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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2012 Cruelty Contested: The British, , and Animals in Colonial , 1850-1920 Samiparna Samanta

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF ARTS AND

CRUELTY CONTESTED: THE BRITISH, BENGALIS, AND ANIMALS IN COLONIAL

BENGAL, 1850-1920

By

SAMIPARNA SAMANTA

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2012

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Samiparna Samanta defended this dissertation on June 28, 2012.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Frederick R. Davis Professor Directing Dissertation

Kathleen Erndl University Representative

Claudia Liebeskind Committee Member

Will Hanley Committee Member

Charles Upchurch Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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To my parents

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Acknowledgements This dissertation is a joint endeavor; it could not have been written and successfully submitted without the help and support of great many people. I owe my gratitude to all those people who have made this dissertation possible and because of whom my graduate school experience at FSU has been one that I will cherish for many years to come. My deepest gratitude is to my advisor, Prof. Frederick Davis. I have been amazingly fortunate to have an advisor who gave me the freedom to explore on my own while aptly guiding me to ask the most critical questions about my own research. As I developed my dissertation project, Prof. Davis provided me with sustained encouragement, sound advice, and many good ideas. I am grateful to my Committee member, Prof. Claudia Liebeskind, for her expert advice and insights that I have used in this dissertation project and for also carefully reading and commenting on revisions of this manuscript. I remain grateful to both of them not only for this dissertation but also for shaping my future academic interests and engagements. I also take this opportunity to thank the other members of my dissertation committee- Prof. Charles Upchurch, Prof. Will Hanley and Prof. Kathleen Erndl--for their many contributions to the presentation and contents of this dissertation. I am indebted to my professors at Penn State---Prof. Kumkum Chatterjee and Prof. Mrinalini Sinha, and my teachers in --- Prof. Deepak Kumar, Prof. Mahesh Rangarajan, Prof. Ranjan Chakrabarti, Prof. Anuradha Roy, Prof. Sujata Mukherjee for their valuable insights. Additionally, the help of both Chris and Anne (graduate coordinators of our department) for keeping me organized and abreast with all the paperwork that is required to successfully accomplish graduate school deadlines is much appreciated. My friends at FSU have motivated this work and helped me to stay grounded as I navigated through the graduate program. I will fondly cherish the friendship with my friends, particularly, Vicky, Erica, Daria, Richard, Aaron and Cindy for all the fun and good-spirited discussions that influenced this research. I greatly value the friendship of my non-History friends, Rupsa, Saikat, Chaity, Tathagata, Oindrila, Mayur, Himadri, Mrinal, Santosh and Sneha for interesting dinner table conversations and countless number of delightful arguments ranging from philosophy to sociology to biology. I am indebted to them and to all my other friends in Tallahassee and in India for making this journey a memorable one.

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Last, but not the least, I would like to thank my family for their love. Specifically, my husband, Samidh, my sister, Tannistha, and my brother-in-, Kaushik for their continuous and untiring moral support that made this dissertation possible. Special thanks to Samidh for his love, patience, and understanding, and to my historian Dad, who has always been my staunchest critic and a loving father. I record my deepest gratitude for my parents for always being supportive of my dreams and aspirations and for loving me for what I am. I dedicate this dissertation to them.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ...... ix LIST OF FIGURES ...... x ABSTRACT...... xi INTRODUCTION: ENVISIONING ANIMALS, HISTORICIZING CRUELTY AND COMPASSION IN SOUTH ...... 1 The Argument ...... 1 Theoretical Framework and Methodology ...... 2 Visualizing Animals, Perceiving Humans ...... 4 Tending Animals, Banishing Cruelty ...... 8 Compassion/Cruelty and the Vedic ambivalence ...... 10 Romanticizing Animals, Contesting Compassion ...... 12 versus “” ...... 14 HISTORIOGRAPHY: NONHUMAN ANIMALS IN NATURE, SCIENCE, AND ...... 17 Historiographical Location of the Argument ...... 17 History of Science and Social Constructivism ...... 18 Material Culture, Identities, and Dismantling Eurocentrisms ...... 19 Science, , and ...... 24 “The Question of the Animal” ...... 27 Cruelty as a Discourse ...... 30 Animals in Modern South Asian Scholarship : Cattle, Classification, Cow ...... 32 Meat, and Urban History ...... 35 Environmental Historians and the Work Animals ...... 37 Colonial Knowledge ...... 39 Dismantling Binaries ...... 41 THE DISEASED AND THE DEAD: RINDERPEST, CONTAGION AND “WRATH OF THE GOD,” 1850-1890 ...... 43 Comprehending Epizootics ...... 45 The of Naming: Ghooty vs. Rinderpest ...... 49 Constructing Rinderpest: “The Calcutta Epizootic of 1864” and the Bengal Cattle ..... 53 The Trail of Mortality...... 61 Controlling Cattle : Local Knowledge, Acquired Knowledge and “Science”...... 64 Epizootics and Colonial Politics ...... 70 THE POLITICS OF DIAGNOSIS: GERMS, , AND MEDICINE, 1860-1920 ...... 73 Germs, Contagion, Veterinarians ...... 75 Disease, Diagnosis and Treatments ...... 77 Quarantine, Slaughter and ...... 78 Opposition to Slaughter and Culling ...... 80 Scientific Experiments and ...... 83 The Bengal Veterinary College ...... 87 , Status and Colonial Claims ...... 90 Inoculation, Laboratory Experiments and Convictions ...... 93 The Bengali discourse and the Rural/Urban Divide ...... 94

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Cruelty, Murrains and Crisis of Cattle Health ...... 97 Animal disease and Humans ...... 99 Health, Hegemony, Control ...... 102 Veterinarians and their Patients ...... 107 MEAT, MORALITY, MERCY: DIGGING THE DISCOURSES ON THE DIETARY ...... 110 The City, Citizens and Diet ...... 111 The Economics of Meat Demand and a Sanitary City ...... 119 Enter the ...... 122 The Slaughterhouse as a Site of Cruelty...... 124 Cruelty, Human Health and Medical Orthodoxy: The Doctors ...... 126 Cleanliness, and : The Native Calcuttans ...... 128 Regulating the , Redefining the City: The Government ...... 129 Slaughterhouses and the City ...... 132 Animals, Vegetarianism and Humanitarianism ...... 135 Meat: To Eat or Not to Eat? ...... 138 The of “Science” ...... 144 Animal Disease, Human Health and Inspection ...... 148 Conclusion ...... 150 LOCATING THE BURDENED BEAST: CARTERS, BULLOCKS AND HORSES ...... 152 A City Run on Bullocks and Horses ...... 152 The Socio-Economic Hierarchy of Draft Animals ...... 154 Cows and Bulls ...... 154 Bullocks ...... 155 The Work-Horse and the Symbolic Horse ...... 156 Unpacking the Ticcas and Ox-Carts: Indices of European and bhadralok Respectability? .... 158 The Carters’ World: Gharrywans, Merchants and Chowdrees - Agents of Overloading? ..... 160 The Burdened Bullock and a Humane Society ...... 163 Compassion Institutionalized: The Calcutta Society for the Prevention of ...... 165 The Carters’ Strikes: Barometer of Tensions ...... 168 Cruelty versus Livelihood ...... 168 Unburdening the Beast: Cruelty versus Control ...... 170 Determining the “Load” ...... 170 Improving the Yoke ...... 176 Cruelty versus Control: The Belgachia Veterinary Infirmary ...... 180 Protection, Prosecutions and Colonial Law ...... 182 “Illiteracy Breeds Cruelty:” The Humane Society ...... 182 The Anomaly of “Animal”: Colonial Ambivalence...... 184 Conclusion ...... 186 CONCLUSION: LIMINAL BOUNDARIES, SHIFTING IDENTITIES ...... 189 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 193 Primary sources ...... 193 Published Primary Sources ...... 193 Contemporary Tracts and Books...... 193 Contemporary Newspapers and Periodicals ...... 194

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Secondary sources ...... 194 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 205

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1: to which Cattle are Subject ...... 58

Table 3.2: Cattle Mortality in , 1870 ...... 62

Table 3.3: Animal mortality rates in Assam from 16th to 31st May 1869 ...... 63

Table 5.1: Meat Confiscated ...... 150

Table 6.1: Maximum Weights for Carters specified under the Hackney Carriage Act, 1905 .... 174

Table 6.2: Scale of Charges for Animals to be brought into Belgachia Infirmary ...... 181

Table 6.3: Statistics of Animal Cruelty Prosecutions, 1900 ...... 183

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Common Bengali Yoke ...... 176

Figure 2: American Yoke designed like a horse ...... 177

Figure 3: Improved yoke invented by Mess. Monteith and Company Half Collars ...... 178

Figure 4: Protector for Horses ...... 179

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation evaluates the nature of cross-cultural interface between the British and the Bengalis in nineteenth and twentieth-century Bengal as studied through the lens of animal cruelty. My project analyzes how discourses of cruelty against domestic animals – in veterinary, dietary, and transport registers – became a ground on which the ethics of colonial relations were worked out in Bengal between 1850 and 1920. By investigating the activities of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, examining court cases against animals, and studying Bengali voices, I argue that late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates concerning animals betrayed less , but reflected in microcosm the existing class distinctions and race anxieties. I further demonstrate that the colonial project of animal protection mirrored an irony in that it exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent colonial state and a powerful, not-too- benign reality in which the colonial state constantly sought to control, subjugate and discipline its subjects—human and non-human. In short, I intend to use the lens of animal cruelty to write a social history of colonial Calcutta as expressed through some human-animal encounters like epizootics, vegetarianism, and carter strikes.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: ENVISIONING ANIMALS, HISTORICIZING CRUELTY AND COMPASSION IN

The Argument

Under the , there was a persistent preoccupation with plants and animals, both of which played important roles in the development of the Indian colony. Animals were connected to the Empire’s social, economic, and cultural structures through their high value as laborers, as sources of food, and as stores of energy for transport. However, historians of South Asia have paid very little attention to domestic animals. This study tries to explore the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals by positioning the discourse on cruelty to animals as a means to understand British in Bengal between 1850 and 1920. Admittedly, the notion of “cruelty” is complex and contradictory, rooted very much in specific understandings of both nature and culture. I believe that using the discourse of animal cruelty as a way to explore the relations between the British and the Bengalis can constitute a unique and fruitful approach to understanding the history of British colonialism. By investigating the activities of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA), examining court cases against animals, and studying Bengali voices, I argue that late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates concerning animals betrayed less protectionism, but reflected in microcosm the existing class distinctions and race anxieties. I further demonstrate that the colonial project of animal protection mirrored an irony in that it exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent colonial state and a powerful, not- too- benign reality in which the colonial state constantly sought to control, subjugate, and discipline its subjects—human and non-human. I draw on a variety of sources: the British archive, colonial English memoirs, reports of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, local newspapers, and court cases where animals became legal subjects of the empire. I also make a conscious attempt to go beyond the colonial English archive and use extensively nineteenth and twentieth century

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Bengali short stories, Bengali periodicals, medical journals, and rare Bengali texts and pamphlets. Using the varied materials, I show how discourses of cruelty against animals – in agrarian, dietary, scientific and transport registers – became a ground on which the ethics of colonial relations were worked out in Bengal between 1850 and 1920. My study moves fluidly between the conjunctures of political economy and everyday life, as well as between ethics and aesthetics. My project centrally involves three case studies, and it is structured chronologically and thematically around three contested sites of human-animal interface: the diseased animal, the eaten animal, and the burdened animal. I begin in the 1850s when cases of cattle plague in parts of Bengal first came to official attention. The first case study thus examines diseased animals and investigates how the Calcutta Epizootic of 1864 came to be constructed as a visible threat to the empire. The second studies animals as food source by situating the trajectory of Calcutta slaughterhouses as sites of contestation between , hygiene, diet, and sanitation. The third examines animals as beasts of burden by probing how the pursuit of livelihood of the carters in Bengal ran into conflict with “modern” cultural and ethical sensibilities, as mediated by the activities of the CSPCA. In terms of physical space, my study moves fluidly from the rural interiors to the urban spaces of the cities because the animals I study were often brought from the rural districts of Bengal to the metropolis, Calcutta, for being slaughtered, worked or eaten. Animals as mobile creatures, changed hands several times and I follow the trajectory of their movement.

