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Dead Leopards

By Rachna Reddy

I saw a dead leopard. It’s mouth rested on a brick. Wet blood seeped out of its nostrils.

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It was shot in 1966. It returned to life when I found a set of old family snapshots.

Three-hundred-and-twenty-five dead leopards were found in India this year, 2011, according to the Wildlife Protection Society of India—166 of them seized from poachers. (Compare to the nation’s symbolic tiger’s 58 mortalities, most by poaching. Though 58 is a tragic proportion if one considers that wild tigers number roughly 3,000 across the globe. More exist in captivity in Texas). Leopards are perhaps the most versatile of large felines. Human-sized cats, they thrive in deserts, savannas, mountains, and jungles. Though their range is still wide—Asia, Africa and the Middle East—they are few in number. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which monitors animal populations, considers leopards “Near Threatened,” worldwide. Indian leopards are “increasingly rare” outside small, isolated protected areas.

I found more photos after the first. The leopard, a male, was puppeted into several poses with formal-faced men, a composition that echoed colonial portraits of aristocrats with tiger corpses and ancient murals from Maharaja’s palaces. Powerful men standing with their conquered trophies.

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Indian tigers have been victims of pride and ostentation for centuries. A single Maharaja is reported to have slaughtered 1, 150 tigers on his leisure hunts. This is not a legend, simply his tally in 1965, according to naturalist George Schaller. Fewer tigers may exist in all of India today. And this ruler is not exceptional. Schaller wrote of the Maharaja of Udaipur slaying more than 1,000 tigers and other kings stacking hundreds. Indian royalty were not the only ones to take part in the sport. In eleven days in 1911, the visiting King George V killed 39 of the striped cats. The “adventurers” also slew 18 rhinoceros and four bears. The one-horned rhino now lives only in protected areas and, like tigers, is extinct on most of the Indian continent.

In the photograph above, the man dressed in all white is M. Naryan Reddy, an advocate and a former member of Parliament—a relic of the era when India first gained independence, or, to me,

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Sunket Thathaya, my great uncle from a village called Sunket. He is married to my grandfather’s cousin. Here he stands, black hair parted, thirty years prior to any memory I had of him. With him are a guide, a college administrator and, on the far left, another lawyer, M. Ganga Reddy who shot the leopard, on the grounds of the Nizamsagar Irrigation Project, 60 miles from the town of Nizamabad in Andra Pradesh, India. The photographer is my grandfather. Sunket Thathaya had thrown a party for him.

It was my grandparents’ first visit to India after moving to the United States in 1959 and the first time anyone had met their children. “When I got up in the morning they said, ‘Well there’s a leopard. Some people went hunting in the night and there’s a leopard,’” my grandfather, Thathaya, told me. “So I went and took pictures right away.”

In this photograph, the back of the leopard’s feet look soft, like kitten pads. He is a small, pathetic creature compared to leopards I’ve seen alive, not in India, but in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, one of the largest protected areas in the world, known for its high leopard densities.

When my thathaya was small, he saw many creatures in the forests of Andra Pradesh. The sambar deer, a shy antelope called a neilgar (gar means “cow,” and Indian cows are small and soft-eyed), who do not appear in Rudyard Kipling’s cast. India was once filled with animals, as strange, beautiful and mysterious as its fabrics and architecture; some remain, though several do not or will not by the next century: elephants, wolves, jackals, vultures, mongoose, striped hyenas, sloth bears, tigers, mane-less lions, cheetahs, rhinoceros, cobras. Thathaya went to primary school in a valley. On some days, when the boys would play outside, they would see something, sitting on those hilltops, watching them—the leopards.

“In those forests we could see deer, pythons, leopards in some areas. Now those forests are gone. You cannot see pythons. Even deer are rare. But in childhood days, when you drive on the road at night you’ll see tigers crossing the road.” He told me that in the Adilibadh District, where my grandmother, Ammama, was born, was a thick forest of tigers, leopards and the other animals he had known.

I asked my Ammama whether she saw leopards in her village.

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“No I didn’t see them, I just saw the deer beti, coming around the house. But people used to tell me because we kept the cattles outside. So they used to come there and take cattle.”

Her cousin brother hunted for deer and antelope when wealthy city friends came to visit. They went by car or bullock cart. He never brought the carcasses back to the village whole, so she didn’t see the animals, even dead. She saw skinless meat; they would dry it and pound it to make keema.

