A polar bear cub, gifted by Russia to Madras Zoo in 1955, couldn’t survive the heat

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Can you believe that polar bears were housed in Madras briefly during the mid-1950s and 1960s? To mark the centenary of the Madras Zoo, started as a menagerie in 1855 at Egmore and later shifted to the People’s Park beside the Central Station, the Madras Corporation reached out to the Moscow Zoo through the Soviet Embassy in India, requesting a polar bear as a gift. The Soviet response was swift and generous. After all, as a research article published in the Yearbook of the Swedish Linnaeus Society in 2016 notes, polar bears have been used as diplomatic gifts since the medieval times.

In October 1955, a polar bear cub, just seven months old, arrived in Madras. It was named Snejhok, Russian for ‘little snow’. According to an article published in The Hindu on October 10, 1955, the polar bear, captured on an icy island of Russia, was about two feet tall and arrived in Madras by the Grand Trunk Express from New Delhi, along with a glutton (an animal of the weasel family) and half-a-dozen pigeons. The animals were escorted by Sosnovsky, Director of the Moscow Zoo, his interpreter, and John, Veterinary Officer of the Madras Corporation.

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Reaching Kabul

The glutton, named Rosa, was captured in the Ural forest near the city of Sverdlovsk in January 1953, and was housed in the Moscow Zoo from March 1955. As the article notes, the animals arrived in Kabul from the Soviet Union on September 21. However, Indian Airlines refused to accommodate them on a flight to Delhi. The Russian Embassy then appealed to the Government of India for assistance. In response, three seats were removed from an aircraft to make room for the animals.

This was not the first time polar bears had set paws on Indian soil. Back on December 31, 1953, a shipment of exotic animals arrived at Madras Harbour aboard s.s. Bärenfels from Germany. Among them were three polar bears, reportedly the first of their kind to reach India in over thirty years. These bears, each a year old, had been captured by Norwegian fishermen in the icy wilderness of Spitsbergen, Norway. Their destination was the Mysore Zoo. The same shipment also included four Russian brown bears — part of an animal exchange that saw Indian monkeys sent to Russian zoos. Two of these brown bears were to stay in Madras, while the other two were bound for Trivandrum.

Different menu

Though polar bears are natural fish-eaters, in captivity they had to adapt themselves to a different menu, comprising cooked meat and bread. To help them cope with the Indian weather, zookeepers regularly sprayed them with water. Special arrangements were made at the zoo to house this visitor. A “polar weather enclosure” was set up, and plans were announced to install air-conditioned chambers to help the bear adapt itself to the tropical heat. However, it is unclear whether the air conditioners were ever installed. In the meantime, Snejhok made do with shower baths and shady corners. Despite the efforts, the weather was a challenge. A special spread in The Hindu on October 31, 1955, during the zoo’s centenary celebrations, noted that Snejhok was not fond of crowds. He was known to become agitated when too many visitors gathered around his enclosure, roaring in protest if anyone got too close. He seemed every bit the snow-dweller, stranded in a furnace.

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And then, just a few years later, the inevitable happened. In the summer of 1959, the polar bear died. Despite the zoo’s best efforts to keep him cool, the bear succumbed to the unrelenting Madras heat. An abscess developed, and the animal didn’t survive. The Corporation wrote again to Moscow, requesting for another polar bear to take Snejhok’s place. While the exact timeline of a second polar bear’s arrival at the Madras Zoo remains unclear, it is likely that this is the one that historian and conservation writer Theodore Baskaran, now 85, remembers seeing in the early 1960s. “The polar bear was miserable,” Mr. Baskaran recalled. “There was no sophisticated air-conditioning system back then, so they had placed blocks of ice in the enclosure. The poor animal was confined to a cage.”

Wildlife biologist and conservationist Ravi Chellam, 64, also remembers seeing the polar bear during a visit to the zoo when he was around six years old, with a certain awe, curiosity, and concern. “While it was fascinating to see a polar bear, two things struck me, even at that age,” he said. “One was the small size of the cage, which had stone flooring and iron bars, like most zoo enclosures in those days. The other was how the bear was just flopped on the ice blocks. I had seen pictures of polar bears before, possibly in The Hindu, and knew they had white fur. But the one I saw had a brownish tinge,” he added.

Mr. Baskaran noted that capturing animals from the wild is problematic in itself, but keeping a solitary animal, without a companion, is even worse. Recalling a visit to the Shillong Zoo with British naturalist Gerald Durrell, he recounted how Durrell, on seeing a lone loris, remarked that it might as well have been stuffed. While the Madras Zoo was shifted to Vandalur, there have been no further misadventures in getting exotic animals that would find it difficult to acclimatise themselves to the city’s weather.