Not So Far from the Madding Crowd: The Aesthetics and Politics of ‘Skill’ in Hu- man-Nonhuman Animal Circus Acts in Colonial Bengal (Late 19th to Early 20th Century)

In this article, I examine a range of circus literature and materials (archives, visual ephemera, posters, handbills, circus lore, and fiction that map The Great Bengal Circus in relation to traveling circuses in the nineteenth and ear-ly twentieth centuries, which followed transnational rou-tes. By focusing on the modality of three specific and his-torically important animal species and their relationship with humans, their visualization and encounter as fleshly events, and the related cultural politics, I seek to unpack the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic entanglements in understanding the body. I situate this analysis within the context of colonial modernity in India, contrasting it with Eurocentric ideas (framed through binaries such as “wild” vs. “tame” or “human” vs “non-human”) that the visceral (in)articulations of “skill” and “virtuosity” as institutionalized concepts obfuscate.