Carpet Sahib & the Ghosts

Strange moving lights, the churail’s scream from a deserted village, unseen terror ... Jim Corbett did not encounter man-eaters alone; he also had a faceoff with ghosts and supernatural powers

- Anjana Basu

JIM Corbett, unanimously associated with man-eaters as well as a national park, was a hunter-turned-conservationist, who believed, very firmly, that ‘a tiger is a gentleman’ and that tigers turn rogue only if wounded and are unable to hunt for some reason.

Oddly enough, the most terrifying of his man-eaters were tigresses who had lost their teeth, were injured by porcupine quills or had cubs to fend for.

July 25 was the 150th birth anniversary of Corbett, an Englishman who many secretly wish had not left India for Africa on the winds of Independence, where he ended up guarding Queen Elizabeth on her honeymoon. Despite this defection, as some might call it, Corbett’s ghost apparently still lingers in the hills of his home. Security men guarding his home have reported strange blue lights at night, which are seen moving in the darkness where no light should be. The result of these stories led me to create a series of children’s books based on Corbett’s ghost roaming the forests of Kumaon and doing what he did best—protecting people from tigers and tigers from people. There was one stray leopard in the set—perhaps appropriately because Corbett only tackled two leopards in his man-eater hunting days and always said that leopards preferred not to face people, unlike tigers.

Corbett himself had quite a few brushes with the supernatural—the strange moving lights on a sheer rock face where no one could possibly have been while hunting for the Talla Des man-eater, for instance. Or, the churail’s (banshee’s) scream from a deserted village while perched on a tree which only he and the night creatures heard. There is also the odd incident that took place when, while hunting the Champawat tigress, he was given a bungalow to stay in but was forced out onto the veranda by some unseen terror during the night despite very real danger from the man-eater. The next morning, he moved in with his men in a tented accommodation.