Whither the man-eater? This entity was once the prime interest of an entire league of famous sportsmen in colonial India, the engrossing content of many books [...]. [T]he man-eater was first constructed, and then dismantled [...]. This erratic rise and fall of the man-eater is descriptive of changing power relations, the ephemeral yet pervasive axis between the colonial and the post-colonial [...].
Jim Corbett was a case in point. [Around the time of independence, Corbett authored popular stories of his adventures in colonial India in the preceding decades, including Man-Eaters of Kumaon and The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag]. [...]
The man-eater was destined [...] to shine in all its ferocity at a certain moment in time and not any other.
Thus, [there is special] context within which specific 'meanings' get associated with animals, at certain times, and at the the hands of select actors [...].
[T]he engulfing realm of the printed word, especially the English book, gave astounding shape and clarity to the idea of a man-eater. [...] The man-eater was never thought of as a sub-species of Panthera tigris in the tables of natural history; rather the man-eater [...] was ‘out of nature’, and thus some kind of an addendum to naturalist understandings. [...] The making of the man-eater into a coherent animal category follows an arduous path. [...] [M]otor cars and other gadgets such as hunting lights had arrived on the scene. [...] [A British officer] who had served in the Central Provinces for quite a while after [1909] [...], commented [..] ‘With modern inventions it would be quite easy to be playing cards in the tent [,] and when the tiger turns up, kill him by pressing a button on a tent wall.’ [His] exasperation was evident [among] [...] [s]portsmen in the 1920s and 1930s [...]. [A] single species splits into undefeatable man-eaters and gentlemanly tigers worthy of observation alone. [...] Amid such lesser sportsmen the man-eater thus became a tactic of power which elevated its [colonial] victor over both the hunters of the past and contemporaries of the present. [...] But it is truly a question if this muzzle-loading gun in the hands of the native [...]. The implication was that sportsmen had a fairer sense of restrictions than the non-sporting classes. With the latter classes gaining political mobility, fears of an 1857-like massacre were also in the air. [...] [B]y the 1930s [...] a host of sportsmen [...] might have preferred to see natives handling a rickety muzzle-loader than an elegant express rifle; the man-eater was intended to remain at large for those ["superior" colonial sportsmen] in possession of the latter. [...]
This development of a sportsman into an author can be located within a history of the book. [...] The English novel as a genre [...] began to acquire greater circulation after [...] 1870. [...] [A] book on which the sportsman laboured was like a trophy [...]. For all such ongoing fuss about size [records], a man-eater was more about qualities: cunning, finesse, stealth [...]. If the difficulty of hunting a man-eater was what gave the sportsman a chance to prove the superiority of his skill [...], then this difficulty was the stuff of a story, not a [size] measurement or a mounted trophy. And [...] an aspect of photography. [...] It authenticated the effort of a sportsman and could not be bought of the market [taxidermy trophies available to simply purchase at local shops] except through a book that bore the author’s name. [...]
There were dimensions of imagination and power that accompanied this. The idea of a man-eater was such that it helped advance the long held belief that the natives were a hapless lot. [...] Pandian [...] shares how the man-eaters of the colonial period were equated with the ‘arbitrary monarchs’ of a pre-colonial era, which also the British sportsman as a symbol of ‘sovereign might’, would meet on its own grounds. [...] [Consider also] the manner in which the simultaneous depiction of the remaining tigers as ‘large hearted gentlem[e]n’ of the forests (a thing Corbett professed) went to convey the contrary image of a docile, tame and innocent nature that could come to be harmed by natives at the slightest instance.
Protecting the people gave the colonisers power over animals, and protecting animals gave it a power over people.
Notions of animality and criminality intersected at the site of the man-eater.
The entire continuum of man-animal relations was thus canvassed through this tactic, which also the medium of the book in the later colonial periods broadcasted to distant corners of the colony. [...] What perhaps distinguished the man-eater from any ordinary form of game hunting was that it was additionally a form of ‘language-game’. [...] [T]he man-eater was an account in which the ephemeral idea of an ‘India’ glimmered constantly in the background. But it did so largely in English. The man-eater was an English diatribe [...]. The side by side portrayal of the victims of the man-eater as ‘superstitious’, ‘rural’ and ‘ignorant’, only went to establish before the (civilised) readers the proof of an (uncivilised) mass waiting to be salvaged, assimilated or disciplined. [...] [A] mild perusal of Corbett’s My India, published about five years after India’s gaining of Independence, provides ample evidence of the above dynamic. The eventual autonomy of the British administration besides a celebration of the decision making capacities of rural masses (described as ‘real’ Indians) is legend in the pages of this book. The political reality of colonial rule is conflated with a nationalistic pride, which also the sportsman allocates to himself in the describing of his (my?) India. One is left to understand that the man-eater thrived at its best in a colonised India as much as an Indianised colony. As the tension between an emerging nation and an erstwhile colony acquired sharpness in the later colonial periods and a decade thereafter, the narrative of the man-eater came into its own.
The man-eater is thus a veritable creature of timing that shone at its brightest in the 1940s, even if it had been shot down 30 years ago by the likes of Corbett. [...] [Later in the twentieth century, there was a] transformation of the landscape from a designated ‘wasteland’ under colonial administration to a ‘World Heritage Site’ in Independent India. At the peak of such transitions in the 1970s [...], the tiger itself was assuming cosmopolitan proportions and being regarded as a ‘citizen’ by the state. [...] [This was an] emergence of [...] a 'cosmopolitan tiger' [...].
All text above by: Varun Sharma. "Rise and Fall of the 'Man-eater': The Changing Science and Technology of a Species (1860-present)". History and Sociology of South Asia Volume 10 (2016), Issue 1. First published online 8 December 2015. At: doi dot org slash 10.1177/2230807515600087 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text in the first paragraph of this post is from the article's abstract. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]
