here again and enthusiastic people across Bengal are thrushing to
visit this oldest zoo of the country with children. Around 80 thousand
visitors are going to visit the zoo on holidays.
The zoo had its roots in a private
menagerie established by Governor
General of India , Richard Wellesley ,
established around 1800 in his
summer home at Barrackpore near
Kolkata, as part of the Indian
Natural History Project . The
first superintendent of the
menagerie was the famous
Scottish physician zoologist
Francis Buchanan-Hamilton .
Buchanan-Hamilton returned to
England with Wellesley in 1805
following the Governor-General's
recall by the Court of Directors in
London. The collection from this
era are documented by
watercolours by Charles D'Oyly,
and a visit by the famous French
botanist Victor Jacquemont . Sir
Stamford Raffles visited the
menagerie in 1810, encountering
his first tapir there, and doubtless
used some aspects of the
menagerie as an inspiration for the
London Zoo .
The foundation of zoos in major
cities around the world caused a
growing thought among the British
community in Kolkata that the
menagerie should be upgraded to a
formal zoological garden. Credence
to such arguments was lent by an
article in the now-defunct Calcutta
Journal of Natural History' s July
1841 issue. In 1873, the
Lieutenant-Governor Sir Richard
Temple formally proposed the
formation of a zoo in Kolkata, and
the Government finally allotted land
for the zoo based on to the joint
petition of the Asiatic Society and
Agri-Horticultural Society .
The zoo was formally opened in
Alipore - a posh Kolkata suburb,
and inaugurated on 1 January
1876 by Edward VII , then Prince of
Wales. (Some reports place the
inauguration on an alternate date
of 27 December 1875). [8] The
initial stock consisted of the
private menagerie of Carl Louis
Schwendler (1838 – 1882), a
German electrician who was posted
in India for a feasibility study of
electrically lighting Indian Railway
stations. Gifts were also accepted
from the general public. The initial
collection consisted of the
following animals:
African Buffalo , Zanzibar Ram,
Domestic sheep , Four-horned
sheep, Hybrid Kashmiri Goat,
Indian Antelope , Indian Gazelle ,
Sambar Deer , Spotted Deer and
Hog Deer.
It is not clear whether the Aldabra
Giant Tortoise Adwaita was among
the opening stock of animals. The
animals at Barrackpore Park were
added to the collection over the
first few months of 1886,
significantly increasing its size.
The zoo was thrown open to the
public on 6 May 1876.
It grew based on gifts from British
and Indian nobility - like Raja
Suryakanta Acharya of Mymensingh
in whose honour the open air tiger
enclosure is named the
Mymensingh Enclosure . Other
contributors who donated part or
all of their private menagerie to the
Alipore Zoo included the Maharaja
of Mysore Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV .
The park was initially run by an
honorary managing committee
which included Schwendler and the
famous botanist George King . The
first Indian superintendent of the
zoo was Ram Brahma Sanyal, who
did much to improve the standing
of the Alipore Zoo and achieved
good captive breeding success in
an era when such initiatives were
rarely heard of. One such
success story of the zoo was a live
birth of the rare Sumatran
Rhinoceros in 1889. The next
pregnancy in captivity occurred at
the Cincinnati Zoo in 1997, but
ended with a miscarriage.
Cincinnati Zoo finally recorded a
live birth in 2001. Alipore Zoo was
a pioneer among zoos in the 19th
century and the early part of the
20th century under Sanyal, who
published the first handbook on
captive animal keeping.
The zoo had an unusually high
scientific standard for its time, and
the record of the Cladotaenia
genus (Cohn, 1901) of parasites
are based upon cestodes
(flatworm) found in an Australian
bird that died at the zoo.
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