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Captain W S Hunt, Brown’s Sporting Tour in India: A Pictorial Journal of that Distinguished Sportsman’s Doings in the East, by Captain W. S. Hunt, London: J. Hogarth, 1865

88 pp., including engraved frontispiece, title page, 1 leaf of dedication, and 41 full-page colour engravings of caricatures with captions; original publisher’s deluxe red cloth binding, bevelled boards with extensive gilt tooling in corner and central compartments, front cover lettered “Brown’s Sporting Tour in India”, all edges gilt, yellow coated endpapers.
8.75 x 13 in (22.2 x 33 cm)

PIG-STICKING, PANIC, AND PITH HELMETS: A VICTORIAN SATIRE OF THE SPORTING RAJ

Published in 1865 by J. Hogarth, Brown’s Sporting Tour in India is an exuberant and rare visual chronicle of Anglo-Indian big-game pursuits in the mid-19th century. Styled as a light-hearted travelogue, the book documents the imaginary yet archetypal exploits of a British gentleman sportsman, “Brown”, through 41 vividly hand-coloured lithographs drawn by Captain William Shapter Hunt, a British officer of the Bengal Cavalry.

Though satirical in tone, the plates reflect actual colonial hunting practices—tiger hunts from elephant-back, boar spearing, and fishing or fowling with Indian beaters—and depict the rugged terrains of northern India through an exaggerated but informed eye. Among the most recognisable scenes:

The series functions as both a humorous homage and a caricature of colonial masculinity, with Brown’s heroic self-image often undercut by visual irony—he’s chased by his prey, slips in the mud, or naps while locals do the real work.

Unlike many hunting albums of the era that lean toward romanticism, Brown’s Sporting Tour plays with its genre conventions. The character of Brown—resembling Charles D’Oyly’s “Tom Raw” or Richard Doyle’s “Manners & Customs of Ye Englyshe”—exposes the excesses and egotism of colonial leisure while still indulging in its aesthetic pageantry.

This volume stands as a unique hybrid: part satire, part celebration of British sporting culture, and a rare surviving example of hand-coloured lithography used in humorous pictorial reporting of British India. As noted by Schwerdt (I, p. 257), it is “an amusing series of well-coloured Indian sporting pictures, seldom met with in complete and well-preserved condition.”

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