(20 minute read)

A hundred years is a lifetime, enough to see time continue its unending loop; dynasties turn to ashes and rise again; cities fall and rise, and the modern turn archaic. A hundred years is a long, long time.

And yet, 105 years later, I think about a walk an eight-year-old girl and her bullock had taken in 19101 on a jungle path similar to the one N and I were walking on, with rhododendrons on either side, a soft carpet of deodar and chir pine needles beneath our feet, a deep ravine that led to some dangerous-looking rocks, and sapphire skies that only the mountains can have. In 1910, these forests were one of the most fearsome in the world, inhabited by a man-eating tigress. That didn’t matter for a little girl named Putli, who was leading Kalwa, her bullock, to her uncle, without any fear.

The Mukteshwar tigress became the Indian jungle’s most dangerous animal after losing an eye in an encounter with a porcupine:

‘She lost an eye and got some fifty quills, varying in length from one to nine inches, embedded in the arm and under the pad of her right foreleg…Suppurating sores formed where she endeavoured to extract the quills with her teeth, and while she was lying up in a thick patch of grass, starving and licking her wounds, a woman selected this particular patch of grass to cut as fodder for her cattle. At first the tigress took no notice, but when the woman had cut the grass right up to where she was lying, the tigress struck once, the blow crushing the woman’s skull. Death was instantaneous.’

She was the third maneater that was operating in Kumaon division at the time, and when the toll of deaths had risen to 24, the veterinary officer in charge of the Institute of Veterinary Research (which still exists) ‘requested the Government to solicit [Corbett’s] help’.

Introducing Mukteshwar, Jim Corbett wrote, ‘Eighteen miles to the north–northeast of Nainital is a hill eight thousand feet high and twelve to fifteen miles long, running east and west…People who have lived at Muktesar (as he calls it) claim that it is the most beautiful spot in Kumaon, and that its climate has no equal.’ In 1910, it would have been a settlement even smaller than it is today. The IVRI is still the nucleus around which a few stores, a post office and a ‘human hospital’ operate, and while Mukteshwar’s hills are now seeing an over-abundance of resorts, holiday homes and private villas, the northern edge of the hill, where the IVRI now maintains an extensive forest of deodar and chir, may still be as Corbett saw it then, when he stayed at the PWD guest house.

Corbett got down to the hunt as soon as he reached the settlement, and after being informed of the last human kill in a valley below an orchard, he set out on the Dhari road that led to the valley:

‘I had retraced my steps for about three miles when I overtook a small girl having difficulties with a bullock. The girl, who was about eight years old, wanted the bullock to go in the direction of Muktesar, while the bullock wanted to go in the opposite direction, and when I arrived on the scene the stage had been reached when neither would do what the other wanted.’

That girl was Putli.

Putli had been entrusted with delivering the bullock to her uncle’s house alone, on a path that led through the hunting grounds of a man-eating tigress, a tigress that had already eaten ‘Kunthi’s father and Bonshi Singh’s mother, and lots of other people.’ Corbett accompanied the girl to her uncle’s house, and once he was assured she was safe within her village’s grounds, rushed to the spot where the tiger had killed another bullock. But her bravery still resounded in his mind nearly forty years later when he recounted the tale, writing after shooting the Mukteshwar man-eater, that he had achieved ‘…the greatest satisfaction of all, at having made a small portion of the earth safe for a brave little girl to walk on.’

***

Putli would’ve grown up, and become a mother perhaps, maybe even a grandmother, and if health permitted, a great-grandmother. Eighty years after she met a mad white sahib out hunting tigers, a young boy would be gifted the book where her walk was recorded; the young boy would wonder at her courage, and forever want to see for himself the country Corbett shielded from man-eaters.

That young boy was me.

We’ve come to Mukteshwar, ostensibly, on a weekend getaway, a second visit for N, a first for me. I have, nevertheless, imagined Mukteshwar, and perhaps the rest of Corbett’s Country, in my mind ever since an uncle lent me a copy of The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag in grade four, and persuaded an aunt to buy me Man-Eaters of Kumaon that year, and The Temple Tiger the next. In between nights of terror and days of fantasies, the hills that Corbett lived and hunted in came alive organically in my mind. Mukteshwar was this small village at the peak of a hill, surrounded by unending forests, the only clearings made by man for cultivation.

