The Tiger Trapper

Ziaur Rehman was a hunter who loved wildlife. His life’s a fine example of why this is no paradox

Ziaur Rehman was a hunter who loved wildlife. His life’s a fine example of why this is no paradox

Ziaur Rehman was known as an accomplished shikari; that is to say, a hunter. What he should be remembered for, however, is how he humanised the tackling of man-eating tigers and leopards through the innovation of caging such wild animals instead of shooting them dead. It’s not an easily acquired skill, and he inherited it from his father Abdur Rehman, a lower-rung railway employee who was content serving as a malaria officer at Mazbat station in Assam. The elder Rehman was comfortable with this dull job so long as this semi-wilderness posting, near the Himalayan foothills of Arunachal Pradesh, let him indulge his passion for hunting.

Though Abdur Rehman’s forefathers were originally from Bihar, he adopted Assam as his true home-state, a place where he could make the most of his true calling. Ziaur was born in Mazbat in 1941, and he too, in turn, led a similar life. He was employed, like his father before him, with the Railways. Like his father too, he lived the simple life of the God-fearing, never one to seek attention, much less adulation. He would dutifully spend his work hours at Mazbat station, going about his job routine with all the modesty at his disposal. Off-hours, he would venture out into the wild—and eventually demonstrate that sportsmanship in hunting is not a prerogative of the elite.

It’s a sense of fair play that comes across exceedingly well in Ruma Devi’s biography Ziaur Rehman’s Tiger Hunting Tales, which records the ethical foundations of his pursuit. Written in engaging Assamese, it must be read by anybody with the slightest interest in wildlife. In a day and age that somehow lets the agenda of the present colour the past, it would be befitting if Ziaur Rehman’s life as an achiever is placed in perspective.

To grasp the context of Ziaur Rehman’s career as a shikari, it is important to appreciate that Assam came under British rule comparatively late—in 1826. This was a time when the planners of the Raj had the sustainability of their administration marked out as their primary concern. ‘Development’ was in focus. To raise land revenue earnings, the administrators came up with an ambitious plan to first conquer the wilderness by encouraging human migration into Assam’s hinterland, and then open up the region to commercial exploitation. This was a huge project. Nepalese people, in particular, were even given monetary assistance to settle in these areas, and by the 1940s, the Nepalese constituted four-fifths of the cattle and buffalo herdsmen population of northeast India’s largest state.

Large projects tend to have large consequences. The settlement policy resulted in bio-diversity losses on a significant scale once elevated tracts of virgin savanna, woodlands and moist mixed deciduous forests were cleared for tea plantations. In the Mazbat area alone, some 1,000 hectares of land was developed to form what is now the Lamabari and Mazbat Tea Estate. To feed the settlers at the lowest possible cost, local area paddy farming was also encouraged.

Meanwhile, the interests of the tea business also drew rail tracks and services to the region. Both people and cargo needed easy access to Bengal’s ports for the development project to meet its objectives.

The human influx also meant that wild animals who inhabited the area were either put to flight or killed, for which there were awards instituted. Shikar, thus, was turned into a competitive sport. But it also deprived the local woodland carnivores of sambar, barking deer, gaur and other prey for subsistence, and in due time (as the ecological balance shifted against them) these predators found themselves in confrontation with human settlements. Cattle would be swooped up. Or plantations ruined. Wild animals turned into a menace for people.

It was in this setting that Ziaur’s father, a skilled tracker of animals, developed his art of animal entrapment. He was, of course, a shikari. And like any other, he kept a shotgun at home. The difference was that he had other equipment as well. Specifically, he had an iron cage of his own fabrication into which he would lure, with bait, wild animals that dared to snatch away cattle or trample crops. As was not unusual in such a household, young Ziaur grew up with pet cubs of assorted wild animals all around him. Some of these were kept in cages, some not. There were reasons for this, and as a boy, he was well acquainted with them. It was family knowledge.It was also an upbringing that sensitised him to the well-being of wild animals.

