Her Majesty’s Servants: the Tame and the Wild under the British Raj
Issue: Vol 7 No. 1-3 (2013) Vol. 7, No. 1/No. 2 (Double) 2013
Journal: Religions of South Asia
Subject Areas: Religious Studies Buddhist Studies Islamic Studies
Abstract:
Through an analysis of colonial and orientalist literature, this article will show how South Asian fauna, through the lenses of Colonial enterprise, came to epitomize a whole system of social relations which can be easily tri-partite: the ruler, the ruled and the unruly. The complex colonial apparatus of dominance and repression clearly surfaces in many of the texts produced by the literates working, living or simply travelling through the British Indian Empire. Fascination for the wildest creatures of the jungle or the domesticated flocks reflected and re-shaped discourses about Western dominance. Eventually it entered European culture and modified our perception of South Asia. As long as the boundaries between the human and the non-human remain thin and blurred, non-human animals were rapidly equated to the human subjects of the Empire. The imperialist discourse, a mythology in the making, was made up of a series of performative utterances used to conveniently describe and to shape the new world. A world to be subjugated, tamed and ruled upon by a self-appointed superior authority. The living landscape of South Asia cannot escape the literary cage of the Empire. Human and nonhuman indigenous animals, or even the hybrid system they form, are discussed like a vast, uncharted and uncanny new territory to conquest with sword and pen alike. The article eventually argues that the colonialism of the mind exerted by the British Empire did not spare non-human animals and such perdurable effects still linger and affect uncritical policies of exploitation.
Author: Davide Torri
References :
Asad, T. (ed.). 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press.
Benson, A. C., and R. Baliol Brett Esher (eds). 1908. The Letters of Queen Victoria. A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861 (3 vols.). London: John Murray.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Brantlinger, P. 1988. The Rule of Darkness. British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
— 2009. Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Brontë, C. 1847. Jane Eyre. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Chamberlain, J. 1897. ‘A Young Nation.’ In J. Chamberlain, Foreign and Colonial Speeches: 89. London: Routledge.
Cosslett, T. 2006. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction 1786–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Croker, B. M. 1896. Diana Barrington: A Romance of Central India. London: Chatto & Windus.
Denenholz-Morse, D. 2007. ‘“The Mark of the Beast”: Animals as Sites of Imperial Encounter from Wuthering Heights to Green Mansions.’ In Denenholz-Morse and Danahay: 181–200.
Denenholz-Morse, D., and M. A. Danahay (eds). 2007. Animal Victorian Dreams. Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate.
Edwards, M. 1953. ‘Rudyard Kipling and the Imperial Imagination.’ The 20th Century 153: 443–54.
Galton, F. 1872. The Art of Travel. London: John Murray.
Green, M. 1979. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. New York: Basic Books.
Greenberg, A. S. 2005. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberger, A. 1969. The British Image of India. A Study in the Literature of Imperialism 1880–1960. London: Oxford University Press.
Jahoda, G. 1999. Images of Savages: Ancients Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Kipling , R. 1894. The Jungle Book. London: Macmillan.
— 1895. The Second Jungle Book. London: Macmillan.
— 1960. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse Definitive Edition. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
— 1994. The Jungle Books. London: Penguin.
Kutzer, M. D. 2000. Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Book. New York: Garland Publishing.
Leighton, M. E., and L. Surridge. 2007. ‘The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized Crocodile of the Nineteenth Century.’ In Denenholz-Morse and Danahay: 249–70.
Mclure, J. A. 1981. Kipling and Conrad. The Colonial Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mukherjee, S. 1987. ‘Tigers in Fiction: An Aspect of the Colonial Encounter.’ Kunapipi 9(3): 1–13.
— 1993. Forster and Further: the Tradition of Anglo-Indian Fiction. Mumbai: Orient Longman.
Murray, J. 1992. ‘The Law of the Jungle Books.’ Children’s Literature 20: 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/chl.0.0579
Nyman, J. 2003. Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee. New Delhi: Atlantic.
Paffard, M. 1989. Kipling’s Indian Fiction. London: Macmillan & Co.
Randall, D. 1998. ‘Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40(1): 97–120.
Ritvo, H. 1987. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Saïd, E. 1989. ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.’ Critical Inquiry 15(2): 205–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/448481
— 1994 (1993). Culture and Imperialism. Reprint. New York: Knopf.
Saminaden, A., S. Loughnan and N. Haslam. 2010. ‘Afterimages of Savages: Implicit Associations between Primitives, Animals and Children.’ British Journal of Social Psychology 49(1): 91–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/014466609X415293
Schell, H. 2007. ‘Tiger Tales.’ In Denenholz-Morse and Danahay: 231–48. Farnham: Ashgate.
Worth, A. 2008. ‘All India Becoming Tranquil: Wiring the Raj.’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9(1): 1–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cch.2008.0013