Against the flame: Raza Kazmi tours memorials to the martyred guardians of our forests

As I whispered a quiet prayer for the departed, my mind wandered to Melghat.

North of Yavatmal, this is the southwestern fork of the mighty Satpuras, where hundreds of ghats (valleys) meet (mel) to give rise to a jagged, beautiful teak forest broken by precipitous ridges and steep escarpments, grasslands and waterfalls, basaltic rivers and rocky outcrops. A land both birthed and forged by ancient fires that once ripped open the earth. Home to Muthwa Deo and other ancient gods of the Korku Adivasis. Where cannons guard timeworn forts now patrolled by tigers and leopards. Where dholes whistle past shrines of Sufi dervishes and forest deities, giant gaur amble along ancient hero-stones, and the calls of the sambar bugle through the forest graveyards of soldiers who fell here, centuries ago.

Why did Singanjude’s story remind me of Melghat? Because the past always finds echoes in our times, and his name called to mind another, from another time: Nazir Mohammad.

***

“Do you know of the memorial at Harisal,” a grey-haired range officer asked, squinting as he leaned towards me. We were sitting in the stone-cobbled verandah of his British-era quarters in Raipur village, deep in the Melghat tiger reserve.

He seemed amused by this rather odd visitor who had driven through miles of backbreaking dirt roads to see the dilapidated 1892 Raipur forest rest house. And who now told him that, beyond old forest bungalows, he was also very interested in graves and memorials in the woods.

I shook my head excitedly, no. “I haven’t been there myself; only heard of it,” he said, offering directions as best one can (“close to the forest naka; the nakedar will know”).

The shadows were lengthening as I reached the naka at Harisal the following day. I opened an e-copy of the 1911 Gazetteer of Amravati on my phone. “Harisal – A Korku village on the banks of the river Sipna… Houses 24, population 119. A PWD inspection bungalow and a forest naka are its only public buildings,” it said.

I peered out the window of my jeep. It was anything but a quaint, quiet village. Dozens of small shops lined the road here. Government offices jostled for space with vehicle-repair shops, their mechanics hammering and welding away at broken parts. People chattered at fruit and vegetable stalls. A bus honked impatiently.

It was a jarring, chaotic contrast to the winding forest roads I had just left. Our jeep inched through the bustle, until I saw it: the forest naka! It had been over a century and everything had changed, but the naka was still there, and its chowkidar.

I greeted him, introduced myself and asked about the memorial. He was taken aback. “You mean the memorial to Ranger Saheb?” he said. “That’s right here.”

I looked around, at the haphazard construction and fruit and vegetable stalls. “Here,” I asked. He motioned for me to follow him. We walked past his naka, turned right, opened the back door of a shanty. “Why am I in someone’s house?” I wondered. I followed nonetheless.

And then there it was. In the shanty’s backyard stood a large stone tablet, atop a 4-ft-high rectangular pedestal. The right side of the base was covered in soot because someone had been using it as part of a wood stove.

Behind the pedestal was a washing-and-bathing area, with some utensils and large blue drums full of water. A broken iron cot lay in front. I turned to the nakedar. Before I could speak, he said, “The area has been encroached upon, sir. No one knows of this memorial, so no one ever comes, and so it has been taken over.”

I turned back to the stone tablet. Its dark granite held an epitaph painted in gold.

“In Memory of Forest Ranger Nazir Mohammad, who served for twenty-one years in the Melghat Forest Division and who was severely burnt while extinguishing a forest fire on 16-2-1935,” it said. “He died of his burns in Amraoti Hospital on 23-2-1935. This stone is erected to remind others of his courage and devotion to duty, by the Forest Rangers of the Central Provinces & Berar and the staff of the Melghat Forest Division. His untimely death deprived the forest department, which he served so loyally, of a faithful servant and the forest staff of one who was respected and esteemed by all ranks. Faithful unto death.”

***

I said a prayer as the last beams of sunlight glittered across the gold lettering.

