Of all the mega mammals in India, perhaps none suffers more from inadequate public exposure and empathy than the Great Indian One-Horned Rhinoceros. With each poaching incident, my belief that Indians are empathetic neither to the already beleaguered wildlife forms nor to our country’s remaining wilderness niches grows stronger. Perhaps the overarching reason is that we have failed to showcase our wildlife and its jungle habitats through focussed and captivating episodes, despite the phenomenal reach of our multi-media capabilities. Take for instance the stories of how the rhino got its skin.
Indian mythology has it that Krishna, deciding that the elephant was an easy target on the battlefield, made a pet of a rhino and draped its sides with a cover fabricated from steel plates. But the clatter of the plates, which were loosely joined, startled the rhino and it tried to dislodge the strange garment. Unable to do so, it lay on the ground and rolled from side to side. This only led to the steel plates being dented by the body weight and becoming enmeshed with the skin. However, as the rhino could not be trained for war like the elephant, it was driven back into the forest. But the steel-plated skin remained.
Centuries later, an Englishman came up with another endearing story of how the rhino got its skin. Rudyard Kipling’s ‘How the Rhino Got Its Skin’ remains a favourite in the Just So Stories . Kipling’s rhino ate up the fruit cake of a Parsee gentleman named Pestonjee Bomonjee. In those times, rhinos had smooth, wrinkle-free skins draped over the body and secured by three buttons beneath the belly. Before entering the lake, the rhino removed the skin and left it on the bank. An annoyed Bomonjee collected all the cake crumbs, especially the burnt, hardened bits of the currants and sprinkled them on the inner surface of the rhino’s skin. When the rhino buttoned on his skin after his bath, the crumbs began to irritate him. So he lay down and rolled on the ground but all that happened was that the buttons snapped off. And so “he rubbed his skin in to a great fold over his shoulders, and another fold underneath, where the buttons used to be... And he rubbed some more folds over his legs. And it spoiled his temper... all on account of the cake crumbs inside.”
The poet who wrote “Fearing nothing, caring for nothing/Wander alone, like the Rhinoceros” obviously had had no idea how the animal’s fearlessness would lead him to deadly ambushes. Its habitat has declined so much that a quarter of Guwahati town’s population could comfortably encircle it, and keep poachers at bay. Will some Good Samaritan please read out the two endearing tales to the poachers? Is anyone listening?
