai’s recommendation and his own fame, he soon got a job as a guard with the Wildlife Association of South India (WASI). His knowledge of the river resulted in him guiding anglers to land the biggest fish of them all in the mighty river: the Barbus Tor Mussallah. Spending time with such anglers, he soon learnt the ways of the tackle and quickly picked up a mean reputation of being a handy man with the rod. J. Detwet Van Ingen, the taxidermist from Mysore, would seek him out well in advance for his forays into the forests. The rulers of Mysore used him as the head ghillie for guests they sent on the river. People from far and wide heard about the man and many could not resist the pull of fishing with him. They would come armed to the teeth. The rifles and shotguns would get them meat for the pot as they shot the odd spotted deer, sambar, wild boar, and wild fowl or landed the over 3 feet long murrel on their spinning rods. However, the rod, reel,