शिकार

Shikar comes from Persian shikār (شکار), meaning hunting or game. The word entered Hindi and Urdu centuries before the British arrived, carried by Persian-speaking Mughal administrators who were themselves passionate hunters. Mughal emperor Jahangir kept detailed hunting journals in the early 1600s, recording every animal killed with the precision of a naturalist. His word for the hunt was always shikār.

British officers in India adopted shikar as both a word and a lifestyle. Big-game hunting became the defining leisure activity of the colonial elite. Tigers, leopards, elephants, rhinoceroses — the shikar was a staged spectacle involving beaters who drove animals toward waiting hunters on elephants or in machans (tree platforms). Jim Corbett, the famous hunter-turned-conservationist, described dozens of shikar expeditions in his books, including Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944).

The shikari — the professional Indian hunting guide — was essential to every expedition. British hunters depended entirely on shikaris' knowledge of terrain, animal behaviour, and tracking. Yet in the published accounts, the sahib always got the credit. The shikari was a footnote. Kenneth Anderson, writing about tiger hunts in southern India in the 1950s, was among the few British-Indian authors who named and credited individual shikaris.

Indian independence and wildlife conservation laws ended the era of colonial shikar. The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 banned hunting of most species. Jim Corbett's name was given to India's first national park — Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand — and the man who shot tigers became a symbol of tiger preservation. The word shikar survives in Hindi and Urdu as the ordinary word for hunting, free of its colonial baggage.