Jungle Folk: Indian Natural History Sketches

INDIAN NATURAL HISTORY SKETCHES BY DOUGLAS DEWAR
LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXII
WM. BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
It is not of the bigger jungle folk that I write—of lions, tigers, leopards, bears, bison, or even deer and antelopes; for of these 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.
The subjects of my theme are the lesser fry—vivacious mynas, noisy babblers, vociferous cuckoos, silent herons, beautiful pittas, graceful wagtails, elegant terns, melodious rock-chats, cheeky squirrels.
A cheery crowd are these. The man who passes his days in India without knowing them misses much of the pleasure of life.
D. DEWAR.
Literary critics seem to be agreed that we who write about Indian birds form a definite school. “Phil Robinson,” they say, “furnished, thirty years ago, a charming model which all who have followed him in writing seem compelled to copy more or less closely.” Mr. W. H. Hudson remarks: “We grow used to look for funny books about animals from India, just as we look for sentimental natural history books from America.”
In a sense this criticism is well founded. Popular books on Indian ornithology resemble one another in that a ripple of humour runs through each. But the critics err when they attempt to explain this similarity by asserting that Anglo-Indian writers model themselves, consciously or unconsciously, on Phil Robinson, or that they imitate one another. The mistake made by the critics is excusable. When each successive writer discourses in the same peculiar style the obvious inference is that the later ones are guilty of more or less unconscious plagiarism. The majority of literary critics in England have not enjoyed the advantage of meeting our Indian birds in the flesh. To those who do possess this advantage it is clear that the Indian birds themselves are responsible for our writings being “funny.” We naturalists merely describe what we see. The avifauna of every country has a character of its own. Mr. John Burroughs has remarked that American birds as a whole are more gentle, more insipid than the feathered folk in the British Isles. Still greater is the contrast between English and Indian birds. The latter are to the former as wine is to water.