Driving back to the forest rest house, I pondered the life and times of this man who lived and died here, all those years ago. Winter was receding and the nights were still cool, but fire season was around the corner.

As we drove through what was now the dead of night, a blaze appeared ahead of us, on either side of the forest road. I manoeuvred my jeep through what looked like a ball of fire and reached the other end. Just then, a loud whirring-buzzing noise reached my ears. Not my jeep’s engine choking, as I first feared, but a leaf-blower. From the smouldering bushes, a few men emerged, silhouetted by the flames.

A team of Melghat forest staff had been burning grass and bushes along a fireline (a thin strip of charred land meant to break the spread of a wildfire). It was vital and difficult work. The flames had to be controlled and carefully snuffed out. So, the men worked through the night, when they could skilfully monitor flames and even embers.

Dinesh Kendre, a forest guard who was accompanying me, enquired in Marathi about the men’s wellbeing and the work. Despite the cool night, I could feel beads of sweat on my brow as tongues of fire hissed and cracked close by, consuming the yellow ground foliage.

The men were a crew of daily-wage Adivasi van mazdoors (forest labourers), as well as forest guards and deputy rangers. They chatted as they worked, occasionally breaking into laughter. I watched them as crackling flames occasionally rose to light up their faces, their skin singed and cracked in places, sweat pouring over the smiles on their lips.

In that moment, it struck me: just as Nazir Mohammad’s memory endures in the memorial at Harisal, his legacy endures too. It lives on in these men and women who fight the blazes, carrying forward the same unyielding devotion to duty.

The echoes of his sacrifice reverberate across the forests of India. In the sacrifice of Vijay Singanjude of Yavatmal; Trilok Mehta, Karan Arya, Puran Singh and Dewan Ram in Uttarakhand; Sundaresh in Karnataka; Jadumani Mohanty in Odisha; Gull Mohammad Shah in Kashmir, and countless others who have fought a thousand fires. Faithful unto death.

A VILLAGE REMEMBERS

It is several months later, and I am somewhere deep within Jharkhand’s Palamau tiger reserve, which is sister to Melghat, in a sense.

Lying on the western frontiers of the Chota Nagpur plateau, it too is a landmass of ancient origin. It too was among the nine original tiger reserves created in India in 1973.

“What do you call this place,” I shout out to a middle-aged cattle-herder as he walks his flock back to his village, Lat.

“Saheb Jarwa,” he hollers back. “Jarwa as in burnt by fire?” I croak, in stark contrast to the tinkling music of dozens of bells, big and small, that sway around the necks of his small cows. A sounder of pigs, being penned in for the evening, cry out from somewhere close by.

“Yes. Named because of the saheb who was cremated here many years ago,” he replies.

Now lying within the reserve, Saheb Jarwa predates it, though. So, who was this man who lies in eternal rest within a grove of sal trees, by a gentle forest stream?

***

The “saheb” was Lakhpat Rai Sabharwal, an IFS officer who joined the service in 1919. At the time, the Imperial Forest Service was almost completely White. Only three Indians had been recruited into it before him since its inception in 1866. Sabharwal belonged to that first generation of Indian foresters who would go on to shape the department from within.

He would become the first Indian to head a forest department at the state level. In 1946, he played a critical role in wresting control of tens of thousands of sq km of forests in Bihar from zamindars.

He died in the forests of Palamau in 1948, and rests here still.

But how did he end up in these remote woods? Therein lies a tale.

***

In 1948, this wooded heart of the Palamau Forest Division was a favoured shooting block. The village of Lat nearby served as the headquarters of the eponymous forest range. It accordingly held a charming old forest bungalow, a range officer’s residence, a range office, and quarters for supporting staff.

In 1991, my father (SEH Kazmi) had taken charge as divisional forest officer or DFO of Palamau. Soon after, he was camping in Lat, inspecting forests in the vicinity, when he came across a curious structure: A dilapidated, cylindrical commemorative pillar, with a marble slab at the base.