“I didn’t even see the leopard that Thathaya took the picture,” Ammama said. Unlike deer and antelope, tigers and leopards are not killed for meat. In fact, meat is sometimes used to lure the cats. Landowners would use live calves or poisoned cattle carcasses as bait.

After my thathaya took the picture, the laywer who shot the leopard had it skinned, cleaned and prepared. Then, he presented it as a gift to my grandfather, the guest, who took it back to Seattle with him.

When I was small and went to India I sat on the lap of my father’s cousin. He told me stories of adventure in the jungle because I loved animals. Like The Time He Shot an Elephant. He removed one hand from my hair and the other from his whisky glass (which wobbled on the sofa arm) and cocked an imaginary rifle.

“A BULL!” he shouted.

“Eek! Don’t shoot the elly-fant!” I said.

“Standing there. In front of my jeep— going to charge! He was about to kill us! I had to. Don’t look so sad.” A squeezing of my chin and bottom lip.

It wasn’t true, of course. My pednana had never killed an elephant. I doubt now that he had even seen one. He liked to tell tall stories, my father said. Recently, I wrote to him and asked him to tell me true stories about hunting in India. He emailed me back:

The few things I am aware and remember from my childhood is as: During the early or mid-sixties, the villagers and jungle guards brought to my dad’s notice that a tiger

was frequenting certain parts of the jungle. My dad and uncle prepared for the hunt. They got a machan tied on a treetop, close to the spot near a small water body where a previous kill of a sambar (type of big antelope) was made by the Tiger. A bait in the form of a calf was tied up to lure the tiger. They spent many frustrating nights for the tiger, which never turned up. Fed up, my uncle did not turn up on a day when my dad went alone with a few assistants.

To his luck or bad luck, a leopard turned up smelling the calf. My dad got the prize. We don't have the photo of the same. This is one big incident. This happened in our own jungle in Warangal district.

In an another incident, in my uncle's village, (E. Jitender Reddy) in Warangal District again, my uncle, out of boredom, one day, after dinner went in a bullock cart with two helpers and a heavy duty lantern to get a few hares, wild boars and other small game. They were abundantly available within a few kilometers from the village. To his utter surprise he spotted a full-grown tiger in the light of the lantern, took a shot with his 12-bore, and got him. For many years I wore a pendant made out of the poor tiger’s claws. Feel bad now.

Nowadays, regularly we read in the papers that leopards are coming into the urban areas, due to human encroachment into their habitat, due to population explosion. During the last two years, two leopards were trapped in Hyderabad city by the forest department officials. One incident happened in Jubilee Hills a couple of years back. There is too much pressure on the habitat of the cats, mostly due to urban expansion and pressure on agricultural land.

If you can make use of the above, please do. Good luck and keep in touch.

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Several weeks later, I went home, to Michigan, for Thanksgiving break. It was the end of it and we ate at a restaurant on the river. Other doctors (besides my mother and father) were at a nearby table but they and my parents ignored each other until someone got up to use the restroom and waved.

We discussed our visit to India this summer. I asked if we would see my pednana, the “elephant-hunter.” My father replied that no one knew where he was because he didn’t want to see anyone. “But he emailed me.” “He emailed you?” said my mother. “How do you even have his email? I don’t even have his email,” said my father. “You gave it to me.” My brother started laughing. He spat a bit of water. “I gave you Pednana’s email,” my father said, and without a first name in front of it he meant my true Pednana, his own elder brother (nana means “father” in Telugu and peda means “bigger). I had never talked to that Pednana about animals. ` I understood now why he mentioned Jubilee Hills, the wealthy neighborhood in Hyderabad where he lived. My Pednana’s acknowledgement of his attitudinal shift—regret at wearing the claw pendant—struck me. Not only because I have a necklace with tiger claws on it (it was a gift from my great-grandmother, to my mother), but also because such consideration for non-human life was unexpected from a man of his age, status and life. Yet it is precisely this consideration that is necessary for the future of all wild things, which, even if one is only concerned with human interests are required for survival.

When I emailed my Sunket Thathaya, who is now eighty-one, I received a different response. His explanation of the events surrounding the photograph lacked the recognition of human responsibility that Pednana had expressed:

In our part Leopards live in hillocks (small hills) in the vicinity of villages. They come out in the night

time to the nearby villages to kill cattle and goats. So they were hunted in those days at the request of villagers.

