In answering the question of why a tiger would leave its natural habitat in the terai, it only makes sense to look at what was happening in the terai at that time. What becomes evident is that the long-standing dynamics between this ecosystem and the human beings who lived within it were undergoing seismic shifts in the late nineteenth century. The deforestation of the terai and the displacement of indigenous Tharu people is often attributed to the eradication of malaria in the 1950s via chemical spraying—and there certainly is considerable truth to that attribution. But what history, taken with a healthy dose of analysis, reveals is that while the delicate threads that bound the terai, the Tharu, and the tigers may have unraveled almost completely in the twentieth century, they were already frayed long before—as early as the mid-nineteenth century, when the policies of the new Rana dynasty began to take hold. And the early damage done to those intertwined and interdependent cords goes a long way in explaining the emergence of a tiger like the Champawat. When those strands came undone, they released a man-eater like none other upon the world.
Some 50 million years ago, when the miacid ancestors of all cats were still scurrying through the treetops and the Paleocene Epoch was still in full swing, a tremendous collision took place. The continental plate of India, which had been an isolated island since drifting away from Africa more than 100 million years before, slammed into the Eurasian Plate. “Slammed” in the geologic sense, as it was a slow-motion impact by human standards, occurring at a speed of less than fifteen centimeters per year. But it was dramatic, nonetheless, in the mountain range it eventually produced: the Himalayas. The world’s tallest and youngest mountains, born of a buckling that only a head-on collision between continents can provide. This upward thrusting of the earth’s crust would eventually engender a bristling range of peaks, reaching well over twenty thousand feet in height, stretching some fifteen hundred miles across, and spanning what is today Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. From their snowcapped heights, these mountains would in turn beget three major rivers: the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra. The name Himalaya means “abode of snow” in Sanskrit—an ancient Indo-European language that serves as the sacred mother tongue of Hinduism, and that has existed in the subcontinent since at least the second millennium B.C., when its earliest speakers began pouring in from the west. They were hardly the first ones to call the mountains home, however. In what is today Nepal, in the Kathmandu Valley, archaeological evidence has been found that suggests human habitation in the region for at least eleven thousand years. The new Sanskrit-speaking Indo-Aryan arrivals lived right alongside preexisting populations, and in many cases mingled, creating a patchwork of ethnic groups interspersed throughout the range’s peaks and valleys.
In some instances, the Indo-Aryan groups who arrived in the Himalaya region—relative newcomers in the grand scheme of things—clung to geographies they were familiar with, while avoiding those that were beyond their ken. They effectively left such domains to the indigenous inhabitants who predated them, while still technically incorporating them into their burgeoning kingdoms. In few places was this practice more pronounced than in Nepal. In the foothills and mountains of the Himalayan range, a series of Hindu kingdoms arose, beginning with the Thakuri dynasty, who ruled parts of Nepal up until the twelfth century; the Malla dynasty, which held dominion until the eighteenth century; and the Shah dynasty, which unified a number of the region’s warring kingdoms into a single Gorkha state in the late eighteenth century. These mountain dynasties spoke a host of Indo-Aryan languages, including Nepali, and embraced the tenants and traditions of the Hindu faith, caste systems included.
One thing they did not do—at least very often—was leave the hills for the marshy grasslands and jungles below. This was the terai, the rich northern floodplain of the Ganges, a green belt of land that ran a verdant course along the southern base of the Himalayas. The word “terai” itself is an Urdu term meaning something akin to “marsh” or “basin,” and this is a fairly accurate description for much of the territory. Vast expanses of elephant grass—which can reach up to seven meters—covered wide swathes of the damp ground, and provided ample habitat for deer, rhinos, sloth bears, wild elephants, and of course, tigers. These flat, rippling grasslands were cut through by tributaries of the great rivers that flowed down from the mountains above, and were interspersed by dense patches of forest (aka, jungle), marked primarily by the famous sal trees, which in the terai were able to keep their leaves throughout the year. As one might expect, the soil in this floodplain was exceedingly fertile, and with the proper irrigation systems could produce considerable yields of grains like rice and millet. Yet the Hindu Pahari people—who inhabited the hills and mountains above—were generally reluctant to visit the flatter, wetter lands below, for one convincing reason: the entire region was infested with malaria. Whatever agricultural promise it held was offset by the very real risk of contracting a potentially lethal blood parasite. To go into the terai, particularly during the warmer monsoon months of the year, was considered a near–death sentence for the people of the Nepalese hills. As the colonial forest surveyor Thomas W. Webber noted in 1902, “[P]aharis generally die if they sleep in the Terai before November 1 or after June 1.” And even in the cooler months, the risk of contraction still existed. The presence of malarial mosquitoes throughout much of the year provided a natural deterrence against any sort of large-scale settlement. Living year-round in the terai, for most Nepali people, was simply out of the question.
There was, however, one group that felt remarkably at home in the terai: the Tharu, a people who predated the arrival of the Indo-Aryan Hindus, and who had developed over many centuries a genetic resistance to malaria. They were able to not only survive but thrive in the tropical lowlands, living off the land in small family-based clan units. While their Pahari neighbors clung to their dense villages and terraced fields in the mountains to the north, the Tharu lived in relative isolation in the jungles and grasslands of the terai belt below, with small communities strung all along its verdant length. There existed—and continues to exist today—some differences in terms of languages, traditions, and religious beliefs among the various Tharu groups. Many eventually adopted the Indo-European languages of their neighbors, and some, like the Rana Tharu of far western Nepal, even hesitate to label themselves Tharu at all, and insist instead that they are descended from an ancient Rajput king. However, one thing the Tharu all share, from the Rana Tharu of the far west, to the Chitwania Tharu in the central region, to the Kochila Tharu of the east, is a common identity as a “people of the forest.” Their own sense of self is intimately and inextricably linked with the natural environment of the terai. It is their mother, and it is their home. And for most of the nineteenth century, they depended upon it for virtually every facet of their existence.
This isn’t to say, however, that they had no effect upon or interaction with the environment. They most certainly did. There is an increasingly antiquated notion that indigenous peoples engaged in sustenance-based survival strategies exist in a sort of innocent and Edenic bliss within an ecosystem. But with the Tharu, as with people just about anywhere, this was simply not the case. The Tharu did create irrigation canals to yield better harvests from their fields. They did engage in a slash-and-burn system of grass husbandry to feed their animals, not least of which were the elephants they caught and domesticated. And they definitely did cut down trees for timber when needed, and clear space for fields in the forest when advantageous. But they did so with the knowledge firmly in place that the forest could serve as both a natural and a renewable resource. To destroy the forest and the animals that lived within it would have been a form of cultural, if not literal, suicide. They relied upon it for building materials, for firewood, for animal fodder,