What is it about?
This paper offers a series of reflections on the life and work of Jim Corbett, the well-known hunter and conservationist in colonial India. As I show, Corbett emerged as a unique individual in colonial India, who, despite being an integral part of the British colonial establishment, held another set of views when it came to conservation. Unlike other colonial hunters in India, what distinguished Corbett was his relationship to the local populace and to tigers which points to the quintessential paradox of hunting and conservation that emerged in early-twentieth century India. For Jim Corbett, as this paper argues, conservation was not so much an abstract idea or concept, but an extension of his own persona, an individualised take on his immediate environment. As such his persona introduces interesting inflections into any simplistic binary of coloniser and colonised, powerful and feeble, hunter and hunted - thus presenting Corbett in a different light than that which the prevailing discourse on hunting and conservation would shed. Corbett's role was unusual, not only in that he substituted the camera for the gun, but also in his localised approach, and in his conservation cause, which evinces respect for tigers. Despite such caveats, this paper argues that Corbett remained a staunch loyalist to the Raj.
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Why is it important?
One of the key questions addressed in this research article is, what caused Corbett’s passion for hunting in later years, to turn into one for conservation? This study closely examines Corbett's changing relationship with Indian wildlife, arguing that the shifts in attitude mirrored changes in his own hunting and professional career.
Perspectives
This article locates Corbett within an analytical framework that recognises the issue of the development of conservation in relation to empire and hunting. The issue begs the question of what makes men like Corbett ‘interesting’ in the past and even today (in Britain or in India) and the politics at stake in writing about such individuals. Richard Grove argues that, ‘much of the ideology of modern conservation thinking actually emerged out of colonial rather than metropolitan conditions’. It is pertinent, then, to note that ‘the consensus required to initiate an environmental policy in the colonies was narrower than in metropolitan societies, and the role of a few interested individuals could therefore easily come to acquire considerable significance’. In the case of colonial India, Jim Corbett is a prima facie example in bringing such conservation thinking to the forefront. What distinguishes Corbett’s career is that, despite being a part of the Raj’s establishment, his hunting lore and conservation thinking were less influenced by the dominant and extant ideologies of the nineteenth century imperial hunters in India and Africa or the ideologies of those who came thereafter.
Dr Vijaya Ramadas Mandala
University of Hyderabad
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: 'Go after a man-eater that has killed a hundred people? Not on your life!', Global Environment, October 2014, White Horse Press,
DOI: 10.3197/ge.2014.070212.
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