Wilding the domestic: Camp servants and glamping in British India

Ezra D. Rashkow
Additional contact information
Ezra D. Rashkow: Department of History, Montclair State University

The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2021, vol. 58, issue 3, 361-391

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Adivasis; environmental history; hunting; labour; wildness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00194646211020309 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indeco:v:58:y:2021:i:3:p:361-391

DOI: 10.1177/00194646211020309

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Indian Economic & Social History Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().