I

From the very start, at one level, imperial hunting was closely linked with conservation. A constant point of interest for colonial administrators and naturalists was to safeguard wildlife for the recreational activity of hunting. Later, with the advancement in colonial scientific forestry and the exploration of Indian flora and fauna, there emerged a genuine concern for the endangered wild species. Imperial administrators, who were hunters-turned-naturalists, became advocates of conservation based on years of expertise and observation of Indian flora and fauna. A closer focus on these efforts reveals critical information on widely written-about aspects of the exploitation of wildlife, as well as the cultural attitudes that were imprinted in the British colonial mindset.

Initially authored by British sportsmen and forest officers, the earliest writings on wildlife conservation reflected their understanding of the native practices of shikar as well as appreciation for Indian wildlife. Colonial hunting accounts also offered critical reports on animal populations and their haunts, as well as wider habitats. Imperial sportsmen such as William Rice (1857), Henry Shakespear (1862), and James Forsyth (1889), among others, gave detailed pictures of a happy environmental balance with great herds of hooved animals and numerous large predators co-existing alongside populated areas.Footnote ³⁰ Despite an overall decline as reported in the Indian Forester (1887), there were places across India where wildlife was believed to be abundant. Both naturalists and hunters took a keen interest in reading and writing about it. Captain James Forsyth of the Bengal staff corps observed that during the latter half of the nineteenth century, forests in central India and the United Provinces were home to a significant population of tigers.Footnote ³¹ Thomas Jerdon, a surgeon major in the Madras army, in the same period came across herds of blackbuck in the Punjab, numbering tens of thousands of animals, travelling through many districts.Footnote ³² He further pointed out that the Malabar coast, central India, the western, and the eastern ghats held considerable numbers of spotted deer, wild cats, and plenty of wildlife.

The expansion of the Indian Forest Service also enabled forest officers to hunt and study Indian flora and fauna more closely. Benjamin Weil points out that ‘shikar might have played a more obvious role in keeping the multiple functions of forests present in the minds of foresters’.Footnote ³³ Hunting was a form of recreation that got a forest officer out into the woods ‘to explore many places he might not have otherwise inspected’. Thus, Edward Stebbing, who had worked for sixteen years as a forest officer in India in the early twentieth century, found that his routine duties offered unique opportunities for observing and studying animal life in Indian jungles. His profession afforded and yielded facilities for the enjoyment of unparalleled sport of large and small game. According to him, the Indian Forest Service would appeal to ‘all young Britons possessed of a love of science, a love of natural history, and a love of sport’.Footnote ³⁴

While systematic destruction of wildlife for sport marked the end of the nineteenth century, gradually, from the beginning of the twentieth century, a perceived change in attitude developed towards the hunted species and the appreciation of nature. Colonial officer-hunters adopted a position of ‘fairness’, which collectively resulted in a growing conservation movement. As J. A. Mangan and Callum McKenzie point out, the future protection of wildlife became a necessity to the imperial officer-hunter for ensuring the future of game hunting. The British officer-hunter, therefore, became the guarantor, whereby ‘game’ became ‘wildlife’, and ‘preservation’ became ‘conservation’,Footnote ³⁵ which marks a fundamental shift in British attitudes from the mid-nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.

The process also drove a further wedge into the hunting community. As conservation did not result in a blanket ban on hunting, the prerogatives came to be more sharply defined. The arrangement and general type of habitat in which hunting took place, the weapons used to hunt, and the relative importance of big game animals, in turn determined the relative importance of the hunter within a controlled regime. One key feature of British wildlife conservation attitudes in India was drawing a stark distinction between the local and the European hunting methods. European sportsmen claimed that they shot the game according to scientific conventions, and they disapproved of local hunting methods. Local people were singled out for blame when it came to the cruel decimation of wildlife and savage hunting practices. Colonial forest officers, hunters, and naturalists assumed that they had a superior scientific understanding of nature, while the native understanding of the Indian environment based on local practices and traditions was described as sub-standard.

Thus, an imperial forest administrator, Edward Stebbing, blamed the locals for threatening wild stock numbers by means of unauthorized poaching.Footnote ³⁶ Another case in point is H. Littledale, a naturalist and member of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), who described how local hunters were destroying birds indiscriminately in the Baroda region.Footnote ³⁷ In 1886, he observed that the Lesser Florican (a migratory species), which used to visit Baroda in small numbers during the rainy season for breeding, and remained there all through the year, had dwindled in number. Littledale himself admits shooting many birds during the months of February, April, May, June, July, and October, although not in the breeding months.Footnote ³⁸ Littledale maintained that these birds were not so much reduced by shooting as by snare, a method of hunting practised by local hunters. He observed how many such birds were brought in alive to the Camp Bazaar with their legs most ‘cruelly tied with feathers plucked from their own wings’.Footnote ³⁹ The prized birds that Littledale got as presents from local hunters, with their legs so harshly tied, were later released by him, after they had recovered sufficiently in his garden.

Littledale's experience and training as a naturalist have a significant bearing on his passion for the preservation of birds. To the local hunters, selling bird-meat was part of their livelihood. These birds were mainly netted for the local market and were their means of survival.Footnote ⁴⁰ As the local shikaris operated with crude weapons, the suffering undergone by animals or birds was unavoidable. Such local modes of hunting were in sharp contrast to the hunting codes of the colonial hunters, who maintained formal close and open seasons for shooting birds and game to ensure respite during breeding. To the imperial men, the native shooting of birds and wild species at will rather than preserving them was morally wrong and represented bad scientific management of species.

The dwindling numbers of wild animals in the forests under British control encouraged the gradual transition in the British position on Indian wildlife, from the one held by the imperial administrators who advocated the eradication of the species of ‘noxious’ animals to the one held by the sensible hunters and naturalists. This, in turn, provided the opportunity for some colonial officer-hunters to become leading advocates of wildlife conservation. It was a moment of historical reconciliation in the hegemonic imperial enterprise as the hunters and destroyers of Indian flora and fauna turned into the preservers and conservers of wildlife. David Prendergast and William Adams's study sheds light on how ideas of wildlife conservation also emerged elsewhere in the empire, in colonial British Africa and its protectorates in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁴¹ Based on the classical model of game regulations and practices of English aristocratic rural estates, even as such establishments died out in England, the ideas were transported to the African colonies. Edward Norton Buxton, a hunter and wildlife expert from an affluent background in England, had made a series of efforts toward preserving the game in British Africa. Subsequently, the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire (1903–14) was formed by an elite group of colonial administrators and hunters, along with Buxton. Effectively using their expertise on game, such men played a critical role in influencing both the Foreign Office in London as well as British colonial government in Africa to bring out better policies on issues related to protected game reserves, hunting, and preservation. However, this article suggests that such ideas emerged much earlier in colonial India from individuals of modest colonial backgrounds, whose expertise, unlike those of the above, was drawn from the native experience. In colonial India, hunters like G. P. Sanderson and E. F. Burton emphasized the ‘level-headed shikar’ in the later part of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, as we know from the lives of Jim Corbett, Colonel Richard Burton, and F. W. Champion, notions of ‘wildlife’ and ‘conservation’ had their dedicated adherents.Footnote ⁴² While tiger-hunts and pig-sticking continued as a highly ritualized form of elite activity among the British upper strata and Indian princes, the aforementioned colonial officials wrote about and articulated views defending the preservation of wildlife.

