The Shikari and the Empire: Jim Corbett’s Silence and the Ghosts of Tree Tops—Suchintan Das

“Over wide areas of the United Provinces [Jim Corbett’s] name is familiar to the village folk as that of the man who has brought them relief from the great fear inspired by a cruel and malignant presence in their midst”, wrote Victor Hope, the 2^nd Marquess of Linlithgow and the 22^nd Viceroy of India. The ‘malignant presence’ was that of the occasional old and/or injured tiger or leopard which, having taken a liking to human flesh, had tyrannized the vale and the hamlets of the Garhwal-Kumaon region in the United Provinces. ‘Carpet Sahib’, as Jim was known to the villagers of the terai, is widely remembered today as a hunter par excellence, a gifted naturalist, ardent conservationist, wildlife photographer, friend of the poor, and the teller of thrilling shikar tales. He was born in India, and after him is named the first national park in the country. Venerated as a shikari and celebrated as an author in his later life, Corbett is hardly remembered as a man of the Empire. His name is often uttered in the same breath as Verrier Elwin, another remarkable Englishman who made India his home—without any mention of why he left this home to spend his last years elsewhere.

Corbett was a railway-man through and through, having served as a contractor with the Bengal and North Western Railway at Mokameh Ghat in Bihar for decades. His ambition, however, was to serve in the military—an opportunity he was denied twice: during the South African War of 1899-1902, which involved the detention of hundreds of thousands of Boer and African civilians in internment camps with high mortality rates, and at the start of the First World War. In 1917, his request to join the British Indian Army was finally granted and he was made a captain of the 70^th Kumaon regiment. He was sent to Waziristan in 1919, where the British Empire was up in arms against militias of the Afghan Emirate, which also happened to be the first government to have recognized Bolshevik Russia. Before the war was formally concluded, Corbett resigned from the army, quit his railway job, and settled down in Kaladhungi, Nainital as a landholder and dealer in hardware. He also struck a lasting friendship with the then district commissioner Percy Wyndham, who needed a manager for his farmhouse in Kikafu, Kenya, a role Corbett happily took over and regularly travelled there throughout the 1920s.

From 1930 till 1947, Corbett lived with his sister Maggie in a cottage that he had built in Kaladhungi called ‘Arundel’, hunted man-eaters, and, in the words of his biographer Martin Booth, “walked through [the village of] Choti Haldwani in the evenings, chatted to ‘his’ villagers and continued to act as the dispenser of justice and fair play.” It was an idyllic and exciting life in retirement for someone who was propertied, and decked with coveted honours by the Raj—recipient of the Kaiser-i-Hind medal, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and Companion of the Indian Empire. In 1947, after having planned it for a year in secret, Jim and Maggie left India, anticipating that they would otherwise become ‘second-class citizens—at the bottom of the queue’ in the newly independent republic. Among other things, what motivated the Corbetts to leave the country they had lived in since their birth and so dearly loved (Jim Corbett’s semi-autobiographical work My India testifies to this love) was the fear of the impending loss of white privilege. They migrated to the familiar Kenya, still very much within the imperial grip, where another branch of their family had settled.

It is in imperial Kenya that our story begins. Jim and Maggie lived in a cottage called ‘Paxtu’, in the grounds of the Hotel Outspan, in Nyeri, Kenya. Corbett’s biographer Martin Booth writes:

Eric and Lady Bettie Sherbrooke Walker, who owned the Outspan Hotel, had built what amounted to a unique game observation platform some miles away on the edge of the forests. Constructed over thirty feet up in the branches of a massive ficus tree and reached by a stout but uneven ladder, it consisted of a rough and ready tree house with an extensive observation platform overlooking a water hole and a saltlick…The accommodation was spartan: a dining room with wood-burning stove, three bedrooms, a chemical toilet, a tiny room for the resident hunter-cum-guard, a room for the staff and the long viewing balcony equipped with comfortably padded seats. To reach the place, one had to walk through the bush for a little over two miles, chaperoned by an armed hunter. The wildlife was the action, and millionaires, film stars, and wealthy tourists went there. Jim, too, often visited Treetops either as an honorary guide or as a member of the photographing public. His nephew, Tom Corbett, was one of the semi-resident hunters.

Corbett loved Tree Tops, both for its incredible location and for being conceptually similar to the Indian hunting platform—the machan—where he had spent many sleepless nights, waiting for the man-eater to arrive.

His short book Tree Tops, which was also his last, begins on a similar note of anxious wait. Only this time he was waiting not for the royalty of the forest but that of the British Empire. In his own words,

PRINCESS ELIZABETH and the Duke of Edinburgh had arrived at the Royal Lodge, Sagana, twenty miles from Nyeri, two days before, and on [the morning of February 5, 1953] I had just finished shaving when I received a breath-taking telephone message informing me that Her Royal Highness had been graciously pleased to invite me to accompany her to Tree Tops.

The day before this invitation arrived, Jim and Maggie had gone to Sagana with the intention of watching the Duke in action in a Polo match, but instead ended up keeping watch on a deep ravine, whose proximity to the ground was making Corbett feel uneasy. He does not explain his trepidation but merely offers a clue regarding the nature of the unnamed danger that was on his mind:

Though a state of emergency had not up to that time been declared, security measures were being taken, for the unrest had started and there had been in the neighbourhood a number of cases of arson about which the press, for obvious reasons, had kept silent.

