JUNGLE BOOK BY SIR RUDYARD KIPLING REVISITED……PENCH NATIONAL PARK.
In my want and desire to explore the wilderness I visited quite a few forests of India. During my flying days, I visited many other forests of different countries but when I started the same in India I found that the breath of life or, you can say the personage of conscience, exists only here. The reason was quite simple. The wildlife and parks department of the foreign countries spend lot of money to synthetically beautify the parks with roads, food centers, parking, and in-process meddle with the natural feel of the forest or the wildlife parks. Indeed one may have a pleasant experience with seamless amenities but the visitor does not feel the breath of life there. Of course, this is my view and not necessarily be the common perspective.
Pench was a forest that was unique in its feel, experience, and its signature. The very first photograph that I shot encapsulated all the above. It was a doorway to the mystic forest.
Very recently we visited the Pench forest which is located on the border of Maharashtra state and the Madhya Pradesh state of India. Having flown for 31 years we decided to travel by train and I took the Nagpur Duronto from Mumbai. The train started exactly on time at 2000 hrs and it was an overnight journey to Nagpur. We reached at 0700 hrs, half an hour before time. We had hired a car to take us to Moughli paradise resort in Turia in Pench. This name rang a bell. Why Moughli. It's just a three hours drive from Nagpur station to the resort and by 1030 we were at the resort. The roads leading to Pench forest is amazingly wide and smooth and the entire highway goes through the buffer zone of the forest from a place called Ramtek.
The highway is designed in such a way that the wild animals can freely cross over from the left of the highway to the right through an underpass designed only for the wild animals to cross through without being harmed. Wildlife department has installed cameras in all the underpasses and they have recorded various animals using this underpass. An excellent initiative by Madhya Pradesh tourism.
Before I delve into the details of the Pench forest it is imperative to know the astounding history of this forest. First is the area of the present Pench Tiger Reserve has been described in Ain-i-Akbari, (The Ain-i-Akbari (Persian: آئینِ اکبری) or the “Administration of Akbar”, is a 16th-century detailed document recording the administration of the Mughal Empire under Emperor Akbar, written by his court historian, Abu’l Fazl in the Persian language. ).
The second is more interesting and much recent. In 1831 Lieutenant Moor, a military advisor to the British East India Company witnessed a human child nurtured by the wolves in the forests of Seoni. The tale of this incident by Sleeman in a booklet titled ‘An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens’ together with Strendale’s story in Seoni inspired the fictional genius, Sir Rudyard Kipling, to pen down ‘The Jungle Book’ and the wolf child was commemorated as Moughli. That’s why Moughli made sense as the name of the resorts in and around Pench.
For a lot of us city folks, a man-cub named Mowgli delivered our first interaction with the wild. In The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling’s realistic characters walk free in the jungles of Seoni — and the forest adjoining the Seoni district; a forest we now know as Pench National Park.
These jungles are a part of Pench in MP and were acknowledged as a national park in 1983 and then tiger reserve in 1993. One just has to stare at the serene Wainganga river, the breathtaking Seoni Hills, and gasp in wonder at the striking gorge where Mowgli killed Sher Khan — the villain character, tiger of Jungle Book. Though during my visit I could not see Sher Khan the Tiger but I did spot his fresh pug marks on the dirt road over the tire marks
Kipling had functioned in old Madhya Pradesh. It is rather likely that he went to the Seoni forest, experienced the natural beauty, and saw the wildlife of that area. The jungles of Seoni so fascinated Rudyard Kipling that Pench Tiger Reserve replaced Rajasthan as the muse for the location of the story ‘The Jungle Book’. Isn’t this good enough reason to visit this forest once?
When one enters the forest he/she can have lots of expectation and that could lead to a completely negative experience of the forest. My earnest advice to all my readers is that always enter the jungle with an open mind. Without a load of your own expectations, the forest proves to be an exciting, beautiful, majestic and very spiritual place, where even the tiniest of creatures has a character to play. You will be witnessed to all the events that unfold in front of you and you too would realize that you, as a human, is also so intertwined with the forest in so many ways. That is when you start to realize the personage of conscience.
Therefore Pench is one of the most favoured wildlife resort visited by many. Wildlife buffs flock to this place just to spot the famous characters of the book, Akela (The Indian Wolf), Raksha (the female Wolf), Baloo (Sloth Bear), and the vicious Shere Khan (Royal Bengal Tiger).Baghira (He is a black panther who serves as friend, protector and mentor to the “man-cub” Moughli. The word bagheera is Hindustani for panther or leopard ) Kaa the python and the other characters. The black Panther went missing from the list of wild animals of Pench for a long time and suddenly as it went missing,it appeared again last year.
The Bengal tiger is the main cat species of the park present in good numbers but since last year due to 6 newborn cubs their sightings have increased and being sighted almost every day. I was not one of the lucky people to have spotted one in Pench, though there is always a second time. As per the latest Tiger Census, there are approx. 40 tigers in the park, 39 species of mammals, 13 species of reptiles, 3 species of amphibians. Commonly seen wildlife is Chital, Sambar, Nilgai, wild boar, and jackal. Also Indian leopard, sloth bear, Indian wolf, wild dog, porcupine, Languors and macaques, jungle cat, fox, striped hyena, gaur, four-horned antelope, and barking deer live in the park.
The park is rich in birdlife too. According to an estimate of the wildlife authorities, the park harbors more than 210 species including several migratory ones. Some of them are peafowl, junglefowl, crow pheasant, crimson-breasted barbet, red-vented bulbul, racket-tailed drongo, Indian roller, spotted owlets, and white-necked storks.
Later in the book, “The Jungle Book” Mowgli the feral child is about 16 years old and living contentedly with his wolves in the Seeonee jungle, when the peace is disturbed by ‘Won-tolla’, a solitary wolf whose mate and cubs have been killed by dholes. He warns the Sioni wolves that the dhole-pack, the wild dog packs, will soon overrun their territory. It is likely so because during my five safaris that I did I did not spot a single wolf but I did spot numerous Dholes, The Wild Dogs. These wild dogs do look cunning and mean.
In one afternoon safari, we came across a leopard mother moving with her cubs very cautiously from one place to another and the cubs were following her playfully oblivion to the dangers. Cubs are always in a playful state and have no inkling of dangers and therefore I captured a cub in its playful state giving a hard time to his mother. It was very difficult to spot the cub through the foliage and the cub was very far away from the safari tracks. I spotted it first through the binoculars and then later attempted to take a photograph. The image is not sharp but still, I would like my readers to get a feel of the forest and its life as it unfolds like the story.
Among the many types of trees, there is one which needs to be mentioned. It is the white kulu trees, also referred to as ‘ghost tree’, that stand out conspicuously among the various hues of green. The tree has a very shiny and reflective whitish bark which actually reflects moonlight in the night and appears as a Ghost in the dead dark of the night. Might a sight to behold. This tree gives out an edible gum which is called as, “Gond” from cuts in the bark. Tribals do harvest this gum as it is used in making sweets like the laddoo
The day of my departure from Pench dawned and I had to bid adieu to the real-time story of the Jungle Book. I wanted to read more, experience, more, feel more, but everything has to come to an end and so did my exploration of wilderness in Pench. To all my readers who have still not visited Moughli’s terrain do visit this place once and experience the breath of life and the personage of conscience