“In Loving Memory of LR Sabharwal, IFS, Conservator of Forests, Bihar. Died at Lat. 28th January, 1948,” the epitaph read.

Forest staff didn’t seem to know much about the memorial. Later, an elderly man came to see my father at the Lat forest bungalow. He claimed to know the story of that fateful day, told to him in confidence by a senior officer who was present at the time, and had since passed away. He narrated the tale as follows.

***

LR Sabharwal arrived in Lat with his son in January 1948, and a shoot was organised in their honour. During the course of it, the father and son split up and began beating the forest, along with other forest staff and villagers, in order to flush out game.

After long, futile efforts, the son finally spotted movement in the bushes close by. Excited, he fired. A loud bang was followed by an agonised scream. Stumbling out of the bushes came a man; it was Sabharwal. The son had not realised his father had circled around to his side of the woods. The forest chief collapsed and died within minutes. The son was distraught; inconsolable.

In the brief moments that followed, the forest staff resolved that, even if they could not save their saheb, they would protect his family. No one would know what had happened here. He would not be taken back to the headquarters, but cremated at the site. The official record would show that he died of a heart attack. Sabharwal’s men swore a code of silence; the secret would not be revealed as long as any of them lived.

By the time my father heard this story, everyone present that day had long died. What became of Sabharwal’s family is not known. I could not trace them in the course of my research. How much of the story was true?

I reached out to Om Kumar, undivided Bihar’s senior-most retired IFS officer. A genial nonagenarian, he replied: “You would be surprised to know that I spent the early months of my forestry life in Lat, in 1958.” All he was ever told by staff was that Sabharwal had died of a heart attack, while climbing the steep bamboo steps to a machaan. “Maybe he slipped?” Kumar said.

The fact that the head of the Bihar forest department was hurriedly cremated in the woods suggests there was more to the story than a heart attack.

By the time I first visited Saheb Jarwa, much had changed. The forests were still watched through the sights of guns, but it was a new breed of “jungle sahebs” who held sway: the Naxals.

The old forest bungalow where my father used to camp was long gone, as were the ranger’s residence and staff quarters.

Yet, amid all this, the memorial endured. The forest department had recently restored it, raising the height of the pillar and building a beautiful low guard wall around it. The wall was of great interest to me because, on inspection, I realised the labourers had left a bit of themselves behind, cryptically etching their names in it, like a puzzle hidden in plain sight.

There was something stranger still.

The Naxals, who unfurled black flags on Independence Day and Republic Day in villages such as Lat, in their fight against the Indian state, had left untouched the Indian flag painted over the entrance to the memorial, along with the slogans Jai Hind and Jai Bharat.

And so, in a region where the flag no longer flew, it endured.

***

Back at Saheb Jarwa, the tinkling bells of cattle returning to Lat faded into the distance. The canopy of towering trees deepened the twilight. It was time to head back.

I stopped close to the village square to ask which road led out of the forest. A couple of men kindly helped, and asked where I was coming from. I’d gone to pay my respects to Saheb Jarwa, I say, and their faces brighten. “Oh, you should come during our jatra (folk festival). Hundreds of villagers from Lat and nearby villages come to the memorial to pray,” one of the men said.

“Pray,” I asked. “Yes. It’s a holy spot now because the saheb who died there was a pious soul. He watches over us and this forest. So once a year, we go to him and pray at his temple. We pray for health, for family and friends, and for the well-being of the villages. We offer flowers to him and the jal (water) from the forest stream nearby. Next time, come during the jatra,” he says.

I am moved by this information. An IFS officer all but forgotten by the world lives on as a guardian of the woods, protector to villagers. A legacy of another mysterious memorial lost to time.

“You’re not from here. Was the saheb from your family?” the young man asks.

I smile, shake my head. “You’re his family now,” I say, before heading out of the forests again.

(Raza Kazmi is a conservationist and wildlife historian. He is @RazaKazmi17 on X)