James ‘Jim’ Edward Corbett grew up in a large family of sixteen children and was the eighth child of Christopher William Corbett and Mary Jane. His parents had moved to Nainital in 1862 after Christopher Corbett quit military service and was appointed the town's postmaster.
He studied at Oak Openings School, which merged with Philander Smith College in Nainital. Before he was nineteen, he quit school and found employment with the Bengal and North Western Railway. Most importantly, Corbett grew up in the jungles of Uttarakhand and spent most of his childhood exploring the wilderness.
The childhood of Jim was largely spent in Nainital and Kaladhungi, where he was taken care of by his eldest sister Maggie.
She used to take Jim for a stroll in the jungle where he had his first tryst with wildlife. He used to accompany a local poacher named Kunwar Singh for adventure hunting in the forest. Kunwar Singh would later become a lifelong friend and advisor of Corbett.
Jim Corbett and other 'white' boys mixed freely with Indian kids in Kaladhungi, picked up several local dialects, and became very fluent in them.
He was given an assignment as a Trans-shipment Inspector at Mokameh Ghat in Bihar. For the next twenty years, he remained in this position and managed a large workforce. It was during this time that Corbett gained a massive reputation as a hunter of Man-eaters. Whenever a tiger or a leopard became a man-eater, and people begged him to help them, he would take leave from work for a few days, and then he would try to track and kill the man-eaters.
“Carpet Sahib” continued to hunt man-eaters till in his late fifties. Jim Corbett was a man of the jungle. Jim's greatest asset was his ability to doggedly pursue a man-eater alone and outwit it - a veritable battle of nerves - which he often won.
Between 1907 and 1938, Corbett tracked and shot at least 19 tigers and 14 leopards. It is estimated that these big cats had killed more than 1,200 people.
The first tiger he killed, the Champawat Tiger, was responsible for 436 documented deaths. He also shot the Panar Leopard, who allegedly killed 400 people. This leopard's skull and dentition showed advanced, debilitating gum disease and tooth decay, limiting the animal in killing wild game and driving it towards man-eating .
One of the most famous hunts was the man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, which terrorized the pilgrims to the holy Hindu shrines Kedarnath and Badrinath for more than ten years.
Jim Corbett believed there are only two permissible reasons for killing wild animals – for food or when they turn man-eaters. Under no other circumstance should they be killed. His conservation efforts formally started to take form in the 1920s. Corbett bought his first camera in the late 1920s and was inspired by his friend Frederick Walter Champion, starting to record tigers on cine film.
Corbett took to lecturing schoolchildren about their natural heritage and the need to conserve forests and their wildlife. He promoted the Association for the Preservation of Game in the United Provinces and the All-India Conference for the Preservation of Wildlife.
Together with Champion, he played a key role in establishing India's first national park, the Hailey National Park, initially named after Lord Malcolm Hailey (British governor). The park was renamed in Corbett's honor in 1957.
Before the British Rule, the Jim Corbett National Park forests were the private property of the local rulers. Though the ownership would later pass into the British hands, the government paid little or no attention to the upkeep of the forested region. The sole aim was to exploit the natural resources and extract as much profit as possible from the jungle.
In a letter dated January 3, 1907, Sir Michael Keen, for the first time, referred to the possibility of turning these forests into a game sanctuary; however, the proposal was turned down by the Governor of the United Provinces (later Uttar Pradesh), John Hewitt. It was years later, in 1934, that the then governor, Sir Malcolm Hailey, supported the proposal for the sanctuary and wanted the enactment of a law to give it protection.
Later, in consultation with Jim Corbett, the boundaries of the park were demarcated. In 1936, The United Provinces National Park Act was enforced, and this reserved forest became the first national park of India. And it was aptly named Hailey National Park after its founder Sir, Malcolm Hailey.
The reserve was renamed in 1955 as Ramganga National Park and was again renamed in 1956 as Corbett National Park. The new name honored Jim Corbett, who played a key role in creating the reserve by using his influence to persuade the provincial government to establish it.
The year 1973 was a landmark in the field of wildlife preservation. This year, wildlife preservationists and naturalists from around the world launched Project Tiger, the biggest environmental conservation project ever undertaken.
This park is one of the thirteen protected areas covered by the World Wide Fund For Nature under their Terai Arc Landscape Program. The program aims to protect three of the five terrestrial flagship species, the tiger, the Asian elephant, and the great one-horned rhinoceros, by restoring forest corridors to link 13 protected areas of Nepal and India to enable wildlife migration.
Later in life, as Corbett gave up the gun for the camera, he developed an unshakeable faith in the natural world and became totally devoted to its protection. It involved an almost spiritual bond with the jungle and its inhabitants.
Note: A hagiography is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, and by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a founder, saint, monk, nun, or icon.
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