¹ Stone, J. (1896). In and Beyond the Himalayas: A Record of Sport and Travel in the Abode of Snow. Edward Arnold. pp. 50–51Google Scholar.

² Forsyth, J. (1889). The Highlands of Central India: Notes on their forest and wild tribes, natural history and sport. Chapman and Hall. pp. 310–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Metcalf, T. 1997. Ideologies of the Raj. University of Cambridge Press. p. 34Google Scholar.

⁴ See Ludden, D. (1993). ‘Orientalism Empiricism: Transformation of Colonial Knowledge’ in Breckenridge, C. and Veer, P. (eds). Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspective on South Asia. University of Pennsylvania Press. PhiladelphiaGoogle Scholar. Also see Cohn, B. (1996). Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton University PressGoogle Scholar.

⁵ See Pandian, A. (2001). Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India. Journal of Historical Sociology 14 (1): 79–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sramek, J. (2006). Face him like a Briton: Tiger hunting, imperialism and British masculinity in colonial India. Victorian Studies 48 (4): 659–680CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ I agree with Martin Sokefeld who states that begar could ‘be understood and justified as part of the overall British civilizing mission: it disciplined the colonial subjects. The Resident in Kashmir, somewhat contradictorily, came to the cynical conclusion that these hardships were no actual hardships for the people of the agency because they were long accustomed to them and simply did not know otherwise’ (p. 954). See Sokefeld, Martin. (2005). From Colonialism to Post-colonialism: Changing Modes of Domination in the Northern Areas of Pakistan, The Journal of Asian Studies; November 2005; 64, 4: 939–973CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, MacDonald, Ken. (1998). Push and Shove: Spatial History and the Construction of a Portering Economy in Northern Pakistan, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1998) 40: 387–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Macdonald states that begar was also justified on the grounds of non-intrusion with the local customs and tradition (p. 295).

⁷ Hansen, T. and Stepputat, Finn. (2006). Sovereignty Revisited, Annual Reviews of Anthropology 35: 295–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Asad, T. (2004). ‘Where are the Margins of the State’ in Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole, D. (eds). Anthropology in the Margins of the State. School of American Research Press. Santa Fe. (2004)Google Scholar.

⁸ Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p. 1.

⁹ Ibid., p. 31.

¹⁰ Mehta, U. (1999). Liberalism and Empire: A Study in the Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. The University of Chicago Press. ChicagoGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Ibid, p. 19.

¹² Foucault, M. (1991). ‘Governmentality’ in Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter (eds). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. The University of Chicago Press. ChicagoGoogle Scholar.

¹³ See Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom. Cambridge University Press, p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ This position is consistent with Foucault's conception of power which is conceptualized as independent of threat of force and whose successful application acknowledges the agency of those on whom power is applied, In this sense power is about conducting the conduct. But Foucault also recognized power working at the level of sheer violence and force. I argue that governance worked as a sheer force or power in the case of begar, whose target objective was not the action (conduct) of the subjects but rather of their bodies.

¹⁵ See, for example Eaton, Richard (1996). The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. University of California PressGoogle Scholar; and Guha, Sumit (1999). Environment and Ethnicity in India 1200–1991: Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society. University of Cambridge PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ See for example Scott, James C., ‘The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia’, Yale University Press, 2009Google ScholarPubMed. Scott, writing about the conception of a pre-colonial state in Southeast Asia about various ethnicities in its domain, states, ‘Those on the mountaintops are the most backward and uncivilized; those living midslope are slightly more elevated culturally; those living in upland plateaus and growing irrigated rice are, again, more advanced, though certainly inferior to those at the core of the valley state, with the court and king at its apex, who represent the pinnacle of refinement and civilization’. (p. 100). See also Skaria, Ajay, 2001. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wilderness in Western India. Oxford University Press, 1999Google Scholar. Skaria argues that both the pre-colonial and colonial states saw Dang people of Western ghats, the hilly region, as jangli, wild, because of their harsh physical environment, known as dang, which offered resistance to travel and mobility. According to Skaria, the British saw the Dang, the people, as interchangeable with dang, the hostile place, because of the shared characteristic of stubbornness and intransigence. According to Skaria, the entire area ‘dang was cast in opposition to the entire plains’, p. 39.