E. F. Burton, a major general in the Madras staff corps, and also a big game hunter and naturalist, in his Reminiscences of sport in India, opined that India's big game species should not be hunted to extinction by sportsmen hunters. Instead, he suggested that ‘a balance should be found within the environment between the needs of the people and the acceptance of wildlife’.Footnote ⁴³ In his other work An Indian olio, writing in the 1880s, E. F. Burton noted how Chankee Kopra in the Central Provinces, a region known to be a grand tiger territory with rich fauna until 1875, had witnessed the cutting down of forests for building railways and telegraphic lines.Footnote ⁴⁴ As he pointed out, ‘since the establishment of railroads, game in general, large game in particular, has suffered great diminution in numbers’.Footnote ⁴⁵

E. F. Burton's early observations were not given a serious thought either by the colonial government or by the natural history societies in the late nineteenth century. But his insights on wildlife conservation were inherited by his son, Colonel Richard Burton (born in 1868), and were also echoed many a time by others from the early twentieth century onwards. In 1907, Reginald Herbert, a sportsman-hunter, urged the government to suspend the rewards for killing tigers, except in the case of the man-eaters.Footnote ⁴⁶ According to him, tigers were to be preserved at all costs due to their specific zoological worth and aesthetic beauty. Edward Stebbing too expressed fears that the rapid development of arms technology and easy access to rifles would destroy India's wildlife, and pleaded for the creation of permanent wildlife sanctuaries.Footnote ⁴⁷

Colonel Richard Burton, who began his career as an adjutant of the 5th Infantry of the Hyderabad Contingent between 1893 and 1897, reached the level of cantonment magistrate in 1903, and was soon to become an advocate of wildlife sanctuaries.Footnote ⁴⁸ His Shikar diaries started in 1894 and continued until 1948. Unlike contemporary hunter-turned-conservationist Jim Corbett, who specifically directed his efforts towards the conservation of tigers and leopards, Burton's conservation study extended to other Indian fauna.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1913, Burton drew attention to the decline of wildlife in the jungles across the Godavari river, based on some of his shikar observations. Burton's role was significant in its time as he had alerted the colonial government to the dire need to conserve the country's wildlife, and in due course, his activities saw the formation of the Indian Board for Wildlife.Footnote ⁵⁰

Like Burton, Jim Corbett too emerged as a unique individual in the late British Raj, who, despite being an integral part of the colonial establishment, held parallel views when it came to conservation. Before his turn towards conservation, Corbett was a well-known hunter of man-eating tigers and leopards for thirty-two years in the Garhwal region of the United Provinces, between 1907 and 1910, as well as in the 1920s and 1930s. Corbett's portrayal of the tiger as a ‘gentleman’, however, stood out in contemporary wildlife thought and highlighted his emphasis in support of Indian fauna, especially the tiger.Footnote ⁵¹ With the help of Malcolm Hailey, the governor of the United Provinces, and a series of efforts that were launched between 1933 and 1935, Corbett succeeded in the creation of a wildlife sanctuary in the Kumaon hills.Footnote ⁵² Protective legislation affecting this park was by far advanced for its time, in comparison to anywhere else in colonial India.Footnote ⁵³ In his later life, Corbett devoted his efforts solely towards wildlife protection, advocated cameras instead of guns, and began to capture tigers on film.Footnote ⁵⁴

Richard Burton and Jim Corbett represent significant interventions in the colonial programme of ‘vermin eradication’ and conservation. Far from being just cogs in the colonial machinery on these issues, both brought their very passionate and personal agendas to the wildlife protection programme, inflecting its operation in unique ways. While Burton strove valiantly to support the cause of wildlife sanctuaries, Corbett stood firmly against the indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife, especially tigers.

F. W. Champion, one of the leading naturalists in the first quarter of the twentieth century, also strongly advocated the camera instead of the gun.Footnote ⁵⁵ Champion, an officer in the Imperial Forest Department in the United Provinces, was later to become the first leading wildlife photographer in colonial India. He was also an inspiration to Jim Corbett in introducing the art of wildlife photography. In 1934, Champion noted that animals such as the blackbuck, the chital, and the game birds, both in the plains and the hills across the United Provinces and other parts of India, were hunted despite the provision of colonial wildlife protection laws.Footnote ⁵⁶ Champion lamented that such heavy shooting did not make ‘the work of the animal photographer any easier’.

For Champion, the scientific study of Indian flora and fauna did not suffice for understanding the ethics of conservation. Instead, he suggested the use of the camera as the medium of pursuit in capturing living animals, especially felines, in the Indian jungles. Champion's work, With a camera in tigerland, contains 219 photographic illustrations of Indian wildlife, including tigers, sloth bears, elephants, jungle cats, and jackals amongst others. These illustrations visually capture and reproduce the aesthetic experience of animals seen alive in their natural surroundings (see Figure 1), contrasting sharply with the triumphant photographs of big game carcasses posed against by the nineteenth century imperial hunters.Footnote ⁵⁷

Fig. 1.

Tiger – one of F. W. Champion's flashlight photographs, taken around 1926, in northern India.

From Champion Archives, Courtesy – James Champion.