Theoretical Framework and Methodology

Admittedly, a study of human-animal relationships has to contend with the question of determining the boundaries of humans/non-human animals, nature/culture. In recent years, environmental historians have contended that not only are the boundaries between human and animal world pervious, but divisions within each group imply that it is not possible to posit human and animal worlds as two homogeneous entities.1 The binaries become even more complicated as colonialism comes to play a crucial role. Linking the subject of animal cruelty to

1 Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New , First Edition. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977); Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York: , 2002).

2 the politics of colonialism, I investigate how different groups of people in colonial Calcutta thought about different animals, discover the principles of classification involved, and show how these principles constituted logical systems of belief and action.2 At the basis of such knowledge formations are subtle theoretical questions that drive my paper: What constituted “human” and “animal” in nineteenth century Bengal? Why did boundary formation between humans and animals lead to cruelty? My study demonstrates how at key moments the creation of boundaries between human and animal mimicked and informed the boundary between colonizers and colonized---the invention of one worked to reinforce the other.3 My project thus attempts to dismantle the impervious worlds of humans and nonhuman animals by studying the interplay of human and animal actors---carters, butchers, elite British protectionists, Bengali babus, bullocks and horses---come together in my case studies. I demonstrate that the histories of animals and humans are intertwined. The very presence of horses, bullocks and other animals makes them agents of history. As sentient beings, they have a social and cultural presence; they are historical beings that have changed over time. Several methodological questions inform this study, the first being, who counts as a “historical actor” in my paper? Historians writing histories of human-animal relationships often acknowledge the methodological difficulties of their project. Since animals do not speak our language or write, they are always spoken for or written about by humans.4 Susan D. Jones, a prominent animal historian, in wrestling with the methodological dilemma of writing about animals, aptly points out that, “animals are perpetual “others,” doomed to have their interests represented to humans by other humans.”5 Erica Fudge in a similar vein argues that “reading about animals is always reading through humans, and reading about humans is reading through animals.”6 This project therefore recognizes the near impossibility of writing a history from the

2 On the theme of colonial scientific knowledge creation, I am drawing largely from David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (: University of California Press, 1993). 3 The terms “colonized” and “colonizer,” are not meant to be polar opposites. In fact, colonialism itself was not a monolith, just as “colonizer” and “colonized” were not fixed categories, but historically constructed. Hence the relationship between them was also constantly changing. I acknowledge the nuances within such categories and the divergent strands within the colonial and native discourse on animals. 4 For analysis of the role of “historical actor” in histories of human-animal relationships, see Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America, annotated edition. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). 5 Susan D. Jones, 4. 6 Erica Fudge, 3.

3 animals’ perspective. Instead, by dissecting specific debates surrounding cruelty to domestic animals in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal, it tries to demonstrate how animals provided the grounds on which the heated debates surrounding diet, nutrition, sanitation and work took place. The animals involved remained powerful signifiers exhibiting class distinctions, race/gender relations, and status hierarchy in a colonial society. Yet, they did not shape the debates, but became the mere ground on which such debates took place.7 This work relies on the methodologies of socio-cultural, environmental history and history of science as it assumes that it is impossible to understand the development of veterinary, nutrition science, and the changing sociocultural roles of animals, as processes isolated from each other. Archival, quantitative evidence is often substantiated with cultural discourses derived from twentieth century Bengali periodicals to present a well-rounded approach, because sole reliance on mere numbers can be dangerous as they often ended up as exaggerations in colonial archival records. Throughout the project, I have attempted to strike a balance between studying the rural material culture as embodied in popular notions of animal disease or sanitation, and the more elite scientific discourses.

Visualizing Animals, Perceiving Humans

Most biologists consider humans to be animals, presuming that the differences between people and other animals involve different degrees of complexity and differences in organization. They argue that people are different from other animals, first because of the scope of their conscious thinking which allows enormous flexibility in their behavior, and secondly, in having evolved a complex language in which they speculate a great deal.8 Human understanding of the boundary between themselves and non-human animals has changed over time leading to a subsequent transformation in attitudes towards animal cruelty. In the entire discourse on animal protection and abuse, the questions that repeatedly surfaced were: How much pain was too much for the animal, how much suffering constituted “unnecessary” cruelty? I contend that

7 Here I am drawing largely from Subaltern Studies works that focus on ’s violence in . By positing a parallel between the fate of the animals and sati, I buttress the claim that the animals are largely marginalized in official and indigenous discourse. See especially Lata Mani, Contentious Tradition: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), whose discussion of the plight of women in colonial germane to my work. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary and Lawrence Grossberg. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. 8 Jennnie Coy, “Animals’ Attitudes to People,” in Tim Ingold, ed., What is an Animal? (New York: Unwin Hyman, 1988).

4 problematizing the theme of cruelty to animals necessitates a categorization of two central concepts---“cruelty” and “animals”--- as they figured in Bengali and British minds. While evaluating Bengali and British perceptions of animals however, I do not assume the two communities to be polarized and homogenous. In fact, I demonstrate through my case studies the nuances and multiple, paradoxical attitudes towards animals even within each community. For instance, not all British were sympathetic towards , and even among those who were, the fissures were numerous. While some wanted to protect animals for economic interests, others validated animal protection as a mission to civilize the Indian poor. Likewise, if the members of the humane society were driven by a strong missionary zeal in protecting animals, their compassion for animals did not necessarily extend to advocacy of vegetarianism. Similarly, among Bengalis, the middle-men bent on maximizing profits by overloading bullock carts cared little about animal protection, while the rich, Hindu of the CSPCA proudly financed the agenda of the Society. The fault-lines were therefore, drawn not along ethnic divisions, but along people from different class, caste, race, community and most importantly, with different interests in animals. Animals have all along been perceived and classified in multiple ways in Indian notions of nature, religion (Vedic ontology, ), and science ( and Unani).9 In Vedic ontology, the Manu Dharma Shashtras list five yajna or sacrifices (Panchayajna) to be performed by every householder--- Brahma yajna or “homage to the seers,” deva yajna or “homage to gods and elementals,” pitri yajna or “homage to ancestors,” bhuta yajna or “homage to beings,” and manushya yajna or “homage to men.” Thus, the fourth yajna which advocates providing food-offerings for animals, birds and insects indicates a concern for the nonhuman animals.10 The category “animal” in fact conveys shifting meanings in Hindu mythological discourses. Not only are the boundaries between animals and humans ever-oscillating (gods are born as animals, and animals are fallen humans), but the boundary between different animals are equally blurred as animals like monkey (Hanuman), elephant (Ganesh), snake (Nag) and fish are

9 For an overview of the place of humans, nonhuman animals and gods in Vedic ontology and , see , The : An Alternative History (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). 10 The exact phrase extolling humans to feed the non-humans is as follows: “Let him gently place on the ground [food] for dogs, outcastes, svapachas, those diseased from sins, crows and insects.” Manu Dharma Shashtras, 3.92, in Nehemiah Davis, The Ancient Language of the Soul: The Mystic Knowledge of Mantra (Xlibris, 2010).

5 deified in Hinduism and elevated on a high reverential podium than others.11 The cow was associated with the sacred, in the ancient hymns of the . Since then, the cow has undergone a gradual apotheosis, transforming into a symbol of all that is sacred and unifies all Hindus.12 Other species too have embodied symbolic religious values---snakes as emblems of fertility; associated with Goddess ; rats as deceased members of the clan of Karni Mata, a fifteenth century female mystic of Bikaner. However, even with the deification of animals, classical Hinduism did not present a safe haven for most animals. Rather, Hindu theology asserted an immensely anthropocentric and hierarchical view of the world in which humans were supreme and nonhuman animals perceived as lower forms of life. Classical Hinduism justified the superiority of humans over nonhuman animals not based on their possession of soul or atman because even animals possess atman according to Manu, and neither in physical or emotional terms because humans and animals share similar physical activities and impulses like food, sleep, or fear.13 The key distinction, as Nelson points out, was cognitive, moral and ritual---only humans are potentially able to receive and absorb revelation or sruti in form of the Veda, and thus only humans have access to dharma. The boundary between humans and nonhuman animals was thus drawn not along their physical or even emotional differences, but over the ritual capacity of humans to have access to moksa or spiritual salvation. In this traditional Hindu worldview, humans and animals are placed on a hierarchical plank in which animals rank at the lowest order and are associated with a wide range of negative qualities like ignorance, inability to reason, lack of intelligence, greed, cruelty, atheism. As Manu states, “People of lucidity [sattva] become gods, people of energy [ ] become humans, and people of darkness [tamas] always become animals.”14 The hierarchy implicit in Hindu view of human-animal boundary comes out equally strong in the related notion of transmigration or

11 On attitudes towards animals in pre-colonial India, I have examined Mughal and miniature paintings, Mughal travel accounts and Bengali fiction. Of particular importance is the painting, “Gods are Born as Monkeys,” Series, (Rajput, Hills, 1700). Cited in Milo Cleveland Beach, The New Cambridge : Mughal and Rajput Painting (London: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 173. See also Francois Bernier, Travels in the 1656-1668 (London: Low Price Editions, 1989). 12 Frank Korom, “Holy Cow! The Apotheosis of Zebu, or Why the Cow is Sacred in Hinduism,” Asian Studies 59 (2000): 181-204. Cited in “Cows, Elephants, Dogs, and Other Lesser Embodiments of Atman: Reflections on Hindu Attitudes Toward Nonhuman Animals,” Lance Nelson in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics edited by Paul Wadu and Kimberly Patton. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 13 Manu holds that even plants and animals have consciousness and experience happiness and unhappiness. Manu I.49. Cited in Nelson, 184. 14 Manu, 12.40. Cited in Nelson, 185.

