How lions vanished from Haryana

Sarika Sharma

That lions once roamed the jungles of Haryana is hard to believe. It is even harder to believe that they could have disappeared in less than 30 years.

References to lion habitat in what is present-day Haryana are difficult to come by, the ‘Imperial Gazetteer of India’ and a few recent books being one of the few to mention their presence in the region once upon a time. Now, conservationist and wildlife historian Raza Kazmi, in a paper published in the ‘Journal of Bombay Natural History Society’, has brought together several references that give vivid accounts of the British hunting expeditions told in thrilling detail — all of them eventually decimating the Asiatic lion population in the area.

In “The Last Hurrah of the ‘Hurrianah’ Lion”, Kazmi goes back to what could perhaps be one of the earliest accounts of British hunting/lion sighting in Haryana, referred to as Hurrianah in the British records. When Kazmi joined Ashoka University in Haryana as a consultant, he wondered what the wildlife history of the place was like, and he was surprised to know that the now vulnerable to extinction Asiatic lions once roamed the very lands around him. This paper is part one of his last two years spent in researching the topic during lockdown.

As soon as the British had seized Haryana, they made their first acquaintance with the lions in India. The year was 1809 and the first record from the region that Kazmi traced dates to the same time. He quotes Aleck Fraser, younger brother of Delhi Commissioner William Fraser, on the two cubs captured and kept by them in Delhi. “These animals have only been known to us since our conquest of Haryana in 1809...” In his letter home, Fraser said they were “large as a common spaniel”, and yet “quite tame”.

It was only until a year later that the presence of lions in Haryana was widely publicised, says Kazmi, who quotes a military despatch titled ‘Lions Extant in India’. It gives a detailed account of five horsemen from the Hansi cantonment [one of the first military stations established by the British in the newly occupied territory] rousing a lion and lioness from their grass cover while the pair was consuming a kill (pig). To quote the paper: “The grass was set on fire to drive the lions out, and while the lioness fled, the large male lion marched towards the soldiers, with his mane and tail erect” and was subsequently killed, but only after severely wounding one individual. The same note also mentioned another lioness being killed similarly by a “party of horsemen” a few days prior to this incident near Hissan (now Hisar) after wounding “one man and two horses”. “The above consequently proves that lions are to be found in India as well as in Africa,” concluded the note.

This confirmation spelled doom for Asiatic lions. In less than three decades, the lions of Haryana were exterminated and rendered extinct.

Kazmi says that in the immediate aftermath of the initial British encounter with the lions of the Haryana landscape, British military officers and soldiers unleashed a decade of wholesale massacre of these big cats across the region. He lists 26 new references dealing with lions in Haryana between 1809 and 1823, accounting for 129 lions sighted, out of which 109 were conclusively killed by hunters. “It is worth noting that out of the 109 lions killed in the region between 1810 and 1823, as many as 80 (could be as high as 82) lions were killed in a mere five-year period (1810–1815). One of the most critical findings of this research was that often during such shoots, entire prides were wiped out by hunters, including cubs that were killed or captured,” he writes.

Among the several records of lions being killed, a few are noteworthy. Like that of Maria Nugent, the wife of Sir George Nugent, Commander-in-Chief of India (1811-1813). The private journals of her travel, later published as a two-volume memoir, contain some detailed records on lions in the region, and cite at least 29 sightings, 22 of whom were killed. Her entries also give an idea of the ecology of lions and why hunting them was easier and swifter. And Kazmi quotes Lady Nugent: “...the instant they make their appearance in the plain, they are followed and destroyed.” It is another of her notes that tells us that while Europeans were the ones making the kill, locals, including the royalty, were definitely hunting lions too. This also leaves scope for further research on Indian hunting expeditions, insists Kazmi.

The last hunting record that he shares is from 1923. It gives an account of the killing of a male lion, tracing back its female partner to the den, her subsequent killing and the capture of their cubs, which were, later that year, presented by General Watson to the King, who had them confined to the Tower of London. Thereafter, references to killing of lions are few and far between.

Interestingly, as Kazmi points out, the records he mentions have been culled from pre-1857 archives, much before the so-called ‘golden period’ of ‘shikar’ literature — which saw a plethora of books on the hunting exploits of the British, and later even some Indian princely states and landed gentry — came along in the 1880s that lasted right up until Indian Independence.

Kazmi flips open a whole new area of wildlife research in the region, the paper full of several references that invite exploration of a rich past.

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