The colonial government was no doubt ruled by its own imperatives when it came to conservation. However, these amateur conservationists too must have acted as a significant pressure group since their efforts resulted in the promulgation of wildlife laws from the 1870s. As early as 1870–1, General Richard Hamilton, a hunter and naturalist, published a series of articles in the Old South of India Observer advocating the importance of preserving game in the Nilgiri hills. Despite immense opposition from European sportsmen and local administrators, he had successfully lobbied with the colonial government in support of framing laws to regulate the hunting of animals as game so as to prevent their indiscriminate slaughter. In his work, Game, by hawkeye, Hamilton called for greater interference from the legislative council, demanding that the government should pass a ruling toward the preservation of game.Footnote ⁵⁸ There are also other factors behind this step. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, ‘Nilgiri became desirable to form the Game Association. The Plateau was a natural Game Sanctuary, where the balance of nature had [sic] virtually undisturbed. The Britishers started killing animals in the name of game. Woodcock, black deer (elk), wild dogs, bears, hogs, cheetah, fowl, spur fowl, peafowl and [many] hares were [more] often hunted.’Footnote ⁵⁹ It was the then governor Lord Napier whose keen interest saw the formation of the Nilgiri Game Association in 1877 and the passing of the subsequent legislation of the Nilgiri Game and Fish Preservation Act II of 1879.Footnote ⁶⁰ The act laid down new rules for the establishment of a closed season, preventing the shooting of the game animals and birds of certain specific kinds, and regulating fishing licences. In addition, it laid down penalties for violation of game provisions.Footnote ⁶¹

The passing of the Elephant Preservation Act in the same year was the first in a series of enactments by the colonial government in the area of conservation. It was followed by the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1887,Footnote ⁶² and the Wild Birds and Animals Protection Act of 1912. The latter in particular was extremely effective in imposing closed and open hunting seasons, also mandating a licence to hunt that thereon became functional in British India.Footnote ⁶³ Eric Strahorn describes the 1912 provision as the ‘new era of conservation’, as it devised rules specifically to protect the tiger species from decline by prohibiting tiger shoots in the night, observing the ‘harvest’ season of endangered wild animals, and imposing restrictions on the baggage of game, besides preserving ‘charismatic’ birds and animals.Footnote ⁶⁴ In addition, the Bengal Rhinoceros Preservation Act was passed in 1932 to protect the rare one-horned rhino species.Footnote ⁶⁵ A number of wildlife reserves such as the Banjara Valley Reserve, Corbett National Park, and Kaziranga SanctuaryFootnote ⁶⁶ were also established around the same time. It is pertinent to note that the conservation laws mentioned above are primarily concerned with regulating hunting privileges, but did not wholly prohibit trade in wildlife products, the latter being a major factor in the decimation of flora and fauna. For instance, the Imperial gazetteer of India refers to the record of profit in trade from exporting hides, skins, and horns which provided an annual income of 1,104,176 pound sterling for the Madras Presidency government in the latter half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁷

One should note that the aforesaid wildlife acts were legislated the same year by the colonial government in concurrence with the Forest Act of 1878 and the India Arms Act. Examining the motivations and thinking behind such enactments offers greater historical insights. The Forest Act of 1878 had a long history aimed at conserving forests for commercial purposes and to bring them under the direct control of the government. The act eventually withdrew forest lands and resources from local communities and curtailed any access without permission,Footnote ⁶⁸ affecting not only Indian farmers, who relied on forest woodland environs for their subsistence, but also the local and tribal populace, who survived primarily by utilizing forest resources through pastoralism, hunting, gathering, and semi-agriculture.Footnote ⁶⁹ Besides, the act also brought wild animals under the direct control of colonial government.Footnote ⁷⁰ These rules were further consolidated by new hunting regulations that came through concurrent legislation of the Arms Act of 1878. This act prohibited the locals and village shikaris from carrying firearms or using advanced weapons, requiring them to obtain special permits to shoot, and with these permits, only allowing them to hunt small game. A provision of free licence up to five years was allowed to those who sought protection from wild animals, but this was chiefly granted to Europeans with prior permission.Footnote ⁷¹ Underlying factors behind such legislation explain the way in which forest resources and wildlife were, in turn, transformed to serve a variety of colonial and local interests. This, in part, explains the British government's continuing focus on the Indian forest and environment.

The colonial advocacy of the creation of wildlife sanctuaries raised the politically explosive issue of customary rights to land and forest resources.Footnote ⁷² While common people were given restricted access, almost two-thirds of the land was declared to be a state forest reserve. Although the colonial government had passed a series of these acts, which sought to regulate the hunting of specified wild species, we have to remember that the destruction of wild animals continued unabated. Historically, the people labelled as intruders and encroachers by the Indian imperial forest officials were, in fact, a population displaced by the colonial wildlife protective legislation.Footnote ⁷³ This naturally resulted in poaching and isolated hunting activities which, though now criminalized, remained persistent.Footnote ⁷⁴ Often, conservation efforts through colonial legislation did not have the support of the local populace, and were not always implemented.Footnote ⁷⁵ Sainthill Eardley-Wilmot, the inspector general of forests in the United Provinces in the early twentieth century, believed that ‘western methods and [forest and wildlife] laws does [sic] not always bear good fruit; for the more uncivilized the people, and the wilder the life they lead – in short, the greater freedom from [colonial] “oppression”’.Footnote ⁷⁶ He was referring to the Assam province, where, despite the whole area being declared a ‘state reserve’, local communities continued to have access to forest produce and small game.

It is interesting that even the most ardent advocates of Indian wildlife conservation did not directly criticize the hunts of the British upper strata and Indian princes, or indeed critique the colonial government strongly. Instead, they petitioned the relevant authorities to stop the unregulated activity of hunting big game species. Further, their conservationist urges, it could be argued, were driven by underlying political advantages in their later lives.Footnote ⁷⁷ These analyses are vital for understanding how the British asserted themselves and consolidated their privilege over the Indian environment in their dual roles as hunters and conservers of the Indian wildlife.

II

A key aspect of this article is the focus on the selective programme of conservation of wildlife that the British pursued in India. To contextualize the discussion, I analyse the conservation efforts – or the lack thereof – centring on the tiger and the elephant in this section, by offering a comparative historical perspective. Rangarajan's insightful and relevant article on the British Raj's war against ‘dangerous beasts’ needs to be mentioned in this context. Rangarajan's study offers quite a valuable picture of the war against the tiger stretching across the whole of British India as well as the native princely states, analysing in the process whether the tiger was an ally or foe, both from the point view of the British colonial government and the native populace. The tiger and the wolf were seen as ‘dangerous beasts’ posing the greatest threat to the Indian agrarian base. The agrarian expansion, coupled with other factors such as the disarming of Indians after the 1857–8 revolt, enabled the British to formulate and systematize ‘vermin eradication’ policies throughout India from the mid nineteenth century onwards. Rangarajan sees hunting as largely destructive in terms of the decimation of India's fauna. For example during 1879–88 alone, the colonial government's bounty system had funded the killing of 16,573 tigers.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such British animosity towards the tiger was a prolonged one, although it was not shared by many Indians and native princes. Thus, by the 1920s, the tiger found some kind of a breathing space due to ‘religious and cultural objections’.Footnote ⁷⁹ What Rangarajan critically misses, however, is the fact that the colonial war on animals perceived as posing a threat was neither seamless nor cohesive in its coverage.

