Animal Kingdoms

Julie E. Hughes

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674074804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

One summer evening in 1918, a leopard wandered into the gardens of an Indian palace. Roused by the alarms of servants, the prince's eldest son and his entourage rode elephant-back to find and shoot the intruder. An exciting but insignificant vignette of life under the British Raj, we may think. Yet to the participants, the hunt was laden with symbolism. Carefully choreographed according to royal protocols, recorded by scribes and commemorated by court artists, it was a potent display of regal dominion over men and beasts alike. Animal Kingdoms uncovers 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 to advance personal status and solidify power. Believing that men and animals developed similar characteristics by inhabiting a shared environment, they sought out quarry—fierce tigers, agile boar—with traits they hoped to cultivate in themselves. Largely debarred from military activities under the British, they also used the hunt to establish meaningful links with the historic battlefields and legendary deeds of their ancestors.Hunting was not only a means of displaying masculinity and heroism, however. Indian rulers strove to present a picture of privileged ease, perched in luxuriously outfitted shooting boxes and accompanied by lavish retinues. Their interest in being sumptuously sovereign was crucial to elevating the prestige of prized game. Animal Kingdoms will inform historians of the subcontinent with new perspectives and captivate readers with descriptions of its magnificent landscapes and wildlife.

1

Introduction: A Leopard in the Garden

On a late summer evening in 1918, in one of the many princely states of Rajasthan in northwestern India, a leopard wandered into a verdant lakeside garden crowded with spent mango and ripening jackfruit trees.¹ Perhaps seeking a comfortable resting place, or else retreating from the excited shouts of gardeners tending the local prince’s private grounds, the leopard scaled the upper branches of a fantastically overgrown Malabar nut tree, or possibly a towering neem.² Safely out of reach and with the commotion below fading off towards the north, in the direction of the nearby royal palace, the animal draped itself over the tree’s twisting limbs in a way only a leopard could find comfortable and dozed off.

Not long afterwards—as depicted in a formal court painting of the incident—a small party of huntsmen entered the garden. Some came on foot, accompanied by dogs. Others from the palace rode in style on elephant-back. They took their places a few yards from the sleeping leopard. A shot rang out. The animal dropped like a stone, dead before it hit the ground.

When this particular leopard walked into this particular garden, it sparked an immediate response from the palace, initiating a predictable sequence of events and flurry of documentation centered on the resident prince’s armed pursuit of it. Soon after the shoot—which the sovereign in question would generously delegate to his heirapparent—palace scribes recorded the tale in their official daily register or haqiqat bahida. Within a few years, court artists too memorialized the incident in a miniature painting showing the leopard three times in narrative sequence: asleep in the tree, falling through the air, and dead on the ground (Fig. 1). Three decades after entering the tale in his Rajasthani diary, a Mewar State shikari or huntsman recounted the story once more for a wider Hindi-speaking audience in his published memoirs, copies of which are available just a few steps from where the miniature painting now hangs on display in the Udaipur City Palace Museum, within half a mile of the garden where the leopard died.³

The domesticated garden setting, the nobly choreographed extermination of the leopard, and the targeting of a sleeping animal from a nearly impregnable post are all sharply at odds with the familiar ideals of colonial shikar and sportsmanship. Under the British Raj, standards of so-called true sportsmanship were allegedly universal and self-evident. By these standards, sitting securely on a trained elephant in a garden while shooting unsuspecting quarry was a questionable practice: there was little danger, the stakes were patently uneven, and the surroundings too tame. Nevertheless, few Indian princes would have judged the leopard shoot that evening entirely out of place or wholly beyond the pale of sportsmanship. The ruling family, artists, and royal huntsmen of Mewar, in fact, considered the event worthy of special commemoration: not every leopard shoot received such notice. Why, then, was this particular hunt so carefully memorialized?

