The young Peshwa's private menagerie

Roughly at the centre of Pune city stands a small hill named Parvati, with a famous temple on top. Its base is crowded with structures of all sorts and narrow roads leading to various parts of the city. But in the late eighteenth century, when Pune comprised all of two square miles, the picture was a whole lot different. Dense jungles crowded the hill’s base and the settled part of the city was more than four miles away. It was around the year 1790, and Nana Phadnis was more or less in charge of affairs at Shaniwarwada. 

The Peshwa was a fifteen-year-old boy named Sawai Madhavrao. For the entertainment of the young Peshwa, a menagerie — a collection of birds and animals — had been set up in the jungles near Parvati. It housed a large collection of fauna — tigers, lions, a lynx and even a rhino! Contemporary records also mention a white coloured Bactrian camel! Nana Phadnis had in fact set up a new department to look after the royal menagerie. 

Charles Malet, a British Resident at Pune in those days, had also taken a special liking to the Peshwa’s private animal sanctuary. He had in fact donated some of the animals. Furthermore, he had an artist named Gangaram Chintaman Tambat design clay models of the animals  and  a painting was also  drawn by him, showing Charles Malet amongst the clay models!  This rather interesting and unique painting was later kept in the Satara records. A copy can be found in the book ‘Poona in Bygone Days’. Gangaram Chintaman Tambat also drew various other paintings, the most famous being of the grand durbar of 1791 at the Ganesh Mahal. Some readers might remember that painting, well known for its conspicuous Ganesha idol. The same person made drawings of rhinoceros, lion, lynx, Bactrian camel, etc., from the menagerie around 1790. 

There were also, as mentioned earlier, antelopes in the collection of animals. Charles Mallet describes how in 1792, he was invited by the Peshwa to see a performance of four trained antelopes! In a scene reminiscent of a modern day circus, Malet describes how the antelopes made synchronised movements and obeyed orders from their trainer, who had trained the beasts for around seven months! 

The Peshwa’s hunting grounds abutted the menagerie and consisted of acres and acres of forest and scrub land mainly populated by hundreds of deer.  Hunting was a favourite past time of royalty in just about every place in the world, and Sawai Madhavrao was no different. Major Price, another British officer to have visited Pune in those days, says, “During my residence at Poona, I do not recollect that anything made a more lively impression on my mind than a visit to the Peshwa’s menagerie, at the foot of the hill of Parbutty. It then contained some of the finest specimens of brute creation that I have ever beheld. There were in particular, a lion and a rhinoceros.” 

Another mention may be found in the ‘Narrative of Operations of Captain Little’ by one Edward Moor, who describes the Poona of 1791.  “The Peshwa has a menagerie of wild animals, but it is not large nor a very select collection. It consists of a rhinoceros, a lion, several royal tigers, leopards, panthers and other animals of the cat kind. An extraordinary camel is by far the most curious creature in the collection.” This was the double humped Bactrian camel, white in colour. Both the camel and the rhinoceros were given by Mahadji Shinde. 

Corollary to the wide hunting grounds and menagerie, the eighteenth century also saw large gardens (baugs) with fountains being built for the ruling class. The most famous of these was the Hirabaug, which also had a palace for the Peshwa and his guests. Built by Nanasaheb Peshwa, a list of guests who visited it in 1803 throws up the name of a certain Arthur Wellesley — the architect of the downfall of Peshwa Bajirao II merely fifteen years later! Then there was Sarasbaug, back then a small island with a temple in the middle of a lake at Parvati’s base. Various other baugs were distributed in various parts of the Pune region. 

Over time, with the demise of the Peshwai, the menagerie and other royal paraphernalia, too, lost their earlier importance. But the legacy and aura remained, for even in 1916, the place was being referred to as ‘Peshwa’s Shikarkhana’ — an echo of the times when Sawai Madhavrao’s hunting grounds abutted the menagerie — as said by James Augustus Kincaid in one of his books. He also talks about a person who was gored to death by the rhino. 

Fast forward to 1953, and the newly-formed Pune Municipal Corporation decided to set up a zoo at Parvati’s base. Built over seven acres of land, part of the original menagerie and hunting grounds, it was duly christened Peshwe Park! New norms in 1986 meant that the Peshwe Park, with its cement and steel cages for animals, had to move  to a new, spacious and more ‘animal friendly’ zoo at Katraj. And in doing so, legacies of two Peshwas were by an interesting coincidence juxtaposed. For the Katraj Snake Park was situated right next to the artificially built Katraj Lake — Peshwa Balaji Bajirao’s brainchild, about which you must have read in one of my earlier articles — ‘The Katraj Aquaduct!’ 

The writer is the author of Brahmaputra — Story of Lachit Barphukan and Sahyadris to Hindukush — Maratha Conquest of Lahore and Attock. Views are personal.