Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T00:44:53.086Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Strange Ecologies of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Parama Roy Open the ORCID record for Parama Roy [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay reads nineteenth-century imperial India as the mise en scène for certain critical concatenations of human sovereignty, divinity, and animality. It does so by focusing on the imperial state's war upon human and extrahuman forms of predation, showcasing in the process a cluster of texts on collective criminal activity, hunting, and popular religion and folklore that share certain grids of intelligibility and vocabularies of rule. Collocating these texts on human and nonhuman predation brings into visibility the degree to which imperial sovereignty in the Victorian period entails traffic across human and extrahuman domains. Thus, thinking about the sanctioned killing of fearsome animal predators comes to be twinned with thinking about wars of pacification against dangerous humans and noxious deities. To think imperial sovereignty consequently involves thinking with humans and animals but also thinking with mutually antagonistic theological forces, Hindu and Christian—and in thinking these together. An attentiveness to these heterogeneous ecologies of empire might serve to illuminate the degree to which the imperial project depends on a complex mesh of transversal and co-constitutive life-forms and forces.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 49 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: The Wide Nineteenth Century , Spring 2021 , pp. 73 - 105
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Allsen, Thomas T. The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, John Henry. Preface to The Large and Small Game of Bengal. London: Henry S. King, 1876.Google Scholar
Bates, Crispin. “Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of Indian Anthropometry.” Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, no. 3 (1995): 2–35.Google Scholar
Baucom, Ian. “The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life.” Polygraph 18 (2006): 166–90.Google Scholar
Brittlebank, Kate. “Sakti and Barakat: The Power of Tipu's Tiger.” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 2 (1995): 257–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Time of History and the Times of Gods.” In The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lowe, Lisa and Lloyd, David, 35–61. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Chatterji, Bankimchandra. Anandamath. Bengal, 1882.Google Scholar
Chirol, Valentine. Indian Unrest. London: Macmillan, 1910.Google Scholar
Chrulew, Matthew. “Feline Divinanimality: Derrida and the Discourse of Species in Genesis.” Bible and Critical Theory 2 (2006): 18.1–18.23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copland, Ian. “Christianity as an Arm of Empire: The Ambiguous Case of India under the Company, c. 1813–1858.” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 1025–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copland, Ian, Mabbett, Ian, Roy, Asim, Brittlebank, Kate, and Bowles, Adam. A History of State and Religion in India. London: Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Crane, Ralph, and Fletcher, Lisa. “Picturing the Indian Tiger: Imperial Iconography in the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Literature and Culture 42 (2014): 369–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crooke, William. The Religion and Folklore of Northern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926.Google Scholar
Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, William. The Last Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.Google Scholar
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts. London: Verso, 2001.Google Scholar
Davis, Richard. Lives of Indian Images. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “And Say the Animal Responded?” Translated by Wills, David. In Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Wolfe, Cary, 121–46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Translated by Bennington, Geoffrey. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.Google Scholar
De Tassy, Garcin. Muslim Festivals in India and Other Essays. Trans. Waseem, M.. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: Penguin, 2009.Google Scholar
Eden, Emily. “Up the Country”: Letters to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India. Vol. 1. London: Richard Bentley, 1866.Google Scholar
Fayrer, Joseph. “Destruction of Life by Wild Animals and Venomous Snakes in India.” Journal of the Society of Arts (February 8, 1878): 187–204.Google Scholar
Fayrer, Joseph. The Royal Tiger of Bengal: His Life and Death. London: J. & A. Churchill, 1875.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernando, Mayanthi. “Supernatureculture.” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere. https://tif.ssrc.org/2017/12/11/supernatureculture (accessed 5 November 2019).Google Scholar
Frazer, James G. Golden Bough. 3rd ed. 12 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1906–15.Google Scholar
Freitag, Sandria B. “Collective Crime and Authority in North India.” In Crime and Criminality in British India, ed. Yang, Anand, 140–61. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Ganguli, Kalyan Kumar. “The Concept of Vahana in Indian Iconography.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 28 (1966): 107–12.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006.Google Scholar
Gordon, Stewart. “Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State-Formation in 18th Century Malwa.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 6, no. 4 (1969): 403–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenough, Paul. “Naturae Ferae: Wild Animals in South Asia and the Standard Environmental Narrative.” In Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge, ed. Scott, James C. and Bhatt, Nina, 141–85. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Hensley, Nathan K., and Steer, Philip, eds. Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Herbert, Christopher. War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Hughes, Julie E. Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humes, Cynthia Ann. “Wrestling with Kali: South Asian and British Constructions of the Dark Goddess.” In McDermott and Kripal, Encountering Kali, 145–68.Google Scholar