In this particular case the aggrieved villagers requested Sri. M. Ganga Reddy, advocate, and his friends to visit their area to hunt for a leopard which was killing their cattle.

Sri. M. Ganga Reddy had shot the Leopard with his rifle. The villagers were relieved when it was killed. At present the leopards are not seen near any village and there is no threat to villagers these days.

Love, Thathaiah.

The “threat” he spoke of was not an untruth. Leopards do kill cattle; they even kill humans the way they kill cattle— in the dark of night, with fatal bites to the neck. One man-eater, the Panar Leopard, was rumored to have consumed as many as 400 people in the early 20th century before it was killed. Man-eaters like the Panar, however, are rare. “The actual risk posed by any individual is small,” wrote animal behaviorist Hans Kruuk, in Hunter and Hunted: Relationships Between Carnivores and People.

As for the cattle, might fences protect as well as shotguns? And as my thathaya told me, it was not without consent and help from villagers that wealthy city dwellers or landowners could drive into the forest and shoot the cats. Why did the village have a leopard problem precisely at the time my grandfather—an educated aeronautical engineer and the only person in his family to work in America—returned to visit India? Why did his relatives want the trophy then? And why didn’t they

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take my grandfather out hunting? Why did those men want to kill the leopard? I wished I could ask these questions, but email was too formal, my great uncle knew me too little, and he was too old and too separate from this time to bother with rights and wrongs. And before he was too old, he was a politician.

Jim Corbett, the legendary hunter of man-eating tigers, was born in British India at the end of the nineteenth century. During his life, Corbett gained respect for nature, and resolved to kill only proven man-eaters, which were a large problem in his lifetime—an era when human populations first exploded in India. It was Corbett who slew the Panar Leopard in 1910. Indians consider him a hero, and today, Jim Corbett National Park encompasses 1,318 square kilometers of jungles, lakes, rivers, marshes and grasslands. Still, it contains only about 150 tigers. Their numbers were much lower, at 44, forty years ago and the animals continue to be poached.

In the 1920s, Corbett began photographing and filming the predators he once shot. In his first book, Man-eaters of Kumaon, he wrote:

I think that all sportsmen who have had the opportunity of indulging in the twin sports of shooting tigers with a camera and shooing them with a rifle agree with me that the difference between these two forms of sport is great, if not greater, than the taking of a trout on a light tackle in a snow-fed mountain stream, and the killing of a fish on a fixed rod on the sun-baked bank of a tank.

Apart from the difference in cost between shooting with a camera and shooting with a rifle, and the beneficial effect it has on our rapidly decreasing stock of tigers, the taking of a good photograph gives far more pleasure to the sportsman than the acquisition of a trophy; and further, while the photograph is of interest to all lovers of wild life, the trophy is only of interest to the individual who acquired it.

I opened the leopard skin at my grandparents’ apartment in Michigan. It was in a suitcase, from 1966, wrapped in plastic, next to my grandmother’s wedding sari. Dried eyes, closed. Lashes had broken off. Its claws were all there, long stitches around them, binding the skin flat to navy cloth.

“Where do you think the shot was?” Thathaya asked.

“I don’t know.” I stroked its nose. There was a nick there, a sliver where fur had fallen off and below was a hard gray surface. It wasn’t the only nick. I wish I knew more about taxidermy. “Maybe here?” I said.

“Yes, yes.”

“—It’s where the blood is in the picture.”

“Yes. Yes, someplace there.”

It was such a small animal. I was even more surprised now than when I had seen the photograph how diminutive. No longer creature of the wild. Reduced. Stunted. Frail. I realized these thoughts made no sense in biology. Still, I don’t think I would have feared such a creature had I seen it in the dark.

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Acknowledgements: My workshop group and Professor Harris were instrumental in helping me to make this piece, which was teeming with stories, into a single, coherent one. Thank you so much for helping me to tell it, Kevin Fox, Jessica Stark, Allie Yee and Alvin Kang. I also want to thank this workshop group for all of their feedback this semester and for sharing their writing with me. I have enjoyed working with all of you. Lastly, I would like to thank my mother, great-uncle, uncle, and especially my grandparents for helping me to learn more about this leopard and the cultural history India’s wildlife.