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In today’s blog, Biswajit Sarmah introduces his recently published article in Environment and History (Fast-track April 2023) Empire, Nature and Agrarian World: A History of Rhino Preservation in the Kaziranga Game Reserve, India (1902–1938) 

The return of the greater one-horned rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis) is considered one of the most successful conservation stories. Historically, the rhino habitat spanned the Indo-Gangetic-Brahmaputra plains. However, by the 1890s, rhinos were confined to stray pockets in Nepal’s Terai, North Bengal and Brahmaputra’s floodplains, the decline being primarily due to hunting for their horns and agricultural expansion into their habitat. In 1901, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India asserted that ‘Rhinoceros is all but exterminated save in Assam.’^[1] In the period 1905–1908, the colonial Government of Assam established three game reserves in Kaziranga, North Kamrup and Laokhowa under the forest department to protect the rapidly vanishing rhinos. Today, the Kaziranga National Park (KNP), the present avatar of the Kaziranga Game Reserve, boasts two-thirds of the nearly 4,000 rhinos surviving worldwide. 

India’s wildlife historiography focuses on charismatic animals like the Asian elephant, tiger, rhino and Asiatic lion. However, their habitats do not attract equally strong attention. The overwhelming focus on the animal reduces conservation history to a struggle between its protagonists (governments, conservationists) and opponents (peasants, illegal hunters). Therefore, it is unsurprising that historical accounts of conservation appear as a clash between diverse cultural views about conservation and the struggle of law enforcement. 

My recent essay in Environment and History addresses some of the challenges mentioned above in the historical scholarship of conservation. To trace the early history of rhino conservation, the essay locates the Kaziranga Game Reserve in the province’s agrarian and ecological context. Such a framing of the game reserve allows viewing various actors in conservation as much more than ‘protagonists’ or ‘opponents’ of conservation. For instance, the government was not only the steward of conservation but also the arbitrator of competing material claims over natural resources (cultivation versus conservation). The peasants who opposed the game reserve were also creative participants in rhino conservation. Further, ecological issues such as floods and erosion, which constantly remade the rhino habitat, also allowed negotiation between conflicting parties. Therefore, situating conservation in the agro-ecological context helps recover a history that exceeds the narratives of conflicts and dispossession to reflect on alliances and accommodation.

Kaziranga, one of the sites selected to protect the rhino, was a narrow floodplain sandwiched between the Brahmaputra in the north and the Karbi Hills in the south (Figure 2). Assamese, Karbi, Mishing, Bengali, Nepali and Muslim peasants inhabited this sparsely populated locality. These thinly cultivated floodplains, where peasants grew rice, mustard and pulses, stood at the margin of a densely cultivated belt of the Brahmaputra Valley. Kaziranga also provided excellent pastures to rear livestock. Before the reserve was proposed, European planters and Indian peasants hunted here.

The neighbouring peasants opposed the idea of a game reserve. They feared the reserve would impede agricultural expansion, restrict forest produce collection and increase pillaging by wildlife. The government was clear that the land set aside for the game reserve must not include cultivated or cultivable land. The government’s stand followed from a lopsided colonial emphasis on expanding cultivation to increase revenue. At the same time, the government wanted to keep the game reserve apart from all kinds of resource use – cultivation, hunting, fishing and foraging. In other words, the government wanted to separate ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.

In the 1910s, soon after the game reserves were established, a new discourse of wildlife conservation started in Assam. The European planters became the biggest proponents of rhino conservation. The game reserves shrank their hunting avenues and they faced intense competition from Indian hunters in the areas outside the reserves. Therefore, they urged the government to expand the game reserve into the adjoining areas by removing the peasants and graziers who allegedly ‘destroyed’ the game.

Contrary to such demonisation of the Indian peasants, my essay shows a positive role being played by the Indians in the conservation of the rhino. Unlike the cattle-lifting tiger or crop-raiding wild boar or elephant, the rhino seldom raided crops and was a ‘peaceful’ animal. The rhino was not easy to kill, and nor were the peasants hostile to it. In ordinary times, the peasants were indifferent to the rhino. Killing of rhinos for their horns escalated only during periods of hardship such as crop failure and soaring unpaid taxes.

While discussing the game reserve expansion, colonial officials were divided over acquiring a piece of land primarily used by the Nepali graziers and Mishing graziers-cum-cultivators. A section of officials supported the acquisition, arguing that the rhino could not be protected in the presence of the graziers and peasants. Others argued that dispersing the graziers with their nearly 7,000 livestock would be a risk to cultivation elsewhere. Thus, the conflict over resources around the game reserve reflected the anxiety of maintaining the ‘agrarian order’ in the valley. Finally, the Chief Commissioner of Assam added the land to the game reserve. The graziers were ordered to relocate to the neighbouring sandbars of the Brahmaputra. 

The primary motive behind the European hunters’ advocacy was to win shooting concessions inside the game reserve. However, fear of extinction of the rhino and the inability to count its stocks meant that the government banned its hunting anywhere in the province. Thus, the rhino became the first species for which the objective of preservation was separated from hunting or material gains. In contrast, other charismatic fauna like the tiger and lion were protected primarily to be hunted. The government also renamed the game reserve the Kaziranga Game Sanctuary, signifying an end to sport-hunting. 

While the rhino found an expanded home and relief from at least trophy hunting, the empire’s agrarian order was at stake. Peasant discontent against the game sanctuary – due to crop damage by wild animals and restrictions on hunting and fishing – kept mounting. Throughout the colonial period, the government deployed no more than seven men to patrol the 430-square-kilometre sanctuary whose grasses grow up to fifteen feet (see Figure 1). The government knew that strict protection by deploying more manpower was expensive and could provoke peasant discontent. To assuage the peasants, the government allowed them along the southern boundary of the sanctuary to graze up to a mile inside the boundary.

The Nepali graziers, who were evicted to expand the sanctuary, settled in the neighbouring sand bars of the Brahmaputra. Within a decade, the Brahmaputra’s braided courses brought these sandbars nextto the northern riparian edges of the sanctuary. The government allowed these graziers into the northern edges in return for their loyalty in protecting the rhino. 

These accommodations paid off well. In 1939, forest officials estimated there to be nearly 100 rhinos in the Kaziranga Game Sanctuary. ‘Burha Gunda’, literally meaning an old solitary bull in Assamese, retired to the sanctuary’s periphery and lived for at least fourteen years in a pasture alongside domestic cattle. It was so used to humans that it allowed photography at very close quarters. The survival of Burha Gunda and many such solitary bulls alongside humans indicated the gradually expanding social base for rhino conservation. 

Eventually, the rhino made room for itself, overcoming the British colonial government’s proclivity towards agricultural expansion and bureaucratic indifference. By the late 1930s, reliable estimates showed that the rhino was making a gradual comeback in the fluid floodplains of Kaziranga. The government relied on the accommodation of rural rights instead of strict protection to protect the rhino. Stringent protection required more manpower and was expensive. Secondly, it could provoke peasant anger, which the government could ill-afford. Rhinos like Burha Gunda and, more importantly, a gradual revival of the rhino defied the interwar conservation paradigm that only wilderness can protect natural heritage. The ecological changes around the sanctuary kept land, humans and animals all on the move. Such fluidity and colonial agrarian priority were central to the accommodation of rural rights. However, for the forest department, the presence of the graziers and fishers remained a fleeting anomaly, which they persistently tried to remove. 

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^[1] George Nathaniel Curzon, Lord Curzon in India (London: Macmillan & Co., 1906), pp. 435–438.