No Beast So Fierce

by Dane Huckelbridge

  There was more to it than just elephants, though. As it turned out, the Shahs of Nepal were not the only ones with expansionist ambitions in the region. The British, under the auspices of the East India Company, had been working to establish a foothold in India since the early 1600s. By 1757, that grip was secure, and the Company had begun controlling its most lucrative trade routes with its own private army, effectively making it the de facto ruling power for much of Bengal—much too close for comfort for the Nepalese kings to the north, and vice versa. As the Gorkha kingdom, under the rule of Prithvi Narayan Shah, gobbled up more and more rival territory to form a unified Nepal, a showdown between the two regional powers became all but inevitable. Eventually, it seemed, the British would invade their competitor to the north.

  With only one small problem—specifically, the same microscopic protozoa that had enabled the Tharu to live more or less unmolested in the terai for centuries. The identical malarial parasite that kept most Nepalese hill tribes out of the lowland jungles could just as easily repel invading Britons. And there was the separate but related fact that the land itself was a natural fortress. The wild grasses could grow in excess of twenty feet, making them all but impassable for anyone not mounted on an elephant. The floodplains were a literal quagmire, sucking in men and machinery alike. And the surrounding jungles were purposefully left wild and without roads, which made navigating their tangles next to impossible for any outsider. When it came to protecting Nepal from colonial invaders to the south, the terai itself was better than barbed wire. What was home to the Tharu was certain death for Europeans.

  The most vivid historical example of the protective barrier that the wild terai could provide was the disastrous 1767 campaign of Captain George Kinloch, just prior to the Battle of Kathmandu—also, incidentally, the battle that finally established the Shah dynasty’s dominion over a unified Nepal. The British East India Company, which did not care for the Shahs’ expansionist ambitions in the least, sent Captain Kinloch into Nepal to break up the siege of the Kathmandu Valley. The Gorkha army, under the command of Prithvi Narayan Shah, had the entire region in a choke hold, cutting off the British from some of their choicest trade routes. The two powers coveted control of the same lands, and Captain Kinloch responded with typical colonial bravado, assuring his commanders that “from Sidley to Nepaul, the road is reckoned extremely good . . . there is no Rivers to be crossed, nor any hills to be passed.” His plan was approved, and with some 2,400 men, he set off from India to defeat his Gorkha rivals to the north. And while he did not immediately meet any uncrossable torrents or unscalable mountains, he did come face-to-face with the hard realities of the terai. The Bagmati River had totally flooded the land, thanks to seemingly endless monsoon rains, leaving his troops with the excruciating task of dragging cannons through mud that was, according to Kinloch’s own journal, “gullet deep.” The path before them left little along the lines of food or provisions, and “no trace of any living creature, except wild Elephants, Tigers and Bears which are here in vast numbers.” As to actual encounters with tigers, Kinloch’s account leaves us guessing, but it seems safe to say that with their roars reverberating through the jungle night, his men did not get much sleep. And the whole time, the bitter deluge never stopped. Kinloch had unknowingly marched his men straight into a death trap, and what followed over the next three hellish weeks included mutinies, bouts of malaria, and thirteen straight days of famine. Even more disastrous, perhaps, than the unforgiving terrain was the defensiveness of its inhabitants. The local “Chaudhary” headman whom Kinloch had commissioned to supply his men with grain essentially abandoned them, and in regards to the rest of the forest-dwelling Tharu, Kinloch would write, “So extremely troublesome were the Jungle people now become, that had a man only fallen a few Yards behind the rest, he was sure to be cut off in a most cruel manner.” Delirious and defeated, dodging arrows and spears, poor Captain Kinloch had no choice but to turn tail and run for his life—or more likely be carried, given his feverish state. And while he did miraculously make it out of the wild heart of the terai, the terai never truly left him. He died the next year, almost certainly of malaria he contracted in its steaming jungle depths.