To the reader, ‘emergency’ and ‘unrest’ signify tension—which, though not squarely identified, permeate the narrative quite decisively.

From the balcony of Tree Tops, Corbett, the Duke, and the Princess watched a herd of elephants quenching their thirst at the waterhole, rewarded a female baboon that had approached the balcony with a large sweet potato, and filmed a fight between two bucks, which ended with one of them mortally injuring the other, before retiring indoors for dinner. Corbett goes on to offer a curious account of an accident that took place next:

While coffee was being made on the table, the spirit lamp caught fire, and was swept off the table on to the grass-matted floor. As frantic efforts were being made to stamp out the blaze the African boy who had served dinner unhurriedly came forward, extinguished the flames with a wet cloth, retired to his cubbyhole behind the stove, and a minute later replaced the lamp refilled and relit on the table. Not long after, Tree Tops was raided and that very efficient boy was carried off, together with all the bedding, provisions, cooking utensils, and other movable articles in the hut, and it is left to conjecture whether the boy’s bones are bleaching in the African sun, or whether he became a terrorist.

Corbett again does not mention who raided Tree Tops and carried off the houseboy, or why on earth he might become a ‘terrorist’. The reader familiar with the late colonial history of Kenya knows what he is alluding to, but one who is not aware of it would be baffled by this aside that is full of such grave possibilities yet replete with a ghostly silence.

One has to read the text almost contrapuntally to ascertain the silent presence of an insurgency that did not just provide a backdrop to Corbett’s narrative but conditioned and impregnated it with its tensions throughout. In fact, Nahashon Mureithi, one of the porter-guides who had accompanied the royal party to Tree Tops, eventually joined the Mau Mau rebellion a few years later. Why Corbett did not even mention the rebels except in a very roundabout way in this book can be explained by referring to a short passage from Caroline Elkins’ book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya:

While the Mau Mau insurgents claimed they were fighting for ithaka na wiyathi, or land and freedom, few people in the Western world took seriously the demands of these so-called savages. The Mau Mau were said to be criminals or gangsters bent on terrorizing the local European population, and certainly not freedom fighters.

Corbett’s silence, it can be argued, was therefore nothing out of the ordinary: it was the Empire-loyalist’s steadfast refusal to recognize the anti-colonial liberation struggle as a legitimate response to oppression. His narrative, therefore, is punctuated by an anxiety about the possible end of Empire and the consequent loss of white privilege—a fate he had so zealously avoided by escaping from India on the eve of independence.

As in the South African War of 1899-1902, in which Corbett had unsuccessfully offered to fight, the ‘Kenyan Emergency’ of the 1950s saw the British army detaining 1.5million people (almost the entire Kikuyu population) suspected of having taken the Mau Mau oath, in internment camps that were comparable with Nazi concentration camps in terms of brutality. As John Nottingham, a former colonial officer in Kenya remarked in an interview with Elkins, “the British hated Mau Mau for the precise reason that it made them behave so badly. How else could they rationalize their behavior?” That the British government could not possibly justify its actions in Kenya is quite evident from the thousands of missing files pertaining to the Mau Mau counter-insurgency operation—what else can the vacant archive of an otherwise meticulously record-keeping empire indicate if not guilt and shame. Corbett’s entry in the Tree Tops register, however, did record a shift in power, not in Kenya—independence was still a decade away—but in Buckingham Palace, for the ailing King George VI had passed away that night:

For the first time in the history of the world a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess, and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen—God bless her.

Corbett ends Tree Tops with both hope and lament, which seem to be typical of the painful process of decolonization in Africa:

ALL that now remains of the ficus tree and the hut honoured by Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, and visited for a quarter of a century by thousands of people from all parts of the world, is a dead and blackened stump standing in a bed of ashes. From those ashes a new Tree Tops will one day arise, and from another balcony a new generation will view other birds and animals. But for those of us who knew the grand old tree and the friendly hut, Tree Tops has gone for ever.

Corbett’s hope was for an imperial revival, and there was no place for Africans in his vision, except as houseboys attending the white elites or as ghosts of insurgents hammered on the anvil of the Empire. Such a vision is untenable in today’s world. Caroline Elkins served as an expert witness for a legal claim filed by Mutua and five other Mau Mau camp survivors against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2009. An out-of-court settlement was reached, with the British government issuing an official apology in 2013, releasing £20 million in reparations, and unveiling a monument in 2015 to commemorate those detained and tortured in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park.

Although Corbett’s imperialist vision is seemingly incongruous with the ethos of such reconciliation, elements of it can still be creatively redeemed. The writing on the wall is that the conservation of wildlife, in order to be successful, has to rely on community initiative and continuous dialogue. Instead of being shaped by imperialist attitudes of imposition and exclusion, it must be guided by anti-imperialist values of cooperation and solidarity. The ficus tree is an important constituent of the Kikuyu sacred landscape. In Facing Mount Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta recalls how the white settlers had deliberately felled all but one ficus tree in his neighbourhood. This kind of terraforming, closely followed by the introduction of monocultures, is a hallmark of settler colonialism. These are the same practices that have historically had a devastating impact on landscapes and the climate. We understand this now better than ever. The questions of cultural and ecological survival are one and the same. The lesson of reading Tree Tops is therefore a simple one, and echoes across different colonial contexts: the ficus tree must grow in Kenya and the olive must thrive in Palestine.