¹⁷ See Das, Veena and Poole, Deborah, 2004. State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Das, V and Poole, D (eds). School of American Research Press. Santa Fe, p. 7Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Kipling, R. 1909. ‘The White Man's Burden’ in The Five Nations. Doubleday, Page and Co. New York. Pp. 79–81Google Scholar, Acknowledgements.

¹⁹ Pandian, Predatory Care, p. 83; Sramek, Face Him like a Briton, p. 672.

²⁰ Greenough, P. (2001). ‘Naturae Ferae: Wild Animals in South Asia and the Standard Environmental Narrative’ in Scott, James C. and Bhatt, Nina (eds). Agrarian Studies: Synthetic work at the Cutting Edge. University Press. New Haven. p. 150Google Scholar; Also see Sivaramakrishnan, K.. (1999). Modern Forest: State Making and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India. Stanford University PressGoogle Scholar. Sivaramakrishnan states that this kind of protective hunting was a form of state-making by the British colonialist. p. 91.

²¹ Pandian, Predatory Care, p. 88.

²² Rangarajan, M. (2001). India's Wildlife History. Permanent Black. DelhiGoogle Scholar.

²³ Hornaday, W. (1913). Our vanishing wild life; its extermination and preservation. New York Zoological Society. New York, p. 189Google Scholar.

²⁴ See for example, Skaria, Hybrid Histories, pp. 198–202 and Pandian, Predatory Care, pp. 84–85.

²⁵ Karanth, U Mel Sunquist and K. M. Chinnappa. n.d. Long Term Monitoring of Tigers: Lessons from Nagarahole. NWFW unpublished paper. http://www.nfwf.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=3032 [accessed 17 January 2011].

²⁶ Baker, J. M. (2000). ‘Colonial Influence on Property, Community and Land Use in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh’ in Agrawal, Arun and Sivaramakrishnan, K. (eds). Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations and Rule in India. Duke University PressGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Forsyth, Highlands of Central India, p. 267.

²⁸ Jalais, A. (2009). Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans. RoutledgeGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ See Bayly, C. (1988). Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. University of CambridgeCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sivaramakrishnan, K. (1999). Modern Forest: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India. Stanford University Press, pp. 90–92Google Scholar.

³⁰ Karanth, U. (1997). ‘The Tiger: Power and Fragility’, in Manfredi, Paola. Danger—Habitats, Species and People. Ranthambhore Foundation, IndiaGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Jim Corbett, the quintessential hunter of man-eating tigers, was an employee of the Railways.

³² Wood, H. (1934). Shikar Memories: A Record of Sport and Observation in Indian and Burma. H. F. and G. Witherby, p. 5Google Scholar.

³³ Greenough states that the penetration of agriculture into wild lands, in the pre-raj colonial period was not straightforward. There was a constant battle between agriculture and the wild lands, each struggling to overcome the other. He writes, ‘East India Company records from the 18^th century testify to the pressure of wildlife on cultivation, and the Revenue Department regarded the presence of wild animals inside village precincts as an economic barometer: as cultivation expanded wild animals retreated, and when cultivation contracted, wild animals advanced. Officials adopted novel measures like paying cash bounties for dead predators, justifying the costs by noting that marauding beasts kept down revenues’, Naturae Ferae, p. 147. See also K. Sivaramakrsihnan, Modern Forest, p. 91.

³⁴ See Gilbert, R. (1889). Notes on Man-eating Tigers in Journal of Bombay Natural History Society, Vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 195–206Google Scholar; Stebbing, E. P.. (1920). The Diary of a Sportsman Naturalist in India. John Lane, London, p. 229Google Scholar.