  It almost goes without saying that had Captain Kinloch encountered the easy march into Nepal he initially envisioned—a country stroll filled with tilled fields and helpful farmers—there’s a strong chance he and his men could have defeated the Shahs at Kathmandu, and Nepal as we know it would have never been born. But the wilderness of the terai and its indigenous inhabitants stopped them, and this was not lost on the Shah dynasty. From that day forward, an informal alliance was formed—one that would only be reinforced during Nepal’s second altercation with the British in 1814, when the Tharu and the terai once again helped protect Kathmandu from outside invasion. Granted, the second skirmish with the British didn’t go as well as the first, and the Shahs lost considerable territory in the west, including Kumaon. But they clearly understood the value of the Tharu people’s allegiance, and they made sure that the Tharu were rewarded accordingly.

  Evidence of this alliance can be found today in the Panjiar Collection, an extremely rare compilation of royal communiqués between the Shah kings in Kathmandu and the Tharu, primarily in the more populous, eastern part of the terai belt, although several records exist from the western terai as well, and serve as good indicators of the general dynamic. Many of the documents are lal mohar, effectively royal land grants that bestowed rights of management to the local Tharu leaders—usually for rendering a service or showing loyalty—some going as far back as the elephant campaigns in the 1814 war with Britain. Much of the terai may have been wilderness, but it was a managed wilderness, and the Tharu were the ones best suited for farming it, populating it, and stewarding it in a sustainable way. The Shahs certainly liked grain revenues, but they prized their wild elephant herds, vast tiger-hunting reserves, and impenetrable tracts of malarial borderland just as much. In order to preserve all of the above, the Shahs generally respected the indigenous hierarchy of Tharu villages, and kept intact the authority of the local chaudhari, or village chieftain, often granting him many of the same rights as they would a Brahmin noble in the hills. And in a surprising display of open-mindedness for a dynasty of Hindu kings, they even worked within the indigenous belief system of the Tharu to manage village life, as shown by this 1807 decree issued by the court of Girvan Yuddha Bikram Shah to a local Tharu gurau:

  To Tetu Gurau, Belaudh praganna, Dhanauji village: We bestow upon you as nankar jagir the uncultivated, forested and barren lands of Dhanauji village in Belaudh praganna and the revenue of the area except for the king’s share. You are given the lands of Gaharwar in Sajot praganna as nankar (tax-free land). Cultivate and make the land populous and protect the people from the threats of elephants, tigers, evil spirits, disease and epidemics. Enjoy all the production of this nankar jagir land. If you cannot settle and protect this area from these disturbances, you cannot take its produce.

  The royal decree is telling not only in that it endows a local Tharu spiritual leader with considerable control over terai wilderness, but that it also deems the management of tigers and wild elephants as essentially spiritual matters, something only a gurau is fit to do. The village in question sat on the edge of Chitwan—prime tiger- and elephant-hunting ground for Nepalese kings. The fact that the king relied on a local shaman to protect its environs from escaped tigers and elephants, rather than government soldiers or paid shikaris, is characteristic of the larger relationship that existed between the Shah dynasty and the Tharu, one in which the latter were not merely subjects, but partners and pioneers in the management of a crucial part of the kingdom. The Panjiar Collection is replete with similar land grants and decrees, with even a few gifted elephants thrown into the mix, for much of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  In reconstructing that period, it becomes clear that the Tharu’s relationship with the Shah kings, much like their relationship to
the forest, was symbiotic and mutually beneficial. The Tharu’s natural malarial resistance allowed them to exist and farm in a part of the kingdom where few others could. Their shifting agricultural methods permitted revenues to be collected without compromising the natural protective barrier that the terai provided. They were the first line of defense in the event of a British invasion, and they alone could capture and maintain the elephants that were so crucial to the military might of the kingdom. In exchange for these services, the Shahs granted the Tharu considerable autonomy, bestowing the chaudharis with the authority to manage their villages through the lal mohar. This was not benevolence on the part of the Shah kings per se—after all, they were as interested in raising revenues as anyone else—but rather an effective strategy for securing their own borders in the face of a foreign colonial power they did not trust, and who, by 1816, they had already been to war with multiple times. The terai served a strategic purpose, and the Tharu were its natural custodians. It only made sense to keep both intact.