6 rebirth which postulates that each of humans was once embodied in plant and animal forms. Rebirth as an animal, the “small creatures”, is a frightening punishment in the Upanishads and Manu. Hindu perception of animals thus, hinges on a strange paradox. On one hand, it emphasizes compassion for animals as it evident in its insistence that all beings (human and nonhuman) have atman (souls) and thus demand empathy. However, animals despite their possession of atman, are dominated by the dullness of tamas, which indicate that the boundary between humans and nonhumans are drawn around the essential Hindu notion of an absence of developed moral or physic life in nonhuman animals. Furthermore, there is a strong in Hindu thought between humans and nonhuman animals because oppression of animals is very often closely tied to the marginalization of human . Cows symbolizing purity are associated with the Hindu upper caste, the , whereas dogs stigmatized as impure are evidently connected to the lowest castes, Chandalas or human outcastes. Stories abound in Bengali children’s , from the ancient animal to more modern fiction, where animals become powerful bearers of class, caste, ritual status in the indigenous society that demarcate the boundaries between not only the white, colonial masters and the native Bengalis, but also highlight the multiple fractures within the indigenous societies. Hindu Bengali attitudes to animals thus cannot be studied as a monolith, but as an ongoing intellectual process of introspection that constantly shifted over time. For instance, it is interesting to note how late nineteenth century Bengali perceptions of animals came to be closely linked to their understanding of not just race, species, caste boundaries but most importantly, to development.15 Writing in 1875, an elite Bengali journal encouraged its readers to develop strong feelings of caste and race superiority against the British and the Hindu lower castes by equating Europeans with the fierce instincts of a , and Hindu sub-castes with “lowly creatures” like dogs and foxes.16 By arguing against interracial breeding among both humans and nonhuman animals, it emphasized that “development” consisted in supporting race, caste and species distinctions and upholding the superiority of a Hindu, Bengali, identity. Animals, in their sacred qualities and cultural diversities thus differed significantly from the British understanding of them as a flat, all-encompassing blanket category. If the Hindu Bengalis classified animals into numerous heads—humans, gods, medicinal commodities,

15 Anubiksana, ed. Hariscandra Sarma 1, no. 1 (Calcutta, 1875). 16 “Jatibhedh,” Anubikshana, ed. Hariscandra Sarma 1, no. 1(1875): 263.

7 mythical beasts----such shifting boundaries seemed alien to the Victorians to whom “animal” featured as a generic, stripped of divinity and mysticism.

Tending Animals, Banishing Cruelty

Historicizing cruelty to animals implies tracing the development of empathy concerning animals in the post-Enlightenment period during which cruelty to animals became punishable by law. Most of the works on history of animal protectionism consider the Enlightenment as the pivotal phenomenon that ushered massive transformations in human attitudes towards animals. The scholarly literature on cruelty to animals detail how the post-Enlightenment era marked the birth of new sensibilities in .17 With boundaries between humanity and inhumanity progressively changing in the eighteenth century, historians have delineated how in the new intellectual climate, animal suffering came to be seen for the first time as an important evil.18 Organized political agitation for the humane treatment of animals began in Britain when the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in London in 1824. Dominated mostly by the rich and powerful, some historians have viewed the animal-welfare societies as an upper class movement to discipline the lower orders.19 In fact, it is often noted by historians that animals were protected by law in Britain before slavery was abolished and before children were protected from the worst exploitations of industrial capitalism.20 British understanding of animal protectionism and cruelty has significant implications for analyzing the colonial situation in nineteenth century Bengal. If England’s early animal protection were in effect a response to the repulsion for lower-class violence, did British

17 For an overview of attitudes towards animals and the birth of animal protection movement in England, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 ( New York: Allen Lane, 1983); James A Steintrager, Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 18 For a description of human-animal relationships in the age of Enlightenment and Empire, see Katherine Kete, A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (New York: Berg Publishers, 2007); Matthew Senior, A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Berg Publishers, 2007). 19There is a debate among scholars on whether the early animal welfare societies were genuinely concerned with animal welfare. Scholars like Keith Thomas and Kathleen Kete argue that the animal protection movement in England was a bourgeois campaign that developed in response to lower-class violence and concern for “public order.” Others like Matt Cartmill argue that these humane societies were nonetheless genuinely concerned with animal cruelty. See Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: and Nature through History (MA, Mass., Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993). 20 Kete, A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire, 2.

8 attitudes towards animals in Bengal imply a similar attempt to discipline the colonized Bengalis? Interestingly, an analysis of the main objectives of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals supports my theoretical claim that the line between the British and the Bengalis cannot be drawn rigidly. In fact, the earliest humane society to be established by the British in India was one that dealt with rights of animals----the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA) in 1861. Lord Elgin, the then of India, lent his powerful support by consenting to become its first patron, along with several influential Hindu landlords. That the CSPCA was a bourgeois attempt to “civilize” lower orders of Bengali society is evident from the reports of its annual proceedings.21 During its inception, it was stated that the main purpose of the CSPCA was “not merely to prevent cruelty towards dumb animals by deterrent influence of legal punishment, but also to foster those merciful impulses that tended to the growth of humanity.”22 In 1900, Rai Issur Chandra Mitter Bahadur, an influential Hindu , pleaded the magistrates to punish lower class Bengalis because the spread of cruelty to animals was, according to him, strongest among the “lower orders of the people, whom educational influences had failed to reach, and who could only be deterred by pains and penalties of law.”23 An analysis of the composition and objectives of the CSPCA aptly demonstrates the complexities of the colonial situation, and testifies that the upper-class Bengalis and British shared their common concerns for founding a moral public order in colonial Calcutta. The specific debates that arose in the CSPCA on the question of animals’ rights and role of lower classes merit the larger question: To what extent did the creation of the CSPCA in a colonial milieu betray the British anxiety to discipline its human subjects---the lower class, uneducated Bengalis---than its non-human subjects, the animals? I argue that animals in this context not only came to be debated as subjects of control, slaughter, and labor, but also perhaps more importantly, became markers of identities, often determining what it meant to be a white British civil servant and a lower class, non-Brahmin Bengali. The larger goal is to study how the British put a different understanding of “animals” and “cruelty,” and applied their Victorian notions to

21 Several volumes of “Reports of the Calcutta SPCA” are to be found in printed form at National Library, . I have examined at the Annual Proceedings of the CSPCA from the years 1861 through 1905 during my stay in Kolkata in summer 2009. 22 Report of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for the Year 1861, National Library, Kolkata. 23 Rai Issur Chandra Mitter Bahadur, Report of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for the Year 1900, National Library, Kolkata.

9 the Bengali context.24 I will examine the relationship between animals and humans in colonial Bengal by studying the meanings associated with animal disease, problematizing slaughterhouses, and carters’ strikes as contested sites, and delving into legislations on animal cruelty.

Compassion/Cruelty and the Vedic ambivalence

Compassion and concern for animals was however not a European import into India. Rather, animal shelters and regular caring for unproductive cattle can be traced as early as the fourth century BCE, and animal homes for aging and enfeebled cattle, (cow homes) are attested in India by the sixteenth century.25 Wendy Doniger has argued that the term ahimsa or “” in Vedic ontology originally applied not to the relationship between humans alone, but to the relationship between humans and animals.26 Ahimsa, Doniger clarifies, means “the absence of the desire to kill or injure,” “a disinclination to do harm,” and can perhaps best translated by the negative “nonviolence”, which suggests both mental and physical concern for others.27 She further suggests that the roots of ahimsa can be traced in Vedic ritual of which upholds the argument that the priest does not actually injure the animal but merely “pacifies” him.28 This tension in Vedic thought is evident throughout classical Hindu India, which was caught between performing animal sacrifice and espousing ahimsa. The ancient Mauryan ruler, , would construct shades and watering places for animals, but not ban capital punishment or killing of animals for meat. 29 The ancient Indian epic, , like Ashoka, is torn between violence and non-violence towards animals. The Mahabhrata prescribes

24 On the question of how the British were constantly misunderstanding and simplifying things Indian, see Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1996). I use Cohn’s model to argue that the British understanding of “cruelty” and “animals” did not quite fit in with the Bengalis’ multiple perceptions of the same. 25 Deryck Lodrick, Sacred Cows, Sacred Places: Origins and Survivals of Animal Homes in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 89. 26 Wendy Doniger, 9. 27 Balgangadhar Tilak translated ahimsa as “harmlessness.” Doniger, 9. 28 Doniger argues that in the Rig Veda, the word ahimsa refers primarily to the prevention of injury or violence to the sacrificer and his offspring, as well as his cattle ( 10.22.13). Ahimsa represents not a political doctrine or even a social theory, but the emotion of the horror of killing (or hunting) a living creature. 29 Doniger brings out the ambivalence in Hindu India towards animal cruelty that manifests itself in the contradictory, twin goals of animal sacrifice and non-violence. Ashoka’s rock inscriptions, for example, mention that only three animals were killed every day in the royal kitchen. However, at the same time, Ashoka allowed for the slaughter of pashus---male goats, , cattle and the animals most used for sacrifice and food. Doniger argues that Ashoka’s attitude “is an expression of a man who is caught between concern for animals’ feelings (do not castrate them) and recognize that people do eat animals. It is a very limited sort of non-violence.”

10 sacrifice of seven wild animals and some domestic animals---goats, ram, bull, mule which clashes head-on with nonviolence towards animals. Arjun, , Agni burn up the , ignoring the plight of animals that live there. Yudhisthir too in his determination “not to be cruel,” hedges, like Ashoka, between violence and nonviolence.30 The two views, violent and nonviolent are thus juxtaposed in an uneasy tension in which the ancient lawgivers operate. Indeed, scholars examining texts of classical Hinduism like the dharmasastras, the epics, the , and the have noted that Hindu attitudes towards nonhuman animals is not a monolith, rather it is immensely complex and often antithetical.31 Lance Nelson through his evaluation of the Manava Dharmasastra ( 200 BCE- 200 CE) has brought out the ambivalence in Hindu notions of hierarchy. If the Sanskritic orthodoxy of Brahmins tended toward a “narrow anthropocentric view of the world,” that conceptualized nonhuman animals as “lower” forms of existence allowed for sacrifice, it however, at the same time, articulated a vision of universal empathy or compassion.32 The Gita, as Nelson points out, espouses as its ideal sages who “delight in the welfare of all beings” ( sarva-bhuta-hite ratah, 5.25)---all beings, and not just humans.33 There was gradual discomfort within the Brahminical tradition about animal sacrifice, which was aggravated by the and Jain critiques of Hindu animal sacrifice.34 This was especially manifest in the Vedic prescriptions for animal sacrifice ( pasu- bandha, “animal binding” to be practiced by the householders. Manu claimed that animals were created for sacrifice, but “killing in sacrifice is not killing,” and that violence (himsa) ordained by the Veda is actually ahimsa. However, at the same time, noninjury is praised as the preferred ideal for the virtuous householders. Doniger sums up the Vedic predicament with nonviolence/ahimsa as she contends that, “Nonviolence or ahimsa is not a Buddhist or Jain monopoly, nor is compassion. Everyone was wrestling with this problem around this time,

30 Doniger, 315. 31 For an analysis of Hindu attitudes towards nonhuman animals see Lance Nelson, “Cows, Elephants, Dogs, and Other Lesser Embodiments of Atman: Reflections on Hindu Attitudes Toward Nonhuman Animals,” A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, edited by Paul Wadu and Kimberly Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 179-193. 32 Ibid., 181. 33 Ibid., 182. 34 Jan E. M. Houben, “To Kill or Not to Kill the Sacrificial Animal ( Yajna-Pasu): Arguments and Persepctives in Brahminical Ethical Philosophy,” in Jan E. M. Houben and Karel R. Van Kooji, eds., Violence Denied: Violence, Non-Violence and the Rationalization of Violence in South Asian Cultural History ( Leiden: Brill, 1999), 117-24.

