Learning how to catch the golden mahseer, the king of freshwater game-fish in India, is a lure that's very hard to resist
So you tell your girlfriend that you’re going to take her angling: to the same river pool where Jim Corbett was pulled headlong into the water by a mahseer which, in his own words, “suddenly galvanised into life, and with a mighty splash dashed upstream” (Man Eaters of Kumaon, 1944). “Isn’t that a carp?” she says condescendingly. “We’re going to fish for carp?” The sneer is clear: sluggish hours spent beside a river, after which (if the bait is taken) the hapless fish is hauled out of the water.
Rudyard Kipling would have been mortified by the comparison: in his story ‘The Brushwood Boy,’ Georgie, the soldier-protagonist, meets ‘the mahseer of the Poonch beside whom the tarpon is a herring, and he who lands him can say that he is a fisherman.’ With its golden scales and projectile-shaped body, the mahseer resembles the unrelated tarpon more than its distant cousin, the carp. But the mahseer leads no sedate life: energetic rivers make it speedy, strong and full of wile. Make no mistake, it is a thoroughbred filly to the carp’s plough horse. Corbett himself considered “fishing for mahseer in a submontane river the most fascinating of all field sports…a sport fit for kings.”
(You are guilty of some manipulation of facts: Marchula isn’t where Corbett’s encounter with the mahseer occurred—that was on the Mahakali River in upper Kumaon—but the hamlet does lie on the periphery of the Corbett National Park, and the Ramganga, which flows through it, is one of the last natural habitats for the golden mahseer.)
A group of veterans observe your arrival with some amusement. “Very pretty tackle!” (this is Gauri Rana, your host) “But these couldn’t lure a bottom-feeder here, let alone a mahseer. And unless you want to spook all the mahseer along the entire stretch, lose the jacket.”
Your girlfriend takes to fly-casting much quicker than you do. She is genetically hard-wired, it seems, to actually cast the bait more than three metres away. No one is surprised when her bait is taken in a shallow pool just beyond a section of the rapids. It’s a small mahseer, a 2.5-kilogram male which takes 20 minutes of reeling and coaxing to point its tail upwards in the water, mahseer-speak for a white flag. If she is thrilled about catching one, she is even more eager to release it, and the finned denizen is quickly returned to the river. Not that there was a choice—angling at the Ramganga is strictly catch and release.
(This story appears in the 25 July, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)