Contesting the man-eater animal(ity): changing paradigms of the colonial-colonised relationship.

This article is about the Indian man-eater tiger, through Jim Corbett's narratives, as an anthropocentric construct of animality in British India at the beginning of the twentieth century. During this transformative phase, the masculine idea of unrestricted sportsmanship against tigers struggles for its validity in the surge of game preservation. The paper argues, forthwith it is the hunting of a man-eater tiger that reinforces the British Crown's hegemony in the subcontinent by studying Corbett as a sort of metonym for imperial legitimacy that protected Indian populations from predation. The analysis sheds light on the politicisation of an animal's animality by highlighting a rare view of colonialism when the imperial power targets man–animal conflict via sharpening the biopolitical congeniality between the coloniser (the state) and the colonised human population. The paper advances on how the colonial and post-colonial state power unevenly exert the notion of conservation by infringing a tiger's identity from biopolitical to necropolitical subject when species (human and animal) share antagonistic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]