Introduction
The begari work (compulsory labour) fell heavily on these people: there was a constant stream of officers and men to and from Gilgit; and their baggage had to be carried by the villagers. . . many homes were broken up; the men ran away across the border, which is here, only a few miles off, and settled in villages beyond the influence of this tyranny.Footnote 1
Col. A. J. Stone, Deputy Inspector General of Punjab Police and a regular visitor to Gilgit for sport hunting of markhor, 1896.They lived in Barricaded houses; and only stirred out when necessity compelled in large bodies, covered with armed men, and beating drums and shouting as they passed along the roads. Many villages had been utterly deserted; and the country was evidently being slowly depopulated by this single animal [man-eating tiger].Footnote 2
Cap. J. Forsyth, Forest Officer in Central Provinces, and an avid hunter who shot man-eating tigers in the central hilly region of India, 1889.The two quotes with which I open this paper contrast predatory relations between state and society on the one hand, and between nature (man-eating tigers) and society on the other. The comparison is central to the main theme of this paper which is the intersection of hunting and colonial governance in late nineteenth and early twentieth century British India. By examining sport hunting of markhor, a mountain goat, by British civil and military officials in the mountainous northern frontier region of Kashmir State, and their hunting of tigers, particularly man-eating tigers in the Indian plains, this paper elucidates and compares two seemingly contradictory ideas of governance by the British of their Indian subjects. I show that these contradictory practices were justified by them within a single colonial ideology of governance, expounded mostly in the writings of liberal political thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Macaulay in the first half of the nineteenth century. This governing ideology was based on a hierarchical ordering of societies on a ‘scale of civilization’ in which the British occupied the highest position.Footnote 3 Through the case of British hunting practices of two different species and in two different socio-ecological domains, I show that at the heart of this governance ideology was the British effort to both protect the Indian society from ‘wild nature’ and bringing civilization into that nature.
I argue that the British saw hunting of man-eating tigers in the foothills and plains as an effort to prevent fierce and unpredictable nature intervening in their day-to-day governance practices in Indian society. This effort was part of a wider colonial imperative of creating order in India as a precondition for revenue collection.Footnote 4 In hunting man-eating tigers, however, the British sought not simply to protect the revenue base of the colonial state but also to display courage, hunting prowess and their ability to protect the indigenous population.Footnote 5 Their claim to sovereignty and effective governance depended upon their successful representation of protection of their interest in a society, against unruly nature, as the protection of society itself against that nature. So important was this idea of protecting Indian society from wild nature to the British that they often suspended fair hunting codes, otherwise considered essential to their identity as sportsmen.
I contrast this hunting-governance convergence with the hunting of markhor, an endemic goat, prized for its spectacular spiral horned trophy, in the mountainous north. This type of hunting sought not to win the support of the colonial subjects; rather it was carried out for sport, following strict hunting codes, and displaying endurance and masculinity, which in a less direct way also informed the colonial governance ideology by representing the British, albeit to themselves and public back home, as fair and strong people. Begar, or forced labour of local people, though originally established by the indigenous state of Kashmir before the arrival of the British, was a fundamental feature of hunting expeditions of British sportsmen to the northern mountainous region. Local people were forced, often with the threat of physical violence, to act as coolies, or porters, to carry the supplies of the shooting sahibs. Although many British sportsmen and travellers showed overt unease at the existence of begar, disagreeing with it on ethical grounds, especially because it was associated with oriental despotism and violated principles of colonial governance, which were seen as based on liberalism, they all used it nonetheless. The British sportsman represented their use of begar, and hence suspension of ethical governance code, by falling back on the wider colonial representation of the northern mountainous region as a civilization-less area, and its people as savages, existing in a state of nature. In such a geographical space, the colonial argument went, rather than protecting society from nature, as in the case of man-eating tiger hunting in the foothills and plains, governance meant the ability of the British to bring civilization into unruly nature via a strong disciplinary force, both literal and metaphorical.Footnote 6 By comparing the suspension of hunting and ethical codes in these two cases, I argue that colonial governance entailed not simply a struggle to civilize India and its population, but also to control the nature that threatened their civilization in India.
Shades of colonial governance
Governance means both an exercise of authority over a defined territory, provision of security and protection to people, and also regulating and cultivating appropriate behaviour among the population.Footnote 7 Literature on colonial governance in British India has highlighted the tension that ran through the imperial ideology of rule. This tension was informed by the imperial logic that the justification of their right to rule India was founded on the just governance of its people.Footnote 8 James Mill, the utilitarian liberal thinker, stated in the first half of the nineteenth century, that over time Britain should extend the same political, social and economic rights to its Indian subjects as were enjoyed by people in Britain. The logical conclusion of this liberal ideology was the eventual extension of self-rule to the Indians and hence the end of imperialism. Whilst many British held such a view, in practice the majority could not imagine most Indians ever being ready for self-rule (nor could they contemplate losing the material benefits of empire). This tension is reflected most aptly in the position taken by John Stuart Mill, clearly against that of his father, that self-government and representative government ‘was not suited to all people’.Footnote 9 In J. S. Mill's liberalism, not all societies were endowed by an identical disposition towards a political and social life based on justice, equality and popular representation.