11 though in different ways and gradually compassion came to supplement or even replace generosity as the prime virtue of householders and sacrificiers.”35

Romanticizing Animals, Contesting Compassion

The tension between cruelty and empathy for animals also found expression in literature around the world that tended to humanize animals, or use animals as metaphors. A literary genre that saw animals as other than an exploitative commodity began to flourish in the late nineteenth century. Anthropomorphic animals were a common element of nineteenth century children’s literature, suggesting a perceived kinship, since they came to be presented as cultural representations of humans. In Europe, numerous nineteenth century authors wrote stories anthromorphizing animals, usually for juvenile audiences, including Anna Sewell, Jack London, , and Lewis Carroll. This current ran, as some scholars have examined, against the larger theme of exploitation and moderated it because teamsters and animal owners internalized some of these values, which led to anti-cruelty regulation.36 India especially had a rich tradition of animal stories that captured the intimate bond between humans and animals in popular and juvenile literature. While some depicted animals as a metaphor of pristine childhood, others were more pedagogical. In fact, it is possible to identify three very broad trends in the genre of Indian animal stories. One can be traced back to the sixth century when Jataka Stories were composed from legends concerning former lives of Buddha. Widely read and loved by children and adults alike, these classics, in a flavor often suggestive of Aesop, narrated dramatic adventures of humans and animals, and blended both and satire. Among prominent Indian animal fables composed in the twelfth century were and that laid down a proper “conduct of life” among children by instructing them to be sympathetic by using animals as metaphors.37 The Panchatrantra and Hitopadesa were however, clearly intended to teach about human behavior and polity, and not so much about animals or how we should regard them. Quite an opposite trend can be noticed in shikar (hunting) stories

35 Doniger, 499. 36 Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 9. 37 Pandit /Tr.G.L.Chandiramani, Panchatantra: The Complete Version, 16th ed. (: Rupa & Co, 2008). Originally composed in Sanskrit in c.1199. Narayana, The Hitopadesa (New : Penguin Classics, 2007); Noor Inayat , Twenty (: Inner Traditions, 1985).

12 that tended to paint the violent, crude face of forest animals and reached a logical culmination with the death of the savage beast by the triumphant hunter. A third trend bore not instructional tones for children, but valorized the relationship between humans and non-human animals as manifested in their daily lives. Such tales were set in the much-familiar surroundings of private spaces and homes---stories that captured the material culture of nineteenth and twentieth-century rural Bengal. It is this trend that I tend to historicize as it yields a rich plethora of nuances concerning nineteenth and twentieth-century indigenous attitude towards animals. A close dissection of nineteenth and twentieth-century Bengali animal stories reveals the complexities that lay beneath Bengali social perception of human-animal affinity. If such tales of human-animal bonding are replete with sympathy and kindness towards the pet animal, they at the same time climax with the death of the animal. Several twentieth century stories---namely, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Mahesh, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadyay’s Adorini, Tarashankar Bandhopadhyay’s Gobin Singher Ghonra, Bibhutibhusan Bandhopadhyay’s Budhir Bari Phera among others---- while emphasizing the protagonists’ love for their pet animal, reinforce a tragic narrative that end in the torture or death of the same animal. Especially powerful and poignant is Saratchandra’s (1876-1938)’s story Mahesh. Set in a little, fictional village of Kashipur in nineteenth century Bengal, the story unfolds with the poor Muslim protagonist, Gafur Mia, spending his days in wretched poverty. His only property and attachment is his ox, Mahesh. One hot, summer morning, on seeing Mahesh tied to a tree, the village Brahmin pundit’s almost fake concern for the bull’s plight is worth studying. Tarkaratna bawls as he warns Gafur, “This is a Hindu village; ruled by a Hindu zamindar. If the cow dies, the zaminder will bury you (Gafur) alive for his .” Interestingly, what Tarkaratna views as animal cruelty (tying Mahesh to a tree) is in reality, Gafur’s poverty. Is it because Gafur is a marginalized, Muslim peasant in a predominantly Hindu village, that Tarkaratna is able to accuse him of cruelty and indifference towards Mahesh? At a moment of heated exchange, Tarkaratna even calls Gafur a kasai or a butcher, which is a very provocative and powerful phrase because it overlooks the peasant’s love for his animal by essentializing all as inherently violent and heartless butchers. Gafur’s love for his animal transcends class, caste, religious barriers as he lets go of his , fakes illness to feed Mahesh instead. Caught between a vortex of unending financial misfortunes and an intrinsic love for his bull, Gafur Mia, ends up unwittingly killing his prized possession, Mahesh, in a fit of rage. Mahesh almost becomes a handy symbol of defining and challenging the

13 identities of different groups of humans inhabiting the village---a rich Hindu zamindar, an arrogant Bramhin priest, and a marginalized Muslim farmer and his hapless daughter. In a similar vein, Adorini, a falling Zamindar’s adored elephant, dies a tragic death as the zamindar unwillingly abandons his prized pet to get over his financial crisis. In yet another poignant tale, Prabin, the treasured horse of Gobin Singh, is almost humanized by Tarashankar Bandhopadhyay (1898-1971) and jumps off from a bridge to death, only to avenge his humiliation at the hands of his master’s pompous son. Budhi the cow in the acclaimed Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s (1894-1950) narrative, is a little fortunate than his fellow-animals, and returns to his lost village, after escaping the terror walls of a city slaughterhouse. It is this strange paradox of primate compassion and cultivated cruelty, of innocence and ultimate death of the animal, which strike us in the Bengali animal narratives. Why do nineteenth-century and short stories on animals oscillate between this duality? Does the colonial situation have a role in this magnificent uncertainty, the dilemma between compassion and brutality? While nineteenth century Bengali champions of animal protection like Peary Chand Mittra attempted to claim kindness as a Vedic monopoly, at the same time however, contemporary Bengali animal fiction reveals how caught between the fear of income uncertainty and an abiding love for pet, the Bengali household often sacrificed the prized animal to ensure its own existence.

Ahimsa versus “science”

This study does not attempt to engage in intense metaphysical introspection on Hindu, Islamic, or Christian worldview on animals. Instead, by tracing the in-built Vedic ambivalence on cruelty/compassion, it demonstrates that nineteenth and twentieth century Hindu, Bengali debates concerning vegetarianism and animal cruelty were not entirely new. What was novel however, was the language of the debate. Each player involved in the larger game of animal protection, attempted to situate an inherent kindness within its own culture, which often caused friction---Vedic ahimsa came to be challenged in the colonial period by the British emphasis on an innate Indian cruelty. Discourses on animal cruelty thus reappeared with renewed vigor in the colonial period as a new parameter entered the larger intellectual scheme---Vedic ahimsa came to be replaced with as the Hindu, Bengali middle class mediated the language of science in their own mental worlds. Straddling two different worlds---insistence on an essential Hindu/Vedic compassion and the relevance of western science---the twentieth century Bengali

14

Hindu middle class eventually appropriated a scientific language in their understanding of animal and human worlds. No longer did they take refuge in Hindu ahimsa, but in a bigyan (science) that stemmed from empirical tests, inspection, Darwin’s Origin of Species, or reports of London . Knowledge flowed from the metropole to the colony, and vice-versa. The time frame within which this project operates stretches roughly from 1860 to 1920. It is roughly from the 1860s that diseased animals begin to enter the colonial archive, though invariably cattle plague breaks out in bouts from the mid-1850s. After 1920, a civil veterinary department is created in India which indicates that veterinary services are no longer as unreformed. This study does not intend to focus on the growth of veterinary services in India and its “professionalization,” after 1920s, which is beyond the scope of this work. Rather, it attempts to show how animals---diseased, slaughtered, or worked---came to define, exhibit colonial tensions, class hierarchies and thus reflect the complexities within the empire in India. Chapter One lays out the larger historical context drawing from pre-colonial sources, develops the theoretical premise and the methodological framework of the study. Chapter Two situates the study in the larger historiographical framework and describes the contribution of the project to South Asian scholarship and beyond. Chapter Three examines diseased animals and investigates how rinderpest or the Calcutta Epizootic of 1864 came to be constructed as a visible threat to the empire. Chapter Four demonstrates how the British subverted indigenous knowledge both through their politics of naming animal diseases, and through the politics of diagnosis. Evidently, cattle plague was also closely tied to the question of inspection. Diseased animals soon began to flood the markets because many native Bengali farmers refused to follow the English method of slaughter and culling as it was economically damaging. It was cheaper to sell the disease animals than seek veterinary attention. As a result, inspection subsequently became a critical concern of the colonial government and animals regularly began to enter the slaughterhouse. The question of whether or not to eat meat was now increasingly tied to the question of diseased meat/meat inspection, and it is here is that the slaughterhouses appear. Chapter Five is thus a logical continuation where I examine how outbreak of rinderpest in the nineteenth century Bengal recast the interest in Calcutta’s slaughterhouses. Among colonial sources, British civil servant William Crooke censured Bengali tribes like Bagdis and for eating dog and tortoise, and lauded Muslims for having a more ‘liberal” diet than Hindus for

15 consuming mutton and fowls.38 If meat-consumption and vegetarianism were both in vogue among the native population in pre-colonial Bengal, what changes followed in colonial Bengal. Though several nineteenth century Bengali doctors recommended eating fish and meat for proper functioning of human intestines, meat consumption in Calcutta increased not in response to the culinary habits of Bengalis, but of the .39 I shall investigate how the resultant demand for meat had a bearing on the functioning of Calcutta slaughterhouses. By examining the debate surrounding meat-eating among the Bengali bhadralok, I demonstrate how slaughterhouses became sites of contestation between public hygiene, diet, sanitation, and science. Chapter Six uses the carters’ strikes led by bullock-cart drivers in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Calcutta to tease out the tensions inherent in colonial animal protection legislations. Chapter Seven concludes by highlighting the common thread that binds these case studies together---- the story of how the late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates concerning animals betrayed less protectionism, but reflected the existing class/race distinctions. Rinderpest control, carters’ strikes, and the slaughterhouses, all betrayed the perfect colonial irony. On one hand, demand for kindness towards animals grew and was actually institutionalized by the British, yet colonial animal protection legislations were never operative on the merchants, traders, British cattle owners, but only on the uneducated cart drivers, butchers, peasants and laborers, which reveals the utilitarian nature of colonial animal protection. Most importantly, humans and animals often mimicked the boundaries between the colonized and the colonizer. The concluding chapter also underscores the contribution of this work to south Asian scholarship, animal studies, and studies on history of science and medicine.

38 William Crooke, “Food,” Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on various subjects connected with India. (London: John Murray, 1906), 226-229. 39 Kalimohan Sen, “Potthyo-Bidhan,” Bhisak-darpana , 6, no. 6 (1896).

16

CHAPTER TWO HISTORIOGRAPHY: NONHUMAN ANIMALS IN NATURE, SCIENCE, AND IMPERIALISM

Animals have held multiple and paradoxical meanings in Indian society ranging from intense veneration to extensive sacrifices. Rendered powerless under the butcher’s knife, they are at the same time pampered in households, personified in children’s fiction, and iconized in religion. Furthermore, attitudes towards animals have changed consistently over time among different of people. In fact, there has never been a homogenous human attitude towards a particular species of animal, as attitudes have continued to be motivated by multiple considerations---ecological, psychological, scientific, cultural, religious, and utilitarian. The goal of this work to is examine how discourses of animal cruelty came to be constructed around three contested sites of human-animal interface: First, the diseased animal or the human paranoia surrounding outbreak of animal disease; second, the eaten animal or concerns over diet, meat inspection and slaughterhouses; and finally, the burdened animal or converting animals to energy.

Historiographical Location of the Argument

This work is situated at the intersection of studies on colonialism, history of science and medicine, animal-human relationships, food and culture. By drawing from these diverse historiographical traditions, my research examines animal cruelty as a discursive domain by considering how it has a direct bearing on history of veterinary medicine, sanitation, environmental ethics, and knowledge systems in colonial Bengal. Domesticated animals reflect both nature and culture, and cruelty to animals represents a particularly fertile area for analysis, given that domesticated animals played critical roles in Bengali and British lives. Hence, an analysis of animal treatment across the two cultures reveals compelling insights into colonial Indian history. My study goes beyond the argument of some historians that the British and natives in colonial India were delineated by gender and race stereotypes, by further

17 demonstrating how such identities were also forged in response to the way the rulers and the ruled viewed the natural world. The project explores this question by problematizing the very concept of animal cruelty as manifested through animal disease control, butchering animals for meat and putting animals to work.

