men with guns

My book reference tally from the National Library has now exceeded sixty, and I've only managed to sift through four.

'Tiger Shooting in India', William Rice, 1857 (with 12 chromalithographs);

'The Calcutta Port Trust: A Brief History of 50 Years Work 1870-1920' (with hand coloured map attached to back cover);

For a second time, Augustus Somerville's 'Shikar near Calcutta ...' , and

Mary Linley Taylor's 'The Tiger's Claw: The Life Story of East Asia's Mighty Hunter', 1956.

The most interesting part of this last book was the author's prologue - an anecdote about a tiger's claw she was given by her 'naval grandfather'. The rest is a collection of stories about a Russian hunter, Yura (George) Yankovksy, she met while living in Korea between 1918 and 1942. While he is an entomologist and ornithologist of some repute, for several decades he goes around Siberia, Korea and Manchuria blasting away at tigers, panthers and leopards. Here is an extract about two cubs that resonated with my father's story.

"On a future hunt, George did get two tiger cubs, for which the zoo in Seoul paid him one thousand dollars. After seeing the tigers, fully grown, in the zoo - where, I must say, they looked contented - I asked George how he had caught them. 'Not with a trap', he replied.

'Then how?' I asked.

'Well,' George said, 'first I had to kill the mother. Then I found the young tigers. I held their heads to the ground with a strong forked stick, while Kim tied their hind legs together. I put a stick behing their teeth, so that they could not close their mouths to bite, and then tied the front legs together, and put them into sacks. We carried them to camp, put them in boxes, and took them to Seoul on the train.' "

This image is drawn from a photograph in Taylor's book. I've seen a number of images of tigers that have been shot and killed, but this photograph of the hunter (a friend of George's) next to those massive bears holds an eerie and violent stillness. Something in his easy stance, his gaze straight into the camera and in complete contrast the vulnerable snouts and upturned paws of the bears.

P. Thankappan Nair

A visit to the National Library courtesy of Amitava Mukhopadhyay has given me another avenue to explore for traces of my great-great grandfather, Edward Alkin. After a tour of the Rare Books section (where I saw a copy of Hicky's Bengal Gazette or Calcutta General Advertiser, 1780; William Carey's 1806 Grammar of Sungskrit Languages; Edward Fry's 1799 Pantographia 'containing accurate copies of all the known alphabets of the world' (and a dedication to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society) and a Tibetan manuscript written in 1670 and gifted to the Library by his Holiness the Dalai Lama), I was slightly stunned to meet P. Thankappan Nair. Mr Nair is an esteemed historian whose area of expertise is Calcutta. He has published 48 books and I had just come across some references to his writings at the Asiatic Society last week.

His work includes four volumes of the history of Calcutta, one volume per century from 16th to 19th; a history of the Calcutta Police; a history of the street names of Calcutta and a history of the actual name of the city. Unfortunately, most of his books are out of print and I plan to go to Bow Bazaar and College Street to scour some of the secondhand bookstores.

P.T. Nair was sitting at a desk preparing a lecture he is giving on 23rd November to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Ashutosh Mukhopadyay collection being donated to the Library ... some 87,500 books. That is another story!

We talked for a while about Calcutta, Australia, cricket, James Prinsep and air-conditioning. He advised Amitava to take me to the Calcutta Port Trust which has a good archive, and a copy of something he had written on the Hugli Shipping Pilots. And also to try the Officers Club as they also hold some documents and archives.

P.T. Nair said that he is at the library most mornings if I had any other questions. He tapped his chest and said that the room gets too cold to stay all day. He was wearing a woollen jumper underneath his shirt.