Jacobin cuckoo brings monsoon to North India. It’s Kalidasa’s chatak |
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Jacobin cuckoo brings monsoon to North India. It’s Kalidasa’s chatak
The bird has many names: Jacobin cuckoo, pied cuckoo, and chatak. The history of its nomenclature reveals the old interplay of colonial power and scientific knowledge.
You can call the Jacobin cuckoo by any of its 50-odd names, but if you live and watch birds in India, you will probably grow familiar with no more than three or four of them.
There is, of course, the Jacobin cuckoo, named after the black-and-white habit of the Dominican order of friars, known in France as the Jacobins. You might know it as the pied cuckoo, since many black-and-white birds are called “pied”. Or you might simply call it chatak, its common name in both Hindi and Bengali.
To the scientific community, the bird is Clamator jacobinus, a name given in 1783 by the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert, who worked from a specimen collected off the Coromandel Coast. Local names for the bird already existed, but that knowledge was set aside. The preserved creature was shorn of its name, renamed in a context wholly alien to its habitat, and returned—polished and formalised—as a newly christened bird. In something as simple as naming a bird from India and Africa, you can tease out the old interplay of........