India Discovered (35 page)

Mr Hatton saith, elephants when they gender, the male gets upon the female as a horse doth a mare and putting his yard under the female’s belly, hee bends it back againe (it having a joynt in it ⅓ part from the end), which he puts into the female into that part which distinguisheth her sex, which lies under her belly; which was a wonder formerly how they should engender, some affirming it was as woman to man, and others that the female kneeled down etc.

Marshall was on the right track; but the theory of their mating
face to face survived well into the nineteenth century and, as late as 1903, a paper on the subject was published by the London Zoological Society.

Like Hodgson, many Englishmen of an earlier generation had formed their own menageries. Jones himself, with his tiger cub, his herds of sheep and goats and his tortoise, had something of the sort. William Carey, another great Sanskritist and the promoter
of the Bengali language, kept a small zoo, the Duke of Wellington kept and studied cheetahs, and his brother Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General, founded the first official menagerie at Government House in 1804. Wellesley attached great importance to natural history and urged the East India Company to provide funds for its research. ‘Many of the most common quadrupeds and birds of this country
are either altogether unknown to the naturalist or have been imperfectly and inaccurately described. The illustration and improvement of that important branch of natural history & is worthy of the munificence and liberality of the East India Company and must necessarily prove a most acceptable service to the world.’ He commissioned a magnificent series of some 3000 drawings of plants, birds
and animals, and he installed the indefatigable Dr Francis Buchanan, late of the Mysore Survey, as superintendent of the menagerie. Buchanan did noble work collecting and describing hundreds of species; but, with his going on leave and Wellesley’s recall, the initial impetus failed. The East India Company had not been impressed by the Governor-General’s scheme and the Government House menagerie degenerated
into a fairground.

A further stumbling block to the development of the scientific study of India’s fauna was the, for once, far from encouraging attitude of Sir William Jones. Nothing shows more clearly the great man’s influence over the course of indological studies and nothing better exemplifies his extraordinarily humane outlook. In his tenth Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society he
stated his position plainly.

Could the figure, instincts and qualities be ascertained & without giving pain to the object of our examination, few studies would afford us more solid instruction, or more exquisite delight; but I never could learn by what right nor conceive with what feeling, a naturalist can occasion the misery of an innocent bird, and leave its young, perhaps, to perish in a cold nest, because it has gay plumage; or deprive even a butterfly of its natural enjoyment, because it has the misfortune to be rare or beautiful.

No doubt this deep compassion had much to do with the reverence for life which pervades all Indian religions and cultures and which Jones had imbibed so deeply. Certainly, it was never more nobly expressed; and, given the tragic consequences of
ignoring it, one might regret that Indian zoology ever progressed beyond the menagerie stage.

But, to Hodgson’s credit, he at least seems not to have confounded science and sport. As in all his other ‘amusements’ he was entirely self-taught, but he brought to the examination of every species a minute attention to detail and structure. This could only be satisfied by the dissection and analysis
of dead specimens. But he was also a great field naturalist, fully conscious of the importance of observing behaviour and habitat, and an outstanding collector. His menagerie included some of the rarest Himalayan goats and pheasants, and he is the only man known to have tamed an Indian jackal. In 1833 he attempted to send some of his collection to the Zoological Society in London. The mortality
rate amongst sea-borne zoo specimens in those days was appalling. An Indian gaur (or bison) sent by the Asiatic Society had just perished at sea, and a rhinoceros in the same cargo had first created havoc on deck and then, ‘a storm coming on, the captain thought it only prudent to throw him overboard’. Hodgson’s specimens fared no better.

One of the deer leapt overboard, the other knocked itself to death against the bars of its cage. The pheasants and pigeons lived until the vessel got into the colder latitudes, when they died, one after the other.

In all, his zoological studies resulted in 127 articles, most of them published in the Asiatic Society’s journals. His first, in 1826, was an account of ‘the Chiru, or Unicorn, of the Himalayas’ and his last, in 1858, the description of
a new species of Himalayan mole. Long-legged thrushes, cat-toed plantigrades, Tibetan badgers, and the fifteen species of Nepalese woodpecker – all were grist to his insatiable researches. His drawings, now in the London Zoological Society, form the most complete folio of Himalayan fauna and his collection of specimens, now in the Natural History Museum, is said to number 10,500. He was the first
to describe some thirty-nine new species of mammal and about 150 new birds.

