Tigers in Fiction: An Aspect of the Colonial Encounter

Those of us who are old enough to have seen that Stewart Granger film entitled Harry Black and the Tiger were treated to all the essential ingredients of a typical tiger-shoot in Anglo-India — blazing sun and tall grass, sunburned Englishman and his trusty rifle, a beautiful but unsatisfied woman somewhere in the background, the 'native' tracker and his mysterious intention (a role played to perfection by I.S. Johar), finally the great black-and-yellow beast leaping. That film was based on the novel Harry Black (1956) by David Walker who served in the British Army in India from 1932 to 1936. The story is set in post-independence India, but the novel is closely related to an ambiguous aspect of Anglo-Indian fiction which originated in a fact of British life in India.