"Face Him Like a Briton": Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800-1875

[...]these hunters needed to adopt various Indian methods of hunting, such as using machans (hunting platforms perched in tall trees) or riding on top of elephants, if they were to hunt tigers successfully while also remaining safely above the typical range of a tiger's spring of twelve to twenty feet. By contrast, I argue that there was greater room for British-Indian interaction in earlier decades. [...]while various scholars such as M. S. S. Pandian have argued that tiger hunting during the late nineteenth century was "one of the sites on which the colonial project tried to construct and affirm the difference between its 'superior' self and the inferiorized 'native other'" (239), I contend that British interactions with Indians were generally more varied and complex during the period before the 1870s than this interpretation allows for. According to Mahesh Rangarajan, the British Raj was even "more systematic" in its efforts to encourage the "extermination" of tigers and other large carnivore predators: beginning in the 1860s, rewards were increased in the Central Provinces and other regions to range from twenty to fifty rupees for adult tigers and ten to twenty rupees for their cubs (Fencing 149). Williamson also described instances of Indian villagers using traps involving nets as well as poisoned arrows to kill tigers (1: 228).6 Unable, therefore, to criticize Indian villagers for being helpless in these cases, Britons instead derided their hunting methods as being inefficient, cowardly, or needlessly dangerous to themselves or others. [...]although the villagers successfully killed the tiger by encircling it, as the Madras judge reported, this was only accomplished after three villagers "were severely torn" by the animal (East India Company, Report).

Loại tài liệu:

Article - Bài báo

Tác giả:

Sramek, Joseph

Đề mục:

Literature

Nhà xuất bản:

Indiana University Press

Ngày xuất bản:

Summer 2006

Số trang/ tờ:

Định dạng:

pdf

Định danh tư liệu:

https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2006.48.4.659

Nguồn gốc:

Victorian studies, Volume 48, Number 4, Summer 2006, Pages 659-671

Liên kết:

ISSN 0042-5222

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"Face Him Like a Briton": Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800-1875

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