Liberalism and hierarchy of evolutionism
Uday Mehta argues that a hierarchy of progress, where people are placed at different stages of an evolutionary path of sorts, is in fact inherent in the colonial liberal project of nineteenth-century India.Footnote 10 This is based on the assumption that, to be understood, something must be part of a single structure, an idea that originates from the Cartesian idea where ‘the singular can be understood only by reference to the general of which it is an instance’.Footnote 11 That is, difference only makes sense if it can be understood as variation, and variation assumes hierarchy. Once this hierarchical social structure was assumed colonial governance practices started to attenuate themselves to the peculiarities of each stage of the evolutionary scale. Thus liberal governance ideology did not take a single monolithic form, applied in a formulaic way and whose purpose was always the ‘conduct of conduct’Footnote 12 or ‘to act upon actions’.Footnote 13 Rather, depending on where a society fell on the evolutionary scale, and hence how it was perceived in its relative proximity to nature or culture, governance also entailed physical control of the conduct and the application of physical violence.Footnote 14
The classification of which stage a particular social group was on the evolutionary scale was determined by many variables which were not necessarily random. Generally speaking, sedentary societies, practicing agriculture, with centralized and traditional political institutions were considered at a higher position on the evolutionary scale than were mobile and agro-pastoral communities, who were difficult to keep track of and to collect tax from. Of course such views of civilizing local people and landscape were not the outgrowth of the British era colonialism, rather, pre-British rulers such as Mughals and Maratha held similar views.Footnote 15
Physical landscape and land cover was another relevant variable. People living in mountains, forests, deserts and swamps—all difficult to penetrate and not suitable for agriculture—were generally seen as lower on the evolutionary scale than people of the plains where mobility and hence legibility and surveillance were easier and the land suitable for agriculture.Footnote 16 Conceptually, the evolutionary scale entailed a movement away from an original state of nature towards human made culture. Thus societies deemed low on the evolutionary scale were also seen by the British as close to nature. Nature in turn represented a complex set of ideas for the British; it was conceived both as an object and a subject. People perceived as close to, or part of nature, were seen as having not developed mastery over their natural instincts through the application of rational thought. So technically, they were seen as lacking free will, because their decisions and mental processes were controlled by nature, which is both unpredictable and has its own agency. Thus both people and their geographical region could then be represented as unruly nature and a potential threat to the established social and moral order from the outside.Footnote 17
Governing in abstract terms, then, meant managing this threat from ‘backward’ societies and unruly nature by applying methods of control and exerting authority which did not address the rational and mental disposition of people, but rather targeted their bodies through the application of force. Governance for the British meant applying a set of administrative practices that moved Indian society generally away from its state of nature to a state of civilization, or progress, with those practices differing depending on the perceived position on the evolutionary scale of particular groups being ruled. This form of governance and its liberal overtones are epitomized by Rudyard Kipling's poem, ‘The White man's burden’Footnote 18 The late nineteenth century saw the flowering of this governance ideology in which extreme nationalism was combined with a missionary zeal to liberate people from their tyranny. Thus liberal governance also entailed ensuring that those groups which had evolved from the basic state of nature, represented by settled agricultural communities, did not fall back into that state again.
In order to understand how these ideals of governance corresponded with each form of hunting—man-eating tiger and markhor—a short description contrasting the animals in question is necessary. The markhor, endemic to the mountainous north-western region of British empire, was one of the most sought after species of big game hunters for its unique trophy. A member of the caprinae family, it is a wild goat with flaring horns that can reach a staggering length of five feet. The markhor remained of particular attraction to the sportsmen who preferred it over its cousin, the Asiatic ibex. It was found in the Vale of Kashmir and north of the Burzil Pass in Astor, Baltistan and Gilgit valleys. Markhor hunting provided the British with an opportunity to display endurance, masculinity and skill, characteristics which were then reworked in the imperialist rhetoric of governance and rule. The tiger is the largest member of the felid (cat) family and one of the most feared predators, including by humans. At the turn of the nineteenth century, tigers were found throughout the forested hilly and plain areas of India. They were a symbol of kingship and divinity, yet also a threat and vermin, because of which the British viewed them with particular ambivalence. In contrast to the markhor, tigers were bounty-hunted by the colonial state and thus formed part of the actual governance practices of the British raj. But it was the display of courage and bravery in tiger hunting that linked with the colonial governing ideology. In the following section I will explain how the different forms of governance can be elucidated through the examples of tiger and markhor hunting.
