By Sarvajit Mukerji
Jim Corbett was born on 25 July 1885, a full hundred and fifty years ago. I vividly recall listening enthralled to my father reading aloud The Man–eating Leopard of Rudraprayag to us on the veranda of Alma House. No more than eight years old at the time, dozens of leopards seemed to me to be prowling in the darkness beyond the circle of warm lamplight that illuminated only part of the shadowy veranda. Corbett’s narration brought alive the forested ridge above Alma House for us, and we learnt to identify oak, birch and cypress. He opened our ears to the cry of the blue magpie and the chatter of the babbler, and our eyes to lush green undergrowth that signalled the secret presence of water. The timeless enchantment of the hills and deep empathy for those who dwell there are gifts bestowed by Jungle Lore and My India. And though Alma House and the towering ridge above it are just memories now, Corbett has remained an inalienable part of our thinking and the language that links us to the world around. Yet remembering Jim Corbett on 25 July 2025, I did not reach out for the iconic memoire, Maneaters of Kumaon nor for Martin Booth’s exhaustive biography or the more intimate one written by DC Kala – rather I turned to Stephen Alter’s In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett.
This elegant triptych of a novel ‘about Jim Corbett’ presents the reader with three vignettes of Corbett: as a schoolboy in Nainital, a shikari in mythical Mayaghat, and finally as an exile in Nyeri, Kenya. I use the word ‘exile’ even though the Corbetts, Jim and his sister Maggie, the last survivors of the thirteen children of a family that had made India their home for three generations voluntarily left its shores to live out their last days in faraway Kenya. While the first two chapters of the novel, ‘The Fern Collector’ and ‘The Man-eater of Mayaghat’ are fast paced narrations about two different incidents with some very contemporary concerns, it is the last chapter ‘Until the Day Break’ which is the most memorable. The title refers to the text engraved on the Corbetts’ tomb in St Peter’s Church cemetery, Nyeri, which is identical to the inscription on their mother, Mary Jane’s grave in Nainital. This tiny fact itself is indicative of the thought of home that must have haunted Jim and his sister Maggie in the highlands of Kenya. ‘Until the Day Break’ is markedly different from the two earlier chapters as author Stephen Alter gives the reader an entry into the mind of the aging shikari turned conservator, Jim Corbett. As the narrative oscillates between Kenya and India, present and past, nostalgia and acceptance, we get an imaginative answer to the question, ‘why did Corbett leave India?’ Corbett’s deep love for his natal country India is amply evident from his books, and Alter subtly unravels several strands where fiction and fact fuse, to tease out an answer. Queen Elizabeth did meet Corbett in Kenya before ascending the throne, but Alter imagines her putting the question to Corbett, why did he leave India? Alter suggests reasons that follow from what he imagines Corbett to have experienced as India inched towards independence, for example the forest fires that had been started by disgruntled villages. Every reader of Corbett’s books is aware that Corbett is not Tarzan or Phantom. He is never the all-powerful white man delivering cowering, pygmy natives from malevolent menacing dragons. Corbett comes across as someone vulnerable, subject to physical ailments and weakness, sometimes scared and always respectful of local people and customs. Alter picks up these little hints scattered throughout his works to delineate the aging man. Most subtle and sensitive is the portrayal of Corbett’s memory of Kaiyu, the fearless tiger-woman of Mayaghat. In the novel, he destroys the manuscript in which he had narrated the painful events in Mayaghat which had laid bare the rapacious face of imperialism for him while also revealing his tenderness for the enigmatic Kaiyu who is tragically shot dead in an uprising against a tyrannical official. Though Jim has left behind most of his trophies and belongings in India, the photograph of Kaiyu carrying a pot of water on her head has travelled with him to Kenya. But she is a part of his life which must always be relegated to silence. He does not share it even with Maggie. Such are the silences that lie even between persons who have lived together since birth. Corbett merely tells Maggie that this is a photograph of a village woman.
There are other mysteries and absences in this last chapter. Corbett had imbibed many of the beliefs of the people of Kumaon. He grew up in Nainital and Kaladhungi, speaking the language of the people, sharing their food and faith, sometimes accepting and sometimes sceptical of their belief systems. But at all times, he retained an abiding awareness of the uncanny. While what is called ‘the sixth sense’ may be a code of survival twisted into our genes, the unexplained also does happen. Why did the camera not capture the leopard that was fully visible to Corbett himself? Who set the terrified goat tied up as a bait free, he ruminates while watching the footage of a leopard he thought he had photographed. While Maggie wonders about the happiness on Kaiyu’s face in another photograph, Jim ponders over an inexplicable absence. Perhaps technology can also trick someone after all.
Are these resonances and parallels between human beings and between human and other than human so improbable? Cindy’s story mirrors that of the pregnant female leopard Tom shot, Kaiyu is killed as she protests against intruders despoiling her forest home much like the man-eating tigress of Mayaghat. These correspondences are as mysterious as the attraction Jim feels for Kaiyu. He recognises her as though she is someone, perhaps a goddess, he met somewhere in the deep shadowy jungle in his boyhood. They share the language of the forest. Such mysteries have been celebrated since time immemorial, and the second song of Solomon that appears ‘In Memoriam’ at the end of the novel resonates like a mighty recessional— ‘Until the daybreak, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains….’
