?Face Him Like a Briton?: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, 1800-1875

Abstract

By 1864, when British Army officer Walter Campbell offered this advice, tigers and tiger hunting had become invested with several potent meanings. As royal beasts and kings and masters of the jungle, tigers had been closely associated historically with Indian and other Southeast Asian rulers (Wessing 27), associations of which many nineteenth-century Britons were keenly aware. Not only did many Britons seek to emulate various Mughal emperors for whom tiger hunting was an element of kingship, but on the way to presuming themselves the New Mughals they had to outdo various regional rulers such as Mysore's Tipu Sultan (who held power from 1782 to 1799) who also employed tigers as powerful symbols of their rule (Brittlebank 140-46). Tigers also represented for the British all that was wild and untamed in the Indian natural world. Thus, the curious late Victorian and Edwardian spectacle of British royals and other dignitaries being photographed standing aside dead tiger carcasses depicted the staging of the successful conquest of Indian nature by virile imperialists (MacKenzie 47). More generally, tiger hunting was an important symbol in the construction of British imperial and masculine identities during the nineteenth century. Precisely because tigers were dangerous and powerful beasts, tiger hunting represented a struggle with fearsome nature that needed to be resolutely faced like a Briton, as Campbell put it (162). Only by successfully vanquishing tigers would Britons prove their manliness and their fitness to rule over Indians. Much has been written about the place of the tiger in Indian and other Southeast Asian cultures during the precolonial period,