Skin in the game

Hundreds of thousands of animals were killed for sport during British rule. A legendary family of taxidermists in Mysore kept notes of it, while their factory converted numerous carcasses into lifelike trophies. THE WEEK traces the untold story of the family and their controversial legacy

- NAVIN J. ANTONY AND PRATHIMA NANDAKUMAR

Edwin Joubert Van Ingen had a misleading surname and a truly extraordinary life. He was not from Ingen, Netherlands, as the name implied; he was born in Mysore, in an affluent family, in 1912. He was simply Joubert to his friends.

He fought in World War II, was captured by the Japanese in Burma, and found himself among the internees who built the bridge on the river Kwai in Thailand. After the war, he returned to Mysore, joined the family business and moved to a bungalow his parents had built at Nazarbad, a pleasant but fortified place that had several important government offices. The bungalow was named Bissal Munti, or “sunny hillock”, after the lay of the land.

Joubert quickly put the war behind him. With his two brothers, he expanded the family business of making animal trophies and became a renowned taxidermist himself. He hunted, feasted and raced horses, and became one of the co-founders of the Mysore Race Club. His family fortune was built on big-game hunting, but naturalists grudgingly respected him for his extensive knowledge of the wild.

He loved company, but remained a bachelor all his life. And it was a long life; he outlived all of his siblings and most of his friends. He finally died in his sleep on March 12, 2013, around four months before his 101st birthday.

Joubert was known to be a methodical man. But he made a number of strange decisions in the years before his death. As he became ill, he sold off property worth hundreds of crores—Bissal Munti, a taxidermy workshop adjacent to it, and a 236-acre plantation in Kerala’s Wayanad district—at unusually low prices.