In the preface to his book, Douglas Dewar pays homage to India’s “jungle folk”. Of the bigger ones, the lions and tigers and leopards, he writes— it is vouchsafed to no man—not even to the shikari, who spends years in the jungle—to obtain more than “an occasional fleeting glimpse” of them.
And these animals he does not include in “Jungle Folk: Indian Natural History Sketches”. The ones that capture his attention are what he calls the “lesser fry”. To these “vivacious mynas, noisy babblers, vociferous cuckoos, silent herons, beautiful pittas, graceful wagtails, elegant terns, melodious rock-chats, cheeky squirrels Dewar turns.
The very endearing adjectives he uses to describe them supplement his overall assessment— they are a cheery crowd, and a man who spends his time in India and does not know them “misses much of the pleasures of life”.
This is, of course, the preface to a book written, and first published, in 1912. Dewar was born in London in 1875, and died in 1957.
A barrister, British civil servant in India, and ornithologist, lived in a time when Indian wildlife, flora and fauna was fascinating to the foreigners who arrived in the country. In fact, so high was the number of books written on the subject of Indian wildlife that Dewar acknowledges the critics in “Jungle Folk”, calling comments like W. H. Hudson’s (“We grow used to look for funny books about animals from India, just as we look for sentimental natural history books from America.”), well founded.
Explaining himself, he writes that to an outsider, who has not met the Indian birds he finds in these popular ornithology books, their style would seem the same, derived and copied from one another in an act of either conscious or unconscious plagiarism. He understands this easy mistake, but says that it is the Indian birds themselves that guide the author’s hand, and dictate his style. This style, of course, is a “funny” one; one that is guided purely by the fact that unlike the birds in America or Britain, which are, Dewar says, “gentle” and “insipid”, the avifauna of India is full of strong, funny, distinct characters, impossible to describe without a liberal sprinkling of the same qualities in the writing itself.
Dewar’s book has been republished in a beautiful edition by Aleph Books, and while the glossary has been dropped, the rest is a faithful reproduction of the first edition. The text has not been updated, and so, the information and statistics in the book remain frozen in Dewar’s time, while the world around them has moved on.
Even so, “Jungle Folk” still holds both charm, and relevance. It speaks of its subject with a kind of love, and affection that is catching. Dewar was a trained ornithologist, but in this book, he ensures that he writes for the novice. At one point, he writes of the rich diversity of Indian avifauna species. “Oates and Blanford describe over sixteen hundred of these”, he writes, immediately going on to put the fact in a more digestible form for his non-ornithological reader, who might “obtain a better idea of the wealth of the Indian avifauna when he hears that among Indian birds there are numbered 108 different kinds of warbler, 56 woodpeckers, 30 cuckoos, 28 starlings, 17 butcher-birds, 16 kingfishers, and 8 crows”. He’s right.
A random number, however large, does not quite make the same impact as that. In the book, Dewar dedicates 44 chapters to these birds, including sections on interpreting their actions and understanding their habitat, migratory patterns and nest-building habits, among other things. Each chapter’s title itself reflects Dewar’s affection for his subject. Dewar’s artwork and sketches are precise too, clean, neat reproductions which add flavour to the book.
To Dewar’s writing itself there is a kind of sepia tinted quality, and while he offers a contemporary book for his times, intended to educate his readers on the then existing Indian avifauna, reading “Jungle Folk” today is a different experience altogether.
It is still instructive, and few ornithologists today will describe the Melodious Drongo or the Respectable Cuckoo the way Dewar does, peppered with words and turns of phrase that amuse as they teach, painting a picture of these birds that is both individualistic and respectful. For Dewar, it is clear, observes but does not patronise.
They are not specimen for him, and so, their world automatically becomes more, for the lack of a better word, human.
The other aspect of this book is the very time it was conceived in.
Today, the fact that it contains outdated data is in itself a study in history and evolution of our own world. It offers a clean view into the past with the scenes it describes— the “no fewer than twenty different species” which elected to share Dewar’s bungalow with him, the abundance of kites Lahore that, according to Dewar, marks the low level of hygiene, the number of Indian Wagtails in the city of Madras, where they are “to be seen everywhere— on the house-top, in the courtyard, in shady garden, in open field, and on the river bank in company with the soldiers who solemnly fish in the waters round about the fort”.
For anyone looking to understand the history of Indian birds a little better, and in the process appreciate them even more, Dewar’s book is a firm and steady stepping stone, one that opens up a world long gone, and guarantees a little more love for the current one.