The British, from the very start, were fixated on the tiger's extermination, as evident in their vermin eradication policy and passion for tiger hunts. However, such a war on ‘dangerous beasts’ was not unilateral. The Indian elephant, for instance, despite being positioned as a threat to the colonial revenue base and initially hunted, was later given state protection, and its poaching made punishable under the colonial Amendment Acts implemented from the 1870s onwards. Hence, the single biggest contradiction in colonial protective legislation was its policy of selective conservation of species. Such a war between the British and the tiger points to how animals are unequally affected and enmeshed in human relationships of power. Instead of seeing British forest and wildlife policy as a part of a totalizing and seamless colonialist discourse, this article argues that British policy was far from seamless, and was in fact situational, pragmatic, and often contradictory.

As far as British policy was concerned, even as the conservation of Indian forests and their wildlife populations was being advocated and legislated, ‘vermins’ and ‘rogues’ were being identified from the early nineteenth century onwards for programmatic extermination, because of the threat they allegedly posed to human habitats.Footnote ⁸⁰ For example, animals such as ‘rogue’ elephants and wild pigs destroyed village crops and became notorious for their aggressive and unruly behaviour. The killing of predators, such as the tigers and leopards, that threatened locals too, was highly rewarded. In a note written in 1875, Major Tweedie mentioned that around 20,000 animals were killed each year for rewards from the colonial government.Footnote ⁸¹ Such developments give us an insight into the struggle between the British and the wild predators in which the local populace was constructed as being defenceless. Colonial hunters and officials often assumed that they alone were brave enough to face large and hostile predators.

While the public interventionist frame was that of colonial men saving the local populace and their livelihoods, in reality, the tiger, the leopard, and the wild pig were all seen as obstacles to the smooth functioning of the colonial economy throughout the nineteenth century. In the making of the colonial enterprise, the British found it necessary to extend rail, telegraph, and engineering works into forested territories which, in turn, created an endemic struggle between the British and predatory big game species.Footnote ⁸² The tiger, in particular, was portrayed as the arch enemy of the British, competing for control over the Indian forest territories. It was not just the tiger's worth as a hunting trophy or the thrill of the tiger hunt that evoked such a representation. The challenge posed by the tiger to the progress of the colonial economy was also a crucial factor that led to the decline of this big game species. In nineteenth-century India, tigers threatened the colonial construction of dams, reservoirs, engineering, and the railways, and often people working in these projects refused to return to work until the colonial government had arranged hunters to kill the tigers in the vicinity. Concern for the safety of these men was frequently expressed by the government officials. When the Indian Railway and the Indian Engineering Services planned the extension of the East Coast Railway, a report published in Indian Engineering in 1888 pointed out the need to ensure the safety of the workmen along telegraphic lines, where they ‘[had] to be protected against tigers’.Footnote ⁸³ William Storey, in the context of colonial Kenya (British East Africa), too reports on how the Anglo-Indian engineer, John Henry Patterson, who was posted in Kenya to supervise the construction of the Ugandan Railway into the Kenyan interiors, encountered difficulties to protect his Indian and African railway workers from the onslaught of man-eater lions. As Storey puts it, ‘The lions had succeeded in bringing all railway construction in the area to a grinding halt, giving Patterson no alternative but to devote all his time to hunting.’Footnote ⁸⁴

By the end of the nineteenth century, the British were looking for more systematic methods to exterminate wild animals through legislation. Rangarajan points out that approximately 80,000 tigers and 150,000 leopards were exterminated between 1875 and 1925. The colonial government seemingly encouraged ‘vermin eradication’, but more often than not, it was a licence to kill issued due to popular pressure. For example, in the 1870s, in the Midnapore region of Bengal, tigers and leopards killed up to 227 people. In retaliation, about sixteen tigers and forty-two leopards were killed.Footnote ⁸⁵ The figures for the number of ‘rogue animals’ that were killed in actuality could have been much higher since more often than not, the killing of ‘rogue’ animals for sport went unreported, and hence was not entered into the official records.

Part of such vermin eradication policies had been entrusted to colonial officials, who were also hunters, and whose duty it was to manage the forests, local populace, and wildlife. Sainthill Eardley-Wilmot (encountered earlier), who joined the Imperial Forest Service in 1873, started his career by organizing hunting parties, safeguarding the locals working in timber plantations, and protecting the crops and the cattle from carnivores. Wilmot believed that it was the duty of the British officer-hunter to secure ‘the good-will of the wild tribes of the forests’, if his work was to provide a ‘considerable sum of money’ to the colonial state.Footnote ⁸⁶ While in charge of the Kheri division, Wilmot described how a Gujjar tribesman, trembling with rage, came to him begging him to exterminate a tiger that had killed three of the villager's cows. Wilmot, afterwards, went on to rescue the local from the tiger's onslaught. He narrated such encounters as though he was performing a mere social service to the locals, and subsequently justified hunting in defence of ordinary Indians, and their livelihoods. But such occasions no doubt also served to satisfy the characteristic fondness of the bureaucracy to hunt while on duty. In his early career as a forest officer, on one occasion, Wilmot's hunting party killed twenty tigers, panthers, bears, and as many deer near the borders of the United Provinces and Nepal.

Wilmot's attitude towards the tiger was typical of the forest officials of his time. For him, the tiger was nothing short of ‘vermin’ and he suggested that the extinction of tigers was only a matter of time:

In contrast, elephants were ‘friends’, ‘whose capabilities are known and trusted’, both at work and play. Even though Wilmot, in later years, became the inspector general of forests, his long career with the Imperial Forest Service is an indication that he acted on behalf of the colonial government, which also influenced his selective conservation attitudes.

From the outset, British hunters and officials both admired wildlife and simultaneously cherished the prospect of bagging big game in India. The tiger represented the ultimate challenge to all respectable hunters in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Of all the Indian fauna, the tiger occupied the uppermost position in the British imagination. Joseph Sramek has argued that ‘British tiger hunting represented imperial domination not just of India's politics but also of its natural environment.’Footnote ⁸⁸ Of course, tigers were ruthlessly hunted and killed under the auspices of the British to justify their vested colonial interests.

