Fitch’s accounts of India stirred the imaginations of his countrymen back home. Playwrights like Christopher Marlowe dreamed of sailors “Lading their ships with gold and precious stones,” while authors like John Milton envisioned the fabled riches of “Agra and Lahor of Great Mogul.” Though such stories provoked romance in the hearts of England’s bards, the nation’s merchants saw nothing but moneybags. Fitch’s stories spurred one especially ambitious group of London traders to approach Queen Elizabeth I with a tempting offer to enrich the nation’s coffers. The Queen agreed, and in 1600 she granted the newly established East India Company a royal charter, effectively designating their organization as the primary liaison between Britain and the rich trading ports of the Far East. Initially, their focus was on the Spice Islands, but shifted to India as a result of conflicts with the Dutch. Inroads were made, and by 1612 the East India Company had convinced the Mughal emperor Jahangir—that same legendary hunter and great lover of tigers—to give them permission to trade at the port of Surat. This small mercantilist concession may not have seemed especially portentous at the time, but its effects would be felt for centuries. Without realizing it, Jahangir had helped usher in the British colonial era in India and inadvertently sealed his own dynasty’s doom. With Calcutta serving as their colonial capital, the emboldened British—under the auspices of the East India Company—began to expand their enterprises in India, first in collaboration with their Mughal hosts, and later, in direct defiance of them.
The century that followed saw a gradual consolidation of Company power, and increased tensions with native-born rulers and European rivals. Those tensions would culminate in 1757 with the Battle of Plassey, when the Company’s own private army defeated a local Mughal vassal and his French allies on the battlefield, resulting in direct Company control over all of Bengal. After which, any pretense of native Indian rule, at least in the eastern part of the subcontinent, was effectively eliminated. From its base in Bengal, the East India Company continued to expand its hegemony westward and southward over the rest of India throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Provinces that cooperated were allowed to exist as subordinate “princely states,” while those that rebelled were met with ruthless force. The role of the British had substantially transformed. They were no longer foreign merchants looking to make a tidy profit—they had become governors. A small, damp, windswept island a full hemisphere away had come to rule, via the East India Company, a sprawling and complex subcontinent it barely understood. Through both guile and blunt force, the British had usurped the Mughals to achieve power over much of India; what remained to be negotiated, however, was how best to wield it, and maintain it.
The solution came in the form of a carrot-and-stick-style collaboration with India’s minor nobility. Specifically, between the local princes, who were generally allowed to keep their fiefdoms in exchange for loyalty and tribute, and British colonial officers, who were charged with gubernatorial oversight. In this way, the local maharajas could continue to rule over their subjects and handle daily administrative affairs, while a British resident backed up by military force oversaw each principality to ensure the Company’s interests were advanced. This collaboration in turn created a certain amount of shared cultural space between the Indian and British colonial elites, and the exchange of aristocratic traditions was not uncommon. The children of maharajas learned to play cricket and speak Oxford English, while British ministers developed a fondness for lofty elephant rides and elaborate hunts in jungle reserves. In this exchange, the ritual of the colonial tiger hunt was born.
One of the first published accounts of a colonial tiger hunt comes via a letter penned by Sir John Day, dated April 1784. In the decades that followed his first encounter with tigers, such orchestrated shikar expeditions would become commonplace for visiting Britons of means, although at the time of his letter, they were still exceedingly novel and “exotic” affairs. What follows is Day’s description of the big event, which he recorded as occurring on the banks of the Ganges, near Chinsurah, in Bengal:
Matters had been thus judiciously arranged: tents were sent off yesterday, and an encampment formed within a mile and a half of the jungle which was to be the scene of our operations; and in this jungle the thickets of long rank grass and reeds are in many places fifteen feet high. At one o’clock this morning thirty elephants, with the servants, and refreshments of all kinds, were dispatched . . . we mounted our elephants, and proceeded to the jungle.
In our way we met with game of all kinds; hares, antelopes, hog-deer, wild boars, and wild buffaloes; but nothing could divert our attention from the fierce and more glorious game . . .
We had not proceeded five hundred yards beyond the jungle, when we heard a general cry on our left of “Baug, baug, baug!” On hearing this exclamation of “tiger!” we wheeled; and forming a line anew, entered the great jungle . . . on the discharge of the first gun a scene presented itself confessed by all the experienced tiger hunters present to be the finest they had ever seen. Five full grown royal tigers sprung together . . . they all crouched again within new covers within the same jungle, and all were marked. We followed, having formed a line into a crescent, so as to embrace either extremity of the jungle: in the centre was the houdar (or state) elephants, with the marksmen, and the ladies, to comfort and encourage them.
