Honorary Tiger: The Life of Billy Arjan Singh

By Duff Hart-Davis

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Dec 31, 2005
• ISBN: 9789351940722

Duff Hart-Davis

Duff Hart-Davis joined the Sunday Telegraph on its inception in 1961 and later travelled extensively as a feature reporter in India, Nepal, Turkey, Caribbean, Norway, South Africa, Ascension Island. Shooting trips took him to Siberia, Poland and Hungary. Duff wrote the Country Matters column in the Independent 1986-2001. A distinguished biographer, naturalist and journalist, he is author of 17 non-fiction books on subjects ranging from Hitler's Olympics, the adventurer Peter Fleming, to a history of the mid-Atlantic island of Ascension. He has also had eight novels published. Duff was brought up on a farm in Oxfordshire. He did his National Service in Germany and read Classics at Oxford. He is married with two children and now lives on a farm in the Cotswolds.

Book preview

ONE

DEATH IN THE JUNGLE

On 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 January 1978 coincided almost exactly with an unprecedented outbreak of maneating in Kheri, the district of Uttar Pradesh in which Billy lives. In fact the root of the problem lay across the border to the north, in Nepal, where such huge tracts of forest had been cleared to create farmland that the resident tigers, deprived of their habitat, had been driven southwards into India, creating a temporary surplus and shortage of prey in and around the Dudhwa National Park.

At the time, however, this was not obvious – and what could not be denied was the fact that two months after Tara had gone wild, tigers began to pick off one human being after another, until terror gripped the villagers, and people began blaming Billy. ‘It’s your bloody tiger that’s doing it,’ they said bitterly. ‘Because she was brought up with humans, she’s not afraid of them, and she’s turned maneater.’ Billy knew, or at any rate passionately hoped, that this was not true. Several times, when examining the site of a kill, he had found from the pug marks that the villain was a male, so that Tara was immediately exonerated, and of several tigresses shot on suspicion of being maneaters, none had borne any resemblance to Tara, whose unique facial markings he knew by heart.

All the same, by the beginning of 1980 the death toll had risen to over eighty, of which his enemies credited Tara with thirty-odd, and as he drove out to the scene of the kill in January, he was once again full of foreboding. Could she, after all, be the culprit this time?

By the time he reached the site, the immediate area had been so thoroughly trampled that no useful evidence remained; but close at hand he found pug marks which he recognized as those of a tigress known to him as the Median (her name derived from the fact that she had attached herself to the big male on the home range between his liaisons with two other tigresses). Alongside her tracks were those of her single cub, then about eighteen months old and still at heel. Billy concluded that it must have been the Median and her daughter that the rescue party had seen.

Maneaters generally start killing humans because they are injured or handicapped, and cannot any longer catch or subdue their normal prey; but Billy knew from frequent earlier sightings that both these tigresses were in full health. Nevertheless, from that moment the Median was under suspicion, and this intensified in June when another man was taken near the Dudhwa railway station.

Then, at the beginning of August, Billy returned from a trip to London to find that the tigress had killed his own assistant tracker, Lallu. It was a deliberate attack within a few hundred yards of Tiger Haven on the dirt track that leads to the house. Examination of the site showed that she had crouched behind a tree before jumping on the man as he walked past, and sunk her canines into his neck, killing him instantly. Once again she had bitten off the genitals, leaving the rest of the body intact. To Billy, this suggested that she was puzzled by the unfamiliar shape of her victims: a tiger’s normal prey such as a deer or a pig is four-footed, and moves with its body in a horizontal posture, whereas humans go around upright. But even if the Median was not yet a confirmed maneater, she was certainly a man-killer – and she had put herself in mortal danger.

Because the latest incident had taken place so close to Tiger Haven, the clamour for Tara’s blood grew louder than ever – and no one was more vociferous in condemning the zoo-bred tigress than the park director, R.L. Singh, whose office and headquarters were in Dudhwa, two miles from Billy’s home. Tara, he insisted, must be eliminated. Trying in vain to persuade him that the culprit was the Median, Billy pointed out that at least six tigresses were active in the area, and that because accurate identification was almost impossible in the jungle, no effective action could be taken until another incident occurred – otherwise an innocent tiger might be shot, and the killer might survive to strike again. Project Tiger – India’s all-out attempt to save the species from extinction – was in full swing: the tiger had become the national animal, and each and every one was precious.

The next attack came soon enough. On 8 November an old sweeping woman wandered off to relieve herself in the teak plantation outside the perimeter fence of the park headquarters compound, only to be grabbed, killed and dragged down a steep bank into a patch of tall grass. R.L. Singh was then in Lakhimpur, more than two hours’ drive away; but instead of going to fetch Billy, who was within easy call, members of the park staff rode out on two elephants to retrieve the body. Had Billy been with them, he would have had a good chance of despatching the tigress there and then, because she was spotted close to the woman’s remains. As it was, the animal disappeared, having eaten only one arm and a breast.