A detailed account given by Sir Joseph Fayrer, deputy surgeon-general of the Bengal army in 1875 and the then president of the Indian Medical Board, is relevant here.Footnote ⁸⁹ Referring to a report presented to the Society of Arts in London by Captain B. Rogers of the Indian army, Fayrer writes:

Often roads and paths were closed for weeks or months because of a wandering tiger. ‘Not only postmen, herdsmen, and causal foot travellers are occasionally seized and carried off, but even those travelling on horseback or in hackeries [bullock carts]’ were killed by tigers.Footnote ⁹¹ A government report of the Central Provinces stated that ‘a single tigress caused the desertion of thirteen villages and 250 square miles of the country were thrown out of cultivation’.Footnote ⁹²

The underlying economic motives, coupled with the anxiety to safeguard people's lives, subsequently led the colonial government to appoint special officers for destroying tigers in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies.Footnote ⁹³ Similar policies were introduced in the rest of British India in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Mysore gazetteer notifies that the government in 1889–90 offered 1,416 rupees for 40 tigers, 2,164 rupees for 124 panthers, and 136 rupees for 587 other animals.Footnote ⁹⁴ As Pablo Mukherjee points out:

The perception of the tiger as a mighty and arch opponent persisted in the imagination of the British ever since their arrival in India. Throughout colonial India, the tiger was valued for its size, strength, ferocity, and beauty. A tiger trophy signified one's lifetime achievement.Footnote ⁹⁶ But even as the tiger was ‘fair game’ in the world of sport, its disproportionate and ruthless decimation required some measure of justification for the non-specialists.

In contemporary hunting literature, the tiger's onslaught on humans was described as a ‘ghastly spectacle, and a fearful example of the destructive powers’ of the animal. British army officer, Walter Campbell, in 1864 had suggested, ‘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.’Footnote ⁹⁷ Sramek explains how tigers were signified as royal beasts, as kings of the jungle, and were ‘closely associated historically with Indian rulers’, which was a fact the colonizers were keenly aware of.Footnote ⁹⁸ The image of the tiger in British hunters’ narratives was that of ferocity and might. Since the much-publicized death of the son of General Hector Munro at the hands of a tiger in the Sundarbans of Bengal in 1792Footnote ⁹⁹ in a shikar outing, the animal continued to haunt the British imagination, well into the early twentieth century. Munro junior's tragic episode was echoed by many British hunters like Campbell, and even commemorated in the Staffordshire pottery of the times.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Tipu, the ruler of Mysore (1782–99), following the death of General Hector Munro's son, ordered a wooden toy tiger representing a tiger devouring a British man – famously known as ‘Tipu's Tiger’ – as a mark of his retribution against the British. Tipu's Tiger engaged the British imagination to such an extent that, upon the siege of Seringapatnam and the subsequent defeat of Tipu in 1799, this wooden toy tiger was brought back to the metropolis and displayed in the East India Company's museum (now Victoria and Albert museum, London) to the public. It has attracted a number of visitors since 1808.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The tiger frequently featured in colonial records as a foe that was seen as being as indomitable and as determined as the Indian rebels. When General H. A. Brownlow of the Royal Engineers, one of the leading figures in crushing the Indian rebellion of 1857, was wounded by a tiger six years later, the press compared the tiger wound to that of a strike from the Indian rebels.Footnote ¹⁰² In 1871, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Sheffield of the Royal Fusiliers of the City of London regiment had a close encounter with a tiger at Midnapore in Bengal, in which he was severely mauled by the animal. The colonel finally shot the tiger and triumphed: ‘I congratulated myself that I had damaged him [the tiger] equally as much as he [the tiger] had damaged me.’Footnote ¹⁰³ In the imperial imagination, crushing the Indian tiger was synonymous to crushing the Indian enemy, thereby triumphantly etching the colonizers’ victory and the British hunter's masculine virtues in sporting annals for posterity. Such notions of contested masculinities between the tiger and the British, in fact, animated the tiger hunt and can be frequently located in huntsmen's writings in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The aforementioned striking parallels signified in unambiguous terms the quintessential colonial urge to vanquish and control hostile native terrain and population.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

This relationship between the hunter and the wild predator was complex. Historians point out that ‘animals like lion and tiger were often metaphors for power even as they were a source of danger’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For the British, the extermination of tigers carried political implications too. The tiger image was used in a symbolic enactment of their colonial dominance. When the Victoria Terminus railway buildings were constructed by British engineers in Bombay, the bold and massive piers of the entrance gates were crowned with a ‘colossal lion and tiger suggestive of the United Kingdom and the Indian empire’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The animals were shrewdly sculpted and gallantly executed in a manner similar to the Landseer's lions at the base of Nelson's monument in Trafalgar Square, London. These sculptures embodied the British fascination for symbolical representation that emphasized their political dominance over India, and sent a message that unambiguously declared the subjugation of ferocious wild predators such as the Indian tiger. Further, they also underlined the British appreciation for the Indian empire and the United Kingdom, marking the high-noon of British imperialism.

From the viceroys and governor generals to the soldiers in the lower strata, the British in colonial India were incessantly attracted to the tiger. Obtaining a tiger skin was almost a ritual feat for the rulers, and it was prized as a much-vaunted trophy. The metaphoric and symbolic illustrations point to how the tiger was feared, imagined, and constructed in the imperial mindset. The British exploited and manoeuvred the tiger's image as the savage precursor of colonial rule in India. Tigers were thus hunted, and hunting them was widely justified with little or no concern for their conservation. Tiger preservation was rarely considered in major official conservation programmes until well into the early twentieth century.

III

Along with the tiger, animals such as leopards and wild pigs, which threatened human habitats, were also successfully eliminated through the colonial programme of vermin eradication. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Major Campbell described the bear, the wild boar, the panther, and tiger as ‘formidable antagonists’ to the existence of British rule, and who for that reason had to be eradicated. He referred to the presence of numerous wild pigs across the rural Indian country doing damage to the grain and village crops. Unable to drive them off, the local people looked for assistance from hunting parties.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Often, the village farmers petitioned the colonial government to kill them. This, in a sense, also explains the vanishing of wildlife due to the expansion of agriculture in fringe areas.