The explanation emerges from its localized, princely context: the brown summer peaks of the nearby Aravalli hills and the well watered, carefully manicured greenery in the foreground; the richness of fine turbans and elephant tusks accented in gold; the utilitarian practicality of khaki howdah cloths and unadorned rifles; the complementary characters and overlapping contexts of wild beasts and Rajput princes. Confirmed and expanded through representative examples and illustrations drawn from a selection of Indian princely states, this picture forms the basis of a distinct colonial era princely ecology—identified and described for the first time in these pages.

Princely ecology in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries perceived no sharp divisions between human and animal, or between the so-called artificial and natural environments. Operating within the constraints imposed by British paramountcy, it encompassed the animals, grounds, and practitioners of the hunt within a subtly shifting web of local histories, state traditions, lineal and regional identities, elite hierarchies, diplomatic relations, political aims, and personal ambitions. It allowed sovereign power and princely identity to be constructed as originating simultaneously from, and contested with reference to, hunting practices, animal characteristics, and environmental conditions that varied contextually and temporally, and whose meanings could be negotiated on the local, regional, all-India, and British imperial stages. Drawing on the Bundelkhandi context, one historian has argued that “[Rajput] identities were constantly contested and required continuous revalidation;” so too, I argue, were the qualities of Rajput environments and game.⁴

In fact, notwithstanding notions of permissibility within the hegemonic ethic of sportsmanship, it was quite natural that an Indian prince, or his designated representative, should sally forth to slay a big cat wandering in his gardens during the high era of the Raj. Arriving on the scene with rifle in hand, a princely gun could demonstrate dominion over nature and membership in an elite cadre of imperial sportsmen while seemingly protecting his subjects heroically from potential danger. This was no simple assertion of despotic authority over a state and its environment, nor some pale imitation of late-Victorian codes of British imperial masculinity grounded in rationality, paternalism, self-control, and pluck. Indian princes used their sporting exploits, within their gardens and in the jungles beyond, to show themselves simultaneously akin to, yet distinct from, local game, rival princes, and elite Englishmen, and to illustrate their personal influence over and intimate association with state environments.

Much more transpired that evening than the celebrated death of a wild animal. In killing the leopard, this princely sportsman suggested the ways he was and was not leopard-like. He defined the predator’s relationship to the garden, as well as his own association with state hunting grounds. He reaffirmed and strengthened connections between his heroic action and noble character, and the history and legitimacy of his lineage. Riding out at his father’s bidding, he consolidated his status in numerous hierarchies: between himself and worthy beasts, within his own family, in comparison with the nobles of his state, peers in neighboring realms, government officials, British royalty, and European elites.

The physical and psychological boundaries that nominally distinguished Indian princes from jangli (wild) beasts, and domesticated environments from dense jungle, were surprisingly permeable. This characteristic of princely ecology is unfamiliar conceptual terrain in modern Europe and North America, and perhaps among all heavily urbanized populations, where far sharper divisions have developed between the civilized and the wild. In these regions, it is common sense that bears do not belong in backyards, alligators in swimming pools, wolves in urban parks, and leopards in gardens.

At first glance, the Mewari landscape in which this leopard was shot looks like a thoroughly domesticated space, carpeted with English lawns, dotted with fruit trees, and bounded by low walls. Yet, not far away, another section of the garden doubled as a nursery for selectively bred wild boar with which to stock the state’s shikargahs or royal hunting reserves. Like the leopard in the Malabar nut tree, these corn-fed creatures complicated the categories, the supposed oppositions between domestic and wild, calling the exact character of the landscape into question. What the garden was on any given day—jungle, shikargah, zoological ground, pleasure park, orchard, or hybrid space—depended on human perception, princely activity, and the nature of the animals in it. All landscapes in the princely states had similarly layered, multiple, and changeable identities, paralleling those of the people and other animals that visited and inhabited them. In particular, India’s princes understood their hunting grounds, whether formal or ad hoc, as intimately associated with and productive of the regionally distinct physical and psychological characteristics of their game, and, indeed, of themselves.

