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COLONIAL PIG-STICKING, IMPERIAL AGENDAS, AND NATURAL HISTORY IN THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2020

MEERA ANNA OOMMEN Open the ORCID record for MEERA ANNA OOMMEN [Opens in a new window]
MEERA ANNA OOMMEN*
Affiliation:
Dakshin Foundation
*
Dakshin Foundation, C-305, Samvriddhi Gardenia, 88/3, Byatarayanapura, Bangalore560092, India[email protected]
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Abstract

As the sport that purportedly enhanced martial conditioning of the ‘dominant’ race, pig-sticking assumed critical importance for the survival of the British in India. When numerous local insecurities and large-scale anxieties threatened the empire, hunting pursuits involving the wily Indian pig, it was said, made soldiers out of boys; the attendant spectacles of masculinity aimed to exert symbolic dominance over the restive Indian masses. The sport also served as an avenue for upward mobility for the subaltern soldier attempting to upstage aristocratic hunting performances in England and India. While masculinity and symbolic governance have been analysed repeatedly in critiques of hunting, sportsmen's contributions to natural history have seen limited analyses. Here, I show that the local intricacies of pig-sticking motivated a superlative understanding of the Indian wild boar, a tricky, unpredictable customer with a vile temper, and a ready propensity to attack its pursuers. Pig-sticking entailed a multi-faceted immersion with both land and people, incorporating hybrid knowledge-making, shaped within the contact zone of indigenous and colonial encounter. Further, while agreeing with post-colonial critiques on sport and imperialism, I propose looking beyond colonial exceptionalism to situate big-game hunting within the larger scholarship on costly signalling and hunting for prestige among human societies.

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The Historical Journal , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , June 2021 , pp. 626 - 649
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Mahesh Rangarajan, Heather Goodall, A. J. T. Johnsingh, Deborah Nixon, Aarthi Sridhar, John Mathew, Madhuri Ramesh, and Kartik Shanker, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of the Historical Journal for helpful suggestions and edits.

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