The question of claiming and naming new species was a particularly sore point. Hodgson was a stickler for precise description and careful identification. He hesitated to proclaim any new discovery until he had studied at least two or three specimens. But some of his contemporaries were less scrupulous. ‘If any person
who chances to lay hold upon a single shrivelled skin may forthwith announce a new animal,’ wrote Hodgson in 1836, ‘the real student of nature must be content to leave what is called discovery to the mere nomenclator; and the science must continue to groan under an increasing weight of fictitious species.’ Three years later he was even more bitter and, in announcing a new species of cuckoo, pointed
the finger even at the zoological societies.

Amongst the numerous new birds forwarded by me to London some years back, when I was young enough to imagine that learned societies existed solely for the disinterested promotion of science, was a very singular form of
cucuculus.
Unceremoniously as many of my other novelties have been appropriated, this one, I believe, still remains undescribed, and I therefore beg to present a description and sketch of it.

Hodgson’s successor in the fields of zoology and ornithology was Edward Blyth, curator of the Asiatic Society’s Natural History Museum from 1841–63. If Hodgson was the Jones of ornithology, Blyth was its Prinsep. As a struggling pharmacist in the London borough of Tooting he had conceived a passion for studying and dissecting birds.
When the pharmacy failed he sailed for Calcutta and the ill-paid, over-worked and underrated post of museum curator. And in this humble position he remained until, after twenty years, his health finally collapsed. He contributed some forty erudite papers to the Society’s journal and catalogued their entire collection. But more important was the stimulus he provided to every would-be naturalist in
India. Like Prinsep he was an inveterate correspondent. To sportsmen and animal lovers alike he sent out a call for specimens; and soon, from the four corners of India, stuffed birds and skins, drawings and descriptions, came flooding in. Working round the clock, he acknowledged them, catalogued them, published them – and asked for more. He became a walking encyclopaedia, ridiculed by some but revered
by those, including Charles Darwin, who shared his love for pure science.

The catalogue of the Society’s collection was incomplete when he was forced to retire. It was taken over by T. C. Jerdon, a doctor in the Madras army. In the 1860s Jerdon published the first standard handbooks to
The Birds of India
and
The Mammals of India.
Twenty years later a further series on
The Fauna of India
was commissioned
by the government with the geologist W. T. Blanford, as editor. Jerdon recorded some 242 mammals but by Blanford’s time this tally had risen to over 4000. However, the decline in the numbers and distribution of the more distinctive species was already evident. Probably Indian zoology owed as much to the improvement in firearms as to the example of Hodgson or the encouragement of Blyth.
As the matchlock gave way to the breech-loader and the breech-loader to the express rifle, sport and science grew in popularity prodigiously. Sadly, in India as elsewhere, no distinction was made between the two, and Jerdon, for instance, could devote much of his entry on
sus indicus
to a lyrical description of pig-sticking.

The accounts of men like Tod, Buchanan and Mackenzie who, in their different
roles, marched and counter-marched across the subcontinent in the early years of the nineteenth century, show plainly that tigers were a terrible curse. Buchanan records whole villages and crops deserted because of their depredations. Alexander tells the same story of the area around Ajanta and as late as the 1860s Blanford notes that nearly a thousand people a year were killed by tigers
in Bengal alone. Leopards, too, could be just as deadly; one is on record as killing 200 people in two years. And these, of course, were only the man-eaters – perhaps one in a hundred of the total; but all preyed on domestic cattle.

