How can a jungle be domestic, and a camp servant be a domestic servant? This article argues for a reconceptualisation of historical forests and jungles of India: spaces usually conceived of as wild and hostile in the popular imagination were also a domestic realm. Pushing the boundaries of traditional conceptualisations of both domestic and wild, I examine the lives of late nineteenth to early twentieth-century camp servants and colonial officers living and working in the central Indian hinterland. Building on my work on populations I have referred to as ‘subaltern shikaris’, typically ‘tribal’ employees in British big game hunting expeditions, and drawing from a vast literature left behind by European forest officers and big game hunters in central India, this article shows how servants and servitude were vital to establishing that jungle camps could indeed be quite domestic.
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