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Pet Tigers as Loyal Dogs and National Icons in Modern India

Fri, March 17, 10:30am to 12:30pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Lower Concourse, Grand Ballroom West

Abstract

Indian princes and British colonials in South Asia regularly caught and kept wild tiger cubs as pets from at least the mid-eighteenth century onwards, usually as an auxiliary to other activities including hunting for sport, pursuing natural history, and maintaining a desirable public image. Private tiger-keeping peaked in India between the 1870s and 1930s, as it seems to have in England, but remained in vogue in the subcontinent among forest officers, politicians, and others enjoying privileged access to these animals and their natural habitats through the 1973 inauguration of Project Tiger. When it came to keeping tigers as pets in South Asia (as in the colonial metropole, the Federated Malay States, and elsewhere worldwide) the line between wild and tame was both insurmountable and, temporarily and conditionally, negotiable by human companions. Indian political conditions and evolving national identities determined the ways in which this divide proved permeable or not from the human side, but tigers had some say in these matters, too. Physically powerful megafauna preferring to act on their own impulses and recognizance, tigers fitfully occupied their intimate places in South Asian lives and beliefs as guard dogs and mischievous children, novelty acts and status symbols, national icons and diplomatic pawns, scientific experiments and honorary colleagues and family members. Through these roles, individual animals from the loyal Selim to the nationally-known and much beloved Khairi have continually reshaped popular understandings of what tigers as a species even are, such that political, cultural, and natural histories collapse into one.

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