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World Lion Day highlights the urgent need for lion conservation amid declining populations due to habitat loss and poaching.
Historically, lions symbolized royalty in India, with Mughal emperors hunting them as a display of power and territorial dominance.
The lion's significance in Mughal culture underscores its role in the ecosystem and the necessity of protecting this majestic species.
World Lion Day was established to bring global attention to the declining number of lions and the urgent need for their conservation.
While lions captivate us with their strength and magnificence, their population has been dwindling due to various threats such as habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict, and poaching.
This day serves as a powerful reminder of the critical role lions play in our ecosystem and the necessity of protecting them for future generations.
As the world celebrates another Lion Day, it is worthwhile to remember that the lion has always been a symbol of royalty in India, like elsewhere in the world. Indian royalty, cutting across the ages, hunted lions for sport. Among them, were the rulers of the Mughal Empire, the political entity that ruled most of the subcontinent from 1526-1858.
But first, let us understand what the hunt meant for the Mughals.
Historian Ebba Koch describes the importance of the hunt for the Mughals, the descendants of Timur and Genghis in her paper 1998 paper, Dara-Shikoh Shooting Nilgais Hunt and Landscape in Mughal Painting.
The first six rulers of the Mughal Dynasty, called the ‘Great Mughals’, were all dedicated to shikar or hunting, she says.
“Hunting was viewed not only as a royal pleasance but also as a means of self-representation and an instrument of rule. According to the Mughal theory of kingship, which was inspired to a large extent by ancient Persian models, the hunt of the ruler symbolized his power to overcome the forces of evil; this was often meant in a political sense,” writes Koch.
She adds that “hunting demonstrated territorial dominion, and as a peacetime extension of warfare, it was used to consolidate the power of the Mughals over their vast empire. A hunting expedition was often undertaken in connection with a campaign, or as a campaign in disguise, to warn rebellion-prone chiefs. Hunting was also used to establish a bond between the Mughal emperors and the indigenous Rajput clans of India because it appealed to the ksatriya (warrior) ideals of this Hindu caste.”
In Lions, Cheetahs and Others in the Mughal Landscape, author Divyabhanusinh gives us an idea of the Mughal hunting landscape.
“At the heart of the Mughal empire, the suba, province, of Agra had only 27.5 per cent of the land under cultivation in c1608 and most other subas in the plains of Hindustan had even less agriculture. There were, therefore, vast areas available as pastures for cattle with abundant supply of firewood in most parts of the realm having higher rainfall in most areas than at present, and possibly there was more forest land available than was thought once to be the case,” he writes.
The three Mughal capital cities—Lahore, Delhi and Agra—all lay in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. According to Divyabhanusinh, despite the existence of these three cities and several smaller urban centres, the emperors remained peripatetic and were on the move with their entourage not only among the three capitals, but also elsewhere such as Kashmir, Ajmer, Burhanpur, the Deccan and so on.
Mughal hunts usually took place along the travel paths of the emperors’ caravans. “Irfan Habib’s incomparable atlas of Mughal India lists 16 imperial hunting grounds including such celebrated ones as Rupbas and Bari near Agra, Bhatinda and Sunam in the Punjab and Jodhpur and Merta in Rajasthan,” writes Divyabhanusinh.
The Mughals belonged to the Turko-Persian tradition. Despite having Turkic and Mongol origins, they spoke the Persian language and adopted Persian culture.
The shahs of ancient Persia considered the lion as a symbol of Kingship. Indeed, the Persian royal symbol for several centuries has been the shir-o-khurshid or ‘Lion and Sun’, which was also displayed on the standard of the Mughal empire.
In Animals with rich histories: The case of the lions of Gir forest, Gujarat, India, environmental historian Mahesh Rangarajan writes, “Moreover, there is little doubt of its centrality in the world of the descendants of Timur (hence their own self-description as Timurid). Like the gazelle and antelope, the lion was so familiar to a man like Zia ud din Muhammad Babur, the first Mughal, that it found no mention in his memoirs, the Baburnamah. These were creatures well known to elite Muslim cultures across central and west Asia…Indo-Persian chroniclers saw the lions as the equivalent of the Badshah: a keeper of order in the realm of animals.”
SO important was the lion that only the emperor could hunt it. Divyabhanusinh cites the writings of the famous European traveller, Francois Bernier, in this regard: “of all the diversions of the field the hunting of the lion is not only the most precious, but is peculiarly royal; for except by special permission, the king and the princes are the only ones who engage in the sport”.
According to Koch, “A hunt—in particular a lion or tiger hunt, which was a privilege of the emperor and the princes—would be performed as an auspicious omen before a campaign.”
The lion was thus an ideal quarry of the Mughals. So, what actually happened when the two met?
The Mughals hunted lone lions, coalitions of males and even prides.
“He (Jahangir) shot a massive lion at Rahimabad near Agra in 1623, which weighed 255 kgs. and it was 9 feet 4 inches long16 which ranks it as the 21st largest lion recorded in India. The weight range of male lions is between 145 and 225 kgs. which makes this lion the heaviest recorded in India. Jahangir was so impressed with his trophy that he ordered it to be painted, sadly the painting is lost,” recounts Divyabhanusinh.
Jahangir’s father Akbar, came across a pride of seven lions in 1562 near Mathura of which one was caught alive, while the rest were killed.
In 1568, he came across two lions between Ajmer and Alwar. “The text of the Akbarnama, Abul Fazl’s chronicle of his reign, is not clear regarding the sex of the animals, but abiding coalitions of two male lions are a well known occurrence in lions of to-day in the Gir forest and in Africa,” writes Divyabhanusinh.
Sometimes, the hunt could almost turn fatal, even for the emperor. This is what happened in 1610, during the reign of Jahangir.
Rangarajan writes: “In 1610, a lion hunt near Agra was almost fatal. A lioness had killed a cow, and knocked down the Badshah Jahangir, whose life was saved by the Rajput noble Anup Rai. Memoirs and paintings show the fatal combat that almost cost the ruler his life.”
The Asiatic lion survived the Mughal period with its numbers intact. According to Divyabhanusinh, “Lions were found all over North India in the first half of the 19th Century.”
However, the ascendancy of the British East India Company proved to be a death-knell. “The 18th century and the first half of the 19th century appear to have been very unfortunate for them and in the 19th by 1880, they were only to be found in the Kathiawar peninsula. Even the relatively small numbers of lions shot or killed were enough to tip the scales against them,” Lions, Cheetahs and Others in the Mughal Landscape concludes.