Tiger huntresses in the Company Raj: Environmentalism and exotic imaginings of wildlife, 1830–45

Abstract

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.