³⁵ Corbett, J. 1946. Man-Eaters of Kumaon (6th edition). Oxford University Press, p. 3Google Scholar.

³⁶ Rangarajan, India's Wildlife History, 2001.

³⁷ Almeida, H. and Gilpin, George, 2006. Indian Renaissance: British romantic art and the prospect of India. Ashgate Publishing Company, p. 39Google Scholar.

³⁸ See Wood, Shikar Memories, p. 81; Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India, p. 272. Rangarajan shows that native princes of India often used begar labour in the hunt in the form of beaters, India's Wildlife History, p. 166.

³⁹ Mangan argues that within the British (masculine) nationalist discourse, the British national character was built through exposure to real and physical danger in the frontier region. See Mangan, J. A. (1986). The Game Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of the Ideal. VikingGoogle Scholar. See also, Wallis, H. (1976). Review: The Exploration of the North American Interior, The Geographical Journal 142 (2): 303–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Windholz, A. (2000). An Emigrant and a Gentleman: Imperial Masculinity, British Magazines, and the Colony that Got Away, Victorian Studies 42: 631–658CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Karen Wonders states that the display of trophies symbolized a hunter's appropriation of some of the character and qualities associated with the species and its habitat. Wonders, K. (2005). Hunting narratives in the age of empire: A gender reading of their iconography, Environment and History 11 (3): 269–292CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ In the first half of the nineteenth century the British sportsmen used indigenous methods of hunting without contempt. The hunting codes that prevailed in the late nineteenth century were, however, distinctly and consciously British, in the sense that they were different from the indigenous methods and imported from the European and English hunting experience. See Pandian, Predatory Care, p. 83.

⁴¹ Lydekker, R. (1924). The Game Animals of India, Burma, Malaya, and Tibet. Rowland Ward, Limited ‘The Jungle’. London, p. 307Google Scholar.

⁴² Forsyth, Highlands of Central India, p. 274.

⁴³ Pandian, Predatory Care, p. 84.

⁴⁴ Gilbert, Notes on Man-eating Tigers, p. 195.

⁴⁵ Sanderson, G. P., 1912. Thirteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India. John Grant, p. 269Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Rangarajan states, for example, ‘unlike parts of Bengal, there were large regions in southern India where man-eating tiger was virtually unheard off’, India's Wildlife History, p. 29.

⁴⁷ Greenough shows that perhaps equal numbers of people were killed by other wild animals, especially from snake bites, but we do not see any tradition of British hunting snakes, Naturae Ferae, p. 234.

⁴⁸ Younghusband, F. 1896. Heart of a Continent—a Narrative of Travels in Manchuria, Across the Gobi Desert, the Pamirs, the Himalayas and Chitral. John Murray. London, p. 64Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Ibid, p. 211.

⁵⁰ Duncan, J. 1906. A Summer Ride Through Western Tibet. Smith Elder and Co. London, p. 11Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, the region was called ‘Yaghistan’ land of ungovernable, savages.

⁵² Visser-hooft, Jenny. 1925. Among the Karakoram Glaciers in 1925. Edward Arnold. London, p. 29Google Scholar.

⁵³ Skaria has descried a similar sentiment amongst colonial officers towards the hilly tracts of the western ghats. Harsh landscape that hindered movement was considered part of the habitus of the people who lived there. They were considered as intractable and intransigence, Hybrid Histories, p. 54.

⁵⁴ Lawrence, W. (1895). The Valley of Kashmir. Henry Frowde: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar. Lawrence describes that towards the end of the nineteenth century more than half the population of Kashmir of around 814,000 was eligible to provide begar, pp. 411–412.

⁵⁵ Ibid, p. 413.

⁵⁶ The Srinagar-Gilgit road was not the only road on which the British and European hunters travelled and where begar was practiced, another popular route among travellers, hunters and explorers was the Leh-Skardu road. From Skardu, travellers could join the Srinagar-Gilgit road in Astor. In this paper I focus on both routes.