The government had instituted a system of rewards, which could be as much as fifty rupees for a tiger, to encourage native huntsmen; the sporting
sahibs
needed no
encouragement. But by Jerdon’s time, the 1860s, this had apparently had little effect; ‘the tiger’s numbers appear to be only slightly diminished’. By the 1880s it was a different story. Blanford noted that ‘within the last twenty or thirty years the number of these destructive animals has been greatly reduced, and they have now become scarce, or have even in some cases disappeared entirely, in parts
of the country where they were formerly common’. Blanford evidently did not consider this a matter for concern, rather for congratulation. Twenty years later Lord Curzon, like his predecessors, would religiously observe the rituals of the ceremonial tiger shoot. Although no man understood better than Curzon the need to conserve India’s monuments, it is doubtful whether any Anglo-Indian appreciated
the need for conserving her wildlife.

The Indian lion, found by Tod in Rajasthan and reported by Heber as far north as the Punjab and by Cunningham as far east as Bharhut, was by Blanford’s day ‘verging on extinction’ and restricted to the Gir forest of Saurashtra where alone it still survives – just. The rhino, which was met by the emperor Babur on the Indus and still found in the Terai in Jerdon’s
day was, by Blanford’s time, reduced to just 473 specimens, all in Assam. Even the killing of elephants was for a time subject to a government reward. The idea that the country’s fauna was as important a part of its national heritage as Sanskrit, or that it had inspired as many artistic masterpieces as the Buddha story, seems not to have occurred to either naturalists or orientalists.

A happier
tale by far is that of the discovery of India’s flora. To a trading concern like the East India Company the natural productions of the country, and the extent to which they could be improved and augmented, were matters of vital concern. It was the spices of the Malabar coast that had attracted the first Europeans and it was opium, indigo, cotton, tea and jute which successively financed the British
raj. Botanical studies thus had great practical and commercial value as well as the purely scientific, and they were funded accordingly. Sir William and Lady Jones might adopt botany as ‘the loveliest and most copious division in the science of nature’ but they also watched with approval the founding of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens in 1786. A similar institution was already in existence in
Madras and it was from there that in 1793 William Roxburgh came to Calcutta to take over as superintendent. Roxburgh, ‘the Indian Linnaeus’, ‘the father of Indian botany’, was, like Francis Buchanan, a Scot and originally a surgeon in the Company’s navy. This was of course no coincidence. The best medical schools were in Scotland and herbalism was still an important part of medicine; botany was in
fact included in the medical curriculum. But whereas Buchanan became essentially a roving field-worker, collecting and surveying his way across Burma, Mysore, Nepal and Bihar, Roxburgh was a scientist and horticulturalist, studying, cataloguing, laying out his gardens, and experimenting with new varieties.

During twenty years he transformed the Calcutta garden into the most extensive and scientifically
organized in Asia. Like the great banyan tree in its midst, which steadily put out more branches and roots till it covered an area a quarter of a mile in circumference, the gardens grew under Roxburgh’s care from a collection of 300 species to one of 3500. For the purposes of study he instituted a herbarium, and trained a number of Indian artists in the production of scientific plant drawings,
a field in which the Indian’s supposed genius for portraying minute detail could be put to good use. By the time Roxburgh retired in 1814 some 2500 plates had been completed. There were also two books in manuscript, one a catalogue of the garden which included at least 500 species new to science, and the other an unfinished
Flora lndica.

This last was eventually edited and published by William
Carey, the orientalist, and Nathanial Wallich. After a brief period in which Francis Buchanan took charge of the Calcutta garden, Wallich became the new superintendent and held the post for thirty years. He had originally come to India as surgeon at the Danish settlement of Serampore just upriver from Calcutta. But in 1813, when the British at last found a pretext for ousting the Danes, Wallich
was taken prisoner and then, in recognition of his botanical knowledge, rehabilitated. Though perhaps less erudite than Roxburgh, he proved an even greater traveller and collector than Buchanan, visiting Nepal, Singapore, Penang and Burma as well as all the more botanically interesting regions of India. His greatest contribution to science, though, was the distribution in Europe of his herbarium,
numbering some 8000 different species, together with vast quantities of seeds and plants. Joseph Hooker declared this ‘the most valuable contribution of the kind ever made to science’. In one fell swoop Wallich made available to the botanists of Europe the flora of ‘the most varied botanical area on the face of the globe’.