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This article examines the history of huntswomen in colonial India in relation to nature,
imperialism and forest fauna from 1830 to 1845. In taking British women’s hunting
pursuits and environmental thinking as its focus, this study considers an activity
often overlooked in assessments of women’s contributions to colonial practices and
dismissed almost entirely in accounts of imperial masculinity that take hunting as their
subject matter. Moving beyond the framework of current historiography, this study
intends to locate the presence of tiger huntresses in the 1830s and 1840s during the
heyday of East India Company rule. The scope of this study also effectively contrasts
the actions of British huntswomen in Britain and in India. Second, examining the Eden
sisters in the spectacles of big game hunting during the Company Raj demonstrates
the nature of British women’s thinking towards Indian wildlife, which was also shaped
by their political affiliations and family backgrounds in Britain, when they moved from
Britain to India. Taking the subfields of the cultural and political ecology of India, this
study illustrates how British women in this period articulated their exotic imaginings
regarding Indian wildlife, such as tigers, elephants and wild pigs, that offers a fresh
perspective to the reader. Hunting on the backs of elephants during the Company
Raj also illuminates how the war functionalities of elephants that had existed in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had faded away by the later period.
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Dr Vijaya Ramadas Mandala
University of Hyderabad