Mystery of India’s first Birdwoman

Jamal Ara (1923-1995). Sketch/Uday Mohite

In these fraught times, it is elevating to read about Jamal Ara, India's first ‘Birdwoman', a title none less than the iconic Salim Ali bestowed upon her for scientifically studying birds of the Chota Nagpur plateau, Jharkhand. Her story was lost to us until researcher Raza Kazmi recently rediscovered and narrated it, with poignancy, in The First Lady of Indian Ornithology, a chapter in Women in the Wild, a book edited by Anita Mani.

Jamal Ara's accomplishments dazzle as she had studied only till Std X. She wrote prolifically from 1949 to 1988, contributing over 60 papers and articles to the journals of the Bombay Natural History Society and Bengal Natural History Society, and the Newsletter for Birdwatchers, which catered to both amateur and professional ornithologists. She wrote Watching Birds, a guide for children, now in its 13th edition.

Hold on, she also worked as a journalist for a while, did a programme on birds for All India Radio, wrote fiction, and translated stories of litterateur K S Duggal, who remembered her, in his autobiography, as a "lonely woman" with a flair for writing in English.

Ara was just the person who should have been serenaded post-Independence, if not for anything other than as a riposte to Pakistan's dire predictions regarding the fate of Muslims who stayed behind in India. But that, sadly, did not happen.

She suddenly disappeared, in 1988, from the Indian ornithology scene. Nobody wondered why she had stopped writing. The address she gave in the letters she wrote to journals was that of Doranda, Ranchi, where Raza Kazmi, too, resides. He made it his mission, in 2018, to search for the mysterious Birdwoman of Doranda.

Her address no longer existed, but Kazmi stumbled upon a 2006 story on Madhuca Singh, a celebrated basketball coach of Ranchi, who credited her achievement to her mother Jamal Ara, "a bird lover." The search ended only last year, when Kazmi met Madhuca, who was named after Madhuca indica, the scientific term for the mahua tree. Madhuca narrated her mother's story to Kazmi.

Born in 1923 in a conservative Muslim family of a police officer at Barh, Bihar, Ara was married to Hamdi Bey, a cousin and leading journalist in Calcutta, much against her opposition. Madhuca was born to them. But the marriage soon broke down. Ara and Madhuca could have been on the streets but for Sami Ahmad, a cousin and an Indian Forest Service officer of the 1940 Bihar cadre. A bachelor, Ahmad shifted them to his official residence in Ranchi.

Posted to different forest divisions of Jharkhand, then a part of Bihar, Ahmad would take Ara on his trips to the jungles. In her was kindled a deep love for the flora and fauna of the area, inspiring her to spend hours observing the avian life around her. But her skills as a writer were not honed. She found a teacher in Mrs Augier, wife of P W Augier, an IFS office senior to Ahmad, who also encouraged her to keep birding notes. As she began to chisel out good prose in English, Ahmad and the Augiers encouraged her to turn her notes into articles - and these began getting published.

Theirs was an old world where companionship meant more than engaging in chitter-chatter.

But this old world was also encountering a challenge from the emerging post-Independence culture of corruption and impunity. The sparks the clash of the two worlds engendered singed Ahmad, after he arrested the son of K B Sahay, a powerful politician who later became the Bihar Chief Minister, for poaching at Palamu. The political system retaliated: Ahmad was suspended. His sorrow became unbearable after he was asked to serve, on his reinstatement, under an officer junior to him. He died in 1966.

Ara and Madhuca, then in college, were financially stricken and emotionally hollowed out by his death. But help came from the old world: a friend of Ahmad heard about their plight and became their safe harbour. His name: Jaipal Singh Munda, the man who had led the Indian hockey team to a gold in the 1928 Olympics and was now an Adivasi leader fighting for the rights of his community. He found a groom for Madhuca - a Gurkha army officer's son.

It seems Ara turned to translating Duggal's work, in addition to her ornithological writings, to overcome the emotional trauma the death of Ahmad had been for her. In 1988, she brought her semi-paralytic sister to live with her in Ranchi. But after the sister began walking, she left Ara. The abandonment shattered her; psychotic breakdowns plagued her.

One day, she made a bonfire of all her writings, notes, and photographs. "It was useless," Ara muttered. In 1995, seven years after having stopped writing, she died, unnoticed and unsung.

After Women in the Wild was published this year, Kazmi went over to the residence of Madhuca. Since an irreparable retina scratch has severely impaired her vision, he read aloud his essay on her mother, who winged an arc as unique as that of migratory birds, with an end as tragic as that of those shot down before their return flight home.

The writer is a senior journalist

Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper