If the thought of a man-eating tiger bursting through wooden doors or mud walls to drag away a sleeping victim isn’t sobering enough, there are stories of Bengal tigers braving water and currents to carry off people from their boats. In the aforementioned Sundarbans, a region famous for its unusually aggressive tigers, the cats have been known to swim out and snatch people from their vessels. Despite the mangroves being officially off-limits, locals still do enter into the protected forests to cut firewood and poach animals, activities that put them at risk from a dense population of environmentally isolated tigers with a limited food supply. Inevitably, human–tiger conflict follows. That was precisely what happened in 2014, when a sixty-two-year-old man from the village of Lahiripur set off in a boat with his two children to catch crabs on a small river in the forests of Kholakhali. In this instance, the stalking tiger leapt from the bank of the river, over the water, and into the boat, where it immediately attacked the father. The man’s son remembered the tragic attack vividly, as reported by The Times of India:
Suddenly, my sister cried out: ‘Dada, bagh (tiger)’. I was stunned, and my body froze. All I saw [was] a flash of yellow. It took me a moment to register the gruesome sight before me. My father was completely buried under the beast. I could only see his legs thrashing about. I shook off my numbness and grabbed a stick. Molina, too, took out a long cutter we use to clear foliage in the jungle. Together, we poked and battered the tiger, but it refused to give up . . . It jumped off and landed on the bank in one giant leap. We saw it disappear into the jungle with my father still in its jaws.
Indeed, tigers do not share the common house cat’s fear of water, and at times, they can even incorporate it into an attack strategy. The renowned filmmaker and tiger expert Valmik Thapar took note of how one tiger he observed in India’s Ranthambore tiger reserve had mastered the technique of chasing sambar deer into a lake, where, once they were hampered by the water, it would drag them under and kill them beneath the surface. Something similar may have occurred on a human target in the Sundarbans in 1997, when a man named Jamal Mohumad narrowly escaped a watery death. This is his version of the attack, which occurred while he was fishing:
The tiger lunged at me with its paws. It dug its claws into my legs and dragged me under the water. I struggled under the water and dived down about 10 feet under the water. The tiger let go of me. I swam deep under water as fast as I could. After a while, when I reached the surface of the water, I couldn’t see the tiger. I swam down the river for a bit and saw a boat and cried out for help.
Jamal became something of a local legend in the Sundarbans, as he was perhaps the only person on earth who had survived three—yes, three—separate predatory attacks by tigers. Despite his harrowing encounters with the animals, he would continue to venture into the forest, driven by the same need for food, firewood, and animal fodder that would have compelled the Tharu people a century before. But in the case of the Champawat, this tiger was no longer content waiting for humans to come passing by. It had begun, by the first few years of the 1900s, to leave the protection of the forest and go out looking for them, undergoing as it did so the transformation from a killer of men, to an eater of men, to an active hunter of them. And in its quest for fresh kills, it would eventually travel away from the marshy grasslands and dense sal jungles of its birth, and begin wandering northward and ever upward, into the populated hills that lay beyond.
* For those interested in a more detailed examination of documentary evidence, there is an epilogue at the end of the book which lists the various colonial records, newspaper articles, and physical artifacts that specifically mention the Champawat and provide insight into its attacks.
† While generally lauded as a landmark event in tiger conservation, the creation of Chitwan National Park involved the forced displacement of dozens of indigenous Tharu families who had called the central forest home—a traumatic event that continues to haunt the Tharu communities that live today on the edge of Chitwan’s buffer zone. There has been some progress in terms of giving the Tharu access to the central forest for the traditional gathering of food, fodder, and building materials, although it is highly restricted, and continues to be a source of friction between the Tharu community and park officials.
The Nepalese beginnings of the Champawat Tiger’s man-eating career may be short on documentary evidence, but it isn’t lacking altogether—particularly in a culture so firmly grounded in oral traditions. And ironically, it is in fact a former tiger hunter, not a historian or academic, who appears to have uncovered a convincing report of its early exploits. Peter Byrne (born in 1925) has long been something of a living legend—an admittedly colorful Irish ex-pat and former game manager for the Nepalese royal family, who witnessed firsthand the legendary tiger hunts of yore, before finally turning his energies toward tiger conservation. One of the few Europeans to have gained access to the royal traditions of the bagh shikar (the story goes that he won the favor of the Nepalese elite by taking their side in a bar brawl), he was given a rare membership in the postwar years to the confraternity of game wardens and shikaris that served at the pleasure of the Nepalese king. And it was thanks to this intimate familiarity with Nepalese tiger hunters that he first heard stories of “the Rupal Man-Eater,” a tiger that devoured scores of villagers in western Nepal at the very beginning of the twentieth century. He was even able to acquire a firsthand account, from the aging father of one of his Nepalese friends—an elderly gentleman named Nara Bahadur Bisht. The ninety-three-year-old man shared with Byrne boyhood recollections of how the tiger had terrified his village, and the massive hunt that was eventually organized in Rupal to stop it.
A glance at the map reveals two eye-opening facts: first, that the Nepalese village of Rupal is just across the border from the Indian town of Champawat. And given the timing, as well as the added details of the armed local response—details that corroborate almost to a tee an account Jim Corbett would later provide—it seems all but undeniable: the Rupal Man-Eater and the Champawat Man-Eater were one in the same. Two names for the same tiger, a Nepalese sobriquet acquired first, and its Indian moniker applied thereafter.
And second? That the village of Rupal is north—surprisingly north—of the prime tiger habitat of the deep terai. When one looks at the tiger reserves that exist in Nepal today—Chitwan, Bardia, Banke, Shuklaphanta—it is not a coincidence that they seem to cluster, like green beads on a string, along the tropical floodplain at the base of the Himalayas known locally as the terai. This is because prior to being deemed national parks, they were royal hunting reserves, kept by the kings for the hunting of tigers. They were chosen specifically as hunting grounds because they were prime tiger habitat, with dense populations of Royal Bengals. This was where the striped cats were to be found, and where they were naturally suited to live. Even in modern times, tigers still cling to the marshes and grasslands of the lowland terai rather than venturing into the colder and dryer hills. A 2014 study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund that measured the tiger population in Nepal found the highest tiger densities “were concentrated in areas of riverine flood plains, grasslands, riparian forests and around wetlands . . .” In Shuklaphanta, tigers much preferred the marshy banks of the Mahakali River. Meanwhile, the dry hardwood forests of the bordering hills supported very low numbers of tigers, primarily because they also offered comparatively low levels of prey. Grazing deer and the tigers that fed on them kept to the rich grasslands and humid jungles of the terai floodplain below. It was simply a warmer, greener, and more biodiverse habitat, and it is almost certainly where the Champawat’s life began.
Rupal, however, where our tiger would first make a name for itself as a man-eater, is not in the lowland terai at all. It’s farther north, beyond the first Siwalik hills, in the beginning of the actual Mahabharat