  It was a partnership that would last as long as there was a need for that impenetrable border with British India—an arrangement that would come to an end, for all practical purposes, in 1846. In that year, an ambitious young upstart from a prominent Nepalese family, Jung Bahadur Rana, took advantage of inner turmoil within the Nepalese government and seized power in a coup. After orchestrating the Kot Massacre—a bloodbath in which he and his brothers trapped and killed some forty members of the court in the royal palace—he expelled King Rajendra Bikram Shah and assumed total control of the government, installing the king’s son Surendra Bikram in the throne as a powerless puppet of the new Rana regime. It is notable that when the exiled Shah king was later recaptured, trying to return to Nepal to reclaim the throne, it was in the terai, the Nepali region that had always served his family so well. He would spend the rest of his life under house arrest, and the Ranas would go on to rule Nepal for more than a century.

  One of the Ranas’ first orders of business, upon deposing the Shahs and solidifying their grip on Nepal, was to improve relations with the British in India. Jung Bahadur Rana was a reformer, a man who embraced Western technology and admired European institutions. He had spent time in India, and he looked to the British colonial system as a model for “modernizing” Nepal and making it a true regional superpower. While the Shahs had garnered their independence through fierce military aggression, the Ranas sought to preserve it with tactful diplomacy. This inevitably meant strong ties with the British to the south. Jung Bahadur Rana would initiate the thawing of Anglo-Nepalese relations with a royal trip to London in 1850, where he would be lavishly received by Queen Victoria, and attend a banquet hosted by the very same British East India Company that his Shah predecessors and their Tharu allies had massacred in the jungles of the terai. He would even set aside his traditional Brahmin prohibitions and took on a foreign mistress, in the form of a high-class courtesan named Laura Bell, a single night with whom was alleged to have cost him 250,000 pounds sterling. As to whether he was simply a john, or an enraptured admirer generous with his gifts, there is some debate, but regardless, he seems to have had few compunctions embracing the West, both literally and figuratively.

  The Ranas would return the hospitality and friendly overtures of the British by supplying their own “Gurkha” troops to help quell rebellions that cropped up in northern India, and by extending invitations to participate in royal Nepalese tiger hunts. It was a tradition that would carry on well into the twentieth century, culminating in an incredibly opulent hunt organized for Queen Elizabeth II in 1961, an undertaking that involved the construction of a virtual city in the middle of the terai. The British royals demurred and let their hosts shoot the tigers on this particular hunt; however, earlier monarchs had no such reservations in doing the shooting themselves. In 1911, King George V and a party of British nobles took part in a traditional Nepalese “ring” hunt in Chitwan at the behest of the Ranas, and over the course of 10 days bagged a total of 4 sloth bears, 18 rhinos, and 39 tigers. Such shoots were commonplace in Nepal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the customary bagh shikar, or royal tiger hunt, transforming from a sacred ritual the Shah kings had once used to strengthen local alliances with the Tharu to a means for the Ranas of cementing foreign relationships with colonial powers.

  And it worked. With the new Rana dynasty in power, the British in India not only had a military ally in Nepal—they also had an enthusiastic partner in trade. The Ranas actively encouraged exchange with their new friends across the border, seeking to enrich their coffers and emulate the economic policies of their neighbor—basically, to “modernize” and “optimize” their ancient economy. One of the most obvious paths to accomplish this was to increase the economic output of the rich bottomlands of the terai—the Bengal tiger’s stronghold.

  With the British military threat over, the natural barrier of the terai was no longer needed, and the Ranas could exploit it however they saw fit. In the decades following the Rana assumption of power, trade with India blossomed, with the western border serving as a primary point of transit, and British Kumaon becoming a mercantilist hub. A range of products were traded, including dyes, textiles, spices, metal, and cattle. But the two major articles of export from Nepal to India are telling indeed: timber and rice. In just five years, between 1872 and 1877, the annual export value to the Indian Northwest Provinces and Oudh went from what was considered a negligible amount to 3,522,280 rupees—roughly twice what Nepal was importing from India from the other side of the border. Of this export total, 548,193 rupees came from timber, and a staggering 1,225,584 rupees came from grain. And both of these primary products, timber and grain, would have come to northern India directly from the western Nepalese terai. The transformation of the terai from wild frontier to national breadbasket was already well underway by the 1870s. Naturally, this meant an increased clearing of forests and cultivation of grasslands—both of which had a profound effect on the region.