Jalais, Annu. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics, and Environment in the Sundarbans. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.Google Scholar
Ker, James Campbell. Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1917.Google Scholar
Kingsley, Charles. Hypatia. London: John W. Parker, 1853.Google Scholar
Kinsley, David R. The Sword and the Flute: Kali and Krsna, Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Bridge-Builder.” In Day's Work, ed. Pinney, Thomas, 3–50. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, John M. The Empire of Nature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
MacMunn, George Fletcher. The Religions and Hidden Cults of India. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1932.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majeed, Javed. Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's “History of British India” and Orientalism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshman, John Clark. The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward: Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission. 2 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1859.Google Scholar
Mayo, Katherine. Mother India. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927.Google Scholar
McDermott, Rachel Fell. Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The Fortunes of Hindu Festivals. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDermott, Rachel Fell, and Kripal, Jeffrey J., eds. Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mehtta, Megnaa. “Nonhuman Governance: Reconceiving Political Potency through a Muslim Forest Deity in the Sundarbans of India” (unpublished paper). “Questions of the Nonhuman: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia” conference. Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Columbia University, 14–15 November 2019.Google Scholar
Miller, John. Empire and the Animal Body. London: Anthem, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morse, Deborah Denenholz, and Danahay, Martin A., eds. Victorian Animal Dreams. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pandian, Anand. “The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India.” Journal of Historical Sociology 14, no. 1 (2001): 79–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pennington, Brian K. Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rajamannar, Shefali. Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rangarajan, Mahesh. Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India's Central Provinces, 1860–1914. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Rangarajan, Mahesh. “The Raj and the Natural World: The War against ‘Dangerous Beasts’ in Colonial India.” Studies in History 14, no. 2 (1998): 265–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rangarajan, Padma. “Thug Life: Confession, Subjectivity, Sovereignty.” ELH 84 (2017): 1005–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rashkow, Ezra. “Resistance to Hunting in Pre-independence India: Religious Environmentalism, Ecological Nationalism or Cultural Conservation?” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 2 (2015): 270–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Roy, Parama. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russell, R. V., and Hiralal, Rai Bahadur. The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India. Vol. 4. London: Macmillan, 1916.Google Scholar
Savory, Isabel. A Sportswoman in India. London: Hutchinson, 1900.Google Scholar
Schell, Heather. “Tiger Tales.” In Morse and Danahay, Victorian Animal Dreams, 230–48.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Carl. The “Nomos” of the Earth in the “Jus Publicum Europaeum.” Translated by Ulmen, G. L.. New York: Telos, 2006.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by Schwab, George. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Scott, J. Barton. Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shakespear, Henry. The Wild Sports of India. London: Smith, Elder, 1860.Google Scholar
Singha, Radhika. A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Sleeman, James. Thug, or a Million Murders. London: Sampson Low, Marsten, 1918.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William Henry. History of the Thugs or Phansigars of India. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1839.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William Henry. Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs. Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, 1836.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William Henry. Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. Vol. 1. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William Henry. Report on the Depredations Committed by the Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India. Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, 1840.Google Scholar
Sleeman, William Henry. “To the Editor of the Calcutta Literary Gazette (anonymous).” Calcutta Literary Gazette, Sunday, October 3, 1830.Google Scholar
Smith, W. Robertson. Religion of the Semites. London: Black, 1889.Google Scholar
Traisnel, Antoine. “Huntology: Ontological Pursuits and Still Lives.” diacritics 40, no. 2 (2012): 4–25.Google Scholar
Urban, Hugh B. “‘India's Darkest Heart’: Kali in the Colonial Imagination.” In McDermott and Kripal, Encountering Kali, 169–95.Google Scholar
Van Woerkens, Martine. The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India. Translated by Tihanyi, Catherine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Waghorne, Joanne Punzo. “Vahanas: Conveyers of the Gods.” In Living Wood: Sculptural Traditions of Southern India, ed. Michell, George, 15–28. Bombay: Marg, 1992.Google Scholar
Westermarck, Edvard. The History of Human Marriage. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1891.Google Scholar
Westermarck, Edvard. Origin and Development of Moral Ideas. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1906, 1908.Google Scholar