In this catalogue of ‘vermins’, the elephants did not figure, although they caused significant damage to crops and were shot at on occasion by sportsmen-hunters, as discussed above. Elephants were removed from the list of ‘vermins’ as early as the 1870s and given state protection as in pre-colonial India. This was indicative, according to Sujit Sivasundaram, of the way in which ‘local knowledge’ was incorporated into colonial management strategies. However, my study has attempted to show that this ‘incorporation’ of local knowledge was not wholly inclusive or consistently done. While the colonizers were intent on portraying the tiger as nothing but malevolent, in Indian popular folklore traditions animals such as the tiger and the lion were portrayed as sagacious and benevolent creatures that lived amicably with the locals.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Likewise, there is evidence to show that local people peacefully co-existed with tigers and other wildlife until the advent of the British. During one of his shikar outings in the western ghats, Major Campbell noticed that the jagirdar's (village headman) fifteen-year-old son was being punished by his father for killing a tiger. Upon receiving an enquiry from Campbell, the village headman explained that the village community had lived on social terms with the tigers in the jungle for centuries: ‘I have no quarrel with the tigers! I never injured one of them – they [tigers] never injured me – and while there was peace between us [villagers and tigers], I went among them without fear of danger.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He blamed his son for killing the tiger and violating the ‘good-fellowship’ between the families of the jagirdar, and of his feline neighbours. In the 1890s, William Crooke of the Bengal Civil Service also reported that the Baghel Rajputs did not destroy tigers except in self-defence.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Forest tribes, such as the Santhals and the Gonds of the Central Provinces of India too maintained such veneration towards tigers until the influx of the British. In the imagination of these tribes, the great cat was pre-eminently ‘an upright and honourable beast’.Footnote ¹¹¹ This form of co-existence that was there between the local populace and wild predators had no place in the thinking and practices of the British with regard to wildlife, where tigers remained as their sworn enemy.

Elsewhere, Ezra Rashkow's study throws light on how, in colonial India, local forms of environmentalism assisted in the conservation of certain species. Between the 1870s and 1940s when colonial hunting had reached its peak, resistance to such hunting had built up across India. Rural Indians, in particular, were often willing to lock into physical combat with British hunters, apparently in order to protect local wildlife. For instance, in 1876–8, William Temple Hornaday, ‘a taxidermist who would later become famous as one of North America's most important wildlife conservationists’, had referred to one of his hunts in India on the banks of Jumna river in the Bombay Presidency, where a group of locals had opposed his hunting party's plan to shoot any gavials (Gavialis gangeticus, a species of fish-eating crocodile) in the vicinity.Footnote ¹¹² Besides, Hornaday observes that ‘The peacock is a bone of contention between English soldiers … and the Hindus. The soldiers go out hunting and shoot peacocks, for which the natives attempt to mob them, and it is said that they seldom go out shooting without getting into a row and perhaps shooting a native.’Footnote ¹¹³ As Rashkow points out, finding themselves surrounded by crowds and angry onlookers, the colonial sportsmen often shot and killed protesting villagers. Such incidents speak of out-armed Indian peasants and Hindu villagers, who frequently risked and often lost their lives while resisting the British hunter, but in the end ensured their duty of protecting local wildlife. Colonial hunters alleged that it was religious fanaticism that made Hindus guard the lives of what the former saw as game and trophies. Such deep-rooted local environmentalism combined with anti-colonial consciousness has antecedents in the native ideas of conservation thinking which secured the conserving of certain species of wildlife but had had its moments of conflict with the British.

VI

In contrast to tigers, elephants in colonial India received a fairer deal. However, I would like to argue that the reasons for conserving elephants were also more practical and economic than a reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers. The British were able to manipulate elephant use for commercial, hunting, and official purposes, which necessitated their conservation. Elephants had been part of Indian tradition since earlier times and were closely associated with festivals, fairs, royal displays, and state processions. They were also owned by temples and used for trade, work, and hunting purposes (see Figure 2). The Mughal and Rajput use of elephants for big game shoots was practically and entirely incorporated by the British, and indulged in by their shikar hosts. Keddah Footnote ¹¹⁴ or the operation of capturing wild elephants, which they had learnt from the Indian potentates, was more or less systematized by the British from the time of the later Company Raj.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It should, however, be noted that it was only eventually that measures were taken to protect the elephant species, and that the elephant too was once hunted, and prior to the 1850s, rewards were offered for its destruction by the Company Raj.

Fig. 2.

Elephant of India caparisoned for hunting.

The natural history of the pachyderms (1836) by Sir William Jardine, Wellcome Library, London.

During the early phase of the Company Raj, the elephant was considered as the greatest threat to the upkeep of the colonial economy and agricultural base. For example, the Company records in the Madras and Bengal Presidencies show that rewards were offered for the destruction of wild elephants that had caused havoc to crops and destroyed agricultural fields.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In 1828, near the Wayanad region in southern India, Henry Bevan, a major in the Madras Native Infantry detailed how he had shot a wild elephant that was coming from some grain fields. He decried that wild elephants commit

Another elephant, ‘the terror of the surrounding villagers’, allegedly responsible for killing as many as fifty people in the span of five years, was finally shot to death by a British officer.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As a result, the Madras Presidency government offered a reward of seven pound sterling each for the destruction of a wild or troublesome elephant.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Besides, what sets apart the British arrival in India was their introduction of shooting elephants for pleasure sport. Elephant hunts were quite frequently reported by colonizers during the early nineteenth century. By going on the hunt, Britons acquainted themselves with the Indian marginal landscapes and their vivid geographies. At this juncture, the British did not yet fully acknowledge the potential of elephants for commercial use and administrative purposes, although domesticated elephants were employed in performing such duties in collaborations with the natives. Hence, in the early nineteenth century, elephant hunting was not so uncommon or unheard of.Footnote ¹²⁰ There was a depiction of a local hunt on the frontiers of Coorg, where a native had killed a ‘male elephant, with a fine pair of tusks that weighed 42 lbs’.Footnote ¹²¹ Hobart Caunter, a European traveller, during the 1830s detailed an elephant hunt which took place at Salsetta island (present-day city of Mumbai) in the Bombay Presidency, where numerous elephant herds were viciously hunted with the assistance of the natives, and most of such herds were shot down by the British for sport.Footnote ¹²² During one such elephant hunt, five European sportsmen had destroyed forty-five elephants.Footnote ¹²³ An underlying aspect of this hunt was how the British hunted and killed wild elephants at their discretion, rather than according to the wishes of the natives, who participated in the hunt to capture them alive. However, British attitudes toward the elephant gradually began to take a different course from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as we shall see in the subsequent sections.

