One afternoon in the early 1970s, a jeep pulls up to an upscale locality in Nagpur that also houses the Tata bungalow. Children playing in the street gathered near the jeep and were stunned to see a huge tiger lying in the trailer. The animal was shot by my father’s friend SK Chitnavis. Theater director Vikas Khurana recalls the time when he was a schoolboy. More than five decades later, others in the area who are now in their 60s still remember going to Khurana’s house to see the tiger.
Chandrakant Deshmukh, a licensed arms dealer, also recalls those days, saying that his father had killed a tiger near Kondhli, about 80 km from Nagpur, and was driving it around town to showcase it. This was the period before 1972 and Nagpur was the center of hunting. Ejaz Shami, who is associated with the health service, says that my uncle Haji Abdul Hameed was an enthusiastic hunter. Once he shot a deer. When he was returning after searching for him, he saw a man wiping blood from his feet. He was shaken by this and stopped hunting.
The Nawab of Porla’s company wrote in the brochure – The leaflet had a short description of how to go about the hunt. It was by sitting on a scaffold or chasing a tiger. Another method was to go around in jeeps and search for tigers at night by waving powerful searchlights. Jai Patil, a politician who recalls how his father shot three tigers in a row thinking that the same animal had returned after being killed. Builder Balbir Singh Renu recalls that his uncle killed the tiger with a single shot from his 12-bore gun.
Harshvardhan Dhanwate talks about his father killing the man-eating tigress of Hingna near Nagpur. Shafat Ali Khan from Hyderabad says central India was a favorite hunting ground for his family. I was in school when my father booked Ballarpur block. I wanted to kill the bison, but the Wildlife Protection Act came into force in the middle of our mission and I missed the bison. This was the period when the elite families of the city used to go for personal hunting trips. Many of them only wanted to hunt the tiger. At the same time, some middle class people also used to go to the nearby bushes by bicycle and hunt deer or black buck.