History of Science and Social Constructivism

In terms of the broader theoretical framework, my arguments are significantly shaped by current academic debates on history of science. Following the works of Constructivists, my work operates within the larger theoretical view that science is not the discovery of an objective reality, but it is a creation bound by culture and other forces operating on it. History of science received a fundamental breakthrough with the publication of the highly influential book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution in 1962.1 For Kuhn, knowledge was relative---relative to the paradigm, and the paradigm created our reality. Kuhn’s work had an incredible effect on professional philosophers and historians of science. The spirit and style of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was readily absorbed by historians and concept of paradigm was appropriated by social scientists. In fact, Kuhn’s work had a great impact among sociologists in the University of in 1970s. David Bloor and Barry Barnes at the championed what they called the “Strong Programme” in sociology of science arguing that the supposed truth or falsity of science was not relevant to the historian’s task. The Strong Programme provided a stimulus to the birth of sociology of science (or “SSK”, sociology of scientific knowledge) and adopted Kuhn’s methodologies.2 Constructivism as an historical approach was largely inspired by several developments in the wider world from the 1960s onwards---the civil rights movements, the birth of social history, advent of feminism, and the War. In terms of methodology, from the 1970s onwards, scholars began to appropriate Thomas Kuhn’s thesis and reasoned that if paradigms were models, then science would no longer be the truth existing “out there,” but rather practical reasoning governed by a set of accepted conventions. Paradigms in this sense, argued the Constructivists, were social construction, just as science itself was. Constructivists have emphasized the local institutional

1 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 2 Ian Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

18 setting of science—material culture, academies, court, university, laboratory, or lecture theater, and the how science has been closely tied to gender, race, ethnicity.

Material Culture, Identities, and Dismantling Eurocentrisms

Studying instruments and the place of production of scientific knowledge have been a primary focus of the Constructivists. They have studied instruments, illustrating how they are made meaningful in social and cultural contexts. For instance, French sociologist Bruno Latour in his celebrated work, coauthored with Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life demonstrated how scientific statements constantly manifested a double potential---they were either referred to as subjective or having developed out of local causes, or they were referred to as a thing “out there” as an objective fact.3 Stating their thesis explicitly, Latour and Woolgar wrote, “Our point is that ‘out-of there-ness’ is the consequence of scientific work rather than its .” 4 In their laboratory ethnography, Latour and Woolgar studied how facts are constructed in a laboratory. By examining through an anthropologist’s lens, “the microprocesses of negotiations that take place continually in the laboratory,” the authors demonstrated the process whereby an ordered account was fabricated from disorder and chaos in the laboratory. In this sense, they reconsidered “the laboratory as a system of fact construction.”5 Latour’s emphasis on the locations and translation of images opened up a new arena of studying the construction of science---the idea of how images depended on cultural, technological and social context for their acceptance, and how that in turn constituted science. If scholars like Steven Shapin, Simon Shaffer and Bruno Latour have focused on the non-human instruments of science, certain scholars have actually tried to study the living actors in the laboratory. In 1994, a very sophisticated analysis of the experimental system was provided by Kohler in his Lords of the Fly, where he showed how the fly was both a technological artifact and a biological organism.6 By studying the laboratory methods and experiments through which the fly was converted into a tool of genetic mapping, Kohler showed “the construction of Drosophila as a standard experimental instrument.” 7 While adding a new dimension to constructivism by concentrating on the ecology

3 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. (Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1979), 180. 4 Ibid., 180-182. 5 Ibid., 41. 6 Robert Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 7 Ibid., 67.

19 of the laboratory, Kohler however remained oblivious of the larger socio-cultural or political developments that might have gone into the making of experimental science/genetics. One only wishes that Kohler came out of the laboratory at times and gave us a broader view of the social history of genetics. Not only has there been a rigorous mapping of the internal arrangements of the laboratories and scientific societies, but there have also been attempts to look beyond the laboratory walls into the fieldwork sites. Scholars like Henrika Kuklick and Robert Kohler for instance, have brought together a collection of essays in Science in the Field, Osiris, where the authors have tried to outline the features that distinguish field science from laboratory science.8 Constructivists have also borrowed heavily from anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who viewed “culture” as systems of meaning in specific social settings. 9 The “reading” of human cultures and social sciences paved the way towards new analysis of scientific communities and science in general. As a culture, a group of now came to be approached on the same term as a peasant village community. Constructivists were also able to study the heterogeneous resources used in science like texts, artifacts, spoken discourse, materials, images and the connections they make with the wall beyond the laboratory. If laboratory studies illuminated the local practices of experimentation by which research findings were communicated to the world outside, certain scholars like Steven Shapin examined the very constitution of trust among networks of scientists in the seventeenth century. In his monograph, A Social History of Truth, Shapin claimed that the extension of scientific knowledge was contingent on the natural philosophers’ trust in one another’s factual statements. 10 Shapin showed how the image of the gentleman as a truth-teller was a crucial factor in the development of a community of researchers bound by mutual trust and decorum. Such studies indicated that an analysis of the broader social and cultural landscape along with a peek into the laboratory could reveal fascinating details about the construction of scientific knowledge. Constructivists have also examined the making and unmaking of identities. Against the view of a ready-made identity of scientists, constructivists argue that a “scientist” did not have a recognized identity. Mario Biagioli for instance, in his fascinating work, Galileo, Courtier has

8 Henrika Kuklick and Robert Kohler, eds, Science in the Field, Osiris. 2nd series, volume 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See also Robert Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 9 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York:Basic Books, 1977). 10 Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series). (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995).

20 shown how Galileo could manipulate his identity as a scientist by seeking royal, aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage at given times.11 Biagioli examined how Galileo could win Medici patronage by representing his discovery of the of Jupiter as appropriate “gifts” for the Grand Duke Cosimo II in 1610. Thus, according to Biagioli, Galileo could package his discoveries to maximum advantage, and thereby claim a powerful position by constructing his own identity as a mathematician, which he could never have commanded in the Italian universities. Biagioli’s interesting analysis of Galileo’s life as a courtier contributed to the field by emphasizing that individuals are shaped by their cultural context and also by their ability to manipulate relationships. Such an exploration of the construction of social identities forces us to study race, gender and sexuality through different lens and entails a much nuanced understanding of identity formation than as a teleological process. In fact, the concepts of race, gender, and sexuality have all undergone massive transformations ever since the onslaught of Constructivism. A fascinating discussion of “race” as a constructed category has been provided by Stephen Jay Gould in his The Mismeasure of Man where he challenged the idea of intelligence as being innate or measurable.12 Rejecting the notion of biological determinism, Gould has shown that nineteenth and twentieth century “science” perpetuated the myth of white male superiority, which in turn served the political purpose of legitimizing the “inferiorization” of Asians and Africans. Dissecting Lombroso’s idea of crime as biological, and exposing the Binet scale and its reification of IQ, Gould shows how the reification of intelligence from the nineteenth to twentieth century (till the publication of Bell Curve) has all along served to biological determinism. Written in a style of popular science, Gould through his analysis of the fallacies of “race science” exposed how culture determined biology. His highly controversial work led to a rethinking of concept of “race” which was no longer considered innate, but visualized as being the product of cultural evolution. Questions of gender and sexuality have also produced resources for rethinking the trope of identity formation. Ludmilla Jordanova’s Sexual Visions focused on eighteenth century scientific and medical discourse on the differences between sexes, and on the fact that

11 Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 12 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1981).

21 knowledge of nature was itself gendered through cultural contexts. 13 Londa Schiebinger’s works emphasized how gender became a crucial organizing principle in eighteenth century classification of nature.14 In lines with Ludmilla Jordanova, she demonstrated how the eighteenth century naturalists were enthusiastic in imposing their social assumptions into their representations of nature, which meant that the nature “constructed” was highly discriminatory in its classification. In the 1980s, developments in the wider world, like the UN Rio Earth Summit and the Columbian Quincentennial helped to boost the link between gender, postcolonial studies and science in a global context. Constructivism was boosted by such historical changes (growth of feminist, African-American, environmental movements) of the 1980s that demonstrated that science and societies are co-constructed. In fact, Eurocentrism encountered a series of assaults from the 1970s onwards. Eric Wolf in his monumental work Europe and the People without History was one of the first to challenge the concept of cultural dominance of Europe.15 He argued that “the history of these supposedly history-less peoples is in fact a part of the history of European expansion itself.” 16 Wolfe’s lead was taken up by some historians of science who influenced by postcolonialism, attempted to counter Eurocentric and androcentric science and policies and their effects. 17 In her work, Is Science Multicultural, Sandra Harding tried to bring to light crucial questions about knowledge formation that are ignored and often de- legitimated by dominant North American and European institutions and cultures. She argues that different cultures have different resources and limitations for producing knowledge, which are not all “equal, or “perfect.”18 Hence, science according to her is multicultural because elements of the knowledge traditions of many different non-European cultures have been incorporated into it.

13 Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 14 Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). See also Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard University Press, 2004). 15 Eric R Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). 16 Ibid., 194. 17 Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 18 Ibid., 19.

22

This work is deeply inspired by a Constructivist approach, as it believes that science is not value-free, but is impregnated with cultural values. Through my study of twentieth century “science” in Bengal, I contend that since these values are societal or cultural, science cannot describe a value-free reality. As Stephen Jay Gould aptly argues, “Theories…are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.”19 I delve into studying the making and unmaking of identities and how that is closely tied to the construction of science. Against the view of a ready-made identity of scientists, I demonstrate that a “scientist” or “veterinary surgeon” in twentieth century Bengal, for instance, did not have a recognized identity. Rather, what it meant to be a “veterinary surgeon” in late colonial Calcutta varied along class, caste race, gender lines and most importantly, along notions of power. While acknowledging the idea of science as constructed, I however, try to draw a line between theory and narrative. Constructivism is also a highly jargonized approach that attempts to go too far in relativizing science. I believe that prioritizing constructivist sociology over historical narrative may lead historians to shaky grounds. This work thus seconds Robert Kohler’s argument that constructivism should not be seen as a “foundation,” but rather as a bag of tools, from which historians can pick up the ones useful for their own purpose. Hence, by inclining towards a postmodernist understanding of knowledge production, this work rejects the “givenness” of any phenomenon by showing the peculiarity of the colonial science.20 Hence, while evolutionary science always aspired toward objectivity, it was and shall always remain in the realm of subjectivity.21 While scientists are pawns of their own culture, interests, and patrons; science at the same time strives towards objectivity. In fact, the concept of social construction should not be a short-hand approach to the history of ideas. This work therefore studies the subjectivities of

19 Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 22. 20 The debates between an objective science and subjectivity; and between nature and nurture continue to this day, and have puzzled many a historians and philosophers of science. Michael Ruse in his Mystery of Mysteries dabbles with the same question of whether “science is a real world that exists independently of humankind and which would be the same even if none of us had ever been,” or whether science is a creation which is bound by culture and may not be the same in different places and at different times. By using Karl Popper as the champion of the cause of objectivity, and Thomas Kuhn and the Edinburgh school as the defenders of subjectivism, Ruse attempts to come up with an answer to the debate. Writing for a popular audience, Ruse tries to develop a middle ground arguing that while science is culturally created, it does also test its theories against the real world. See Michael Ruse, Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 21 Ruse, 35.

