Tiger-Hunting Expeditions — Shikar, Man-Eaters and the Changing Terai

An official's sport

Edward Braddon (1829–1904) was a British official who later became a politician in Tasmania. He spent much of his Indian career in Bengal and then, from 1862, in Oudh ^[1]. He wrote that he spent fifteen years there, touring its twelve districts for six months a year and covering about 3,000 miles annually ^{[1, p. 285]}.

His book has chapters titled "Mixed Shooting in Oudh" and "Station Life in Oudh", and it includes a map of "the Oudh forest tracts and Nepal Terai" ^[1]. Read together, these passages describe sport as an extension of administrative life. Tours of inspection doubled as shooting trips.

Expeditions in the Terai

Braddon's Terai chapters, as far as we could search them, mostly concern the forests of the Nepal Terai, across the border from Oudh. They do not mention Kheri or Dudhwa by name. They still convey the shape of an expedition:

• Elephants. Hunting parties moved on elephants, and tigers were shot from the howdah. Braddon describes the Maharaja of Balrampur, one of the Oudh landholders who sided with the British in 1857, as keeping about a hundred elephants and hunting tigers from his howdah ^{[1, p. 272]}.
• Hazards. Elephants could sink into quicksand. Braddon records a Chief Commissioner of Oudh spending days freeing one ^{[1, p. 235]}.
• Machans. In the Trans-Gogra (Ghaghara) country of Oudh, tigers were also shot from machans. Braddon notes these were only about ten feet high and gave little real protection ^{[1, p. 360]}.
• A peopled landscape. Even in the remote Terai the forest was not empty. Braddon writes that most of the people his parties met there were herdsmen from Oudh who had brought cattle for summer grazing ^{[1, p. 249]}. He also refers to Terai land that had once belonged to Oudh but had been ceded to Nepal ^{[1, p. 328]}.

These details matter because they show that the Terai of the hunting memoirs was a working landscape. It was grazed, crossed and contested, and its herders and forest people knew it far better than the visiting sportsmen.

The people behind the hunt

No colonial tiger hunt happened without local labour and local knowledge. The structure varied, but certain roles recur across the hunting literature:

• Mahouts handled the elephants.
• Trackers and shikaris read pugmarks and the alarm calls of deer and monkeys.
• Beaters drove animals through grass and forest towards the guns.
• Villagers reported kills of cattle and tied out bait.

Braddon's own text includes an attendant badly mauled by a panther and a beater fatally gored by a boar ^{[1, pp. 57–58]}, in hunts outside Oudh. It is a reminder of who carried the risk.

The knowledge of the Terai's forest communities, of where tigers moved, which grasslands flooded and where animals drank, was the foundation of every successful expedition. It is rarely credited in the memoirs, and it is the same knowledge good naturalists still draw on today.

"Man-eaters": a word with a history

The man-eater is the most famous figure in the literature of Indian tigers. It is also the most problematic.

Braddon's own man-eater chapters are set in Deoghur and Jamtara, far to the east in what is now Jharkhand, not in Oudh or the Terai ^{[1, pp. 178–212]}. The best-known man-eater stories of all, Jim Corbett's, concern Kumaon and Garhwal in the hills of what is now Uttarakhand. Neither should be borrowed to tell Dudhwa's story.

The term itself carried a great deal of assumption. In the nineteenth century a tiger that killed people might be labelled a man-eater without any way of knowing whether one animal or several was responsible. Many "man-eaters" were shot on circumstantial evidence. Today's guidance from India's National Tiger Conservation Authority is far stricter. It requires the individual animal to be identified, and it reserves the label "dangerous to human life" for a confirmed animal that deliberately hunts and feeds on people ^[2].

Sport, bounty and protection

Not all killing was sport. The colonial state also paid rewards for killing tigers, leopards and other animals it classed as dangerous. The historian Mahesh Rangarajan has studied this "campaign against dangerous beasts" between 1875 and 1925 ^[3]. Even forest officers who loved wildlife, such as F. W. Champion, argued in the 1920s and 1930s for reducing those rewards ^[4].

The turn towards protection came slowly, then decisively:

• 1935. India's first national park was created in the United Provinces, later named Corbett.
• 1970. By July 1970 tiger hunting was banned across India. The Delhi High Court upheld the ban in 1971 against challenges from commercial shikar companies ^[5].
• 1972. The Wild Life (Protection) Act was passed, and India's first all-India tiger census counted 1,827 tigers ^[5].
• 1973. Project Tiger was launched on 1 April 1973 ^[5].

The F. W. Champion story follows the parallel rise of wildlife photography.

Why it matters

The age of shikar explains why tigers in the Terai, and across India, came close to collapse by the mid-twentieth century. It also explains why the first conservation laws were so focused on stopping killing. And it holds an uncomfortable truth: the memoirs that made the Terai famous were written by visitors, while the people who knew the forest best are mostly absent from the record.

What this story tells us about Dudhwa today

The skills once used to find tigers for the gun, reading pugmarks, listening for alarm calls, knowing where animals rest in the heat, are the same skills used today to watch them. In that sense, a modern safari inherits the hunting tradition's field knowledge while rejecting its purpose. The landscape that hunters crossed on elephants is now protected precisely because the hunting nearly emptied it.

In closing

Braddon's Terai of howdahs and machans is gone. What survives in his pages is a picture of a forest full of people as well as animals, and of a relationship with tigers built on killing. The Terai's later history is the long work of replacing that relationship with protection, observation and, slowly, coexistence.