Tiger and society: threats and systemic links
In the second half of the nineteenth century, colonial representation of indigenous governance, especially that of the Indian princes of various states, was described as oriental despotism and as such predatory. This necessitated a British response in which they represented their rule as providing protection against these predators. This logic was played on a symbolic level in tiger hunting, particularly hunting of man-eating tigers which signified particular ideals of imperial governance based on care towards colonial subjects.Footnote 19 As Paul Greenough states, ‘In India a competent ruler was required to “protect” his subjects, and the East India Company accepted this duty in part by taking control of wild animals seriously’.Footnote 20 Pandian states in the same vein that ‘The pursuit of predatory tigers opened the countryside to the rule of law and the improvement of welfare only by instantiating the hunter himself as kingly potentate, personification of sovereign force’.Footnote 21
The agro-ecology of India as it was inherited by the British raj comprised villages surrounded by pastoral lands and extensive forest. Mahesh Rangarajan shows that pre-colonial India was hugely under-cultivated and that it was indeed labour rather than land that was a limiting factor in agricultural production.Footnote 22 With the mosaic of savannah and forest, wildlife populations thrived in nineteenth century India. William Hornaday of the New York Zoological Society wrote that in 1877 he ‘found the Ganges—Jumna dooab, the Animallai Hills, the Wynaad Forest and Ceylon literally teeming with herds of game’.Footnote 23
Tiger habitat and human encroachment
The tiger problem, and the lore of hunting associated with it, emerged as part of a specific colonial mode of production during the nineteenth century. The movement of humans, particularly towards the second half of the nineteenth century, brought them in more frequent contact with wild animals. Colonial agricultural policies either brought ‘waste’ land under cultivation through irrigation or converted natural forest into commercial forest for timber extraction in tiger-habitat regions, after the Forest Act of 1878.Footnote 24 Giving direct evidence of this, Karanth et al. show that in the late nineteenth century, tiger habitat in Nagarhole, Karnatka was converted into reserved forest and existing tree species were replaced by highly valued teak.Footnote 25 Mark Baker, reporting on the Kangra hills, a prime tiger habitat in Himachal Pradesh, gives similar accounts. He states that irrigation intensified and expanded agriculture by bringing ‘waste’ land under cultivation while forest was converted into tea plantation.Footnote 26 Captain J. Forsyth of the Bengal Staff Corps wrote the following about tiger hunting in the Betual district in the central hills of India in the 1880s:
While wondering about during the months of April and May, in the teak forests of the Betul districts, I devoted a day now and then to the sport of tiger-shooting; and it was the laudable custom of the forest officers to spare, if possible every year, a few weeks during the height of the hot season, for the purpose of making an impression on the numerous tigers which at that time rendered working in the forests and carrying timber dreaded by the natives, and consequently costly to the government.Footnote 27
Annu Jalais in her recent study has shown that large parts of the Sundarban forest in south Bengal were cleared for harvesting wood and cultivation as early as the first decade of the nineteenth century. These intrusions were proceeded by construction of harbours and ports.Footnote 28
Generally speaking, during the nineteenth century, pre-colonial agrarian structures, which had been geared towards surplus extraction for state formation were re-directed for capital formation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the colonial state transformed the existing agrarian landscape by changing crop patterns and composition, and ownership of land to favour expansion of agriculture into uncultivated landscapesFootnote 29 leading to shrinking tiger habitat and intensification of its conflict with humans.Footnote 30 It was not only agriculture that increased predation of humans by tigers. The laying of railway tracksFootnote 31 through forest areas, the laying down of telegraph poles, doing settlement work, and the movement of people conducting censuses and surveys also intensified the conflict. Colonel H. S. Wood, who hunted in Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century, recounts that numerous coolies were killed by tiger attacks whilst working on the telegraph lines.Footnote 32 He further recounts that census and survey workers were also killed whilst travelling on official duties to make assessments of populations and land in remote areas.
I am not arguing here that the predation threat did not exist before; as Paul Greenough shows, contrary to the ‘Standard Environmental Narrative’ in South Asia, which depicts a harmonious and non-violent relationship between society and nature in pre-colonial subcontinent, the threat of wild predators was part of everyday reality for South Asian peasants.Footnote 33 But the frequency and scale of the contact and conflict between humans and the natural world, and the conversion of the latter to the former increased. During the latter half of the nineteenth century this battle however began to shift in favour of society as tiger hunting was formally incorporated into administrative practices of the colonial state. Introduction of modern and far more effective fire power than before, and the sheer increase in the number of sportsmen played a significant role in this decisive shift. The conflict between humans and tigers intensified, resulting in an increase in bounty killing. During the second half of the ninettenth century, the problem of man-eating tigers became particularly acute in Bengal in the central districts where hunting of tigers was organized at the behest of the district collector of revenue.Footnote 34 Similar shooting methods were used to eradicate man-eating tigers from other areas such as the Kumaon Hills on the foothills of the Himalayas.Footnote 35 Rangarajan estimates that around 80,000 tigers were shot by bounty killers between 1875 and 1925.Footnote 36 Based on their threat to human society tigers were often depicted in British paintings as a marker of wildness and as a symbol of amoral and vicious cruelty.Footnote 37 As such, the man-eating tiger came to symbolize the continued threat of unruly and dangerous nature to Indian society, and its hunting thus symbolized the ability of the British colonial administration to control and keep that nature at bay. What is ironic is that it was the policies of the raj that put the native population at risk from man-eating tigers in the first place.
