28 January 2014, 02:13 PM IST
"Oh, he's so beautiful," said Bunny, from elephant-back.
I wouldn't have described him as beautiful. He looked proto-historic, a refugee from before the dawn of time; a huge grey rock come to life, with stubby legs; slender, flicking ears; and deep-set eyes covered with long lashes. He was a full-grown male rhino, the first we'd ever met outside a zoo.
We were in the Kaziranga national park, in Assam. Kaziranga was part of the series I was doing for The Paper on wildlife sanctuaries.
A couple of weeks previously, we'd been in Jaldapara, in North Bengal. We'd stayed in a wooden cabin in the heart of the jungle.
The forest officer at Jaldapara had invited us to dinner at his cottage, some four kilometres away.
"I'll send my elephant to pick you up at seven," he'd said. It had made a quotable quote for the story I'd written.
Tragically, it was a story too much of which was written in blood. Poaching was already a full-fledged growth industry. At the park office in Kaziranga a forest ranger opened a locked safe and took out a bundle wrapped in jute sacking stained a rusty red. The ranger opened the sacking and revealed a triangular lump of flesh and compacted hair, jagged at the base where it had been hacked off from where it had originally grown: it was the horn of a rhinoceros, prized for its supposedly aphrodisiac qualities.
"They chopped the horn while it was still living. It bled to death. For once, we managed to catch the people who did it," said the ranger.
This was the other, unromanticised side of India's fast-disappearing wilderness and wildlife. The conflict was not just between a rapidly expanding human population – with its increasing need for cultivable land – and wildlife habitats; the real conflict was between two world views: conservation and progress, or what was seen as progress. It was an asymmetrical conflict. Despite champions like Billy Arjan Singh, conservation – even then – didn't stand much of a chance. Progress – or what passed by the name of progress – was an unstoppable juggernaut, cutting down forests, swallowing up grasslands, leaving its smouldering footprint on scorched earth.
The hacked-off horn of the rhino I saw in Kaziranga wasn't just a pathetic exhibit in a case of poaching. It was a memento of a much larger, more tragic despoliation. I thought of the thumb of Eklavya, cut off by himself as guru dakshina to Dronacharya who feared that the tribal would outdo the high-caste Arjuna in archery.
In the rhino's horn, I saw what is often called progress as civilisation's revenge on all those, human and animal, who inhabit the forests that were humankind's first home.
That losing war still continues, 30 years later. As this is written, a mobile service provider reminds us that there are only 1,411 tigers left in the country. A beach resort has been started on an island in the Andamans where the stone-age Jarawa live; there are only some three hundred of the tribe left, and it is feared that contact with outsiders might lead to their physical and cultural extinction.
Tough luck for the Jarawa. For Eklavya. For the rhino.
"He's so beautiful," Bunny had said, on elephant-back.
jug.suraiya@timesgroup.com
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