  Of course, this transformation also changed the traditional relationship between the indigenous Tharu and the central government, and hardly in a positive way—it effectively robbed the people of their autonomy and of their stewardship of the land. In the transition of power from Shahs to Ranas, the terai transformed from a frontier to be preserved to a resource to be exploited. The old allegiances between the Tharus and the Shah kings—allegiances forged through decades of collaborative elephant hunting, pioneer farming, and resisting the British—simply did not fit into the Rana vision of a modern Nepal. Accordingly, the relative autonomy and self-management over the lands of the terai that the Tharu had enjoyed became an obstacle to Rana hegemony. And as such, the Tharu themselves went from useful allies in managing the terai to a hurdle standing in the way of political and agricultural reform.

  Steps to remove this obstruction appeared as early as 1854, when the freshly empowered Ranas decided to institute the Muluki Ain, a legal document that imposed a state-decreed caste system upon the Nepalese, and relegated the Tharu to the inferior, impure status of masine matwali, or “enslaved alcohol drinkers”—a legal designation that would persist for more than a century. This affected their rights as citizens, and gave the upper hand to any higher-caste hill dwellers who might happen to deal with them in matters of land or labor. And just seven years after that, in 1861, the Ranas imposed a system of land management called the jimidari. The new local headman, or jimidar, could potentially be a chaudhari from one of the more elite Tharu families, although the title was increasingly being granted to the high-caste Brahmins from the hills, especially friends and relatives of the Ranas. Essentially, it was cronyism in its purest form. As Tharus often did not possess official written title to the lands they used, such tracts of forested or sparsely cultivated land were frequently given away to the entrepreneurial jimidar landlord, under the condition that he convert them to rice paddies and recruit tenants to farm them, thus increasing revenues. “Recruit” may not be precisely
the right word, as the existing kamaiya labor arrangements of the time amounted to what most would call indentured servitude, in some cases even slavery. Land grants to jimidar were usually birta, or hereditary, which fixed this new social structure firmly into place. The old system had broken, and the old allegiances were gone—under the 104-year rule of the Ranas that followed, only three lal mohar land grants would be given to Tharus in the terai, compared with the dozens they had received during the reign of the Shahs. The land was being handed over to the hill-dwelling elite in exchange for political favors, and they in turn could develop it however they chose.

  The effects of this transformation would ripple out, destabilizing the culture, the land, and its animals alike—not as profoundly as the truly ruinous changes that would occur with the chemical eradication of malaria in the 1950s, but damaging nonetheless. A formerly seminomadic people engaged in hunting and gathering, while also practicing only a minimally invasive form of forest agriculture, were for the first time becoming tied to the land as indentured servants—essentially, a rural peasantry aimed not at small-scale subsistence farming, but at producing an exportable and commodified surplus. The diverse forest resources that had traditionally sustained the Tharu became increasingly unnecessary to the Rana, and the wild populations of deer, elephants, and tigers they had helped to keep in balance were pushed aside to make way for farmland. The eventual physical effect of this cultural shift was a breaking up of the formerly continuous ecosystem of the terai, and replacing it with restricted pockets of residual wild habitat. It is true that the Ranas maintained traditional hunting reserves for tigers, including those in Chitwan, Bardia, and Shuklaphanta, and that they engaged in tiger hunting on a massive scale, in elaborate hunts designed to demonstrate their authority, and later, as we well know, to curry favor with foreign guests. And the Tharu would indeed continue to work at the hattisar in such places, patiently awaiting the next royal visit. However, despite their passion for tiger hunting, the Rana rulers seemed more than happy to watch the lands that surrounded the reserves become productive livestock farms and rice paddies. To a dynasty bent on catching up with their colonial British neighbors through economic optimization and agricultural reform, what other purpose could such lands have possibly served?