The reintroduction of the cheetah in India has revived a three-year old intellectual debate on whether the fastest land mammal in the world was ever a resident in the wild in India.
In the latest salvo, wildlife historians Raza Kazmi and Divyabhanusinh said in a paper in the Journal of Bombay Natural History Society’s (BNHS) September-December 2022 volume that wild cheetahs inhabited almost the entire length and breadth of India and parts of neighbouring Pakistan.
The authors have mentioned 152 references to wild cheetahs in India between 1818 and 1997 in their paper titled: “Response To A Critique Of ‘Asiatic Cheetah Acinonyx Jubatus Venaticus In India: A Chronology of Extinction and Related Reports” and claimed that cheetahs inhabited the Indian wilderness stretching from Punjab and Haryana in the northwest to Odisha in the east, and Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the south.
The paper is a response to a 2022 article in Seminar by wildlife biologists Dharmendra Khandal and Ishan Dhar, both with Tiger Watch in Ranthambore, that critiqued an earlier article by Kazmi and Divyabhanusinh in 2019 in the BNHS journal, Asiatic Cheetah in India: A Chronology of Extinction.
Khandal and Dhar argued that a map on the geographical distribution of cheetahs used by Kazmi and Divyabhanusinh in the 2019 article included captive animals, thereby presenting an erroneous picture. They further argued that there was insufficient evidence on the wild origins of cheetahs in India.
In the latest article, Kazmi and Divyabhanusinh (K&D) have addressed these issues and provided a map and annexure of references to cheetahs in India and Pakistan from 1772 onwards based on various historical documents that prove their existence in the wild. MK Ranjitsinh, former bureaucrat and one of the main architects of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, and India’s Project Cheetah (reintroduction of the animal from Namibia and South Africa) has backed Kazmi and Divyabhanusinh’s inferences based on his personal research and work on cheetahs in India.
They clarify that their 2019 paper was not a distributional study, but only a chronology of the cheetah’s extinction in India, and provided a new map of the actual distribution based on various historical notes, documents, books etc.
“…we provide an actual distribution range map of cheetahs in India using only references to wild cheetah records (i.e. excluding cheetah coursing records, captive animals, paintings and skulls). This map, thus, includes locations mentioned in the specific records of killing and sighting of cheetahs in the wild, and also maps out general references to their occurrence in the wild in various British Provinces and Princely States,” they write in the new paper.
Ranjitsinh said that cheetahs may have “entered India through the northwest near the Makran coast” and then “stayed back and spread over almost the entire Indian landscape”. He added that “science should tell us the facts and it should not buttress preconceived notions. Cheetahs may have very well existed down south also, may be not in the Western Ghats but other parts of Peninsular India”.
The distribution map is bound to cause a stir in view of India’s ongoing Project Cheetah as part of which eight cheetahs from Namibia were released in Kuno by PM Narendra Modi on September 17 last year and another 12 from South Africa on February 18. Kazmi and Divyabhanusinh cite other references as well – including details of cheetah trapping methods used to capture wild cheetahs.
In their 2019 paper, the authors had also pointed to the role of the British in exterminating the cheetah in India. “This brings us to Prof. Mahesh Rangarajan’s crucial research. His search through archival records found that the British government gave rewards for the destruction of not only adult cheetahs, but also for their cubs from about 1871 onwards,” they wrote.
The new paper has references to the cheetah’s existence in Peninsular India and the northwestern region of the country. “While we are constrained by the temporal scope of our paper being limited to 1772 and thereafter, without going into all the details we must mention that both Tonk Manuscript (more on it later) as well as works of eminent historian Irfan Habib has recorded cheetahs from the plains of Punjab and Haryana in the medieval era. Even the Akbarnama records capture of cheetahs from Punjab (in 1571), Hisar (Haryana) in 1560, and Gwalior (in 1569)…”
Tonk Manuscript is referred to as such because it is unpublished and its title is not known, its relevant portion on cheetahs was translated from Persian by Chandra Shekhar of Delhi University according to Kazmi’s paper.
In its Cheetah Action Plan released last year, which was based in Divyabhanusinh’s research, the Union environment ministry said the main reason for the decline of the cheetah in India was the large-scale capture of animals from the wild for coursing, bounty and sport hunting, extensive habitat conversion, and the consequent decline in prey base. “Historically they existed in a very large area,” said SP Yadav, Project Cheetah chief.
But the last word on the debate is yet to be heard.
Khandal said they will be responding to Kazmi and Divyabhanusinh’s latest paper. “We have to thank them for considering our suggestions and removing the captive cheetahs from the list and providing a new map. We will point out a few issues (with the new paper) though.”