It is pertinent to note here that most of the work related to opening up of the uncultivated land for agriculture, forestry and railway, was done by the so-called ‘criminal’ tribes. Corvee labour, or forced labour or begar (especially from the Bhils of Gujarat, the Dangs of the Narmada valley and the Santhals and Kols in Bihar) was also commonly used during tiger shooting expeditions, and it was not uncommon for a beater or coolie to be killed by a tiger.Footnote 38 The official categorization of tribal peoples all over India and in the tiger habitat as criminal or wild tribes provided the justification for extracting labour from these people. As we shall see in the case of markhor hunting in the Himalayas, here too, corvee labour was justified on the basis of the ‘lower’ level of civilization of these tribes. At the same time, these tribes were also the means through which wild nature was to be controlled, in the service of protecting the more civilized groups of Indian society.
Suspending hunting codes to protect society against nature
By the end of the nineteenth century tiger hunting had become very popular amongst imperial officers. Hunting in general was seen as a sport with proper rules of practice, or hunting codes, to which ideas of fairness were central. Instructions written for sportsmen and by sportsmen emphasized subscribing to certain codes of shooting. Such an adherence to hunting codes was not only seen as the right attitude towards wildlife for conservation purposes, but was seen as ethically and aesthetically superior to indigenous hunting practices, especially those of subsistence hunters. The ethics cultivated through adherence to hunting codes were connected to what was seen as the right imperial character needed for the governance of India.Footnote 39
Elaborate codes for hunting tigers in India emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as the British tried to mark themselves off from the native hunters.Footnote 40 British hunters emphasized their willingness to take risks as they hunted, to expose themselves to more danger than natives would. Richard Lydekker wrote in The Game Animals of India in the early 1920s when sport hunting had been firmly established:
Tiger-shooting may be divided into four main classes, namely, shooting from elephants, driving with beaters to sportsmen posted in trees, sitting up over the ‘kill’ to await the return of the murderer, and walking up on foot. The last is certainly the most dangerous, and probably therefore the most exciting sport, fatal accidents being frequent. The least exciting of the four is the sitting up over the ‘kill’ on a machan, or platform, built in some convenient tree.Footnote 41
It is difficult to know which of the four methods that Lydekker wrote about was used the most, though it is clear that many exaggerated the danger to themselves. For example, J. Forsyth, who never hunted on foot and used a shooting elephant, or used a bait, wrote:
Some people affect to despise the practice of using elephants in following tigers, and talk a great deal about shooting them on foot. As regards danger to the sportsman, nine-tenths of tiger said to be shot on foot are really killed from trees or rocks, where the sportsman is quite secure.Footnote 42
However when we compare instructions for hunting man-eating versus non man-eating tigers all codes of hunting were to be set aside. As Pandian writes:
The elimination of man-eaters stands out as a great anomaly in the late colonial art of managing [the] tiger population, for here the elaborate masculinist codes of sportsmanship often did not apply. Man-eaters had to be eliminated at all costs, even if that meant resorting to regretful tactics of shooting a sleeping tiger as legendary hunter Jim Corbett once reported doing.Footnote 43
Reginald Gilbert, an officer in the Indian Civil Service in Bengal and an avid hunter, states that he was invited by A. W. Crawley-Boevey, Collector of Surat, to shoot a man-eater. Writing in 1889 in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society on the subject he wrote:
you must not expect me to give you any thrilling account of some personal adventure where I risked my life to rid the district of a brute long the terror of inhabitants, because I may say at once that the only man-eater I have killed, exposed me to no more danger than I should incur in any ordinary's days shooting after small game. Indeed, it would scarcely be in accordance with the object of our Society to read a paper relating to personal adventure of this kind.Footnote 44
Writing in the same vein G. P. Sanderson, an officer in the Forest Department of Mysore, states that it is imperative that every man-eating tiger is traced out and slayed ‘by all means possible and at every expense’.Footnote 45 Even though there were very few tigers that were actually man-eaters, for example some districts were totally clean of man-eaters,Footnote 46 the fear and lore of man-eaters became something larger than what it actually was.Footnote 47
By suspending hunting codes the British located the shooting of man-eating tigers within the sphere of governance rather than of sport. Tigers were seen as an element of raw nature that disturbed British plans for an orderly society, thus competing with them for authority and submission. They threatened not only indigenous populations, but the entire project of imperial governance. Thus the elimination of these tigers represented to the British justification and legitimization of the empire, hence the suspension of hunting codes.
