A tiger's head hangs over a stack of rifles in a tea planter's bungalow in Assam (Fig. 12). In the distance, beyond the bungalow garden, tea pluckers are hard at work. A tangible reminder of the dense jungle out of which plantations were carved in Assam in the nineteenth century, the tiger trophy is indicative of the extent to which plantations remained entangled with the forest in 1945, when this illustration was published.1 In such terrain, wild animals frequently wandered to the forest edge in search of food and shelter, or into plantations themselves. Perceived as intruders, they were either chased away or killed, and if they happened to be big cats, their skins and heads might be preserved as prized trophies. Growing tea meant coping with the extreme challenges of living in close proximity to the jungle. But as countless colonial photographs and planters’ memoirs reveal, these human-animal encounters also had their advantages. Wildlife trophies made colonial heroes out of tea planters, repositioning them as brave burra sahibs (great masters) in tea country, where they had successfully conquered the jungli – the wild, or the savage. For what could be more impressive than bagging a tiger, that most ferocious of jungli predators?

Dead or alive, the tiger drew the jungli into the social, cultural and material realities of plantation life. It reiterated hierarchies of race, gender and class that were essential to running a plantation. It earned the planter the respect of his colonial brethren and constituted a point of entry into their orbit of camaraderie. It also gave the planter his personal and very conspicuous badge of honour: an animal trophy that promoted key ideas about masculine identity, while spatialising, visualising and memorialising the performance of his colonial authority. In other words, the tiger trophy enabled the planter to write himself into the topos of tea country by producing new mythologies of the wild that linked him back to the perceived ‘wilderness’ origins of the ‘province of Assam’, that place once described as ‘covered with jungle and swamp, the abode of the tiger and wild animals of all kinds’, which had ‘now … become the home of an industrious peasantry’.