South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Resistance To Hunting In Pre-Independence India: Religious Environmentalism, Ecological Nationalism Or Cultural Conservation?, Ezra Rashkow

Department of History Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article presents new evidence with which to evaluate the validity of the popular picture of religious environmentalism in India. It examines accounts of a large number of incidents described in Indian language newspapers, the colonial archive, and hunting literature published between the 1870s and 1940s, in which British and other sportsmen clashed with villagers in India while out hunting. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the colonial sports-hunting obsession was in its heyday, but opposition to hunting across India was also mounting. Rural villagers, in particular, were often willing to become involved in physical combat with hunters, …