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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2020
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.
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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84 Ibid., p. 114.
85 Colonial policies perpetrated a hugely problematic categorization of several itinerant groups as the ‘Criminal Tribes’. Low on the caste ladder and branded hereditary criminals, they were persecuted by colonial authorities and Indian caste communities. However, centuries of wanderings over the subcontinent endowed these enigmatic groups with superlative skills in hunting and tracking and natural history.
86 Wardrop, Modern pig-sticking, p. 218.
87 Ibid., p. 105.
88 Newall, Hog-hunting in the East, p. 127.
89 Moray Brown, Shikar sketches, p. 21.
90 Baden-Powell, Pigsticking, pp. 52, 53.
91 Ibid., p. 53.
92 Newall, Hog-hunting in the East, p. 234.
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109 The ‘annexation of natural knowledge’ was justified by the existing military culture. The extraordinarily large Indian army was at the forefront of colonial expansion and hence in a position to acquire knowledge and to spread European practices, Sivasundaram, ‘Trading knowledge’, p. 31.
110 For example, Sivasundaram, ‘Trading knowledge’; Raj, Relocating modern science; Beinart and Hughes, Environment and empire; Lorimer and Whatmore, ‘After the “king of beasts”’; John Mathew, ‘To fashion a fauna for British India’ (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard, 2011).
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125 Wardrop, Modern pig-sticking, p. 78.
