Table of Contents

Prologue: Of Two Reigns of Terror

Introduction: The Beastly Tale of the Leopard of Gopeshwar

1. Crooked Becomings
2. Murderous Looks
3. The Cute Killer
4. A Petition to Kill
5. The Leopard of Rudraprayag versus Shere Khan
6. Big Cats in the City
7. Entrapment
8. Three Beastly Tales to Conclude

Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Nayanika Mathur is associate professor in anthropology and South Asian studies, as well as a fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India.

Reviews

“In this captivating book, Mathur offers a sensitive examination of ordinary ethical struggle with cruelties and injustices spawned by human domination of the earth. She writes gripping stories of big cats, mostly from within the villages and towns of Himalayan north India, to bridge the different ways in which the global climate crisis has been imagined, understood, and explained. This is precisely the bridge that must be crossed to reach solutions that are locally meaningful and globally just.”
*K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University*

“At a time when scholarship is highlighting the phenomenon of extinction, Mathur offers an important intervention that redirects attention from this accelerating absence by focusing instead on imaginatively constituted interactions between humans and animals under threat. Introducing many innovative, intriguing, and witty concepts, Crooked Cats is a distinctive contribution to the ongoing and ever-evolving conversation about human-animal conflict and coexistence.”
*Kath Weston, University of Virginia*

"While Mathur focuses on personal experience of an unusual occurrence, her persuasive arguments, with supporting resources and notes, successfully connect the observed phenomena to issues of interest to many... Highly recommended."
*Choice*

"Nayanika Mathur’s Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene is a hard-hitting argument by a political scientist about the cultural (both human and leopard) and institutional ways in which big cats, particularly leopards, cohabit with humans in India. The book is a fascinating look at the political ecology of human-eating big cats and the responses of humans from the relatively powerless to the more powerful as mediated through governmental bureaucracy."
*Oryx*