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"Hunting India History."
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Animal kingdoms : hunting, the environment, and power in the Indian princely states
Animal Kingdoms reveals the far-reaching cultural, political, and environmental importance of hunting in colonial India. Julie E. Hughes explores how Indian princes relied on their prowess as hunters of prized game to advance personal status, solidify power, and establish links with the historic battlefields and legendary deeds of their ancestors.
eBook
Shooting a tiger : big-game hunting and conservation in colonial India
This book extends our understanding of hunting in colonial India in a number of significant ways. It tells the reader about the essential link between shikar and governance. An enormous amount of research has gone into this book, and in that it advances the study of hunting and empire, together with the conservation aftermath, in very significant ways.
Book
Animal Kingdoms
Animal Kingdoms reveals the far-reaching cultural, political, and environmental importance of hunting in colonial India. Julie E. Hughes explores how Indian princes relied on their prowess as hunters of prized game to advance personal status, solidify power, and establish links with the historic battlefields and legendary deeds of their ancestors.
eBook
ANIMALS WITH RICH HISTORIES: THE CASE OF THE LIONS OF GIR FOREST, GUJARAT, INDIA
This article explores how far animals are or are not endowed with a sense of history. The century-long history of lion–human interaction in the lions' last habitat in Asia—in India's Gir Forest, Gujarat State—is the focal point of analysis. In turn, there have been longer-term shifts since ancient and medieval times. Aside from two specific phases of breakdown, Gir's lions rarely attack people. To comprehend why this is so, both the lions and humans need to be seen as products of history. Although it is going too far to endow the lions with historical consciousness, Gir's lions clearly do have memory of memories. Over a half-century since hunting ceased, living on a mix of domestic livestock and wild prey, they now co-inhabit not only the forest but a much larger territory in close proximity to resident people. Their case calls for rethinking both animal and human histories to allow for associate species that adapt to human presence, and are capable of memory.
Journal Article
British huntswomen in colonial India: Imperialism and gender hierarchies, 1890–1921
This article examines the history of British huntswomen in colonial India, c. 1890-1921. It aims to map the dissemination of the codes of huntswomanship, which came to signify the cultural and political ecology of India, in relation to historical geography and the animal kingdom. This study argues that British women could not have gained such an ideological significance without the active collaboration of indigenous people. In addition, this article contends that British huntswomen's environmentalism and the hunted fauna differed widely from those of male imperial hunters-an important historical development in relation to shikar in India that extant historiography has overlooked. Taking into account the memoirs of Mrs Alan Gardner, Isabel Savory and Mrs W. W. Baillie, this study offers a different reading of the history of huntswomanship in colonial India beyond the maledominated genre of the imperial hunt. While tiger huntresses existed in the English East India Company period, in the later Raj, more British women successfully transformed big game hunting mores by positioning their practices in the realm of sport. These women conceptualised gender hierarchies and intelligently articulated their views on the hunt, as well as hunting fauna, through a colonial feminist perspective. Finally, the analysis sheds light on the political dimensions of huntswomanship and the implication of gender politics in the context of environment and empire.
Journal Article
Forms of Predation: Tiger and Markhor Hunting in Colonial Governance
In this paper I compare late nineteenth and early twentieth-century sport hunting of markhor, a mountain goat, by British civil and military officials in the mountainous northern frontier region of Kashmir State, with their hunting of tigers, particularly man-eating tigers in the hilly and plains regions of India. Using these two instances, this paper elucidates and compares two competing visions of colonial governance. The British sportsman hunted man-eating tigers in order to protect Indian society from wild nature. Hunting them was also symbolic of their welfare-oriented governance ideology. They also hunted markhor in the northern mountainous region using begar, or forced labour, which they justified by falling back on the wider colonial representation of the northern mountainous region as a civilization-less area, where a more coercive form of governance was needed. So, rather than protecting society from nature, as in the case of man-eating tiger hunting in the plains, what was needed in the mountains was the ability of the British to introduce civilization into unruly nature via a strong disciplinary force. I argue that colonial governance entailed not simply a struggle to civilize India and its population, but a more profound struggle for control over nature.
Journal Article
The Making and Unmaking of the Gonds. History of Hunting Mores in Colonial India
This article will examine Gond tribes and their social history of hunting mores in colonial India. While a large corpus of anthropology and ethnographic studies has analysed the socio-economic and cultural life of many indigenous tribes in India in the post-colonial and contemporary
situation, they do not particularly offer greater historical insights concerning the colonial period for the reader. This is true especially on the subject of tribal hunting practices during pre-colonial and colonial periods, which was often entirely dismissed by mainstream historians. Hence,
it is worthwhile to consider what kind of life the Gonds led prior to British rule, and in what way the Gonds' society had flourished until the colonial intervention; and to what extent hunting had primacy in the tribal economy and society of the Gonds in the Central Provinces during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The present study aims to analyse the history of the Gonds in relation to their hunting practices and their negotiation with natural environment during the colonial period. Situating this hypothesis in the sphere of cultural geography and natural history, and
on a par with other tribal groups, our research will shed light on the Gonds' forest homelands, their ecological vision and society of hunters during a time when wildlife numbers outweighed those of people. Thereby this research will offer some reflections in order to locate the Gonds' hunting
mores in space and time for the colonial period in India. Importantly it will be suggested that despite 'subalternity' attached to the Gond tribals, they were successful in maintaining independent hunting cultures under the very rubric of the British Raj.
Journal Article
Colonialism and Its Unruly?—The Colonial State and Kuki Raids in Nineteenth Century Northeast India
This paper examines the colonial representation of tribal raids in the Northeast frontier of India and argues that, rather than being the ‘lawless and predatory habits of the savage hill tribes’, it was an expression of hill politics. The Kukis raided British territory when they discovered that an extension of the colonial boundary threatened their very existence as an independent state-evading population. It traces how the Kukis re-ethnicized themselves in the hills by evolving a system that is state-repellent, protected by a vast strip of forested jungle around their settlements commonly known as the ‘hunting ground’. It locates the ‘raid’ in the context of the difference in the perception of space and territoriality between the colonial state and indigenous polities. Colonial spatial ideology and its hill-valley binary are seen to play a vital role in animating tension on the frontier. The raid is thus understood as the ultimate weapon of resistance against an established state by an independent ‘not-a-state-subject’ people in defence of their autonomy and essentially represents non-state practices against state appropriations. Instead of being ‘unruly’, the raid is seen as a form of organized and premeditated resistance based on the consciousness of the hillmen's lived world order.
Journal Article
THE RAJ AND THE PARADOXES OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION: BRITISH ATTITUDES AND EXPEDIENCIES
This article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers.
Journal Article