For the rest of the day panic reigned in the compound – yet at about 4.30 p.m. a man called Asghar, one of the elephant charkattas, or fodder-cutters, walked down into a ravine to answer a call of nature. He too was seized and carried off – and when his companions went in search of him half an hour later, they found nothing but his spear and water container lying in a pool of blood. This time they did send for Billy; but because darkness had fallen before he reached the scene, he could not follow the line of the drag.

Only in the morning did a search party discover the body, more than half of which had been eaten. Confronted by the grisly evidence, Billy agreed that the tigress must be shot as soon as possible: as he himself said, ‘familiarity had bred contempt, and humans were now included in her natural prey species.’ R.L. Singh – a smooth-looking man who sported a neatly-trimmed dark beard, perhaps in the hope that it would distract attention from his hair which had turned prematurely grey – hurried back from Lakhimpur, and in a radio message from Lucknow his boss, the chief wildlife warden of U.P., officially declared the animal a maneater.

During the day Billy got his tracker, Jackson, to build a machan, or tree platform, above the spot where Asghar had been killed, and, together with the park director, sat up until 9 p.m. with his .375 magnum rifle over a buffalo tethered as bait. The tigress did not return, but in the morning she came out of the grass and began calling loudly as she moved off to the north-west, parallel to the metalled road that leads through the forest to the Nepal border.

R.L. Singh went after her on an elephant, armed only with a borrowed 12-bore shotgun loaded with buckshot – a weapon dangerously inadequate for the task – and when she came out on to the road, he followed her at a distance for more than a mile. But he also sent a messenger to fetch Billy, who arrived with his big rifle to find that now three tigers were involved: the Median, her nearly full-grown cub, and another sub-adult animal, all of which had disappeared into a stand of six-foot-high grass alongside the road.

That night, to hold the killer in the area, he staked out another bait in the jungle about fifty yards from the road, at a spot where two forest tracks formed a small crossing. In the morning, when he went back to see what had happened, he found that the tigers had duly killed the buffalo, but had not managed to break the tethering rope; so, advancing cautiously with loaded rifle at the ready – for he felt certain the maneater was somewhere very close – he untied the tether and withdrew.

Sometime during the morning the tigers dragged their kill further into the forest, where the straight, dark-brown trunks of sal trees towered above the four-foot-tall undergrowth. The bushes were both thick enough, in patches, to make the killer feel secure, and scattered enough to give a rifleman a good chance of a shot if she moved from one clump to another.

In the afternoon, therefore, an armed party set out in pursuit: one elephant carried Billy, with his .375, Jackson and R.L.Singh, who by then had acquired an ancient .375 with a broken safety catch, hurriedly sent down from Lucknow. The men were perched on a khatola– a padded platform, like an inverted table with very short legs – behind the mahout, or driver, who sat astride the elephant’s neck, steering it by digging his big toes into the backs of its ears. On a second elephant were Billy’s brother Balram, equipped with the family’s .500 double-barrelled express rifle, and three American tourists, who happened to be staying at Tiger Haven and had arrived at a (for them) thrillingly opportune moment. Billy would have preferred them to stay out of the way, but they were immensely excited by the prospect of a hunt, and Balram had persuaded him that he could bring them along.

Billy had handled firearms ever since he was a boy, but he knew that R.L. Singh had never fired a rifle at a live target, and so he had little confidence in his ability as a marksman. All the same, since they were in the park director’s territory, he felt constrained to give him first shot.

The hunt proved short and sharp. Following the drag-line through the grass, the elephants moved forward. Hardly had they come on the remains of the kill when a tiger started up out of the undergrowth. R.L. Singh raised his rifle and would have fired, had Billy not grabbed his arm and hissed, ‘Wait! This is the cub!’ Seconds later another tiger rose out of the bushes and sat staring at the elephant, no more than ten yards off. From her very boldness Billy realized at once that this was the Median, covering the retreat of her cub, and not in the least fazed by the proximity of humans.

‘Shoot!’ he whispered.

R.L. Singh fired, from point-blank range. Splinters of wood flew from a branch between rifle and target, but the tigress had clearly been hit, for she gave a lurch before bounding away to the right. From all round in the jungle peacocks, startled by the boom of the heavy rifle, let fly their warning calls – Ay-yorrh! Ay-yorrh!

Silence fell. Then gradually the monkeys and smaller birds resumed their normal conversations. After waiting a few minutes, Billy told the mahout to make the elephant kneel, and Jackson slid down over its tail to inspect the point of impact. On the ground he found a lump of skin and flesh, indicating that the tiger had been hit somewhere in the gut. How seriously she was wounded, it was impossible to tell – so Jackson climbed back to his perch and both elephants moved forward, starting to sweep through the bushes in ever-widening arcs.