Within princely ecology, there was no popularly accepted and fundamental divide between people and wilderness of the sort famously identified and critiqued by William Cronon.⁵ Whether Rajput elites approached them as locations or concepts, they saw neither the wilderness nor the garden as devoid of human mediation. This did not necessarily compromise the qualities that constituted wilderness—although some interventions and certain humans certainly could. Princely gardens in colonial India never lacked some measure of wildness. A leopard in such a garden was not foreign, but rather a rare and valuable enhancement of something that in a sense was already there. The animal might be a dangerous transient, a welcome guest, or a tolerated wayfarer; however viewed, it remained a creature whose potency could be harvested by the king, and that could be hunted on the same terms as those that prevailed in the forest. Akin to leopards in gardens, kings were no strangers in forests. On the contrary, it has been suggested that Indian princes were symbolically as well as literally rooted in the forest, their very legitimacy and physical substance nourished on its fruit and meat.⁶

If little separated kings and leopards, a deep chasm divided peasants from kings and leopards alike. The ability to move safely and successfully between forest and garden was largely restricted to the elite. To the extent that princes and princely character overlapped with wild animals and wilderness, it is impossible to segregate the human from the wild in princely India. And yet, socio-economic and political rank and identity severely constrained the idyllic possibilities at the heart of princely ecology. Agricultural peasants could enter a forest’s margins, but its depths remained beyond their scope; adivasi communities like the Bhils belonged in the jungle, but the garden was out of bounds. Kings, leopards, and their ilk alone reigned transcendent. Cronon’s hope—“if wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both”—finds no validation in princely ecology. Here, divisions between the human and the wild are complicated by hierarchies of class, caste, and sovereign privilege.⁷

The recently coined term “cosmopolitan tiger” describes this animal as it is perceived by contemporary Indian city-dwellers, international wildlife foundations, and foreign elites. It suggests that knowledge about tigers in these cosmopolitan populations comes primarily from Animal Planet television and visits to zoos or wildlife sanctuaries.⁸ Bengali villagers in the Sundarbans who actually live in the midst of tigers face an entirely different animal—an uncaged creature of flesh and blood—yet do not consider tigers implacably dangerous by nature. This is, rather, an animal that can be negotiated with through the diplomatic services of local deities; it can be appeased if villagers regulate their behavior while in the forest (by avoiding strife and temporarily suspending caste hierarchies) to avoid causing it offense. Tigers only withdraw from such negotiations and become uncontrollably violent when they realize the privileges of being seen from a cosmopolitan perspective by unconditionally supportive elites, governments, and NGOs, all of whom condemn villagers as environmental trespassers deserving their fate as “tiger food.”⁹

Not so long ago, there were princely tigers. Like their cosmopolitan cousins, princely tigers were conceived of at comparatively safe distances. Those who imagined them and maintained their importance—and tried to conserve their numbers—were elite, powerful, and all-too-frequently unreceptive to popular petitions and policy demands based on countervailing visions of prosaically dangerous carnivores. The villagers of princely Rajputana and Bundelkhand, unlike those in contemporary Bengal, may not have maintained close diplomatic relations with local tigers, but it is unlikely that they, or the tigers, failed to practice basic “strategies of avoidance . . . [that] allowed for coexistence if not total harmony.”¹⁰ Still, the modern breed of “cosmopolitan tigers” in the Sundarbans are not far removed from their Rajput state predecessors. Princely tigers and other royal game acted on their near-sovereign immunity by attacking people, killing livestock, and destroying crops. The extent of damag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: A Leopard in the Garden
• 2. Princely Sport and Good Tiger Grounds
• 3. Exceptional Game in Powerful Places
• 4. Controlling Environments for Progressive Sport
• 5. Martial Pasts and Combative Presents
• 6. Threatened Kingdoms of Dwindling Beasts
• 7. Conclusion: Leaving the Garden
• Bibliography
• Index