Despite being perceived as a threat to agricultural and revenue base, the elephant, as the Company Raj also acknowledged, was useful when it accompanied the colonial officials discharging their official duties, and was thus valuable for practical purposes. For this reason, the colonial government allotted elephants to different district officers to facilitate their touring of their respective provinces. It was a significant indication that the importance of elephants had shifted from the battlefield in pre-colonial times to everyday trade and administration under the British rule in India, where their worth for communication and transport was recognized. Elephants under the Raj thus were brought into service for the transport of troops, access into the jungles, hunts, and the timber trade. They were employed for large-scale assignments of logging, to fell the heavy trees that weighed up in tons and drag them through streams and rivers from the forested region, and then to unload them into trucks and boats. Elephants were indispensable, especially in north-east India where transport and infrastructure facilities were nearly absent, and in the remote corners of the western ghats and the Central Provinces, where they enabled the British administrators and the army to move in the difficult terrains of steep hillsides and muddy swamp lands.Footnote ¹²⁴ From the 1850s onwards, the British started supplying elephants to magistrates and the judicial administration in the Central ProvincesFootnote ¹²⁵ and to the revenue officials for conducting revenue and topographical surveys in the United Provinces and Bengal Presidency.Footnote ¹²⁶ W. W. Hunter reports on how from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the capture of elephants in the Indian empire had become commercially valuable to the British. In the Assam province, for example, during 1877–83, about 735 elephants were captured, yielding to the government revenue of 12,173 pound sterling.Footnote ¹²⁷ Given these reasons, the Indian elephant was protected from being hunted or shot, and was accorded colonial state protection.Footnote ¹²⁸

These factors, in fact, underline the role of the elephant as a ‘beast of burden’, but nonetheless they also paved the way for the conservation of the elephant species. The elephant's function, as discussed above, also explains how the Indian elephant historically had become more valuable for the British from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. With the advent of the Indian railways, which necessitated timber extraction for the nascent railway construction work, especially for laying down rail sleepers, the British acknowledged the economic worth of the elephant. Thus, the elephant's workmanship was engaged for constructing the Indian railways system too. The establishment of the Imperial Forest Department in the 1860s and later, and the implementation of Forest Acts also warranted the supply of elephants for the imperial forest officials to oversee their duties.

However, as the colonial government strove to obtain elephants for its own use, it had to compete with poachers and other rivals. Elephants were often killed by poaching for ivory and commercial gains, or became the targets of unreported hunting and frequent mishaps. In addition, a number of elephants were accidentally killed or wounded in the Kheddah or elephant capture operations. A letter from the collector of Coimbatore to the chief secretary, governor of Madras in 1879 reported how a considerable number of elephants were killed while in captivity and blamed the lack of proper methods in capturing wild elephants for these deaths. Thus, ignorance, resulting in the deaths of these animals, also caused financial losses to the colonial government.Footnote ¹²⁹ In the same letter, the collector mentioned how ‘gamesmen from Europe [came] … to India during winter to shoot wild animals, which also included elephants’. Incidents like these had become detrimental to the sustenance of viable elephant populations. The collector subsequently described elephants as a ‘rapidly diminishing species’, and recommended protective measures to be undertaken by the colonial government.

Records show that the then Madras Presidency led the way in elephant conservation. To resolve mishaps of the kind described above, the Madras Presidency government in 1873 passed an Elephant Preservation Act.Footnote ¹³⁰ The act proclaims, ‘whereas it is expedient to make provision to prevent indiscriminate destruction of wild elephants’ this special law strictly prohibits shooting of elephants in the Madras country.Footnote ¹³¹ It was followed by the enactment of the more comprehensive Elephant Preservation Act, 1879, by the British Indian government, which covered other parts of India. Writing the statement of objects and the reason for the proposed bill, T. H. Thornton, the secretary to government, in 1878 stated:

The area covered by the act was expanded to include the territories of the north-western provinces, Oudh, the Central Provinces, British Burma, and Coorg with the provision that the local governments could enforce the law when and where necessary. In view of the relevant provision of the Act VI of 1879:

On the other hand, it was an inescapable fact that elephants under the Raj also caused much damage to forests, crops, and human habitations. The colonial government's protective measures thus did not apply to ‘rogue’ or wild elephants, in response to pressure from villagers and the local populace.Footnote ¹³⁴ The destruction of agricultural fields and colonial plantation crops too was significant – on aggregate in excess of their value – and the catalogue of the destructive activities of elephants was endless: ‘knocking down trees, destroying bamboos, pulling up boundary stones, stopping up roads with bamboos, and in plantations taking a delight in pulling up plants in pure mischief’.Footnote ¹³⁵

The Mysore gazetteer of 1897 thus recognized that ‘Elephants are too valuable to be destroyed, but a special reward is sometimes offered for the destruction of a “rogue” elephant that has become dangerous to life.’Footnote ¹³⁶ The deputy conservator of forests, Coorg, recommended that at least capture of elephants should be enforced, noting that elephant preservation by the colonial government perpetuated ‘a nuisance’ for outlying villages with no good purpose. On the basis of such opposition from the forest officers, the Coorg government created rules permitting licensee sportsmen to ‘capture’ elephants.Footnote ¹³⁷

The colonial government passed further provisions to the Act vi of 1879, commencing from 1 April 1879. Accordingly, a person, on obtaining a licence from the collector, was permitted to kill, injure, or capture wild elephants, but only in self-defence, and to prevent them from causing damage to houses or cultivation. One could also do so to scare away a wild elephant from main roads, railway stations, tracks, or canals. Breaking of this rule could be penalized with a fine extending up to 500 rupees for each elephant, in the first instance, and imprisonment extending up to six months, or just a fine, or both.Footnote ¹³⁸

However, it is ironic to note that across the British colonies of Ceylon and East Africa (Kenya) the elephant did not fare well in terms of its protected status. In Ceylon and Kenya, cruel treatment was meted out to the elephant and there was decimation of the elephant for blood sport of hunting and ivory trade. The colonial British government records show that in Ceylon alone as many as 5,194 elephants were destroyed between 1845 and 1859 and a further 3,253 were exported between 1853 and 1894.Footnote ¹³⁹ In Africa, hunters like W. D. M. Bell, who spent sixteen years in hunting elephants in different places, from Kenya, Karamojo to the French Ivory Coast, claimed to have killed as many as 1,000 elephants.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Others such as James Sutherland reported to have shot 447 bull elephants between 1902 and 1912 in Portuguese and German East Africa.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Arthur H. Neumann, another British hunter, in his book Elephant hunting in east equatorial Africa, detailed how he had shot sixty-nine elephants between 1893 and 1896, and in 1906, had made a profit of 4,500 pound sterling by selling the elephant ivory.Footnote ¹⁴² During 1845 to 1885, 15,199 pounds weight (6,894 kilogrammes) of ivory was imported into Britain, of which much came from Africa while one fourth was obtained from India.Footnote ¹⁴³ In essence, the above discussion shows how critical and symbolically useful Indian elephant had become for the British, even as the indiscriminate killing of its African counterpart continued unabated, principally for the ivory trade, while in Ceylon, where elephants rarely possessed tusks, they were killed for blood sport.