Hunting and the institution of begar
During the nineteenth century, the north-western frontier region of the British Indian Empire was the site of an intense geo-political struggle between the Russian and the British empires. During the height of this rivalry, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the British feared an imminent Russian invasion from the mountain passes north of the independent state of Kashmir. The country north of Kashmir stretched across the immense mountain ranges of the western Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindukush, and the Pamir, into Chinese Central Asia, and was under the control of the resource-poor and sparsely populated states of Ladakh, Baltistan (divided into Skardu and Khaplu), Hunza, Nagar, Astor, Chitral, Yasin and Gilgit. During the nineteenth century, the combined forces of the British empire and the Kashmir State, in a series of military campaigns, brought all the small mountain states on their side of the central and south Asia watershed (at the northern boundary of Hunza), under their control and established a dual administrative machinery of Political Agencies, in the British case, and Governorships in the case of the Kashmir State. In 1891, the last of these mountain states, Hunza, fell to the combined forces of the Kashmir state and the British army.
Representation of the region in colonial discourse and begar
Peppered throughout the literature produced about the northern frontier region of British India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are statements about the inability of civilization to cross the mountain barriers. Francis Younghusband, then a captain in the British Army and one of the greatest players of the Great Game, who travelled north from Srinagar in Kashmir to Kashghar in Chinese Central Asia, writes about his travel through the region in this way:
Kashghar was well known, too, from the Indian side, and there was a Russian consul stationed there. So when I reached the place I appeared to have arrived again on the fringes of civilization.Footnote 48
When Younghusband returns from the North and enters Kashmir, he writes:
My first care, therefore, was to go off to one of the native shops. . .and purchase a clean shirt and to have my hair cut, my beard shaved off, and to get a good wash. . .I had expended nearly two hours upon these preparations for my plunge into civilization.Footnote 49
In 1898, Jane Duncan, one of the few women adventure travellers to the region writes in the same vein:
One of the joys of expedition was getting away from dress with its worries as distinguished from mere clothes, and many a time after returning to civilization I longed to be in the desert again where crows and goats did not care what I wore.Footnote 50
It is important to note here that these statements of coming in and out and going back and forth into civilization were not mere metaphorical statements. From the way they were used, especially with reference to a physical space, it is clear that for these travellers civilization, in addition to having a moral or temporal dimension, also had a spatial dimension. For the British colonial officers and travellers the mountains of the region were a hurdle to the movement to civilization into the communities, who therefore existed in a sort of original state of unruly and threatening nature.Footnote 51 But what do these explorers mean by ‘civilization’ in this context? And how did they think that civilization could be introduced into the mountainous country?
For the British the arrival of elements of the colonial administrative apparatus such as consulates, political agencies, telegraph poles, and post offices on the newly constructed lines of communications constituted the bringing of civilization to the area. After the conquest of Hunza, the British started improving communications in the region through building roads and a telephone and telegraph system. Notice that when Younghusband travelled through the region, the road leading north from Srinagar to Chinese Turkestan through Gilgit and Hunza was in very bad shape. It was because of this that Younghusband set the boundaries of civilization in Srinagar. About three decades later when the Srinagar-Gilgit road had been built and heavily used, Jenny Visser-hooft, a Dutch Geographer, wrote ‘Beyond Gilgit civilization ends’.Footnote 52 So the construction of the road into this region symbolized the penetration of society into nature in an effort to civilize it.Footnote 53
The Srinagar-Gilgit road was improved and constructed under the supervision of the second Political Agent of Gilgit Agency, Algernon Durand, who justified the construction of the road by invading Hunza in 1891 and thus extending the frontier of British India to the Pamir mountains and Central Asia watershed. This road was a 200-mile dirt track, suitable for pack animals and horses, crossing over an almost 14,000 feet high pass. Although, following the conquest of Hunza in 1891, the region was ‘pacified’ and its boundaries with Russia fixed and stabilized under the Pamir-Boundary Commission of 1895, the strategic significance of the Srinagar-Gilgit road was not lessened. Gilgit and the adjacent valleys being grain-deficient regions depended on the import of grain and supplies from Kashmir. After the establishment of a combined British and Kashmir military garrison in Gilgit and Bunji, all food and ammunition supplies were transported on the Srinagar-Gilgit road. For the maintenance of order and security in the frontier, the British regarded the road as a key strategic factor.
The dominant form of transportation on the Srinagar-Gilgit road was human. Prior to British direct involvement in the region, the Kashmir state had required local people to provide free labour, begar, to state officials travelling on the road. Moreover, the local headman, or numberdaar, was to provide food items on controlled rates to the official travellers of the Kashmir state. A special parwanah (an official slip) was issued to any official travellers by the Kashmir state upon the presentation of which local people were obliged to provide food and labour.