When we had slowly and warily approached the spot where the first tiger lay, he moved not until we were just upon him; when, with a roar that resembled thunder, he rushed upon us. The elephants wheeled off at once . . . They returned, however, after a flight of about fifty yards, and again approaching the spot where the tiger had lodged himself, towards the skirts of the jungle, he once more rushed forth, and springing at the side of an elephant upon which three natives were mounted, at one stroke tore a portion of the pad from under them; and one of the riders, panic struck, fell off. The tiger, however, seeing his enemies in force, returned, slow and indignant, into his shelter; where, the place he lay in being marked, a heavy and well-directed fire was poured in by the principal marksmen; when, pushing in, we saw him in the struggle of death, and growling and foaming he expired.
We then proceeded to seek the others . . . and with a little variation of circumstances, killed them all; the oldest and most ferocious of the family, had, however, early in the conflict, very sensibly quitted the scene of action, and escaped to another part of the country . . .
The chase being over, we returned in triumph to our encampment . . .
As Sir John Day’s account demonstrates, many elements of the traditional royal tiger hunt were appropriated by the colonial newcomers—indeed, the techniques the English adopted were not substantially different from those of their Mughal predecessors. They sat perched in the same howdah, atop the same elephant, while the same local shikaris served as guides, and the same villagers were drafted to beat the tigers out of the bushes. The hunt had all the familiar ostentation, all the connotations of military might, and much the same ritualistic importance as that of the Mughals’. The fundamental difference, however, was what the ritual signified. The tiger held a different implication for the British than for the Mughals and other Indian rulers.
Under the former, the ritualistic slaying of the animal took on a new meaning—and the tiger itself would become a symbol of local defiance. Consider Tipu’s Tiger, a peculiar, life-sized mechanical curiosity that once belonged to Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the rebellious kingdom of Mysore. Unlike many of his neighbors, Tipu Sultan refused to capitulate to the East India Company. Fiercely proud—indeed, the Sultan liked to call himself the “Tiger of Mysore” and used the animal as his official emblem—he would not accept British encroachments into his territory, or form alliances with them of any kind. It was a courageous strategy, although not a successful one. The Sultan was defeated in the Fourth Anglo–Mysore War, and in the end British troops stormed his palace, discovering a bizarre and most unsettling sight, as recorded in this East India Company account publis
hed in 1799:
In a room appropriated for musical instruments . . . was found an article which merits particular notice, as another proof of the deep hate, and extreme loathing of Tippoo Saib towards the English: this was a most curious piece of mechanism as large as life, representing a Royal Tiger in the act of devouring a prostrate European officer: within the body of the animal was a row of keys of natural notes . . . intended to resemble the cries of a person in distress intermixed with the horrible roar of the Tiger: the machinery was so contrived, that while this infernal music continued to play, the hand of the European victim was often lifted up, and the head convulsively thrown back to express his helpless and deplorable situation. The whole of this machine, formed of wood, was executed under the immediate orders, and direction of Tippoo Sultaun, whose custom it was in the afternoon to amuse himself with this miserable emblematic triumph . . .
The mechanical device with its haunting organ depicted an actual event—Hugh Munro, the only son of a British general who had defeated Tipu’s own father in a previous Mysore rebellion, had been killed by a tiger while hunting with friends on the Bay of Bengal in 1792. The device’s commemorative aspects, however, were overshadowed by its symbolic message. And that larger meaning was hardly lost on the British soldiers who had stumbled upon it. The triumphant tiger represented all the innate, unyielding ferocity of a native-born Indian king, exercising his divine right to repel a foreign invader, while the wailing British officer represented—well, a wailing British officer. Tipu Sultan had used his emblem, the tiger, as a projection of his own defiance against the British, and the British were more than happy to bend that analogy to fit into their own worldview. Whereas the kings of India had regarded the tiger as a powerful yet benevolent manifestation of their own royal mandate, the British viewed the very same animal with suspicion and disdain. And while the hunting of tigers had once been an affirmation of identity for India’s ruling class, it became under the British a sort of ritualized reenactment of the colony’s subjugation—the slaying of the rebel Tipu Sultan performed all over again, albeit on a smaller scale. To kill a tiger was to vanquish all that was deemed alien and dangerous in India; the act itself made the country safer, and a little more like England. The existence of tigers in the wild was viewed, both symbolically and literally, as a direct challenge to British hegemony. Overcoming that challenge was an act of conquest—of colonization—and it was very much encouraged by the colonial government.
Viewed through this new colonial British lens, the goal of tiger hunting changed as well. To a Mughal king or a local maharaja, the idea of actually exterminating tigers would have been preposterous. To hunt tigers was their divine right, a sacred ritual of affirmation; to remove all the tigers from the Indian landscape would have imperiled their own identity. To the British, however, the extermination of tigers became synonymous with progress, with “civilization.” They were an obstacle to modernity that needed to be removed. For British governors and the military officers who carried out their orders, the tiger was, as the journal Tiger-shooting in India put it, a “cunning, silent, savage enemy” that committed “fearful ravages” against those trying their best to “civilize” what was, in their own Eurocentric eyes, a “primitive” land. How could an ambitious colonist establish a tea plantation, or a cattle station, or even a decent school, with bloodthirsty five-hundred-pound predators lurking in the shadows? To the British in India, this was a rhetorical question.
