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Description
This essay examines the "imperial manhood" of the British Empire as constructed in relation to class, nature, and the hunt in Jim Corbett's The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. The essay argues that Corbett re-fashions this masculinity through his burgeoning environmentalism, attempting to maintain his identity despite the empire's dissolution.
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Despite enormous popularity in the years following World War II, when his books were international best-sellers translated into sixteen languages, Jim Corbett's tales of man-eating cats in the Indian jungles of the early twentieth century receive relatively scant critical attention today, even with the growth of interest in nature writing and environmental literature. In India, where he is recognized as a formative nature writer whose books remain in print and continue to sell, and as the man for whom the nation's oldest National Park is named, ink is generally spilled over Corbett's biography rather than over analysis of his works. However, Corbett's writing calls for scholarly attention, both for its vivid and knowledgeable portrayal of Indian jungle life, and, perhaps more significantly, for the insight it provides into a masculine consciousness that is, at once, complexly colonialist and deeply concerned with the plight of the natural world. A careful reading of Corbett probes the complex interaction among masculinity, nature, and empire, showing how none of these can be understood without the other. In the process, Corbett offers us a venue for thinking about the ways in which much of contemporary global environmentalism is the inheritor of empire, and the urgent need to come to terms with that inheritance, exorcising the ghosts of colonial consciousness even as we recognize their contributions to conservation. (1)
Scott Slovic has recently called for a reconsideration of our understanding of the relationship between masculinity and nature under a heading that he terms "ecomasculinism." Slovic suggests that the tendency of "ecofeminism" has been to blame men for the desecration of nature and argues that "ecomasculinism" would serve to counter this trend with images of men acting in sensitive and beneficial ways in the natural world (67-80, esp. 72, 78). Despite the fact that my project shares various elements that Slovic attributes to ecomasculinism, I am rather leery of the neologism and the ideological weight it suggests. One reason for this leeriness is that the term, like much of the recent eco-prefix profusion, seems to focus on the subject matter of inquiry rather than the critical tools with which it will be pursued. Perhaps even more so, it seems so bound up with its (certainly important) environmental message that this agenda takes precedence over the dynamics of individual texts. (2) My focus in this essay is not so much to redeem the image of men vis-a-vis nature and environment, but rather to explore the ways in which the deceptively simple form of the hunting story allows Corbett to develop a remarkably nuanced and complex style in which his environmentalism seems to arise as a re-fashioning of the imperialist masculinity in which he was raised. This, in turn, offers insight into the position of a masculinity inherited from imperialisms of the past within the current global environmental movement.
Corbett's The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag opens on "The Pilgrim Road" (3) where Corbett details the hardships that "you," the reader whom he casts as a hypothetical Hindu pilgrim, will face as you perform the arduous pilgrimage to Kedarnath and Badrinath. Corbett walks beside you for a few pages, until the road reaches Rudraprayag "where you and I, my pilgrim friend, must part, for your way lies across the Alaknanda and up the left bank of the Mandakini to Kedarnath, while mine lies over the mountains to my home in Nani Tal" (4). This opening chapter introduces several of the key motifs that I will highlight in the text and, most significantly, offers us a glimpse into the significance its writing holds for Corbett. Corbett will himself walk much of the road that he describes over the course of the text and his hunt for the man-eater.
Despite the fact that Corbett never firmly identifies himself as a "pilgrim," he too is, at the least, a traveller on the "pilgrim road." (4) Thus, writing The Man Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag constitutes, for Corbett, a pilgrimage of sorts, into the utopian space of the British Raj, literally a "no place" in that he worried that Independence heralded not merely the end of the Raj, but its erasure from memory (Guha vii). The text seems haunted by the possibility that the Raj was fantastical, that it, in fact, never existed as imagined. This anxiety parallels the reflections of many exiled writers who engage with home as a space of memory that often feels like a mirage. Salman Rushdie, for instance, speaks of adding colour to a black and white picture of home through his fiction, thus envisioning the act of writing as a desperate attempt not only to preserve the lost homeland, but to maintain agency within it and re-form a sense of identity in relation to it (9). Both dynamics are vital to our understanding of Corbett as he attempts to wrestle with the end of the Raj, and, with it, many of the traditions in which his sense of identity as a noted hunter and British Indian man were fashioned, in order to maintain a coherent, habitable identity rather than becoming an anachronism.
If the imagined homeland of the Raj is the site of Corbett's pilgrimage, however, its object is the leopard. And it is around the leopard that the intersecting strands of signification become so densely intertwined that separating them becomes almost impossible. A great deal of the rhetorical energy directed at the leopard in the text takes the form of Corbett's attempt to prove the man-eater a "natural" being, a leopard, rather than a supernatural "fiend" or "evil spirit." Far from fixing the leopard in place, however, the result is a profusion of leopards as multiple layers of signification are added to the cat's presence, as elusive a signifier as it is a creature of the night. If we can attribute a specific object to Corbett's pilgrimage, it is to "hunt the leopard down" not only in the physical sense, but also to identify and pin it to a particular meaning, thereby fixing Corbett's own identity in relation to it. This, in turn, offers us great insight into the ways in which Corbett's imperial masculinity is constantly fashioned and re-fashioned by the pursuit of the leopard as both animal and symbol, opening avenues for new understanding of the complex interactions between masculinity and nature.
In order to understand the significance of the transformation that Corbett's textual "pilgrimage" enables, a few words of context are helpful, regarding both the text and the position of both man and leopard under the Raj. The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag was published in 1947, the year of Indian independence and Corbett's self-expatriation to Kenya--a time of tumult within Corbett's own psyche, the British Empire at large, and in an India wracked by the horrors of Partition. Throughout the centuries of its development, the British Empire had been seen as, in many respects, a manifestation of the disciplined, rational virility of Britain's manhood, a... |
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