I wasn’t too far off; the northern edge retains the forests the tigress would have lorded over. The rest of the massif, though, is slowly seeing the advent of civilization: resorts, holiday homes, private villas. Like the tigress, man too thinks ‘highly of the amenities of Muktesar’, and the hills have slowly begun to give way to clearings of concrete. It isn’t hard to imagine why there are no more tigers here now.

It is at night, however, that the forest begins to claw back. In a darkness devoid of electric power, where the light of stars and the moon illuminates and cast shadows of mythical beings, we hear a sound, an alarm call, and my mind – still trapped in a childhood dream of hunts on foot – imagines the forest coming alive. I declare grandly to N the alarm call means a predator is nearby, perhaps a leopard (which rules these hills in the absence of its larger cousin). I peer hard into the shadows of deodars and chirs to catch a glimpse of one. ‘Dhonk’, the beast calls again, and I imagine it to be closer. From my perch on a first-floor balcony, I peer harder, wishing, praying even, for adventure.

The next day, a guard demolishes my hopes by declaring it was a sambhar, a jarao as they call it in Kumaon, that had come to munch on his flowers.

Forests are fecund ground for imagination: the sidhes and the faeries of the Irish may not be home in a Himalayan forest, but there are enough shadows, shapes and whispers to set the mind racing. In the early part of the last century, when Corbett hunted man-eaters, these forests were home to tigers – even now, in Bhutan, the striped kings have made forests as high as 3,000 metres home. Now, none exist in these upper Himalayan hills; the tigers have all moved to the plains, where it’s easier for man to create a boundary of sorts and declare the area a reserve, but the Himalayan forests feel emptier for lack of them. Now, in these hills, leopards rule: feline grace.

Despite the forest with its leopards, bears and jarao, I pretend to be living in the past, during Corbett’s time. As the evening grows and the shadows become longer, the wind begins to pick up and howl, I am reminded of Corbett writing about ‘sandstone caves overhanging the road’ to Muktesar that ‘must produce very weird sounds in a gale’. I try to recollect the road he took from his summer home in Nainital to ‘Muktesar’; he mentions walking up from Ramgarh, but since we have driven up from Bhimtal, we come via Bhatelia, which is on the other side of the ridge.

***

In the early twentieth century, when Corbett stalked man-eaters across Kumaon’s hills, settlements would have been far and few in between. Even today, the road from Dhari to Mukteshwar has few settlements, and it is only as one gets closer to Bhimtal that modernity begins to overwhelm the landscape. Leopards are commonly sighted; a few days after returning to Delhi, I see a YouTube video where a male in its prime is casually walking across barren fields carved into the hillside just below the main settlement of Mukteshwar during the day. And the second night in Mukteshwar, driving back to our guest house, a large shadow zips across the road like a ghost, a leopard desperate to not be seen by humans.

Yet, the hills are largely silent in the day. On the early morning drive back, I expect to see some signs of wildlife on a hill road that cuts through a regal forest. There are only birds – paradise flycatchers, jungle fowl – gorgeous avians, and the conspicuous lack of bigger fauna, even the Himalayan langur or the Rhesus macaque, is troubling.

In the hills, forests are giving way to summer homes and, now, apartments. We are running away from the soot of the cities to the green of the hills, but soot doesn’t run off quite so easily.

***

I wonder what happened to Putli. If she had children, did they end up fighting in the Second World War, like so many thousands from the hills? Did they not return from a war that wasn’t theirs? If they did, did they continue living in these hills, or did they move to the plains too, just as so many others have done? What did she do after the maneater was shot? Did Corbett ever meet her again? A hundred years later, these are the questions I leave Mukteshwar with.

A hundred years is more than a lifetime. Dynasties turn to ashes. Empires crumble. The unyielding cycle of history continues. And Mukteshwar has changed incorrigibly. Will Putli recognize these hills if she revisited them? The path she took may not even exist anymore, except in the pages of Corbett’s books. And in the imagination of a young boy who was thrilled to read a brave man’s adventures in forests far away from his own.

1. In Behind Jim Corbett’s Stories (by Priyavrat Gandhi, Preetum Gheerawo, Manfred Waltl, Joseph Jordania & Fernando Quevedo de Oliveira), Gheerawo cogently argues the Mukteshwar maneater was shot in 1909, and not 1910. I’ve however decided to stick to 1910, as I haven’t been able to find a second source for this correction.

The easiest way to get to Mukteshwar is to drive or take the train to Haldwani, and take the Bhimtal-Bhowali road up to the KMVN Guest House, which still retains the old PWD guest house that Corbett stayed in. The guard may even show you the kettle Corbett used, if you’re lucky.