A practice associated with the higher echelons of the military and colonial administration, pig-sticking seems to have been seen as an ideal pastime to aid in the improvement of the colonial classes. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, winner of the Kadir Cup in 1883, authored a book on the sport Pig-Sticking or Hog-Hunting: A Complete Account for Sportsmen - And Others (Baden-Powell, 1924) which contains a long section devoted to the various benefits of pig-sticking. After noting that, being a social, skilful, and active pastime, pig-sticking is generally good for mind and body, he goes on to suggest that it is specifically valuable in India for getting people accustomed to the heat and discouraging young men from the morally deleterious escape to higher altitudes – the hot season,

‘at first…a long nightmare became, with pig-sticking, the healthiest and happiest part of the year. So long as there was pig-sticking to be got one never wanted to go away to the usual poodle-faking at hill stations. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that hundreds of lives and thousands of livers are saved every year by the exercise and outdoor life of pig-sticking’ (Baden-Powell, 34)

That the author concludes it has helped train soldiers in skills ‘that have stood them in good stead later on in other sterner fields’ (Baden-Powell, 34-5) is understandable, but perhaps most interestingly Baden-Powell also sees it as a model pastime for employees in the civil administration. After a digression about Indian nationalism, in which he bemoans the ‘few eager spirits who are racing, ahead of time and ahead of qualification’ (Baden-Powell, 37) toward independence, comes a passage headed ‘Pig-Sticking’s Value to the Indian Civil Service.’ Here, the author suggests that the sport offers a model of the panacea that the Raj might need, for on the pig-sticking field it can be shown that ‘the white man and the Indian can be mutually good friends and comrades where they have a sport in common’ (Baden-Powell, 38). Moreover, it takes the ‘young civilian out into his district’ allowing him to enter into ‘friendship with his headmen, which cannot be got through official correspondence and chuprassies’ (Baden-Powell, 39).

These were valuable lessons, to be sure, but from the pig-sticking literature the impression emerges not of duty but of sheer enthusiasm borne of the drama, danger and pleasure of the hunt and its attendant social events. Alongside numerous dramatic paintings of hunters spearing their pigs, Wardrop’s Modern Pigsticking contains several pages of poetry devoted to pig-sticking. The substance of the poems mostly consists of paeans to pig-sticking in which the sport appears as the grand metaphor for the romance of the Raj, and functions as the vehicle for nostalgic daydreams of the headier moments of the Imperial life. Titles such as ‘The Call of the Kadir’ and ‘The Old Hog Hunter’ introduce poems which revel in the recollection of younger days spent riding for hog. (‘Farewell to Simla’ by one I. M. Crump – ‘Farewell! Dear Simla ladies / You’ll have no charms for me’ – also bears out Baden-Powell’s remark about ‘poodle-faking’ in the hill stations.)  

It is this heady pleasure that is captured in Kadir Cup. The Cup was the supreme date in the calendar of a specifically Imperial sport held in the highest moral and social esteem by its participants. The colonial and military classes are here at play, and at a favourite game. The opening shots place us atop an elephant in the spectators’ convoy; the ‘flag elephant’ is visible ahead. The convoy advances over the kadir, wading through a watercourse, before we see a shot of the line of beaters and riders, and then some footage of a heat comprising five riders. Later we see what seems to be a tea break as the elephants kneel and their riders dismount (the young woman shown here is Violet Fraser, daughter of Sir Stuart Fraser, a one-time resident of Kashmir; a uncorroborated note in the archival file suggesting that the film may have been taken by Sir Hari Singh, the Maharaja of Kashmir, may be relevant in this connection).

These images are a candid record of a sport that had not been practised by the English aristocracy since the middle ages, when boar became extinct in the British Isles, but which enjoyed a new golden age during the heyday of the Indian Empire. While the more serious literature shows how quickly a novel pastime can be invested with the utmost symbolic gravity, the purely ‘hunterly’ writing about the sport is more straightforward about the other connected pleasures, and provides a less varnished picture of the sport in its Imperial context, providing evidence of the luxuries the pig-sticking set might expect to enjoy when at a hunt meet or just out for sport with a riding mate. The pseudonymous ‘Raoul’, in Reminiscences of Twenty Years’ Pigsticking in Bengal (1893), gives a good account of many a hunt (‘iced drinks were very acceptable after every gallop’; ibid.: 79), and never forgets to mention the ‘A-1 tiffin’ his coolies made available, often after a hot tub at the end of hard day’s riding: ‘cold mutton and redcurrant jelly washed down with iced shandy-gaff’ (ibid.: 54), ‘tinned lobsters seasoned with hot chilly-vinegar and bread and butter, washed down with sundry bottles of Bass’s Pale Ale’ (ibid.: 135), and ‘Palkabaree mutton, Ortolans washed down with claret cup’ (ibid.: 141) are among the gastronomic delights on offer after a hard ride after pig. 

Francis Gooding