⁵⁷ Koenigsmarek, H. (1910). The Markhor: Sport in Cashmere. Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner and Co., Ltd. London. pp. 94–95Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Shikari is an Urdu word which simply means a hunter. The professional shikaris who assisted the colonial officer were themselves mostly current or ex-hunters, who used their skills in the existing commercial opportunities.

⁵⁹ Brig-GeneralKinloch, Alexander A. A., 1892. Large Game Shooting in Thibet, The Himalayas, Northern And Central India. (Third Edition). Thacker, Spink and Co. Calcutta, p. 266Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 266.

⁶¹ Haughton, H. L. 1913. Sport and Folklore in The Himalayas. Edward Arnold. London, p. 346Google Scholar.

⁶² Stone, In and Beyond Himalayas, pp. 50–51.

⁶³ Lawrence, The Valley of Kashmir, p. 415.

⁶⁴ In order to develop their competing authority and sovereignty in the region, the British officers made a sharp distinction between themselves and Kashmiri rulers. One of the ways in which they did this was by arguing that their rule was based on the ideas of ‘liberality, justice and courtesy’. See Sokefeld, From Colonialism to Post-colonialism, p. 949.

⁶⁵ Stone, In and Beyond Himalayas, p. 12.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 14.

⁶⁷ Kinloch, Large Game Shooting in Thibet, p. 262.

⁶⁸ Duncan, A Summer Ride Through Western Tibet, p. 7.

⁶⁹ Lawrence, The Valley of Kashmir, pp. 245–246. Baltis are the inhabitants of Baltistan, but the name here refers to the general portering class of the region.

⁷⁰ Lawrence, The Valley of Kashmir, p. 413.

⁷¹ Ibid., pp. 413–415. Also see Sokefeld who states, ‘The British, however, were not “humane” to the extent of abolishing this practice’, From Colonialism to Postcolonialism, p. 953.

⁷² Officials of the state often used the begar system to employee free labour to bring their personal property of wasteland under cultivation. The result was that many peasants had to abandon their own fields, which were tax-bearing properties, and worked on the land of an official of the state, who had been awarded wasteland as jagir (estate). These wastelands were not subject to tax, so through the transfer of labour from their own, tax-bearing fields, to the development of the wasteland, which were non-tax bearing, the system helped officials enrich themselves at the expense of the state and the peasants.

⁷³ Macdonald, When Push Comes to Shove, p. 294.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 295.

⁷⁵ Duncan, A Summer Ride Through Western Tibet, p. 7.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 185.

⁷⁷ As Colonel Koenigsmarek, writes, ‘In the width and thickness of its antlers and branches the barasingh of Cashmere is not far behind the wapiti. And where is the sportsmen whose heart will not beat harder when stalking a markhor, at the sight of this king of rocks, with his majestic, spreading, twisting horns, peculiar to himself!’, The Markhor, p. 72.

⁷⁸ For example Stone, when writing about shooting an ibex and how it represents a ‘fair’ hunt, states: ‘But the ibex is a gentleman in his manners and customs as compared with his spiral-horned cousin lower down mountain; he gives you all the chances that a fair-minded animal should give an honest foe. He is nevertheless “all there” when reading his ancestral hills, and, after you have circumvented him, you feel that he has been a worthy opponent’, In and Beyond the Himalayas, p. 27.

⁷⁹ Guha, Ranajit, 1997. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Harvard University PressGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁰ See Sivaramakrishnan, K. 2002. Situating the Subalterns: History and Anthropology in Subaltern Studies Project, in Reading Subaltern Studies. Ludden, David (ed.). Anthem Press, LondonGoogle Scholar.

⁸¹ Martin Sokefeld described that in the Hunza state of the western Himalayas the British were able to win the support of the local population for their rule, From Colonialism to Post-colonialism, pp. 962–969.