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'A World of Stark Realities and the Rule of Tooth and Claw': Jim Corbett and Late Colonial Rule in British India

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'A World of Stark Realities and the Rule of Tooth and Claw': Jim Corbett and Late Colonial Rule in British India University of Bristol Department of Historical Studies Best undergraduate dissertations of 2013 Guy Chalk 'A World of Stark Realities and the Rule of Tooth and Claw': Jim Corbett and Late Colonial Rule in British India The Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol is com- mitted to the advancement of historical knowledge and understanding, and to research of the highest order. We believe that our undergraduates are part of that endeavour. In June 2009, the Department voted to begin to publish the best of the an- nual dissertations produced by the department’s final year undergraduates (deemed to be those receiving a mark of 75 or above) in recognition of the excellent research work being undertaken by our students. This was one of the best of this year’s final year undergraduate disserta- tions. Please note: this dissertation is published in the state it was submitted for examination. Thus the author has not been able to correct errors and/or departures from departmental guidelines for the presentation of dissertations (e.g. in the formatting of its footnotes and bibliography). © The author, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the prior permission in writing of the author, or as expressly permitted by law. All citations of this work must be properly acknowledged. 1020945 'A World of Stark Realities and the Rule of Tooth and Claw':1 Jim Corbett and Late Colonial Rule in British India Figure 1: Corbett and the 'Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag'2 History BA Dissertation 2013 Student Number: 1020945 Candidate Number: 40004 1 J. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Oxford 1944), 13. 2 D.C. Kala, Jim Corbett of Kumaon (London 2009), 84. 1 1020945 Contents Page Introduction 3 Chapter 1: Corbett the Sportsman 10 Chapter 2: Corbett and Colonial Governance 18 Chapter 3: Corbett and The Law of the Jungle 25 Conclusion 31 Appendix 33 Bibliography 36 2 1020945 Introduction 'Respected Sir, ...In this vicinity a tiger has turned out man-eater since December last. Up to this date he has killed 5 men and wounded 2. So we the public are in a great distress...The forest officials are doing every possible arrangement to kill this tiger but there is no hope of any success. 2 shikari gentlemen also tried to shoot it but unfortunately they could not get it. Our District Magistrate has notified Rs.150 reward for killing this tiger, so everyone is trying to kill it but no success. We have heard that your kind self have killed many man-eater tigers and leopards. For this you have earned a good name specially in Kumaon revenue Division. The famous man-eater leopard of Nagpur has been shoot by you. This is the voice of all the public here that this tiger also will be killed only by you. So we the public venture to request that you very kindly take trouble to come to this place and shoot this tiger (our enemy) and save the public from this calamity.'3 Few Englishmen have been held in higher esteem in Independent India than Jim Corbett. For more than half a century he has been remembered and celebrated as a compassionate and sympathetic man with exceptional environmental awareness. The renaming in 1957 of the famous Ramganga tiger sanctuary as the Corbett National Park, 'in memory of one who dedicated his life to the service of the simple hill folks of Kumaon',4 is a good indication of the respect in which his memory is held. Honoured as a friend to the people and the wildlife of India, Corbett is above all remembered as a great shikari; the famous slayer of man-eating tigers and leopards whose unparalleled success between 1907 and 1946, is credited with killing at least 33 man-eaters in the hill districts of Kumaon. His hunting exploits made Corbett's a household name among the scattered hamlets of the region where he was immortalised in 'a dozen folk songs and a thousand tales'5 and venerated by the Kumaoni people as a sadhu or holy man. 'Carpet Sahib' (as his name is often rendered by Kumaonis), 3 Extract from a petition sent to Jim Corbett 'by the people of Garhwal' on the 18th of February 1933, reprinted in Corbett, Man-Eaters, 154. 4 M. Booth, 'Corbett, Edward James (1875-1955)' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 2004), 2. 5 For example: 'In the whole of this wonderful orbit There will never be second Jim Corbett For his shikar fame and name Will remain just the same And to the end of time As Jim Corbett.' Kala, Jim Corbett, 150. 