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Mahi Chandra Miri was instrumental is curbing poaching activities in Kaziranga.
In the early 20th century, if you were to scour the land in Assam on which the present-day Kaziranga National Park now stands, you’d find a dystopian sight.
British naturalist and tea planter Edward Pritchard Gee, who lived and worked in Assam, articulated his observations in his book The Wildlife of India (1964), “In the early 1930s, Kaziranga was a closed book, a sort of terra incognita (unknown land) completely left to itself by the Forest Department. I remember trying to get permission to go there in 1934, but the rather lame excuse of the British D.F.O. was, ‘No one can enter the place. It is all swamps and leeches, and even elephants cannot go there.’”
Needless to say, Kaziranga’s current avatar would surprise Gee. It’s spinning a success story across 430 sq km, playing host to two-thirds of the world’s population of endangered Indian one-horned rhinoceros, swamp deer, large elephants, and a high density of tigers.
But what today is a UNESCO-approved verdant sprawl looked quite the opposite a century ago.
The man behind the makeover is Mahi Chandra Miri, whose story will remain a page-turner in the annals of conservation history.
The life and times of Mahi Miri
A wooden signboard five kilometres east of the Bagori sub-beat forest office at the Kaziranga National Park reads in bold font, ‘Mahi Miri Tower’. An arrow directs you to a hillock, where the conservationist spent many an evening keeping watch on the forested land (in those days, its identity was that of a game sanctuary).
His vantage point offered him sweeping views of the forest; he’d be quick to notice any skulduggery; the sanctuary was notorious for poaching.
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Mahi would commence his vigil at dawn, binoculars trained unwaveringly on the land beyond. And god forbid he spotted the miscreants, he’d rush on elephant back to catch them. The hillock was christened after him in the 1970s, long after he passed away in 1939 at the age of 36.
It stands tall, an ode to a hefty legacy he left behind.
His love for animals was well-known, shares his great-nephew Tridip Patir; his bonds with them were instinctive.
Born in 1903, Mahi’s penchant for nature developed in his home village, Alimur, in Assam’s Lakhimpur. His discipline came from his father, Doley Miri, a man respected by the community. His beginnings were humble; Mahi and his brother grew up in a makeshift thatched cottage on a plot of hired land at Sivasagar. The boys attended the Sivasagar Town Government HE School.
A tennis aficionado, Mahi often played legendary sportsman Prof PC Roy. He was hardworking; “soft-spoken and disciplined” is how most described him.
Mahi was known for wearing his passion on his sleeve, at least that’s what those who knew him well recall. Tridip, while looking to pursue his doctoral thesis in human-nature relationships, took a trip down memory lane, only to realise that an understanding of the topic was impossible without learning more about his exemplar great-uncle.
“While many in Assam are familiar with his wife, the celebrated Padma Shri educationist Indira Miri, few know about Mahi Chandra Miri,” he points out.
“This is unfortunate because his contributions to conservation and his role in establishing Kaziranga’s protected status were immense. He was instrumental in transforming Kaziranga from a neglected wilderness into a world-renowned conservation landmark," Tridip remarks.
Kaziranga has had quite a chequered journey. It was Mary Curzon, Lord Curzon’s wife, whose interventions helped convert it into a reserve forest in 1905, when she failed to see any rhinoceros on her trip to the park.
The hoof marks in the forest did nothing to improve her mood. It was Balaram Hazarika, an eponymous animal tracker from Assam, who emphasised the urgent requirement for wildlife conservation to Mrs Curzon, who asked her husband to do something.
On 1 June 1905 Kaziranga Proposed Reserve Forest was created. But by 1938, its existence was threatened by rampant hunting activities. It was a shadow of its current self. Tridip credits his great-uncle for the real on-ground transformation.
The inflection point in Mahi’s life came in 1929, when he, along with officer Madhab Bhattacharjee, was selected for the Imperial Forest Service. The duo was sent to Rangoon for training in the Forest College there. This was followed by a posting in Guwahati as an Extra Assistant Conservator of Forest.
The man who put Kaziranga on the world map
In the 1930s, Kaziranga was infamous for poaching.
EP Gee’s book adds weight to the argument, “I talked to the Forest Officer who was the first to be deputed to survey Kaziranga in the mid-1930s. He found poachers’ camps at every bheel (small lake), and about forty carcasses of rhino with the horns removed.”
The book elaborates that the Mikirs, “simple, peaceful but very interesting tribal folk who dwell in the Mikir Hills just on the southern boundary of the sanctuary”, were among the many poachers.
Mahi, undeterred, along with his band of forest officers, cleared out hundreds of poacher camps, often putting their own lives at stake. Not just within the realm of wildlife, but impact was at the heart of each of Mahi’s endeavours. Cognisant of the community’s contrast to his privilege, he always sought to help them, providing them with the wherewithal to study and dream.
This is also reflected in his representing tribal communities at the Simon Commission in Shillong in 1929, led by Rai Saheb Sonadhar Senapati, who would become so impressed with Mahi that he’d give him his daughter Indira’s hand in marriage.
In her autobiography, Indira commends her husband for the respect he accorded to her.
“All my apprehensions turned out to be baseless,” she refers to her qualms before marriage. Her book details vivid memories of their time together, one of the most enjoyable for her being in 1934 when Mahi was transferred to the Bagari range of the (then) Kaziranga game sanctuary with headquarters at Golaghat.
Mahi was focused on curbing poaching. Indira, meanwhile, took advantage of the time to familiarise herself with the lay of the land.
“At night, wild elephants raided the paddy fields to gorge on the ripe paddy. Occasionally, one of them would venture into the bungalow and noisily scratch its neck on one of the wooden posts supporting the building. I was too afraid to be able to sleep. The first couple of months in Baguri, I lived in constant fear of the forest and its wild beasts. But, slowly, I grew to love the place,” she writes.
She became accustomed to birds breaking the morning silence and silver fish disrupting the water’s surface. She took it all in. But what she most looked forward to was her husband’s interactions with the communities. His zeal snapped awake a devotion in them to protect their forests.
Villagers began alerting him to the movement of poachers.
Having the communities become a part of his efforts helped Mahi.
Most of these were marginalised tribes who had historically depended on the forests for their livelihood. As historian Arupjyoti Saikia points out in Forests and Ecological History of Assam, “Everyday requirements, namely, grazing, shifting cultivation, collection of firewood, or fishing inside the forests...the peasants collected fish, mostly as their daily food requirements and also for their petty trade with the help of locally developed traps”.
But through dialogue, Mahi sparked change in them.
As Mising activist Doley shared in an interview with Roundglass Sustain, “Miri had the advantage of being a Mising tribesman and thus was in a position to empathise with the tribes in Kaziranga.”
Together with A J Milroy, the erstwhile conservator of the Assam Forest Department, he blazed a trail to amp up efforts to stop poaching. Their efforts culminated in Kaziranga being opened to visitors for the first time in 1938.
Mahi also supervised the capture of the first live rhino in Kaziranga, which was later sent to a zoo in the United States. As Tridip shares, when waters inundated the Karbi-Anglong area in Assam in 1939, Mahi chose to stay back and assist the locals.
“This is also how he contracted Black Fever, which later took his life at the young age of 36 in 1939,” adds Tridip.
Mahi passed away at an early age.
But his legacy lives on in the landscape of Kaziranga, a dream he channelled all his efforts into.