Some animals slip away without much notice. Others leave a hole so wide it starts to feel like a page torn from the country’s story.

The rhinoceros belongs to the second group. Standing in Pakistan today, it is hard to picture a rhino shouldering through reed forests along the Indus, feeding near Mohenjo Daro or fleeing before a Mughal emperor on the Peshawar frontier. And yet the old records keep insisting: it was here.

The painting of Zaheeruddin Muhammad Babur hunting a rhinoceros is usually read as royal theatre, but it opens on to a landscape we have forgotten. History remembers him as the founder of the Mughal Empire — a warrior-poet out of Fergana, a man of gardens, grief and appetite — and less often as one of the finest observers of the country in early modern South Asia. In his memoirs Baburnama, he catalogues rivers, passes, fruits, birds and animals with a naturalist’s attention, and his rhinoceros is no traveller’s rumour. He met it, in territory that is now Pakistan.

In February 1519, Babur crossed into the ground between the Indus and the Punjab plains and recorded a hunt on the “Sawati” side, at a place the locals called Karg-khana, the house of the rhinoceros.

Seals, manuscripts, one Mughal miniature and a handful of travellers’ notes are all that remain of a species that once ranged the Indus…

Seals, manuscripts, one Mughal miniature and a handful of travellers’ notes are all that remain of a species that once ranged the Indus…

The cover was thick. A female came out with her calf, arrows flew and the calf was killed. A hard passage to sit with now, but a valuable one: the rhino had a range, a local name and a presence large enough for a place to be named after it.

Days later he turned to the Salt Range, the old Koh-i-Jud, moving through Bhera, Khushab, Chiniot and the River........

© Dawn (Magazines)