At 16, around the time of India’s Independence, there was a sudden change in Ziaur’s life. The circumstances were such that he had to forgo his studies and adopt farming as a livelihood, and that too, away from home—in Mera Bil. This was a dangerous place, where wildlife attacks were so common that gun licences were handed out to large numbers of people. The idea was to safeguard cultivation, and poaching came to be seen as a democratic right, even a matter of teamwork. It’s the same social acceptance of shikar that explains why modern-day game theory still uses it as an example without awkwardness.

As for Ziaur, rather than summon the nerve to ask his father for a gun, he adapted the knowledge of tribal workers to fashion a bow and arrow for himself. He even scored a single-arrow kill of a leopard once. More interestingly, he built a bamboo stockade to trap this spotted cat with the help of local people.

His father, on hearing of these risky ventures in Mera Bil, sent him his shotgun and iron cage, which was 10 ft in length and 4.5 ft in height with an iron partition for the live bait and a trapdoor. Soon, he too had honed his skills as a hunter as well as entrapment artist.

A leopard was one of his memorable catches, though his fame was made by what was known as the Belsiri man-eater, a tiger that had shrouded Belsiri Tea Estate in fear and proven too elusive for his own father’s wits. On the invitation of PC Barua, Raja of Gauripur, several shikar troupes had tried and failed to kill the animal, including a royal contingent from Cooch Behar. Eventually, it was left to the ingenuity of the 17-year-old Ziaur to trap this tiger alive.

The spine-chilling tale is described in Ruma Devi’s book. Ziaur began with intelligence gathering. On finding that the man-eater had a taste for woodcutters, he courageously crouched in the cage as the bait himself, equipped with a piece of wood and dao to make the sound of wood being chopped. It was a long wait, but he had his tiger at the end of it caged. It turned Ziaur Rehman into a legend overnight. Needless to add, the tiger had pellet wounds in its fore paw.

Assam’s loss of wildlife was accelerated by the easy access to jeeps that hunters got after World War II (left behind by US forces). The practice was deterred many years later, only after the state’s ban on tiger hunting in 1970 and the historic Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. Ziaur, having shot more than 40 tigers and leopards in his career as a shikari, knew it was time to adopt the cage full time. Between 1975 and 1983, he successfully caged as many as 12 man-eating tigers across Assam (on request from district and forest (authorities). He preferred to cage even those tigers that the Forest Department had classified as ‘man-eaters’ and ordered shot. “It is a hundred times easier to shoot an animal,” he would say, “as it is a hundred times more bothersome to cage it.” This was his attitude, even though he got little in return for his efforts. Taking leave of his job, carrying his cage to some far-flung corner of a jungle, picking up an animal’s trail, tracking its movements, trudging long distances on foot, laying the trap, fending off hostile human intervention, and often replacing baits stolen by villagers, he did it all sportingly.

The relationship with each target was often intense, and he named each by their disposition as he assessed it. There was the Samrat of Belsiri or Rani of Balama, for example, which he took up challenges against. Any capture took at least a fortnight, often more than a month. Night after night, he sometimes had the tiger come, move around the cage, but refuse to enter. The animal knew his game, he believed, and was out to ensnare him instead. It was a fair match.

Sadly, nobody plays it anymore. The tranquilliser gun has long outmoded his trap. The new approach doesn’t always work well. Just this March, in an attempt to tranquilise a cattle-lifting tiger on the fringes of Kaziranga National Park, a fully equipped vet got shot in his arm by the home guard accompanying him, while another guard was mauled to death by the animal. The tiger was killed by villagers a short while after.

To Ziaur, it speaks of a modern-day loss of patience, sensitivity and an art form born of a love of the wild. It’s not game anymore. It’s not even remotely fair. A tiger caged can be uncaged. A tiger killed is worse than a statistic. It is a tragedy.

Yet, when Ziaur Rehman was brought from Mazbat in the morning of 27 April with breathing trouble to Guwahati Medical College Hospital, there was no room for this unknown. It was a long wait yet again. And he passed away that very evening, minutes after a room was made available and before he could be attended to.

Manju Barua regards himself as an antiquarian with amateur interest in history. He lives in Kaziranga, and has so for last 22 years

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Manju Barua