23 scientists and knowledge production, while admitting the objective claim that science often makes. I also take a stand against epistemological relativism, and instead focus on “global” and “local” histories rather than on “universals,” which I believe, no longer appear as useful. Siding with the post-Kuhnian and postcolonial schools of science, I hold that there is no one scientific method, no monolithic “science,” and no single style of good scientific reasoning, since both European and non-European sciences have used different methods/styles of explaining nature. In fact, postcolonial criticism that developed in the 1970s launched a severe attack on all forms of master-narratives because most of the powerful master-narratives like capitalism, industrialism, feudalism are Eurocentric, and because such master-narratives have been used to frame Third World histories.22 My work calls for dismantling Eurocentrism and it can be placed within such larger body of works on postcolonial science and technology.

Science, Epidemics, and Empire

My study is situated within the broad historiographical theme of science and imperialism that has attracted the attention of many scholars since 1980s. In 1989, Michael Adas in his monograph, Machines as the Measure of Men drew our attention to the criteria through which westerners “measured” non-Western people.23 Certain scholars like George Basalla have viewed the dissemination “western” science across the globe as a benign diffusion of a fully constituted medical tradition emanating from the colonial metropoles.24 Basalla triggered writings on science and imperialism that largely saw science as an instrument of colonial expansion in the non- Western . Influential among such scholars who followed the Basalla paradigm is the Daniel Headrick whose Tools of Empire emphasized on the transmission of science across inspired by an imperialistic zeal.25 The historiography on science and medicine however began to break away from these models as studies began to focus on questions of

22 This is one of the central projects of the postcolonialists. See Arif Dirlik The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997); Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2000). 23 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 24 George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science, CLVI, 5 May, p.611-22; George Basalla ed., The Rise of Modern Science: Internal or External Factors (, Massachusetts: D C Heath, 1968). 25 Daniel R Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

24 legitimization of science in different cultural contexts, on the politics of knowledge-creation, and on the dialogue between the different knowledge systems. The politically motivated interests of the empire meant that not only the knowledge transmitted to India was shaped by a dominating hegemonic power, but the growth of science in indigenous society also felt the impact of colonialism. It is this dismissal of the “politics of knowledge” that according to Dhruv Raina, renders Basalla prone to criticism as he argued, “It is this decontextualization of science, sanitized from its political context, that accords science privilege, and when devoid of any sense of its practice renders it a kind of scientific imperialism.”26 Historians of empire have been engaged in studying Indian and African experiences with Western medicine.27 In the South Asian context, historians have argued that more than an ideological tool of the empire, science was also used for sustaining that very empire through a hegemonic project. Scholars like Ian Inskter, Deepak Kumar, Dhruv Raina have demonstrated how the Empire in India literally used science to legitimize power relations in a hierarchical colonial world and thus establish their hegemony over the subjects. Inskter has emphasized that, the British interest in India was largely restricted to commerce and the natural history project.28 Others like Zaheer Baber and Roy Macleod have argued that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “the loss of political and economic sovereignty produced a situation wherein the diffusion of modern science was more or less decided by imperial colonial policy.”29 One of the most comprehensive studies on the use of a hegemonic science in the project of Empire-building in colonial India is Science and the Raj by Deepak Kumar.30 Kumar has testified that geology, mineralogy, and the material sciences were honey pots for a colonial regime that was built upon the principle of maximization of revenue. The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries thus saw the mushrooming of the botanical and the geological surveys, colonial gardens, scientific societies and educational bodies. In fact, one of the earliest formal scientific

26 Raina, 2003. 27 Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Press, 1991); . John Iliffe, East African Doctors: A History of the Medical Profession. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 28 Ian Inskter, “Prometheus Bound: Technology and Industrialization in , and India prior to 1914: A Political Economy Approach,” Annals of Science 45 (1988): 399-426. 29 Roy Macleod and Deepak Kumar eds., Technology and the Raj: Technical Transfers to India 1700-1947 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995); Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization and Colonial Rule in India (New York: State University Press, 1996). 30 Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj: A Study of British India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

25 institutions to be established in most of the British colonies was the botanic garden, which had a major role in the colonial expansion of the West.31 In the context of colonial medicine, David Arnold has examined the colonial project of “colonizing the body,” and the way in which Western science asserted its superiority over indigenous medical traditions.32 Others like Gyan Prakash, have studied the “cultural authority” of Western science in colonial India.33 Scholars have also treated epidemics as “windows” through which to view a colonial society.34 Radhika Ramasubban, for instance, has shown that Western medicine in India was “enclavist” and “segregated” because it was geared towards meeting the health needs of the army and the European community, while never really reaching the larger sections of Indian population.35 Reacting to Ramasubban’s emphasis on army, Arnold holds that it would be a mistake to regard the army in India as a single homogenous constituency, just as it would be wrong to simplify the relationship between the army and medicine, which according to Arnold was a sufficiently complicated one.36 Instead, by studying the varied Indian and European responses to the three epidemic diseases, Arnold shows how the medical gaze was confined not among the army, jail and the British community, but extended to large sections of Indian society. Mark Harrison in his Public Health in British India has pointed out that “decision-making” in matters of medical and sanitary policy was increasing coming from within the competence of Indians themselves.

31 Some prominent works in this regard has been by Donal P. McCracken and Lucile Brockway who have traced the imperial network that held together the Empire’s gardens in the different colonies from the Atlantic to Asia. Studying the Kew Gardens centered in London, Brockway demonstrates how the plant transfers from distant lands to the various British colonies were the part of a huge botanical imperialism that connected the scientific elite in London, the British Parliamentarians and the white colonial officials in India. While seeds and knowledge moved from center to periphery and back to the center, it only demonstrated the power of a hegemonic science employed for the purpose of empire. The studies of both Brockway and McCracken bolster the idea of botanical knowledge being diffused through the metropolis to the periphery and back to the center---a knowledge that first converted into profit and finally to a hegemonic power over the “natives.” See Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979); Donal P. McCracken, Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian (London: Leicester University Press, 1997). 32 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (London: University of California Press, 1993). 33 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 34 Birdie Andrews and Andrew Cunningham have stressed that the introduction of Western medicine into non- Western societies has been contested at almost every level. See Birdie Andrews and Andrew Cunningham eds. Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (New York:Manchester University Press, 1997). 35 Radhika Ramasubban, Public Health and Medical Research in India : Their Origins under the Impact of British Colonial Policy (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002). 36 Arnold, 63.

26

Such studies are immensely rich in capturing the nature of British medical tradition as it developed in both the metropole and the colony. However, as Seema Alavi rightly points out, such studies remain invariably “state-centric.”37 Deeply influenced by Alavi’s work who has examined the “Indian players who contributed to the agility of the Indo-Muslim tradition,” my study redirects scholarly attention to the need for examining how “science” was mediated through the indigenous communities that challenged, assimilated and eventually appropriated it in their own mental worlds. Chapter Five especially, through an analysis of colonial and indigenous debates surrounding public health, science, sanitation, and diet examines how the late nineteenth and early twentieth century twentieth century Bengali bhadralok came to terms with modern science and imagined it in their own cultural contexts. I therefore depart from that dominant scholarship on science, medicine and imperialism that have all along been engaged with analyzing “western” science as a repressive force, and have hence overlooked the productive encounters and moments in South Asian history. This work, by contrast, tries to divert the focus to look beyond the British-influenced colonial archive in order to explore the cultural discourses that shaped the intellectual trajectory of the Bengali bhadralok as well as the popular culture of the peasants.

“The Question of the Animal”

Scholars investigating the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals have tended to engage in intense philosophical and theoretical debates in determining the boundaries between the two. Animal studies or “human-animal studies” has comprised of a wide range of disciplines within the humanities, social sciences, and biological and cognitive sciences. Despite the disciplinary differences, two major theoretical questions have dominated the field: the question of “animality,” and the problem of human-animal distinction. Regarding the theme of “animality,” most scholars now that agree that much like the critique of essentialism in feminism, queer theory, and race studies, theorists in animal studies have tried to demarcate how “animality” differed from humans, and thus they have always ended up homogenizing the

37 Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition 1600-1900 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 7. Alavi questions the idea of Western models of civil society being imported into India and used as tools of colonial domination. Instead, she studies how supposedly colonial concepts like “public health” had indigenous roots.

27 radically different forms of animal life.38 Most theorists now believe that “animal” cannot be reduced to any simple set of shared characteristics. This problematic was first raised by Jacques Derrida who used the phrase “the question of the animal” throughout his writings on animals. When Derrida speaks of “the question of the animal,” he refers to the way in which philosophers have traditionally written about animals in reductionist and essentialist terms.39 Similarly, in recent years, traditional human-animal distinctions have been attacked from multiple theoretical perspectives. Animal studies theorists have grappled with the larger question of whether animal- human distinctions be drawn along different lines, or be abandoned altogether. My study does not attempt to engage with such philosophical or theoretical debates concerning “animality.” Nor does it try to displace or dispute the validity of such models (human-animal distinction). Rather, it historicizes the evolution of such categories, as they were perceived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how such colonial / indigenous knowledge in India shaped and influenced both discourses and practices. My work is thus not based squarely on ethical and ontological issues concerning animals, but on the larger historical debates involving different parties in a colonial society on questions surrounding animal cruelty/compassion. Historians have investigated the similarities and differences in practices and beliefs connected with animals across both time and space. Most historians agree that in nineteenth century Western thought, animal behavior was usually portrayed and interpreted in terms of a contrast with human behavior.40 Several works have explored such contrasts to historically understand the factors underlying both anthropomorphic and anthropocentric perceptions of animals. Anthropocentrism, or the idea that the human occupies the central space of the universal and thus excludes what is considered nonhuman, has come under serious critical attack. 41 was one of the most phenomenal and earliest works on the question of animal

38 For an overview of the theoretical approaches in animal studies, see Matthew Calacro, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida ( New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 39 Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am,” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369- 418. Derrida calls into question essentialist accounts of animalty. See also, Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000). 40 Tim Ingold, ed, What is an Animal? (New York: Unwin Hyman, 1988). The authors in this volume all examined how humans have attempted to decide what to recognize as “human” or “animal.” 41 Recent scholarship challenges the idea that humans are hierarchically placed on a higher plank than animals who are “lower” or “simpler” than human beings. Several scholar shave proved that such hierarchical evaluations based on the differences of degree between humans and animals are empirically flawed. Often, animals are viewed by philosophers strictly through a human lens, and found to be lacking in certain traits that are considered to be unique to humans.