3 1020945 became and remains 'one of the small band of Europeans whose memory has been worshipped' in India.6 Yet Corbett's revered status as protector of the weak and pioneering conservationist is misleading. Few historian's today would dispute Michel Foucault's assertion that power, 'is both different from and more complicated, dense and pervasive than a set of laws or state apparatus'7 and Corbett's reputation overlooks his immersion within the 'various systems of subjugation' that constituted late colonial rule.8 This dissertation will explore Corbett's neglected part in the diffuse 'coercive networks'9 and technologies of power of colonial Indian society which, in his own words, 'made it possible for a handful of men to administer, for close on two hundred years, a vast subcontinent with its teeming millions.'10 Born in 1875 in the hill country of Naini Tal and raised in the Himalayan foothills, Edward James Corbett, better known as Jim, was the eighth child of a domiciled European family. First an employee of the railways, later the proprietor of a business in Naini Tal and member of the Naini Tal Municipal Board, Corbett maintained a lifelong association with various agencies of the colonial apparatus. At the age of ten, he was already a cadet in the Naini Tal Volunteer rifles. In the First World War Captain Corbett commanded his own Kumaoni labour corps of 500 men in France. On his return, he was promoted to major and served in the Waziristan campaign of the third Anglo-Afghan war (1919-20). For a short while in the 1920s, Corbett joined the Special Dacoity Police Force in pursuit of the notorious bandit and 'criminal' tribesman Sultana. Even in his mid sixties, he was awarded the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel for his training of Allied troops in jungle fighting techniques for the Second World War. At home Corbett governed his numerous Indian tenants with a 'fair but iron hand',11 zealously policing the surrounding forests as a 'self styled game warden'.12 Included among his close friends were Percy Wyndham (Kumaon District Commissioner), Malcolm Hailey (Governor of the United Provinces) and Lord Linlithgow (Viceroy of India). Certainly Corbett's description of himself as 'a mere man of the street, without any connection 13 to the Government' seems doubtful. 6 M. Hailey, 'Introduction' in J. Corbett, Tree Tops (London 1955), xii-xiii. 7 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings 1972-1977 (Brighton 1980), 159. 8 J. Weeks, 'Foucault for Historians', History Workshop, No.14, (Autumn 1982), 109. 9 T.C. Sherman, 'Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives of Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa and the Carribean', History Compass, Vol.7, issue 3 (May 2009), 659-677. 10 J. Corbett, My India (Oxford 1952), 161. 11 M. Booth, Carpet Sahib: A Life of Jim Corbett (Oxford 1991), 129. 12 Kala, Jim Corbett, 64. 13 J. Corbett, Jungle Lore (Oxford 1953), 122. 4 1020945 From boyhood, Corbett was intimately acquainted with the surrounding natural world, first making 'a hobby of reading and interpreting jungle signs'14 and soon initiated into that quintessential activity empire: hunting. Enshrined in Corbett's childhood was 'that day of days' when he was given his first gun,15 and by the time he was eleven he had shot his first leopard. In 1907 Corbett killed his first man-eater, inaugurating a vocation in which he enjoyed unparalleled success that eventually gained him global renown. Yet, although the combined depredations of the man-eaters that he dispatched over the next forty years were thought to have been responsible for over 1500 deaths, to Corbett the tiger remained 'a large- hearted gentleman'16 and he maintained that to classify the leopard 'as VERMIN, as is done in some parts of India, is a crime'.17 In the mid-1920s, amid the rapid and ongoing destruction of the India's wildlife, Corbett began to form nascent conservationist views, and by 1947 when he migrated to Kenya in the wake of Indian independence, Corbett was able to boast that he had 'earned the reputation for being keener on photographing animals than killing them.'18 Corbett's interaction with the natural world has been perceived generally to have been determined by a compassionate consideration for the vulnerable people and environment of Kumaon. However, one premise of environmental history is that the dialogue between humans and nature is worthy of historical investigation and can be 'reconceptualised as a sophisticated tool for telling better social, political, economic or any other histories'.19 Corbett was subject to the broader imperatives of colonial rule, and a consideration of the broader ecological and environmental context helps us to place him in perspective. Environmental historians of India have demonstrated processes of ecological degradation in which the exploitative colonial society to which Corbett belonged has been routinely cast in the part of the villain.20 Although historians such as Ramachandra Guha have been criticised for promoting a 'golden-ageist view of indigenous, pre-colonial uses of nature',21 there can be little doubt that colonialism involved unprecedented exploitation of the Indian environment.22 14 Corbett, Man-Eaters, 8.
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