A Natural History of Colonialism

The Egyptian mythologists, in order to account for animal worship, said that the gods, pursued by the violence of earthborn men, who were their enemies, had formerly been obliged to disguise themselves under the semblance of beasts.

—The Natural History of Religion, David Hume

In 1875 the Indian tiger (Panthera tigris) was rechristened the Royal Bengal Tiger—first by the Calcutta press and then by the rest of the world—in honor of the enthusiasm shown by the Prince of Wales, Edward VII, in hunting it during his eight-month tour of India. If naturalists seek a single event that doomed the fate of this species they could point to Edward’s expeditions. Of course, Edward alone cannot be blamed. Tiger hunting had always been a colonial favorite, and the Victorians (who devoured publications like The Oriental Shooting Magazine, The Bengal Sporting Magazine, and The Indian Sporting Review at clubs around India) had turned it into a rite of passage. Like any good politician or celebrity, Edward was merely stamping with approval a widely enjoyed sport. After Edward’s trip, however, a regrettable fashion took hold. While the Indian tiger had merely been hunted, the Royal Bengal Tiger was massacred.

Perhaps the recent widespread availability of George Eastman’s cumbersome but portable camera also had something to do with it. Suddenly, all around the subcontinent, Victorians were eager to be photographed with their feet proudly planted on “Stripes.” What is sport without measurements and records? Rowland Ward’s The Sportsman’s Handbook to Practical Collecting, Preserving, and Artistic Setting-up of Trophies and Specimens (first published in 1880 with new editions almost every year through the end of the century) carried instructions on how to arrange the tiger’s carcass for measurement. The dead beast was to be tugged (at the nose and tail) to a straight line before fixing the four pegs: the tip and root of the tail, the nape of the neck and the nose.

Decades before the ramifications of such excess could be realized and lamented, however, a grisly development captured the public’s attention. The ineptitude and impatience of the average hunter resulted in large numbers of injured tigers. Record-sized tigers became less newsworthy than the growing numbers of maimed, disabled, and, consequently, cattle- and man-eating felines. During the age of “maneaters”—peaking in the 1920s and ’30s—thousands of people were killed and eaten by these ghostly, crafty, but, invariably, maimed shaitans (devils). In 1922 alone, more than sixteen hundred Indians were killed by tigers. Shutting down entire districts, further isolating already isolated villages, terrorizing unarmed railway crews and paving crews stuck at remote roads, the lore of the maneater reigned supreme while the popular imagination was fueled by first-hand accounts of encounters with ghost tigers.

Our relationship to a historical narrative is likely to be influenced by the circumstances of our first encounter with it. Anglophone Indian schoolboys like myself, living urban lives and attending schools in the 1970s (a time when curricula all but ignored the natural world), took our first instruction on the Indian wilderness from cheap editions of the stories of Jim Corbett—that famous scourge of the shaitan—whose books are in print even today. The more grotesque the maiming, the more inept the feline became at dispatching its prey, the greater the numbers of failed, or partly failed, attacks on humans, the greater the terror. One of Corbett’s maneaters had changed its diet after its canines were shot off. Another, shot in the shoulder, recovered to a twisted limb. While Corbett was not an easy act to follow, many tried. Kenneth Anderson, one of Corbett’s latter day cousins in south India, showed greater flair for his craft—if not the hunting, at least the writing. The titles of Anderson’s episodic chapters—“The lame horror of Peddacheruvu,” “The dumb maneater of Telavadi,” “The novice of Manchi”—reminded us city dwellers about the eccentric vileness of the hinterland.

If we quickly outgrew the simple satisfactions of such stories, it was partly because of the multipronged efforts of Project Tiger. Initiated...