Abstract
Abstract
Whither the man-eater? This entity was once the prime interest of an entire league of famous sportsmen in colonial India, the engrossing content of many books, headline news and even the object of several statistical enumerations. Where our current-day sensitivities open up rather differently to the presence of man-eaters, or even the memory of its hunters, the article at hand explores some of the processes by which the man-eater was first constructed, and then dismantled by spokespersons of the wilds themselves. This erratic rise and fall of the man-eater is descriptive of changing power relations, the ephemeral yet pervasive axis between the colonial and the post-colonial, and the overall cunning of human society to represent animals for its own purposes. The role of certain technologies (such as the rifle, the camera and the realm of print) in a discourse of nature is so immanent at the site of the man-eater that it serves to inform the production of wilderness, as much as the making of the endangered in current times.
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