PROLOGU E Captain Thomas Williamson, the author of the epic book about India’s animals, Oriental Field Sports, says that in the 1780s, while pig-sticking, one was likely to encounter tigers that had strayed into the open, but never lions, or for that matter, cheetahs. He went on to state that, after spending the last two decades of the eighteenth century roaming the wilderness of India, he believed that there were no lions in Hindustan. For me this was an excellent clue regarding the state of the lion during that time, which was, then, a much debated topic. In his observations of the same period, Thomas Pennant says of lions: ‘Those who deny that those animals were natives of India, assert that here was a royal menagerie and that the breed was propagated from the beasts which had escaped.’ The debate about the origins and prevalence of lions and cheetahs in India must have been vigorous in the eighteenth century and later but I was intrigued by the fact that it hasn’t been talked about much in recent years. In fact, in the twentieth century, most serious observers just took it for granted that lions and cheetahs were indigenous to India. In his book, Wild Animals in Central India, published in 1931, A. A. Dunbar Brander writes that there were no lions in Central India and goes on to say of the cheetah that, ‘The Hunting Leopard (Cynalurus jubatus) has now almost entirely disappeared from the province without apparent reason, and I only know of three animals having been procured in the last twenty years.’ As we will see in the course of this book, it is likely that what Brander referred to must have been three trained cheetahs imported from Africa. Why is it that the comments about lions and cheetahs and their rarity remain unchanged over hundreds of years, especially from people who travelled across India in search of game? Why are pictures of lions as hunting trophies so rare and the few that exist tend to have been taken 13
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