Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj explores representations of animals during British rule in India – the tigers, elephants, boars, furs, and feathers that sometimes all but obscured the human beneath and behind them, and that were integral in the creation and maintenance of the hierarchies of colonialism.
Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj exists on two levels: one offers a sophisticated view of how power and oppression work within constellations of species, race, class, gender, and nationhood, and the other is a deeply suggestive meditation on our humanness and how we locate it within a spectrum of relations. Drawing on a range of texts including hunting narratives, stories, poetry, novels, photographs, journals, paintings, and cartoons, the argument builds with a lucid and beautifully unobtrusive feel for the telling example.
- Foreword
- List of Illustrations
- Glossary
- Introduction: Why the Animal? Or, Can the Subaltern Roar, and Other Risky Questions. Some Theoretical Frameworks
- Animals, Children, and Street Urchins
- Herein the British Nimrod May View a New and Arduous Species of the Chase: Hunting narratives 1757-1857
- Our Rightful Claim to Superiority as a Dominant Race: Hunting narratives 1857-1947
- Animals, Humans, and Natural Laws: Kipling and Forster
- Making Kingdoms Out of Beasts
- Notes
- Illustration Credits
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Shefali Rajamannar is an associate director of the Upper Division in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California, USA.