Needless to say such a system was highly oppressive and exploitative and could only be implemented with the help of physical force. Particularly effected were the villages which lay on the Srinagar-Gilgit road. Walter Lawrence, an officer of the British Raj who carried out land settlement and revenue work in Kashmir in the 1890s, wrote:
No arrangements were made to distribute the begaar [sic] according to population, or to take it by turns from villages, and as a rule the unfortunate people who lived. . .along the line of communications, were harassed daily, while more remote villages, whose inhabitants could flee to the mountains when the news came that coolies were wanted, had a comparatively speaking easy time.Footnote 54
Describing situations when officials of the Kashmir state appeared in the villages for seizing labour for carriage, Lawrence writes,
I have seen whole village bivouacking on the mountains when the agents of the collection of transport arrived in their tehsil, and I have seen inhuman punishment dealt out to men who demurred to leaving their homes for two or three months. . ..Footnote 55
While the begar was ostensibly for official purposes and hence officers of the Kashmir state and British Raj on official duties, in practice it was utilized by a much wider array of people. One benefactor of this exploitative and draconian system was the British hunter.Footnote 56
Sportsman and begar
By the turn of the twentieth century, the independent princely state of Kashmir had become a paradise for big game hunters of the British Raj. Colonial army and civil officers swarmed into the hills in the Vale of Kashmir and the mountains beyond to the region today called the Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan, stalking the wild game. Count Hans von Koenigsmarek, a major in the General German staff based in India, wrote in 1910:
There is scarcely a single young officer or official who does not make an expedition to the Himalayas as soon as he can after getting to India. Each one of them hopes to make a record. . .they are filled with the one desire to bring back the best head or to shoot the rarest animal at the greatest height.Footnote 57
The sportsmen shot Kashmir stag, snow leopard, brown and black bears, ibex, blue sheep and the most sought after prize, markhor, a mountain goat endemic to the region, famous for its magnificent spiral horned trophy. The sportsmen came to the region for shooting for a period of between two to five months at a time; in the initial years hunting within the valley of Kashmir, and later, in the early twentieth century, travelling as far north through the regions of Baltistan, Ladakh, Giglit and Hunza, on the Chinese and Russian frontiers.
Srinagar was the starting point where all major logistical arrangements for the hunting trip were made. Sportsmen acquired a suitable shikari,Footnote 58 or professional hunting guide, and food. Porters or coolies for carrying the expedition supplies were collected in forward stages from the villages along the road. Collection of coolies was a major challenge to the success of the expedition. Brigadier Kinloch in giving advice to fellow sportsmen writes:
In many parts of the hills inevitable delay is caused if a large number of coolies are required, as they frequently have to be collected from scattered and distant villages.Footnote 59
Kinloch recommended at least 12 coolies for each expedition for one season.Footnote 60 Captain Haughton, a military officer in the British army, who hunted in the region states that around 200 hunting licences were issued per year by the Kashmir Game Preservation Department in the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 61 Thus hunting alone utilized around 2,400 people in the region, about 15–20 per cent of the population along the Srinagar-Gilgit road.
The increased inflow of British hunting parties each year, especially at the peak of the agricultural season, made it difficult for people to tend their own crops. Writing about this policy and its influence on the people in the Astor valley, S. J. Stone, Deputy Inspector General of Punjab Police in the 1890s, and avid sportsman, wrote:
The system of compulsory labour is very oppressive in every part of Kashmir, and it is greatly aggravated by the numbers of English travellers who wander about this country for eight months of the year.Footnote 62
Both the British officials as well as the sportsmen were not always at ease with the use of begar, as we saw in Stone's comment above, acknowledging the system as ‘oppressive’. What particularly irked the British in the case of begar was the violation of liberal political principles upon which the wider discourse of governance was based in which the British recognized their Indian subjects to possess some political rights. For example, Walter Lawrence, the Settlement Officer in Kashmir, stated this about begar:
Briefly speaking, the man liable to begar was an ‘outlaw’ without rights of any description, and begar was looked upon by the official as an incident of serfdom which entitled them to take all things, either labour or commodities, free of payment, from the villagers.Footnote 63
For Lawrence, then, begar represented the pre-modern, and by default an institution associated with feudal and oriental governance. Their tacit acceptance of this institution contradicted their efforts to mark themselves as superior and a different type of ruler than the local petty rajas.Footnote 64 Notwithstanding this contradiction, the British officers and sportsmen continue to use it. For example, at one point in his account Stone, who in the previous quote clearly criticized begar, describes an incident in a village in Astor valley, on Srinagar-Gilgit road, in which he and his staff had to pull out hiding men from underground animal sheds. He writes:
A general rush was made into the huts, and another man brought out. . .shortly afterwards there was more whispering among the women, another rush down, and another man was revealed to the light of day, blinking like an owl. It was now rumoured that the Makadam himself was concealed below. This was too much for me. I lighted the lantern, and myself went down to explore the nether regions; but there was no more discoveries—the human mine was exhausted.Footnote 65
After Stone's unsuccessful search for the village Makadam, he describes that during the process of seizing the local population from the village a Kashmiri dakwala (an official of the post office) who was present in the village started to help:
the ‘Kotwal’ [village watchman] appeared after a time from a village across the river, and the dakwala pounced on him at once, tied his arms behind his back, and with his alpenstock belaboured him on his posteriors till he was tired. After this preliminary he spoke to him. The matter-of-fact-way in which the Kotwal took his punishment was extra-ordinary; he was evidently used to it.Footnote 66
Such physical and violent means did not go without resistance by the local people, who deployed various tactics to discourage the sportsmen from returning to their villages. For example Kinloch, writing in 1892, states:
In many places the natives will deny the existence of game, and will tell any number of lies to induce the traveller to leave their village and go to some other one. . .this anxiety to get rid of sportsmen is partly caused by the unwillingness of the people to furnish the supplies required by the travellers; but I fear that it is partly to be attributed to the conduct of Englishmen, who have thrashed or abused villagers for not showing game, when they were doing their best.Footnote 67
Reforming begar
In 1889, the Government of India practically took over the administration of the Kashmir State through various executive and administrative reforms, on the grounds that the state officials of Maharajas, mainly Hindu Brahmins, had rendered the state bankrupt because of their rampant corruption. The reforms were led by Walter Lawrence, and begar became a major issue and focus of scrutiny. On the one hand it reminded the British of despotic oriental governance, yet on the other they recognized the strategic importance of keeping the lines of communication open to Gilgit, which required continued begar labour on the Srinagar-Gilgit road. Thus, rather then abolishing begar wholesale, a policy of mandatory provision of labour on the Srinagar-Gilgit road was kept but now the labourers would get paid for their work, at a rate set by the state.
