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A Concise History of Science in India c12.s3: Animals and Natural History in the Medieval Period

A Concise History of Science in India c12.s3

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English

Animals and Natural History in the Medieval Period

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The trail blazed by ancient Indian naturalists tapers into the medieval period without much variations on the theme. The advent of the Muslims, particularly of the Moghuls from the sixteenth century onwards, added a new perspective to the study of animals, inasmuch as they attemped to record observations made by themselves, or by others after careful verifications as far as possible. This transition is reflected in some of the important Sanskrit works of this period, followed by the memoirs of the Moghul kings. Of the Sanskrit works, the *Mānasollāsa*, composed by King Someśvara, deserves special mention. This interesting encyclopaedic work deals with recreation and describes in detail various modes of relaxation which include topics like drawing, painting, iconography, gardening, culinary art, cock-fighting, hunting, fishing, etc. Horaa has published an English translation of the fourteenth chapter of *Mānasollāsa* entitled *Matsyavinoda* (the sport of angling). Someśvara gives a classification of sporting fishes as scaly and scaleless, lean and thin, and those living in sea or in rivers. He names 37 fishes, where they live and what they feed on. Furthermore, he deals with lines, hooks and baits suitable for various types of fishes, and advises on the sport of fishing. This work, according to Hora, is rich in factual and deductive knowledge which in some respect remains unsurpassed even now.

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a Translated by Griffiths, II, pp. 575–76.

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The only Indian work which may be said to deal exclusively with zoology is Haṁsadeva's *Mṛga-pakṣi-śāstra*, written in the thirteenth century A.D., at the behest of the Jaina King of Jinapura, Saudadeva, who, fascinated by the beauty of animals in forests, decided to stop hunting and to acquire knowledge about them. Haṁsadeva's account of beasts and birds can by no stretch of imagination be called scientific; rather his emphasis is on the love-life of animals, their temperament (based strictly on the three *guṇas*—*sattva*, *rajas* and *tamas*—of the philosophical system), their size, colour, etc. Nevertheless, the book represents the first attempt in India at large-scale description of animals of which the nomenclature as adopted by him is drawn almost exclusively from the Sanskrit literature of the middle and ancient ages. He describes six kinds of lions, three of tigers, two of hyenas (which he also calls leopards), three of bears, two of rhinos, thirteen of elephants, seven of horses, four of camels, three of asses, three of boars living in forests and seven living in country and villages (with which he confuses porcupines), five of buffaloes, etc. His list of birds is fairly long. In spite of the rather inaccurate treatment, one can discern accuracy of description of features helpful in identification. The many varieties listed are no doubt inspired by the synonyms, each of which has been erroneously treated as a separate kind. Furthermore, information about periods of gestation, longevity, etc., is based more on hearsay than on factual observations.

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*Śukranīti*

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Anatomical details on the domestic animals, like the elephant, horse, cattle, etc., were mostly confined to the external morphological characters like the colour of body, colour of hair, proportions of body-parts, gait, temperament, etc. B. K. Sarkar has ably summarized the information on these aspects of elephants and horses available in ancient texts, specially in the *Śukranīti*. The assessment of the external characters of these animals was chiefly done from the practical point of view, to distinguish between the different qualities of animals in relation to their usefulness, and various breeds were enumerated taking into consideration the external characters of practical importance.

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a Hora (3 ii), pp. 145–69.

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*The Muslim Period*

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The Muslim rulers of India, in their own way, were sportsman-naturalists. They were keen hunters and had big menagerie of horses, dogs, cheetahs, falcons, etc., which were primarily helpful in hunting. Few, however, have left records which could throw light on the fauna of the country or its natural history. The only exceptions are the Moghul kings whose memoirs and biographies bring to light interesting information about the fauna and flora of the period. Ali in a series of articles has given a lucid account of the love of nature of the six great Moghul kings, Babur to Aurangazeb. Apart from their keen interest in animals and nature, the Moghul rulers were particular about truthfulness and accuracy in their memoirs.

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Babur, after his victory at Panipat in A.D. 1526, proceeded to compile a comprehensive gazetteer of Hindustan, to describe at length the customs of peoples, animals, fruits and flowers of the land he had conquered. In recording his observations he had taken special care for their authenticity and accuracy. Even when engaged in affairs of the State, or marching against a foe, Babur was always awake to the objects around him, and anything new that he saw was carefully noted mentally and reduced to writing in his memoirs at the earliest opportunity. Of the larger mammals, he was very fond of hunting the rhinoceros, an animal he had not seen in his native land. He frequently hunted the rhinos in the jungles of Peshawar and Hashnagar.

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Humayun (1530–1540, 1555–1556), in his chequered career, had but little time to indulge in hunting animals. Yet his deep love of animals and nature is reflected in little passages of *Tazkerech*.

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Akbar (1556–1605) was passionately enamoured of animals of all kinds from Persia, Turkestan and Kashmir. The inmates of his menagerie, which were every day led past under the royal window for the monarch's observation, included horses, elephants, antelopes, nilgais, rhinoceroses, large buffaloes with prodigious horns, lions, tigers, some of the finest sporting dogs of every kind from Uzbek, and species of birds of prey used in field sports for catching partridges, cranes, hares, and even for hunting antelopes on which they pounced with violence.

