Mega Mammals in Ancient India (Rhinos, Tigers, and Elephants)

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Since antiquity, big mammals have inspired fear as well as fantasy among humans. Not only do megafauna pervade the domains of religion, art, literature, and folklore, it is also now widely acknowledged that they can serve as important, if not always adequate, indices of environmental quality. In this book, Shibani Bose looks into eras bygone in order to chronicle the journeys of three mega mammals, the rhinoceros, tiger, and elephant, across millennia in early north India.

Carefully sifting through archaeological evidence and literary records in Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, and classical Western accounts, Bose documents the presence of these big mammals in diverse cultural contexts, from hunter- gatherer societies to the first urban civilization of India and beyond. This work aims to reconstruct human interactions with these mega species through time while trying to understand the larger ecology of ancient India.

This book is especially well-timed as the conservation of our megafaunal heritage is a major concern for biologists, ecologists, and conservationists. It underlines the need to historicize human interactions with these mega mammals with the contention that awareness regarding their past is critical for their future.

Shibani Bose is an independent researcher, and has taught at Miranda House, University of Delhi, and also at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, USA.

HISTORY AS A CHRONICLE OF human activity is as old as the hills, the saying goes. Yet, history of the environment and other life forms we share our planet with is a recent phenomenon. The toll taken by the industrial revolution, imperial formations, and the two world wars on humans and the environment was no doubt the impulse that led to the rise of the new genre of historical writing in the second half of the twentieth century. Since other life forms cannot communicate their experience of anthropomorphic depredations, we have only our perceptions of what happened and what is happening to them and their habitats.

Coming to the history of faunal experience and ecology in India, first off the block was Jean Philippe Vogel, who, in 1962, wrote of the ubiquitous hamsa, the goose, in art and culture in ancient times. In 1977, P. Thampakkan Nair chronicled the place of the peacock, India's national bird, in art, culture, religion, and history. The histories of these birds were soon followed by those of the cheetah and Asia's lions. Their passage through history, their suffering due to human depredations, and their place in Indian art and culture were chronicled in 1995 and 2005 respectively. It is not out of place to mention that Asia's lions have had many votaries as well, including Mattias and Monika Klum, who wrote about them in Swedish in 2000! Also, Raman Sukumar gave us his seminal work on Asia's elephants in 2011 in the same genre. Tomes have been written about the tiger. India's national animal, and the subject of India's most ambitious effort in faunal conservation. Yet, surprisingly, it awaits a serious biographer who traces its travails through ancient times to the present.

Bose's research is a crucial addition to this corpus. It has a some- what different approach though, insofar as she has chosen three megafauna: the greater one-horned rhinoceros, which is endemic to India, the tiger, and Asia's elephants. The biographies of the first two are being chronicled for the first time. Her treatment of the elephant's travails adds a different perspective to Sukumar's work. Unlike other works mentioned here, Bose has confined herself to the period from the Pleistocene to c. 300 CE, and geographically to north India. These parameters of time and space have enabled her to dig deeper into varied sources where others have not ventured, particularly in the case of the tiger and rhinoceros.

The author traces the past distribution of the three animals through faunal remains, proto-historic artefacts, and historical literature up to c. 300 CE. From this it becomes evident that the rhinoceros's extreme range included Gujarat and Rajasthan, from where it has long since disappeared though it was recorded in Punjab until the first half of the sixteenth century. Evidence for the tiger, on the other hand, is somewhat scarce. It is prominent in the proto-historic period though, as witnessed on the seals of the Harappan civilization. It lasted in this area till 1886, when the last tiger was reportedly shot on the banks of the Indus in Sindh. It continued to thrive in Iran as the Caspian tiger, and survived there till 1953, when the last one there too was shot.

Asia's elephants were found in the Indian subcontinent as far west as Mehrgarh in Pakistan in the proto-historic period. It may be noted, however, that Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (1479-1425 BCE) hunted 120 Syrian elephants, a subspecies of Asia's elephants: Elephas maximus asurus. But by the time we come to the Arthaśāstra, Gujarat is its extreme western range.

A detailed analysis of the proto-historic finds and historical literature illustrates the intimate knowledge the ancient world had of these three species. For example, the solitary character of the rhinoceros, references to musth in elephants, and the touching interrelationship between the tiger and forests, where one could not last without the other, are but a few illustrations. Even today, this is startlingly so.