28 rights, ethics and protectionism.42 Launching a brutal attack on speciecism, argued that at the core of his work “is the claim that to discriminate against beings solely on account of their species is a form of prejudice, immoral and indefensible in the same way that discrimination on the basis of race is immoral and indefensible.”43 According to Singer, the capacity of animals to feel pain, which he argues has been proven scientifically, is a valid justification for saving lives of animals. Establishing the limit of as the only defensible boundary between the interests of humans and animals alike, Singer investigates the tradition of inflicting cruelty and suffering to animals in the Western world from to animal experiments to eating animal flesh. Singer provides justifications for using humane techniques of animal slaughter in factories, including making a case against eating “kosher meat” by Orthodox Jews and Muslims which requires killing of “moving animals” with a pole axe. Singer sums up his solution, “If, to preserve religious laws intact, a choice must be made between the taste for meat and the agony of millions of animals, surely it is justifiable to ask those who follow the religious laws to do without meat.”44 Singer develops his arguments against speciecism by holding that eating meat itself implies using animals as a means to human ends. Tracing human attitudes to animals from pre-Christian (Judaic and Greek sources) to Enlightenment and post- Darwinian thought, Singer showed how it was as late as in the mid-nineteenth century that cruelty to animals was for the first time made a punishable offence. Citing the opposition to Darwinian thought as an indication of the strength of speciecism in Western world, Singer concludes by arguing that “the idea that “humans come first” is more often used as an excuse for not doing anything about either human or nonhuman animals than as a genuine choice between incompatible alternatives.”45 An especially influential work on animals that has shaped this study is Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate. Ritvo has argued that Victorians used animal breeding to resolve class anxieties. As industrialization strained the English class structure, breeders created elaborate class systems, replete with blue books and pedigrees patterned after those of the nobility, for horses and dogs. The shows offered breeders from lower rungs on the social ladder a rare chance

42 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Harper Perennial, 1975). 43 Ibid.,233. 44 Ibid., 157. 45 Ibid., 233.

29 to compete against and defeat social “betters.”46 Following Ritvo, I examine the tensions between race, class, and science in colonial Bengal. How did race anxiety and the urge to preserve the white, male, imperial honor affect the claims of science? What were the challenges faced by the indigenous medical community or the Bengali veterinary surgeons who were asserting their identity over an allegedly “superior” western science as also battling to establish their place over human medicine?

Cruelty as a Discourse

Closely tied to “the question of animal,” is the study of the ways in which different discourses have represented the animal. I draw from Erica Fudge’s major contribution, which is not so much about animals as about the ways in which humans define themselves as human in the face of the animal.47 She argues that in historical terms the animal can never be studied in isolation, it is always a record by and of the human. It is for this the reason that her book undermines the apparently antithetical binary of animal and human.48 “It is about both animals and humans; the link is inevitable. Reading about animals is always reading through humans, and reading about humans is reading through animals.”49 Fudge uses the example of Bear Garden in nineteenth century England to “reveal the truth about humans” who she argues, by watching the cruel entertainment “sink below the level of the beasts.” According to her, the Bear Garden thus serves as a place where the identity of being human becomes problematic because “the Bear garden makes humans into animals.”50 In a nutshell, by using writings dealing with the animal in early modern England---whether theological, humanist, scientific or legal—Fudge shows how the animal is always represented as the antithesis of the human. But she argues that in presenting the animal as the thing which the human is not, writers give animals a status, which undermines the desire to make a clear separation . In her words, “paradoxically, humans need animals in order to be human.”51

46 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). 47 Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). See also Erica Fudge, ed. Renaissance Beasts: Of Humans, Animals and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 48 Ibid., 2. 49 Ibid., 3. 50 Ibid., 15. 51 Ibid., 3.

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One of the earliest and major interventions in the history of human attitudes towards animals was Keith Thomas’ work in which the author investigated the central question of why there was a significant change in attitude towards animals in the fifteenth century England. 52 Thomas argued that in the first phase extending from fifteenth to nineteenth century, human attitude towards animals was still very much a part of a man-centered discourse. During this period, people in England condemned cruelty to animals not because of any genuine concern for animal welfare, but because it was believed to have a bestial impact on human behavior. However, it was from seventeenth century onwards that one notices a major shift in the discourse of animal cruelty as anthropocentrism started gradually eroding. Thomas believes that the birth of such “new sensibilities”---the idea that it is “unnatural to take pleasure in cruelty”--- was largely the work of zoologists, botanists and astronomers. Thomas traces the concern for which left its mark in legislations and early humane societies which began to prevent “unnecessary” cruelty to animals. Thomas’ work has been critiqued by scholars like James Steintrager who has argued that Thomas’ work suffers from an uncritical analysis of the concept of “power.”53 Steintrager examines the concepts of “cruelty,” “humanity” and “inhumanity” in the Enlightenment culture to study human attitudes towards animals and monsters in Europe.54 He argues that during Enlightenment, there was a major transition in human understanding of “humanity” and “cruelty” as it was now believed that humans feel pity more than other creatures because they are reasonable. Since reason activated and enabled compassion, there was a transition in human understanding of “humanity” from reason to pity.55 Steintrager shows how this shift from reason to pity had an important bearing on human attitudes to animals. He argues that in the eighteenth century, “the emphasis on sympathy meant that those who practiced professions that opened them to indifference to suffering by the force of

52 Keith Thomas’ Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (New York: Allen Lane, 1983). 53 James A. Steintrager, Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 54 Steintrager, 43. He especially analyzes Hogarth’s series “The Four Stages of Cruelty” from 1751 where the story is told in the series that appears almost banal in its clarity---a poor boy, Tom Nero begins by torturing animals, eventually moves on to killing a human. The message of the engraving, Steintrager argues, was that cruelty to animals, which is to be shunned in any case, leads to cruelty to humans and thence to the application of justice to the wrongdoer. The author uses Hogarth’s engravings to demonstrate “the movement of the mark of humanity from reason to pity.” 55 Steintrager, 44.

31 habituation were at a particular risk of being suspected of inhumanity.”56 Similarly, the boundary between science and sport came to be demarcated strictly as the legitimacy of came into question. Determining the boundary between science and sport, or legitimate and illegitimate cruelty only revealed that, as he rightly states “cruelty was once considered by many to be perfectly human and that this situation was not overturned without struggle or paradox.”57 Drawing from these varied works, I demonstrate how the animal protection sentiments in England influenced the colonial experience in Bengal, and also how the Bengalis grappled with the tension between cruelty and an Hindu-Vedic ahima ( non-injury). Straddling two different worlds, they appropriated the different discourses at different historical moments.

Animals in Modern South Asian Scholarship : Cattle, Classification, Cow

In modern South Asian scholarship, the theme of human-animal relationship has been approached from multiple perspectives---anthropology, literature, history to religious studies. A scrutiny of these works can arguably lead us to delineate three broad trends. One trend followed by scholars like Laxman Satya and some economic historians, focused on the catastrophic impact of colonial onslaught on several regional Indian cattle cultures and rural ecology.58 Such works, despite bringing in ecological factors, simply viewed change as a response to colonial, capitalist penetration rather than casting environment as dynamic in itself, and had a tendency to over- romanticize the presumed pre-colonial idyllic past. Among studies of Indian cattle complex can also be placed works of anthropologists like Marvin Harris that either attempted to investigate animal sacredness by examining animal symbolism, or analyzed the usefulness of cattle by investigating Indian property relations or technology-driven-environment base.59 A second strand taken up by the Subaltern Studies scholars like Gyan Pandey examined the relationship between cow, community and religious mobilization, depicting how cow became a “rallying symbol” of political mobilizations among Hindus of Upper India in the late nineteenth century.60 Such scholars like J R McLane, Sandria Freitag and Gyan Pandey have discussed the growth of a

56 Steintrager,62. 57 Steintrager,78. 58 Laxman D. Satya, Ecology, Colonialism and Cattle: in the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). 59 Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (Vintage, 1989). 60 Gyan Pandey, “Rallying Around the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri , c. 1888-1917,” Subaltern Studies 2 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

32 distinctly “Hindu” identity that manifested itself through the - controversy and the Cow-Protection riots.61 Still another domain of analyzing indigenous and British attitudes towards animals is the field of environmental ethics as manifested through pre-colonial and colonial hunting practices. This dominant theme pioneered by John Mackenzie, Mahesh Rangarajan, M S S Pandian, and K. Sivaramakrishnan have dealt with histories of animals in wilderness, illuminating big game hunting and investigating contests over game, forests and wilderness in South Asia.62 Exploring colonial hunting practices in nineteenth and twentieth century India, John MacKenzie has investigated the British fascination for hunting in India.63 According to him, besides fox hunting, wild boar chase, and deer hunting, England could hardly offer any other form of sport. Hence, the “wild” and “youthful” Indian fascinated the British as it was considered to possess the wilderness that could alone match the valor of the “masculine” occident. In a similar vein, Ranjan Chakrabarti has illuminated the British fascination for the and how it has inspired a great range of colonial responses.64 Chakrabarti concerns himself with proving that shikar in general, was one of the sites on which the colonial project sought to construct the difference between its “superior” self and the “inferiorized” native other.65 Another work that has tried to tease out the connections that people have tried to draw between hunting and being “human” is Matt Cartwill’s A View to a Death in the Morning. 66 Dwelling on the changing meanings of hunting, the author examines how from the seventeenth century on, the growth of anti-hunting sentiment was linked in various ways to the growth of science, as science itself called into question the moral foundations of human’s over nature by blurring the boundary

61 John McLane, Indian and the Early Congress ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Sandria Freitag, “Sacred Symbol as Mobilizing Ideology: The North Indian Search for a ‘Hindu’ Community,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 4 ( October 1980): 597-625 and her Religious Rites and Riots: From Community Identity to in 1870-1940 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980); Gyan Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region 1880-1917” in Ranajit Guha ed. Subaltern Studies 2 (Delhi, 1983): 60-129. 62 Mahesh Rangarajan, India's History: An Introduction, 1st ed. (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India, 1st ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 63 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism Studies in Imperialism ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 64 Ranjan Chakrabarti, 67. 65 Ranjan Chakrabarti, “Tiger and the Raj: Ordering the Maneater of the Sunderbans 1880-1947,” in Space and Power in History: Images, Ideologies, Myths, and Moralities (Kolkata, India: Penman, 2001). 66 Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

33 between humans and beasts. Cartmill also analyzes how big-game hunting was embraced by European colonialists as a symbol of human dominion over the lower orders, and attacked as cruel and oppressive by opponents of imperialism. Mahesh Rangarajan’s work is a rich contribution to South Asian hunting literature that not only examines both Indian and British hunting (shikar) as they flourished alongside each other in eighteenth and nineteenth-century, but also shows how the wild animals entered colonial legislations.67 From the late nineteenth century onwards, Forest Rules began to lay down “bag limits” for sport hunters, as the latter debated what was better as a sport---snares for deer or trapping .68 The wild carnivores, Rangarajan shows, had thus entered official thinking and colonial system of classification. If wild animals entered the colonial knowledge system through official classification, what about the domestic animals in rural Bengal or the animals in urban space of Calcutta that were worked, eaten or slaughtered? In fact, the material culture of nineteenth and twentieth century Bengal heavily revolved around domestic animals---agricultural cultivation depended on cattle; the urban city life relied on draft animals; and animals featured in food and rituals of the native Bengali subjects. Yet, in spite of the socio-economic importance of animals to Indian culture, contemporary South Asian scholarship is surprisingly silent on the importance of studying domestic animals as historical actors. Examined as a whole these scholarly interventions provide us with fascinating insights into game hunting, wildlife conservation, cow protection controversies, or the material cattle culture. They are however, not histories of animals per se because animals (mostly tigers and cows) are incidental to these studies, which are not concerned with studying animals as subjects of history, but with commercialization, capitalist penetration or policy decisions of the Raj. My current research project thus fills in this gap in South Asian historiography. My dissertation opens up a new window into colonial Calcutta through a comparative and overlapping study of the historical use, construction, and meaning of draft animals from the mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. By focusing on discourses of

67 By examining the colonial shikar literature, Mahesh Rangarajan brings out the clear contrast with the previous pre-colonial period. Rival Indian hunters who did not belong to a privileged elite circle were branded as butchers who killed for gain and not for glory. Native shikaris, who were often low caste or tribal hunters, supplied partridge, hares and quail for the British table. However, as animals and birds valued for their meat and sport became scarce, there was a rush to corner access. An all-white Game Association, founded in 1870, sought to regulate hunting styles and the use of wildlife resources by allowing very few Indians access to the forests. See Mahesh Rangarajan, India's Wildlife History: An Introduction (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). 68 Rangarajan, 52.

