Colonial officers of the early 1800s may have observed Indian villages banding together to drive away the occasional man-eater with spears, nets, and poisoned arrows, but such a thing would have been impossible by the advent of the twentieth century. Weapons had long since been outlawed, and much of the shared cultural knowledge of how to defeat man-eaters had been lost as well. If rural Indian populations had become helpless in the face of apex predators, it was largely because colonial policy had rendered them as such.