Jane Duncan, who travelled through the region shortly after the reforms, describes the system:
Travel within Kashmir territory is thoroughly organized, and at each village it is the duty of the lumbardar, or headman, who is paid by the State, to supply at fixed rates any food and wood available, and also transport in shape of coolies or ponies, and show an official list of price if required. The rate for a pony, riding or pack, is 8 annas per march of about 16 miles and 4 annas for a coolie.Footnote 68
Under the reform, as recommended by the settlement officer, Walter Lawrence writes,
an organised transport corps will now do away with the evils of The Gilgit road begar; and when our Settlement Officer has extended his work to this portion of the Maharaja's domination, it is to be hoped that the poor persecuted Baltis will become the happy prosperous people they hope to be.Footnote 69
Lawrence mentions that the reformed begar system was used both by the Kashmir officials and the British travellers, mainly sportsmen. He, however, very keenly points out that when it was used by the British, the labourer always got his wages:
The instance I have given above refers to a modest demand for carriage made by a European visitor, and in such instances the wage of four annas per stage was invariably paid.Footnote 70
Reflecting on the improbability of doing away with begar completely, Lawrence was of the view that it would remain until a substantial increase in population had occurred which would provide a wage labour class who could do the work of transportation which currently the farmers and peasants of the state were required to do:
Begar in a modified form will linger on until good roads are made through the valley and until population [increase]. . .bring a labouring class into existence.Footnote 71
The reform, then, did not abolish begar, rather it changed it into forced but paid labour.Footnote 72 In fact the corrupt and oppressive system which Lawrence tried to change continued and resulted in the emergence of a two-tiered system of begar. One tier of unpaid workers continued to serve the direct interests of the state. The other, nominally paid, was established to provide for the increasing number of European visitors to Kashmir.Footnote 73 As Ken McDonald, in his wonderful study of the evolution of begar and its transformation into the modern portering sector in Baltistan, writes: ‘for Lawrence, the presence of money was all that was required to suppress the moral objections to begar and to legitimize it’.Footnote 74
While I agree with Macdonald that compensation legitimized begar to a certain extent, I also argue that representation of the region as lacking a fully developed monetary market due to low population is important in rendering the region as still part of nature. Notice that in Lawrence's view the region had not yet reached the natural population level that could support wage labour. As mentioned above, the British view of the local people was based on an evolutionary schema in which societies close to nature lacked certain features, such as centralized political institutions, surplus agriculture and thriving trade and markets. Lawrence's description of the region, then, as ‘not-yet-ready’ for wage labour justified begar as the natural form of labour institution for its people.
