Who was Jim Corbett?

Early life in Nainital and Kaladhungi

Any Jim Corbett biography starts in the hills of Kumaon. Edward James Corbett was born on 25 July 1875 in Nainital, one of a large Anglo-Irish family settled in India. His father was the town’s postmaster, and after his death, Jim’s mother held the family together.

The family spent summers at Gurney House in Nainital and winters at Kaladhungi in the forested foothills below. It was at Kaladhungi that the young Jim learned the jungle: he could read tracks, imitate animal calls and tell a tiger’s alarm call from a leopard’s long before he was a teenager.

Local villagers and hunters taught him to move quietly and read the jungle’s warning signs. Those lessons, learned while roaming the forest with a catapult and later an old muzzle-loader, are the thread that runs through all his later hunting and writing.

The Kaladhungi house is now the Corbett Museum, about 30 km from Ramnagar, and worth an hour on your way to or from Nainital.

The railway years at Mokameh Ghat

Corbett left school young and went to work for the railways. For around two decades he managed the transfer of goods across the Ganges at Mokameh Ghat in Bihar, running a large team of labourers.

He wrote about these years with real warmth in My India, and they explain much of his later outlook: he respected ordinary working people and wrote about them as equals, which was unusual for the period.

He also served in both World Wars, leading a Kumaoni labour company in France during the First, and training soldiers in jungle skills during the Second.

Hunting the man-eaters of Kumaon and Garhwal

Between about 1907 and 1938, Corbett was repeatedly asked by the government to deal with tigers and leopards that had turned to killing people. He usually hunted alone or with one companion, on foot, and refused rewards. The best-known cases are below; the death tolls are figures from records of the time and should be read as approximate.

What sets Corbett apart is that he looked for causes. He often found that a man-eater had old gunshot wounds or broken teeth that stopped it hunting normal prey. Put simply, he blamed careless hunting, not the tiger.

The hunts themselves were gruelling. He often spent weeks in remote villages, sitting up all night over a kill or following pugmarks through steep ravines, knowing the animal might be watching him. His accounts are full of respect for the villagers who lived in fear, and for the animals he was sent to kill.

From hunter to photographer and conservationist

By the 1930s Corbett had largely swapped the rifle for a cine camera and spent long hours filming tigers in the wild, which was extremely difficult with the equipment of the day.

He warned, decades before most people listened, that India’s tigers would disappear without protection. He spoke to villagers, schools and officials, and he supported the creation of the reserve that became India’s first national park in 1936.

His change of heart mirrors the one India itself went through over the next few decades. Tiger hunting was banned in the early 1970s, and the protected area he knew so well became the launch site for Project Tiger. Few hunters of his era lived long enough, or thought hard enough, to make that journey.

Jim Corbett’s books

Corbett wrote in a plain, gripping style that still reads well. His books have been translated into many languages and have rarely been out of print.

• Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944): his first and best-known book, including the Champawat tigress.
• The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (late 1940s): a full-length account of the long hunt in Garhwal.
• My India (early 1950s): sketches of village and railway life, often called his warmest book.
• Jungle Lore (1953): how he learned to read the forest as a boy at Kaladhungi.
• The Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1954): later hunts, including Talla Des.
• Tree Tops (1955): a short account of the royal visit to Treetops in Kenya.

If you read only one before your safari, make it Jungle Lore. It changes how you watch a forest.

Kenya, Treetops and his final years

After Indian Independence, Corbett and his sister Maggie left India in 1947 and settled in Nyeri, Kenya, where he kept writing and photographing wildlife.

In February 1952 he was at Treetops, a game-viewing lodge built in a tree, when Princess Elizabeth stayed there. That night her father died, and she came down the next morning as Queen. Corbett recorded the moment in the lodge’s logbook, and the story made Treetops famous.

His last years in Kenya were spent close to wildlife once again, and he completed several books there. Jim Corbett died on 19 April 1955 and is buried in Nyeri, far from the Kumaon hills he wrote about with such affection.

His legacy in Corbett today

Around 1956–57 the park was renamed Corbett National Park in his honour, and in 1968 a subspecies of tiger, the Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti), was named after him.

In Kaladhungi you can visit his house, and the village of Chhoti Haldwani that he helped build for local farmers. Around the region, places linked to Corbett include Corbett Falls and Nainital. To see the landscape he fought for, read our history of the park.

Visiting Corbett’s places today

• Corbett Museum, Kaladhungi: his winter home, with letters, photographs and personal belongings.
• Chhoti Haldwani: the village next to the museum, with a heritage walk and the long stone wall he had built to protect the fields from wild animals.
• Nainital: where he was born and spent his summers, with views of the lake and hills he grew up in.
• The reserve itself: Kanda, Dhikala and the Ramganga valley are all places he knew and wrote about.

Most visitors cover Kaladhungi on the drive between Ramnagar and Nainital, which makes an easy half-day with a safari the day before or after.