Elephant killing under the Raj was not as significant in extent as it was elsewhere. G. P. Sanderson, an officer in charge of the government elephant catching establishment in Mysore and Dacca, pointed out that the number of elephants killed by hunters in India was far less compared to Africa and Ceylon, due to protective measures taken by the colonial government.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ He had expressed his concern thus: ‘so fine and harmless an animal that there is no chance of the sad fate that is pursuing his African congener, and leading to his rapid extinction’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This, in part, explains why parts of Africa where elephants roamed freely until the colonial influx, later became a haven for British hunters for blood sport and the ivory trade. It can be argued that the African elephant, not surprisingly, displaced the Asiatic subspecies as game by the later part of the nineteenth century. Britons’ incorporation from Indian potentates of local management practices in capturing elephants, and their wildlife perceptions too, offer a clue as to why the Indian elephant was valued and protected unlike its African counterpart. As one British hunter in Africa puts it, ‘I doubt whether the inhabitants of Africa ever succeeded in training elephants in the past [but the inhabitants of India do].’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ He goes on to say that ‘the African elephant has a much worse temper than the Indian [elephant]’ and ‘moreover, they do not strike the observer as being so intelligent as the Indian species’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ By distinguishing the African elephant from the Indian subspecies, colonizers quite consciously set apart the elephant's characteristics, thereby justifying its hunting and conservation at the same time, but in different geo-political and cultural settings.

Historian John MacKenzie in his seminal work The empire of nature has argued that the conservation movement in colonial India came much later than the game enactments in African colonies at the turn of the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ However, here I show evidence that indicates otherwise. For example, the Indian Elephant Preservation Act of 1879 had indeed inspired the formulation of game regulations across colonial Africa. Even as the Cape Act of 1886 for the preservation of game had been extended to British South African territories in 1891, the British Foreign Office still emphasized the need for more comprehensive game regulations in African territories in the same year. On the other hand, it was the India Office which passed game preservation regulations in British Central Africa, British East Africa and Uganda.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ By this period, the elephant species were well protected with the codification of the 1870s laws in colonial India, even when the colonists and native Africans still indulged in killing elephants for ivory, trophy hunting, feeding the workers, and transporting elephant meat for militaries during the world wars. For instance, during the First World War, British military served elephant meat to colonial troops on the African front.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Seeing such whole-scale destruction of wildlife, Hermann von Wissmann, governor of German East Africa passed a decree to establish game reserves and introduced the licensing system. Wissmann, by using his association with the colonial India Office in London, had proposed ‘to form sanctuaries for game as compared with the Elephant Preservation Act in India’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ He contended that, if the great game is to be economised, sanctuaries or reserves must be established. His government accordingly set apart two great districts of German East Africa in which game was protected absolutely.

It is also true that even the colonial government's wildlife conservation policies in the Raj were not always consistent. Legislation had to be tested constantly against the realities of everyday negotiations on the ground between the colonial officials and local communities, and in the course of time, ambitions had to be adjusted accordingly. The Elephant Preservation Act of 1879 continued to remain effective until 1946. A note from the agriculture department dated May 1946 on the damage caused by the elephants stated that no elephant could be shot ‘unless it is savage or dangerous temper called “rogue”’.Footnote ¹⁵² Advising the government of Madras on the method by which to contain the marauding elephants, the secretary, Home Department, government of India in a note on 24 April 1946 suggested appointing selected numbers of ‘Range Officers and Game Wardens’. These men were briefed to shoot rogue elephants raiding crops in the Mysore district and elsewhere in India in the months of November and December which, according to the government findings, gained good results. The British Indian government's approach to conservation thus was transformed and modified according to the situation, the location, and the availability of resources, and to maximize their exploitation, both for commercial profit and practical expediency.

The comparative perspective on the colonial conservation of tigers and elephants outlined above is significant. The incorporation of elephants as a protected species in colonial policy since the 1870s demonstrates the deep and vested interests of the British in the elephant's preservation and explains why elephants hardly ever featured in British hunters’ narratives as foe. Conversely, tigers in colonial India occupied a central place in imperial hunting narratives as the arch-enemy, and a challenger to the Raj's might. Classified in colonial official documents as ‘vermins’ and dangerous carnivores, they were cruelly persecuted amidst much joyous celebrations. While the enactment of wildlife acts remained selective and, in fact, justified the destruction of predatory big game species, the formation of wildlife societies and national parks in the early twentieth century was a mere excuse on the part of the colonizers to affirm their status as conservers and preservers, ordering landscapes, and wildlife populations to their own advantage.

V

To conclude, British conservation policies on wildlife in India were intrinsically linked to colonial hunting. Indiscriminate shikar had drastically reduced the numbers of wild animals available as game by the end of the nineteenth century. A basic imperative of colonial conservation, ironically, was to recoup this loss to ensure the future of the sport in India. A question arises then as to when and how the idea of conservation took root. While the elephant was protected by law from indiscriminate destruction as early as from the 1870s, the tiger continued to be listed as ‘vermin’ and was hunted until well into the early twentieth century. However, the conservation of the elephant species did not change its role as a beast of burden and its utilitarian worth to the colonial economy. The article also has shown that it was due to the efforts of some hunters-turned-naturalists that the idea of wildlife preservation gained momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was only from the early part of the twentieth century, with the passing of the 1912 Wildlife Preservation Act, that a new era of conservation gained precedence, where ‘game’ became ‘wildlife’, and ‘preservation’ became ‘conservation’. It is singularly striking that the British government did not show any positive drive for the preservation of tigers until much later, when efforts of hunters-turned-conservationists such as Jim Corbett came to the fore. Conservation, though a mere disguise, was extended to safeguard big game species including tigers. There is little doubt that wild animals such as tigers and elephants, among others, are significantly fewer in number in the Indian sub-continent today than in the nineteenth century.

The British ruled tigers, elephants, and many Indian people through their inconsistencies rather than from a unified Orientalist ideology. As we have seen, the conservation programme was not a simple or direct corollary of the colonial management of ‘scientific’ or commercial forestry. Wildlife conservation was dictated primarily by the needs of the colonial economy and smooth governance. The policy of ‘selective conservation’ that the British adopted underlines a peculiar paradox enshrined in the programme. Construction of negative and positive images of Indian wild animals, that is, of tigers and elephants, respectively, and their related fortunes, were more closely tied with their relevance and utility to colonial governance, rather than with any environmentalist concern for their survival. The article has shown how the British attitudes and the policies implemented were situational and pragmatic. More importantly, it points to a story that signifies the ability of the powerful to change attitudes and shift behaviours according to the circumstances. Thus, tigers were seen as the symbolic enemies of civilization, noxious creatures in the way of economic development and tragic symbols of a decimated nature, all at the same time, whereas elephants were left alone because of their usefulness. Extermination and preservation of species thus went hand-in-hand so that colonial interests rather than animal welfare could be promoted.