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Moreover, he was a great breeder of domestic animals—elephants, camels, cows and horses—and the breeds of horses produced in his stables were as fine as those of Arabia.

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His mode of hunting most frequently employed was *quamargah* or 'ringing in' method. He employed his armies (which kept them trim in Bengal florican, painted by Mansur, court-artist of Emperor Jahangir, in c. A.D. 1624. (Courtesy, Indian Museum, Calcutta.) *See page 441* times of peace) to surround vast tracks of the countryside, gradually closing in, and driving the game towards the centre of the ring where the royal hunters lay in wait.

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Siberian crane, painted by Mansur, court-artist of Emperor Jahangir. (Courtesy, Indian Museum, Calcutta.) *See page* 441

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The Game Department of Akbar maintained a record of all animals hunted, with measurements and the minutest details concerning them. He possessed a remarkably large number of cheetahs or hunting leopards (about 9,000), a species now extinct from India, and ‘lynxes’ (? caracal), in addition to a large variety of good hunting dogs. His birds of prey, trained in sport, were the *bāz* (*Accipiter gentilis*), *shāhīn* (*Falco peregrinus*) and *shunqar* (*Falco biarmicus*) and *burquat* falcon (probably the golden eagle, *Aquila chrysaetos*). The Emperor, however, preferred the *bashāh* (sparrow-hawk, *Accipiter nisus*), which was given various names by him.

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Jahangir (1605–1627) was the greatest naturalist among the Moghuls, just as his father was the greatest Emperor. ‘His profuse and engrossing memoirs are a veritable natural history of the animals that came under his notice, and a record of the most searching observations concerning them.’a For exhaustive account of Jahangir as a naturalist, Alvi and Rahman’s book may also be referred to (Alvi and Rahman (2)). In this monograph the authors have ably brought together all available information about this particular fact of Jahangir who could have been a better and happier man as the head of a natural history museum.

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His love for animals was so widely known that foreign dignitaries often gave him presents of exotic animals, and his court artists, specially Ustad Mansur, were kept busily engaged in drawing the likeness of animals and other objects that came to the Emperor or to his notice. Mansur excelled in the art of animal and floral portraiture, as accurate and meticulous as their literary records maintained by the Emperor. Many of the animal paintings made by the court artists of Jahangir have been lost, but whatever has survived (scattered in several museums and private collections) can be of great utility to modern taxonomists and naturalists for their accuracy of representation (Pls. VII, VIII, IX).

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Though not a trained zoologist, Jahangir’s keen powers of observation and passion for knowledge imparted to his descriptions an objective thoroughness characteristic of modern scientific writing. In describing organisms observed by him, he gave local names, geographical distribution and even structural characteristics, weights, measurements and some interesting notes on ecology and behaviour. Though characterized by an overtone of the admiration for beauty or a feeling of repulsion for an ugly animal, his descriptions were often precise enough for the correct scientific identification of the objects described. His studies of the sarus crane, and the gestation period of the elephant, are two amongst his original contributions, and his observations on the ecology, behaviour, etc., of animals generally might come under the same category as ‘the first records’ of modern zoological writers.

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a Ali, p. 841.

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Jahangir maintained a big aviary and menagerie where he carried on his observations, tests and experiments. His curiosity and passion for verifying hearsay often led him to dissect objects of his hunt and to examine the internals. He was specially interested in the position of the gall-bladder and never failed to verify whether this organ was situated inside the liver or outside. It may be of interest to note that what was just a natural curiosity for Jahangir assumed great importance some 300 years later. From the functional and evolutionary points of view, the presence or absence, size and position of gall-bladders in various animals formed topics of extensive investigations during the third and fourth decades of the present century. He was also keen to study the reproductive behaviour of animals in captivity and recorded some interesting observations on the breeding of the cheetah and of the tiger in captivity. Equally interesting are his observations on the diet of the Indian python (*Python molurus*) ‘which can swallow up to a hog-deer’ and of the king-cobra (*Ophiophagus hannah*) which was seen swallowing another cobra.

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Jahangir’s repute as a hunter was no less than his passion for nature, and his records reveal astronomical figures, 3,203 mammals and 13,954 birds. The nilgai (889), and deer, antelopes, mountain goat, etc. (1,670), among mammals, and pigeons (10,348) and crows (3,276) appeared to be his special targets.

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The two last eminent Mughal kings, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, did inherit the qualities of their ancestors, but not to the same extent as Jahangir’s or Akbar’s.

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The animals mentioned in the memoirs of the Moghul kings have been listed by Ali, along with notes recorded by them. Jahangir’s animals have also been dealt with by Alvi and Rahman. Of special interest in this connection is the find of a miniature portrait of the dodo (a bird from Madagascar now extinct) in the collection of the Institute of Orientalists of the USSR, Academy of Sciences. This remarkable miniature (Pl. IX), apparently drawn from a live specimen, though unsigned and undated, bears the unmistakable Mansur style and was probably drawn from a collection of three birds in the possession of the East India Company’s Factory at Surat where it was observed and described by Mundy in 1628.

Cites (2)