The minimal impact of the reforms is clear in the following account given by Jane Duncan of her travels through the region in late 1890. She wrote, ‘The villagers sometimes take to the hills when they hear of the approach of a party in charge of a State chuprassi [messenger], with the consequences that no supplies can be had’.Footnote 75 Duncan describes the scene when the local people in Khaplu valley in Baltistan refused to sell her any food or provide labour, despite her presenting the ‘parwanah’ from the Kashmir officials in Leh:
At four o'clock he [lumbardar of Hanu Nallah on the other side of Chorbat La] and the chowkidar and a dozen villagers or zemindars [farmers] came and said that I was not a shooting sahib [my emphasis] and not a European (they seem to think women can't be Europeans), I was only a mem sahib with three men, and that they would not give me any supplies, and would beat my servants. Aziz Khan showed the lumbardar the ‘perwanah’ which the Wazir Wazarat had sent me at Leh, giving orders that I was to have what supplies I required, and told him he must give them. Later Aziz Khan slapping the lumbaradar when he refuses.Footnote 76
Some elements of fair hunting and liberal influence
As mentioned in the previous section on tiger hunting, that British sportsmen created elaborate hunting codes which were meant to give the wild animal an equal chance, I also noticed that suspension of such codes in the case of man-eating tigers rendered their shooting as something other than sport, namely governance. The British sportsmen who visited the northern mountainous region viewed the wild animals under chase as deserving of fair play, of being given an equal chance in an encounter. As Mangan shows, the idea of fairness in sports was based on game ethics, which valorised liberal political ideas, based on courage, justice and equality. All of these ideas can be seen at play when examining markhor shooting in the region. For example, sportsmen were allowed to take the biggest males only. This criterion was based on the fact that because the biggest male ibex or markhors stay at higher altitudes than juvenile males and females, they are thus relatively difficult to reach and kill. Experiencing hardship and risk on the way to attaining one's objective, a good trophy, was in the case of sports hunting constituted as fair play. The communal hunting practices of the indigenous societies, which were primarily driven by subsistence, were seen as unfair because they did not give a fair chance to the prey to escape. A fair hunt, in the British sportsmen conception was a contest or competition between two equal individuals.Footnote 77 The sportsmen often represented the large trophy size ungulates as direct counterparts to the hunter in nature. A trophy-size markhor was often referred to as a ‘Patriarch’ or ‘king of rock’ by the British sportsmen.
The prey is considered as having an equal masculine status in nature as the hunter, thus deserving the ethical and fair treatment that the hunter might himself deserve. Once the hunter and the hunted were imagined as being equals, hunting itself could now be imagined as a fair sport, as the players in the sport were imagined to possess symmetrical powers. It was this imagined equality between the two that both constructed and produced hunting as a (fair) sport.Footnote 78
When viewed within the light of a discourse of fair hunting practices, the reliance of sportsmen on begar is a contradiction. In other words the fairness in hunting was possible only through reliance on an inherently unfair labour practice in the wider social sphere. The contrast with tiger hunting shows that the British considered the local wildlife of the region as equal to themselves hence bestowing symbolic equality to these animals through the application of a hunting code. But as far as the people of the region were considered they were thought to be not deserving of that equality. Predation, in the form of seizing local labour under begar for hunting expeditions became the correct modus operandi for the British. If, for the man-eating tiger in the plains local population was fair game, then in the mountains, indigenous population and its labour was fair game for the British. If in the plains villagers fled to other locations in fear of the wild tiger, then in the mountain they fled from the British sahib.
Conclusion
Hunting is an activity that treads the boundary between nature and culture. The British hunted in their Indian empire for a variety of purposes. From the governance point of view, a successful hunt was both about controlling wild animals and wild people. I have shown that in contrast to the case of tiger hunting, where the British suspended conventional hunting codes, justifying such violations on the grounds of protecting human populations, in the case of markhor hunting they suspended liberal codes of governance by using begar. The British sportsmen reflected on both kinds of suspension by presenting different rationales and justifications. It is the comparison of these rationales, that is, their underlying logic, that points towards how hunting is implicated in governance in a very specific manner.
The British justified suspension of ethical codes on the perceived backward evolutionary position of the local people. The different positions that the British took reflect a conception of governance as a constant struggle between nature and culture, striving to keep the former from penetrating the latter, and pushing the latter to penetrate the former. The two contrasting modes of governance through hunting emerged from different conceptions of the local ecological conditions in which tiger and markhor hunting took place. In the tiger hunting territory, although the tribal people were seen as part of nature, the farmers of the plains were generally seen as closer to a civilized state, and thus in need of protection from wild nature. They were seen as ‘receptive’, to some extent, to the norms of liberal governance. In the markhor hunting territory, by contrast, the people were seen as part of nature, and incapable of participating in institutions and norms of liberal governance, including a market economy. They had first to be tamed, to be cultivated and disciplined through force.
This discussion of governance through different hunting modes and in different ecological zones is central to discussions of the nature of colonial power in India. Many contemporary scholars have complicated Ranajit Guha'sFootnote 79 characterization of colonial power as based on domination rather than on hegemony, by showing that colonial power was a hybrid of the two conditions.Footnote 80 That is, in some instances the colonial state was able to achieve conditions of hegemony through their administrative practices.Footnote 81 This paper shows that colonial power, as coercive force or persuasive tact, was not necessarily two opposing modes of governance; rather, these two modes could be justified within a single framework under the liberal political ideology of the colonial state. Although I have not found evidence, it is possible that some men who hunted man-eating tigers also shot markhor using begar. Clearly, the objective in the first contradicts the method in the second. The co-existence of apparently such contradictory practices within a single governing ideology was facilitated by the conceptualization of liberalism which accommodated a political relationship based on ideas being equal and common, as well as hierarchical and different. In the two kinds of colonial hunting examined in this paper, the agro-ecological conditions became the basis on which the colonial hunters stratified local society on the continuum of nature and culture, or coercion and persuasion.
