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It began right at the top with Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India between 18. īut even as hunting continued unabated, at the turn of the century an attitudinal shift to hunting in general was gradually taking hold in the upper circles of the colonial government. Gee estimated that at the beginning of the twentieth century Indian tigers numbered around 40,000, and by 1964 their numbers had dwindled to a meagre 4,000. According to one popular estimation, 80,000 tigers were killed between 18.
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These were the days of flamboyant empire, with little or no restriction on hunting activities. Colonel Julius Barras wrote about his long adventure-filled career in India in a two-volume India and Tiger-Hunting (1885). In The Wild Sports of India (1857), Bengal Army Captain Henry Shakespear recommended hunting because it was the perfect masculine sport to keep British soldiers away from alcohol and women. For example, in his vividly illustrated hunting book Tiger Shooting in India (1857), Lieutenant William Rice boasted of being an expert on tiger shooting. Most shikar memoirs were written either by vacationing army men or foresters, who had ready access to forests they looked after. Shikar literature popularly glorified adventure, exploration, and collaboration with the natives during the hunt. During the Victorian era – the heyday of the tiger hunt – there emerged an extensive hunting literature devoted to shikar, the Hindustani and Anglo-Indian term for the hunt. Tiger hunts have remained enduring images of extravagance and might of the British Empire in India, and inspired a widely popular imperial mythology as perhaps most famously portrayed in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). Tiger hunts in India have a rich history of their own, and that Exeter has somehow been made part of that history had me intrigued. They raise our environmental guilt, they remind us of nature’s destruction in the hands of man. Like any responsible museum, RAMM’s curators have taken care to send a nuanced message through its natural history exhibits. The accompanying plaque states that the King presented tiger skins to British museums so that visitors who have never seen a tiger could meet one face-to-face. Exeter’s Bengal tiger was one of 39 tigers the King had killed during his hunting excursion in Nepalese Terai in 1911 – the year of his grand Coronation Durbar in India. Indian Institute of Information Technologyĭuring my trip to Exeter to attend the Britain and the World Conference earlier this year, I discovered that the Royal Bengal Tiger on display in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) was a gift from King George V (1865 – 1936). Bengal Tiger, Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), Exeter.