After advancing barely a hundred yards to their right, the party spotted the tigress lying on her side, apparently lifeless, with a patch of blood showing that she had been hit low in the stomach. As a precaution Billy told R.L. Singh to put another bullet into her, which he did. When the impact provoked no reaction, Billy got down, threw the empty cartridge-case on to the body, and then, as a final test, tried the old hunter’s trick of pulling the tiger’s tail.

Everyone could see that the maneater was dead. To Billy she looked about six years old, in prime condition, and bore no physical defect that could have accounted for her fatal predilection.

R.L. Singh’s first words were, ‘It’s Tara, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ said Billy. ‘It’s nothing like her. It’s the Median.’ Not only were the facial markings different from Tara’s: the biological fact, which everyone except R.L. Singh understood, was that Tara, at just over four, was not old enough to have borne the two-year-old cub which had been the Median’s constant companion.

In any event, everyone came down off the elephants and took photographs. When the park director suggested that the best course would be to bury the tigress there and then, in the forest, Billy agreed, and he went off home thinking that the interment was already taking place.

That should have been the end of the saga – but in fact it was only the beginning. Next morning Billy still felt puzzled by the circumstances of the shot, and when he returned to the scene for another look round, he found that an inch-thick branch had been cut off by the director’s first bullet, deflecting it into the target. Taking the branch with him, he walked down to the park headquarters and presented it to R.L. Singh, congratulating him on his good fortune.

He was startled to find that, far from burying the tigress’s body, the park director had had it taken back to his headquarters and laid out in a trailer, surrounded and neatly covered by fresh grass, so that only its head was showing. As Billy was standing there, Singh set off with the trailer hitched behind his jeep on a triumphal tour of the principal towns in the district, proceeding through nearby Pallia to Lakhimpur, Sitapur and finally Lucknow, the state capital, where the chief wildlife warden of U.P. had his headquarters. Along the way he stopped again and again in villages so that people could come and stare at the ravening monster from which he had heroically freed them.

The further he went, the wilder and more fanciful his stories became. He did not, of course, let on, that his first shot had been a prodigious fluke – that if the bullet had not been deflected by striking the branch, it might well have missed altogether; but he described how Billy had stood over the fallen monster with tears coursing down his face, stricken by grief at the death of his former pet.

When the U.P. government, in gratitude, presented R.L. Singh with the head and skin of the tiger, mounted (at a cost of Rs 6,000, or over two years’ wages for an average peasant), he installed the stuffed body in his office and posed beside it for photographs, regaling journalists with lurid accounts of how the tiger had charged him before he fearlessly gunned it down.

He corroborated these fantasies in articles of his own, and excelled himself by telling newspaper reporters that Billy had wanted to use Tara for purposes of espionage: he had hoped to fit her with a radio collar so that he could transmit messages to Soviet satellites. Twenty years after the event, he produced Tara the Cocktail Tigress, a book whose mendacity was in a class of its own. He could find no way of accounting for the fact that Tara was too young to have had a two-year-old cub, but he sought to explain the discrepancy in markings by claiming that the stripes on a tiger’s face change as it grows older. Billy agreed that markings do sometimes alter as a young animal puts on bulk and fills out its frame, but Tara had three unique points of patterning which remained the same throughout her life: one was a set of stripes like an inverted catapult on her left cheek, another an isolated spot above her left eye, and the third a small triangle of black on her left hind leg. Photographs taken long after the death of the Median confirm that she was living wild.

Billy, meanwhile, was left to carry on his one-man battle to preserve Dudhwa’s big cats. Naturally, he was upset by the Median’s untimely death, for the tigress had been an old acquaintance: he had often seen her in the jungle, and in several close encounters she had had a chance of killing him. Beyond that, he had dedicated the best part of his life to the welfare of tigers, and the last thing he wanted was to see one shot.

At least the right animal had been killed, and a genuine maneater eliminated. At least he had the comfort of knowing that Tara had once again been absolved from blame. But he knew, also, that clashes between people and carnivores were bound to continue, because the Indian population was rocketing out of control: humans desperate for living space were continually encroaching on the tigers’ territory, and the two species could not co-exist on the same ground. Further, he knew that the authorities in the forest service – corrupt and incompetent as they were – would declare other tigers maneaters without any thorough investigation, so that many innocent animals would meet their doom. He felt that, already, Project Tiger was proving dismally ineffective, and that it was only a matter of time before the kings and queens of the jungle were driven to extinction.

The most unfortunate result of the row about Tara was the fact that, from the moment of her introduction, he was dogged by the insensate hostility of the Indian tiger establishment. The fact that he had devoted himself to saving the country’s wildlife seemed to make no impact on the babus (clerks or bureaucrats) in Lucknow and Delhi: his advice was rarely sought, his ideas for improving the situation were ignored, his private machan was destroyed by employees of the forest service, and attempts were made to prosecute him.

It is hard to escape the impression that jealousy played a major part in this sustained campaign of denigration. The fact was that Billy pressed ahead and did things, while