Ample evidence of these attitudes can be found in the many field manuals on shooting and hunting published by colonists at the time. In one titled Oriental Field Sports, printed in 1807, Captain Thomas Williamson expounds on the benefits of tiger eradication:
Of such importance has the search for tigers, and their consequent destruction, proved in some parts of Bengal, that large tracts of country in a manner depopulated by their ravages, or by the apprehensions to which the proximity of such a scourge naturally must give birth, have, by persevering exertion, been freed from their devastations; and, in lieu of being over-run with long grass and brambles, have become remarkable for their state of cultivation to which they have been brought. Perhaps no part of the country exhibits a more complete corroboration of this fact than the Cossimbazar Island; which, though not exempt from the evil, has changed from a state of wilderness to a rich display of agriculture. A few patches of cover yet remain; however, they cannot fail to speedily be annihilated, when perhaps a tiger may be as great a rarity, as formerly it was an incessant object of terror.
In just one short passage, the good captain essentially sums up the entirety of early British attitudes toward tigers, and toward India as a whole. He sees the forests and grasslands merely as places to be cleared and put to the plow, and the predators that inhabit them as actually “evil” in their unwillingness to be subjugated or easily removed. Colonialism in a nutshell.
That isn’t to say, however, that colonial attitudes toward tigers were completely unfounded. Although generally shy and reclusive, tigers did occasionally kill livestock, and sometimes did indeed kill people. Bullet wounds weren’t the only infirmity that could lead to man-eating—old age, worn-down teeth, and even porcupine quills occasionally turned otherwise normal tigers into man-eaters, and human–tiger conflict was not unheard of in British India. In 1769, tigers in the forests around Bhiwapur were said to have claimed over four hundred victims, causing an entire village to be abandoned. And more than fifty years after poor Hugh Munro, the British general’s son, succumbed to stripes on the Bay of Bengal in 1792, some seven hundred people a year were still being killed by tigers in the state of Bengal alone. Obviously, tigers weren’t harmless—they were apex predators, after all, endowed with awesome strength and terrific abilities. And humans were, at the end of the day, edible meat. But when one considers their actual menace compared to other animals, it becomes obvious that the danger they posed was greatly exaggerated. The annual government gazettes from the period clearly show that other animals presented a significantly greater threat to humans than tigers. Poisonous snakes, for example, consistently killed twenty times as many people in India as tigers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many other “wild beasts” such as wolves, bears, leopards, and rhinos rivaled and regularly surpassed tigers in terms of yearly victims. Out of the annual total of between 20,000 and 25,000 lives that were usually claimed by wild animals in India each year during the colonial period, tiger victims generally numbered somewhere between 800 and 1,000. And while 1,000 deaths a year due to tigers may seem considerable, out of a total population already approaching 300 million by the late nineteenth century, it’s still a very low mortality rate. When one considers that nearly five hundred people die each year in America—a country with a population roughly comparable to India’s in the nineteenth century—simply from falling out of bed, one realizes that except for a few isolated occasions and regions, tigers would have been the least of the average Indian villager’s worries. And even in the rare instance when tigers did present a realistic threat, the people were not, despite their portrayal by colonial rulers, totally helpless. Many rural communities did have their own methods for dealing with tigers—after all, they had been living alongside them for hundreds if not thousands of years. In 1815, for example, a judge in Madras reported how seven hundred villagers “formed a Circle round [a] Tyger” that had been terrorizing their lands and finished it off with spears. There are similar accounts of villages banding together to use nets and even poisoned arrows to get rid of problematic tigers—something the British, who generally lived in cities and bungalows far removed from any actual threat of tiger predation, had the audacity to critique as unsporting. Apparently they saw more valor in butchering tigers at scale, using high-powered rifles from an elephant’s back.
The tigers’ tragic fate under colonialism also produced unintended human consequences. Although it may seem counterintuitive, the increased hunting of tigers can and often does translate directly into more human de
aths by tiger. Obviously, there is a point at which so many tigers have been killed, there are simply none left to strike back—and this was precisely what would happen in India in the second half of the twentieth century, when tigers were brought to the brink of extinction. But there was also a point, earlier in the process of decimation, during which large numbers of humans were entering the woods and actively seeking to interact with large numbers of tigers. A simple increase in human–tiger interactions inevitably results in an increase in lethal encounters, and as we well know, simply having a rifle is not always an effective defense against a full-on tiger assault.
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