No Beast So Fierce. Dane Huckelbridge
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tigers were the Tharu’s problem—not theirs. Rather than send in hunters, they preferred to let the locals handle it.
There is another reason tiger attacks may have gone unpublicized, though, and that was the cultural stigmas that often attended them. Predation upon man, conducted by a tiger, was almost cosmically aberrant to the Tharu people, whose syncretic belief system represented a melding of both Hindu and older animistic beliefs. Such attacks represented the unintended overlap of two separate spiritual spheres, in the unholiest of fashions. Tigers were regarded as the physical manifestation of the power and grace of the natural world—more specifically, of the forest, upon which the Tharu depended above all else. Under normal conditions, the tigers of the forest were seen as benevolent guardians, even protectors. But if their forest decided to send in a tiger to attack a village, then something in the spiritual health of the community was gravely out of order. A problem with its puja offering, a broken spiritual promise, or some other affront to the gods of the natural world grave enough to summon a distinctly striped form of punishment. Accordingly, it was common belief that the spirit of a tiger victim was doomed, at least in some unfortunate cases, to haunt the earthly realm as a bhut—a malevolent poltergeist of sorts capable of causing bad luck, illness, and even death. And since tiger victims were often totally devoured, the essential and extremely complex Tharu funeral rites of cremation and riverine release became difficult to perform, ensuring further spiritual calamity enacted by the bhut. These destructive spirits could take two forms, that of a churaini for women, or a martuki for men, and only the help of a shaman, or gurau, could keep them at bay. So feared were these specters, it was not uncommon for Tharu widows to pass a torch over the mouth of their departed husbands, to invoke their spirit not to return as a bhut, but instead continue on its path toward becoming a protective pitri, or ancestor spirit. And another complex ritual, involving head shaving, ceremonial rings of kus grass, and branches of the peepal tree, would be enacted thirteen days later to ensure that the proper progression had taken place. These funeral rites needed to be performed to create sacred balance in the village, and in the case of many tiger attacks where victims were partially or completely devoured, this was not always possible—resulting in a spiritual hurdle that put the entire community at risk. With this in mind, one can easily imagine a general reluctance among the families of tiger victims to call attention to the attacks, and risk being blamed for any communal misfortune down the line.
These kinds of stigmas have declined somewhat in the terai of Nepal and northern India in recent years, as the presence of bhut has slowly transformed from practiced religion to old-fashioned superstition, and man-eating tigers have faded—although not vanished entirely, as we shall see—from cultural memory. When talking to Tharu guraus in present-day Chitwan, I found that the perception of tiger attacks as a form of divine punishment does still exist, although they don’t attach any bad luck or ill will to the families of the victims, and they would never deny a funeral service if asked. In fact, they believe that the offended god or spirit will often deposit tiger whiskers on the ground around the village as a form of warning, to give the community the chance to come together and mend its ways before another attack occurs. In the Sundarbans of West Bengal, however, where village men still go into the forest to fish and collect honey, and where tiger predation is still a daily threat, the stigma against tiger victims is very much alive and relevant. Many locals refuse to even speak of tigers or utter their name, as they believe words alone are enough to summon snarls and stripes from the mangrove forests. And when tigers actually materialize and do attack, relatives of the victims are often similarly avoided. “Tiger-widows,” as they’re unceremoniously known, can be considered unholy or tainted, and at times face abuse from in-laws as well as general ostracism in the community. They are frequently treated as a source of bad luck and forced to live in isolation, where they can wear only white saris and must eschew all forms of decoration, including jewelry or bangles. They are barred from most ceremonies and festivals, and allowed to travel roads only under certain hours. Such shunning may sound cruel—particularly when imposed on a person who has already had a loved one killed by a tiger—but it stems from the very real fears of people who are totally reliant on the forest for their livelihood, and who cannot afford to associate with anyone who may have incurred the forest’s clawed wrath. The people of the Sundarbans pray and make offerings to essentially the same forest goddess as the Tharu do in Nepal and northern India—although they call her Bonbibi instead of Ban Dhevi—and they rely on her favor for protection from tigers. When that protection fails, they, just like the Tharu, know that something grievous must have happened to have lost her favor. And this is not something one would want to broadcast in any way.
But problem tigers have not vanished from the Nepalese terai. They still exist today. And to re-create what the first, harrowing manhunts of the Champawat must have been like, one need not journey far into the past at all.
When untangling the skein of information regarding the Champawat, the unavoidable point of entry is the sheer number of its victims.* The tiger is alleged to have claimed 200 victims in Nepal, and then later another 236 victims once it crossed into India. That’s 436 human lives taken by a single animal. To put that grisly number into contemporary perspective, the entire roster of the National Basketball Association evens out at around 450 players. So essentially—according to most published accounts—the Champawat very nearly consumed the entire NBA. While comparing its statistics with modern-day professional sports teams’ numbers may border on the whimsical, the horror and trauma it would go on to cause for the inhabitants of western Nepal and the Kumaon division of northern India at the turn of the twentieth century was viscerally and painfully real.
But if the number seems wholly beyond the realm of possibility, there are some other man-eaters bounding across the pages of history that clearly demonstrate that large-scale human predation is not beyond the capacity of many apex predators. In France, for example, between the years 1764 and 1767, a wolf—or possibly a wolf–dog hybrid—known as the Beast of Gévaudan reputedly killed some 113 people before Jean Chastel, a local hunter, finally shot it and ended its spree. It is a shocking number, but also one that is fairly well documented, thanks to ecclesiastic funerary records from the Gévaudan region. In 1898, a pair of lions known as the Tsavo Man-Eaters temporarily put a massive British railway project in Kenya on hold when they began pulling workers from their tents at night. Accounts vary as to the total number of victims, with some going as high as 135, although scientific tests conducted by the Chicago Field Museum, which has the taxidermied lions on display, has indicated that they probably didn’t actually consume more than thirty-five of their victims. And while its own total tally isn’t remarkable in size, the rapidity of the infamous shark that terrorized the Jersey Shore in 1916 has earned its status as the original “Jaws.” As to whether it was a great white or a bull shark is still debated—but either way, the deadly fish attacked 5 people and killed 4 in less than 2 weeks. And then of course there is “Gustave,” a Nile crocodile from Burundi with a reported length of more than twenty feet, a hide pocked with bullet scars, and an apparent taste for human flesh. In addition to the wildebeest and hippopotamus that comprise its diet, it is said by locals to have eaten as many as three hundred people. These may be some of the more publicized examples, but history abounds with similar predators that have taken humans as prey, in numbers that frequently extend into the dozens, and sometimes even the hundreds. Leopards, brown bears, alligators, even Komodo dragons—they all can and occasionally do attack and eat human beings. It’s not common, but it does happen.
That tigers are capable of attacking human beings, under the right circumstances, is beyond dispute. We may not be their preferred, or even usual prey, but that hardly means humans never serve as a source of nutrition. We are made of meat, after all. But is the tally for the Champawat Tiger, a number recorded under less-than-optimal circumstances for fact-checking, and larger than that of any other man-eater on record, actually realistic?
The number of two hundred victims in Nepal—as well as the overall tally of 436 victims—is generally cited in most scholarly works as a credible figure. Perhaps not exact, but reasonably close. This is the number cited later by Jim Corbett, the number evidently certified, tacitly or otherwise, by the colonial British government at that time, and this tally, or similar figures, are repeated by modern-day tiger researchers and tiger hunters