Book Title: Hunting In Shadows Of Raj
Author(s): Philip Wollen
Publisher: Philip Wollen

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________________ My community, basically Christian, Anglo-Indian, middle class were ghosts. At one level, with a foot in both camps. British and Indian. But, in the deepest sense, disembodied souls with feet in no camps. But this is not an analysis of the complex chessboard of my early life. It is simply my childhood memories of one aspect of life in our community in those fractured days. It centres on "hunting". Today it is just a verb or a noun. But in those days it was sport, a way of life, a badge of honour, a marker of one's place in the vast tapestry of communities, and an accepted norm of cruelty in an otherwise sophisticated and enlightened civilization. As a teenage boy, I was taken on two so-called "shooting trips” by a renowned "shikari” (Hindi for "hunter"). In those unenlightened days, hunting in India was considered a manly sport, practiced mainly, but not exclusively, by those who were part of the departing British or the remnants left behind, vainly hoping that their way of life would continue as before. The first "shoot" was a "day-shoot" with "beaters”. Barefoot and impoverished villagerswere hired to strategically descend in a lateral ribbon-line from the hilltops through the lantana scrub and "wait-a-bit" thorns, making an unholy racket with drums, bells and horns. The objective was to frighten whatever wild animals were hiding, or more likely cowering, out of their jungle cover into the deadly path of a rifle bullet. Panther, peacock, wild boar, bear, jungle fowl... it didn't seem to matter. A smorgasbord of murderous opportunitiesaccompanied by an orchestrated cacophony of noise and terror. I confess that on that day,I saw nothing and remember even less. I spent the whole day on my own, crawling through the scrub, on hands and knees, trying unsuccessfully to visit the nests of nocturnal nightjars and fire flies! Or searching for "bloodsuckers", an ill-fitting name of for these beautiful,

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