THE RAJ AND THE PARADOXES OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION: BRITISH ATTITUDES AND EXPEDIENCIES

Abstract

AbstractThis article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers.