In ancient India, the endless jungle was full of tigers, lions and wolves, and these ferocious animals often entered the surrounding countryside to wreak havoc, biting and killing cattle and sheep in villagers' homes, and incidents of beasts injuring people often occurred. Due to the influence of Hinduism, the local Indians did not like to hunt animals, which is one of the reasons why indian beasts were raging, from the eleventh century AD, India entered a period of foreign domination, and the Afghans, Turks and Mongols in Central Asia conquered India and brought their hunting culture into India.
Ancient Indian rulers went out hunting
By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Turkic Mongol Babur had gone south to destroy the Delhi Sultanate and establish the Mughal Empire on Indian soil.
Babur's patrilineal ancestor was the famous Timur the Great, and his mother was a descendant of Genghis Khan, and it was precisely because of this special status that Babur was keen on the hunting of nomadic peoples from an early age.
He often led soldiers on hunting to cultivate tacit understanding and synergy among soldiers.
During the period when the Mughal Empire ruled India, some of the jungles in India became the royal hunting grounds of the Mughal rulers, who loved hunting and had ministers in the court who were responsible for organizing hunting activities. According to Indian history books, the Mughal royals were proud to be able to hunt lions, and when they encountered lions and other beasts of prey during hunting, the emperor had to shoot the beast himself, and if he escaped, he would be looked down upon.
The Lion Flag of the Mughal Empire
It is said that jahangir, the fourth ruler of the Mughal Empire, was the monarch who hunted the most, and after each hunt, the court clerk would record the number of animals Jahangir hunted. When Jahangir was forty-seven years old, the clerk reported to Jahangir the total number of animals he had hunted since he was twelve, and that more than seventeen thousand animals had been hunted by Jahangir, two-thirds of them herbivores and birds, and the rest were large animals and beasts of prey.
The love of hunting also led Jahangir to invent many animal hunting techniques, in order to be able to hunt an adult lion,
Jahangir ordered the soldiers to throw the sheep stuffed with opium in their stomachs to the lions, and when the lions ate the sheep, they were anesthetized by the opium in the sheep's stomachs and became uninsuring, and just when the lion was about to fall unconscious, Jahangir shot the lion with a bow and arrow.
Aurangzeb's father was Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal
This method, invented by Jahangir, soon became popular in the Mughal court, and the members of the royal family successfully hunted several lions in every hunt, until the reign of Jahangir's grandson Aurangzeb, which began to be abolished. Although Aurangzeb was also a hunter-gatherer, after he ascended the throne, he ordered the residents to ban the sale of opium and alcohol, so that soldiers could not buy opium to anesthetize lions.
Later, during a hunting expedition, Aurangzeb found a lion and ordered his soldiers to lure the lion out with sheep as bait, but the soldier said to Aurangzeb:
"We don't have opium to fill the bait because you have ordered a ban on the sale of opium, and if the lion is not anesthetized, I am afraid that the lion will hurt the emperor."
Asiatic lions, once active in places like India, are on the verge of extinction
After listening to the soldiers, Aurangzeb asked the soldiers to bring a donkey, and then said to the soldiers:
"No opium, just feed the lion, just use this donkey as bait, just take the lion."