"Face Him Like a Briton": Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800-1875
Never attack a tiger on foot—if you can help it. There are cases in which you must do so. Then face him like a Briton, and kill him if you can; for if you fail to kill him, he will certainly kill you. (162)
—Walter Campbell, My Indian Journal
By 1864, when British Army officer Walter Campbell offered this advice, tigers and tiger hunting had become invested with several potent meanings. As "royal" beasts and "kings and masters of the jungle," tigers had been closely associated historically with Indian and other Southeast Asian rulers (Wessing 27), associations of which many nineteenth-century Britons were keenly aware. Not only did many Britons seek to emulate various Mughal emperors for whom tiger hunting was an element of kingship, but on the way to presuming themselves the "New Mughals" they had to outdo various regional rulers such as Mysore's Tipu Sultan (who held power from 1782 to 1799) who also employed tigers as powerful symbols of their rule (Brittlebank 140–46). Tigers also represented for the British all that was wild and untamed in the Indian natural world. Thus, the curious late Victorian and Edwardian spectacle of British royals and other dignitaries being photographed standing aside dead tiger carcasses depicted the staging of the successful conquest of Indian nature by "virile imperialists" (MacKenzie 47). More generally, tiger hunting was an important symbol in the construction of British imperial and masculine identities during the nineteenth century. Precisely because tigers were dangerous and powerful beasts, tiger hunting represented a struggle with fearsome nature that needed to be resolutely faced "like a Briton," as Campbell put it (162). Only by successfully vanquishing tigers would Britons prove their manliness and their fitness to rule over Indians.
Much has been written about the place of the tiger in Indian and other Southeast Asian cultures during the precolonial period, [End Page 659] particularly as it related to kingship. For example, Peter Boomgaard has contended that various Javanese kingship rituals such as the sima-maésa fight between tigers and water buffaloes and the rampogan sima or rampog macan (tiger-sticking) served the dual function of killing tigers as well as allowing Javanese rulers to "show [their] prowess" in the natural world ( Frontiers 109, 145–66). More relevant for our purposes here, various Indian monarchs, including several of the Mughal emperors, hunted tigers as a major way to demonstrate their power over nature. For example, Jehangir had a minute account kept of his prolific hunting over a thirty-six-year period between 1580 and 1616 during which time he is said personally to have killed 17,167 animals, including eighty tigers (Ali 31: 841–42). Likewise, seventeenth-century Italian visitor Niccolao Manucci wrote that Shah Jahan's "ordinary amusement was tiger hunting" (qtd. in Ali 31: 843).
The British had great pretensions to becoming successors to the Mughals during the nineteenth century. Before they could attain such power, however, they had to vanquish other Indian rulers, such as Mysore's Tipu Sultan, who also employed the tiger in their symbolic arsenals—in Tipu's case almost to the point of "obsession" (Brittlebank 140). Among other uses, the tiger or the tiger stripe ( babrî ) was used as decoration on his throne; on the uniforms of his soldiers; and on his coins, flags, and arms (Zamana Gallery). Perhaps most famous, though, was "Tipu's Tiger," a mechanical man-eating-tiger-cum-organ, which French craftsmen designed for him around 1794 and which is housed today at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. When wound, this mechanical organ enacts an allegory of the fierce animosity Tipu's regime felt toward their British adversaries, representing the macabre scene of a tiger roaring and pouncing on a prostrate, shrieking European victim (Archer 10).
Here, then, the tiger has...