34 cruelty and politics of burdening animals in Calcutta, the present study explores the intersection between indigenous religious, ethical traditions and those brought by the British.

Meat, Vegetarianism and Urban History

Studies that focus on the commodification of animals into meat grapple with several histories simultaneously---an economic history exploring the relations between the producers and the consumers; a socio-cultural history unraveling the different strands within colonialism, consumerism and diet; and finally an urban history studying the rise of new urban meat centers with corresponding developments in technology. In fact, there is a strong tendency for the study of meat inspection and industry to be appropriated by animal rights activists. Such works delineate the social history of meat eating along with their often denunciatory stand on the practice of meat consumption. Typical of this trend are the works of scholars such as Jeremy Rifkin, Nick Fiddes and Carol J. Adams who study the American consumerist society that thrives on a carnivorous culture. 69 While detailing the “rise and fall of the beef culture”, these books focus on the moral aspects of meat eating, thus condemning the practice of meat consumption and vouching for vegetarianism. Nick Fiddes’s in his Meat studies the meat-eating culture of the West---Britain and America.70 As the name of the book suggests, Fiddes argues for the universal symbolism of meat as a category that demonstrates man’s control over the natural world. Writing in a similar vein of an animal rights activist is Jeremy Rifkin’s Beyond Beef where he offers economic, ethical and environmental reasons to persuade people from eating beef.71 Historians and anthropologists dealing with the history of meat consumption have however viewed the same topic from a different perspective than that of the animal rights activists because rather than debating the ethics of meat eating; their works situate the meat industry in the broader historical context. Jimmy M. Skaggs in his monograph Prime Cut studies how “The red-meat industry is a microcosm of American economic development.”72 Louis Carroll Wade in her Chicago’s Pride looks at the sudden rise of the stockyard township in

69 Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (New York: Routledge, 1991); Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton Books, 1992); Carol J Adams, The Pornography of Meat (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004); Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory; (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1999). 70 Fiddes. 71 Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton Books, 1992). 72 Jimmy M Skaggs, Prime Cut: Raising and Meatpacking in the , 1607-1983 (College Station: Texas A&M University, 1986).

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Chicago and the activities of the packinghouse employees as both workers and residents.73 The ecological consequences of meat-eating has been dealt with by Ted Steinberg in his chapter “The Secret History of Meat” in Down to Earth where he discusses the pre-nineteenth century American preference for pork to the literal monopoly of beef in the national palate.74 A somewhat similar study is undertaken by Roger Horowitz in his Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation where he focuses on the “dynamics of meat consumption.”75 Each of these works examines the question of commodification of animals in their survey of the role of technology and consumerism as the post-World War II period witnessed the transformation of farm animals into packaged edibles. This colonial ecological revolution that was ushered in by the Europeans in the seventeenth century was according to Carolyn Merchant, the first phase in the deconstruction of the environment and reconstruction of human consciousness.76 The question of commodification of animals and the mushroom growth of the meat industry is tackled with an even broader brush by scholars like William Cronon, to whom the rise of the meat industry was inevitable ever since the Europeans took over the Great Plains, eliminated the buffaloes and brought in cattle. Cronon also points to another effect of increasing mechanization of the meat industry---it led to a certain “alienation” of the animal from the tables and ‘civilization”77. By engaging such works, I shall situate the history of meat consumption, vegetarianism and colonial slaughterhouses. One of the most valuable models in writing a history of Calcutta’s slaughterhouses will be Jeffrey M. Pilcher’s The Rebellion where he shows how the sausage rebellion represented a battle by local officials, butchers, and consumers to retain control over the Mexico City meat supply against the foreign meatpacker DeLay and his patrons within the Porfirian regime.78

73 Louis Carroll Wade, Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 74 Ted Steinberg, “The Secret History of Meat,” in Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 75 Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2006). 76 Carolyn Merchant, “Animals into Resources,” in Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 77 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W Norton, 1991). 78 Jeffrey M. Pilcher, The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890- 1917 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

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General histories of western vegetarianism already exist, such as Colin Spencer’s well- known survey of vegetarianism.79 Spencer shows that though the word “vegetarian” was not coined until the mid-nineteenth century, the meatless diet has been around for as long as people have. Spencer describes the major movements that shared the doctrine as well as the surprisingly diverse moralities, perspectives, and philosophies that motivated them. Carol Adams has studied the gendered dimensions of vegetarianism.80 My study is indebted to the work of Trisham Stuart’s most recent study, The Bloodless Revolution and James Gregory’s Of Victorians and Vegetarians.81 These authors examine the early Europeans’ attitudes towards Hindu vegetarianism in India. Gregory argues that Europeans like Marco , Francois Bernier were prepared to see a utilitarian rationale behind the Hindu cow worship. Cow contributed to the agronomy and well-being of the country. However, the protection of animals that were not useful flabbergasted even the most hardened travellers.82 The ultimate surprise for the Europeans was the Indian “animal hospitals” or pinjrapole. Europeans were most challenged by the fact that such hospitals extended effort and money on animals that were past their usefulness. Hindus appeared to be extraordinary exemplars of charity.83 This contrasts sharply with my findings as I examine the growth of a humane society in colonial Calcutta and investigate the CSPCA’s perception of Indians and animal treatment. Indians were, according to the founders of the CSPCA, marked by their innate cruelty that only western practices and “civilized” kindness could heal. The contrast with Stuart’s early Europeans is striking, and it only shows how the logic of colonialism had gradually established over issues of animal protection/cruelty.

Environmental Historians and the Work Animals

The issue of human-nature encounter has been tackled by several environmental historians who have focused on commodification of nature into “work”, “energy” and “power.” One outstanding work in this genre of environmental history is The Organic Machine by Richard

79 Colin Spencer, The Heretic's Feast : A ( London: Fourth Estate, 1993). 80 Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory; (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1999). 81 Trisham Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and (London: 2006) ; James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians:The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007). 82 Gregory, 52. 83 Gregory, 53.

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White where he illustrates the conversion of river Columbia into an “organic machine.”84 White's book is as much a story of human agency, as of Columbia’s agency. Evidence in support of White's position (where he attributes enough agency to Columbia) is the fact that he strongly argues that it would be wrong to say that humans have either killed or raped the river. He prefers the metaphor of a “failed marriage” instead of death or rape because White's Columbia acts in the human-nature liaison. Throughout the book, White shows how the two “agencies”---that of Columbia and the humans, overlap, coalesce and overpower each other. The river’s agency is asserted when in spite of it being subsumed to technology, Columbia floods and frustrates men. Despite the changes on its body, it remained a natural system with its “unmade” qualities. I believe that is the essence of White's book----the “organic machine” was both a human creation and yet . “Work” is the other broad theme that runs prominent in the book. Columbia had been working since time immemorial (rivers are historical, according to White). But she has to be “put to work” by humans, which means that with the commodification of water, the nature of the river’s “work” undergoes a change, and thus changes the corresponding relations around it. White is also tempted to express the workers' identity through their work alone when he argues that the workers’ existed in their work statistics. It is thus work and energy that brought the river, the salmon and the men together in one mutually dependent relationship. Borrowing White’s theoretical model of biocentric history, I narrate the story of conversion of animals into “work” as exhibited through the practice of loading and overloading bullock carts in colonial Bengal. The common practice of overloading bullock carts formed the flashpoint of tensions in a native society that was overly dependent on putting animals to “work.” As the categories of “domestic,” “captured,” “tame,” “wild,” were repeatedly being redefined by the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Acts, so one notices efforts made by animal dealers to manipulate these categories to circumvent the provisions of the Act to their profits.

84 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

38

Colonial Knowledge

Most historians of South Asia agree that colonial knowledge-gathering was a state sponsored project, which was necessary not only to know India, but also to justify their colonial domination over the subject population. While British imperialism in India was guided by financial imperatives, it was necessary to legitimize their domination over the subjects. In fact, there has been an intense debate in South Asian scholarship on the role of the colonial state in the construction of this “colonial knowledge.” To classify it broadly, there are two opposing approaches used in evaluating the role played by colonizers in shaping the nature of the colonial state. 85 One group of scholars, broadly classified as post-colonialists and included works of works of Bernard Cohn, Thomas Metcalf, Nicholas Dirks, Mrinalini Sinha and Lata Mani, holds that the role of the colonized was negligible in this process. The colonial state was able to maintain a hegemonic control in the production of colonial knowledge because of the “epistemological violence” waged by the colonial state against its colonized subjects.86 The other group, broadly classified as ‘revisionist’ scholars like C. A. Bayly, Brian Pennington, and Thomas R. Trautmann, argues that there was active collaboration between the native and the colonial state. Edward Said’s ushered a major analytical debate on the colonial representation of the colonized.87 The postcolonialists, largely influenced by Edward Said, maintained that the impact of the colonial state was pervasive and that it was in fact able to bring about major changes in the colonial state by redefining what constitutes of India and how Indians

85 I am drawing upon Phillip B. Wagoner’s classification of the two groups as ‘postcolonialist’ and ‘revisionist.’ Phillip B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge.” in Comparative Study of Society and History. 2003. pp. 783-814. 86 Nicholas Dirks in Foreword to Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. 1996. p. xii in The Bernard Cohn Omnibus (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). 87 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). In his monograph, Said argued how European writings on the Orient like travel literature, novels and history were Eurocentric stereotypes about the colonized that helped to perpetuate Western dominance in these lands. Orientalism was thus less about Orient as it was about the Occident, because the colonized “other” was never allowed to speak for itself. The “Other” was always judged through binaries of European development---not by what the Orient had, but by what they lacked in their stages of European development. The Orient according to Said was thus not a given entity, but was socially constructed by the Occident, and such constructions were conditioned by power relations. What is important about Said’s Orientalism is not whether the Orientalist representation of the Orient is right or wrong, but the reductionism that characterizes the depiction of the Orient by homogenizing differences and essentializing the Orient in terms of certain attributes like femininity, irrationality, and religiosity. The text in its study of Eurocentrism is considered one of the classics of postcolonialism, just as there have been criticisms against it. Dennis Porter accused Said of reducing Orientalism to a monolith that represents a unified western discourse on the Orient. Similarly, Arif Dirlik argued that a problem with Saidian Orientalism was the idea of an Occident with a unified culture.

39 chose to view themselves. Bernard Cohn was among the early scholars to argue for the importance of colonial knowledge production as the main agency of power in British India.88 He argued that the British simultaneously misunderstood and simplified their understanding of things Indian, therefore relegating the Indian subject into a stereotypical role it assigned under the name of tradition. For example, in trying to understand the legal system of India, what colonialism did was completely transform “‘’ into some form of English case law.” Cohn also maintained that, although colonial knowledge was largely produced in the colony, it was not of the colony: rather, it came about through the conjunction of pre-defined, imported European forms of knowledge – the “investigative modalities” of Cohn – with the raw data provided by the indigenous social and cultural forms of the colonized society.89 Similarly, Nicholas Dirks, one of Bernard Cohn early students, through a highly Foucauldian approach, studied how caste figured in colonial imagination and beyond.90 According to Dirks, the solidification of caste into a definitive category of expressing social identity occurred gradually through the colonial project of knowledge creation. The Revolt of 1857 was looked upon by the Raj as an “anthropological failure,” and it was now necessary for the colonial state to gather as much information about the “Indian.” Thus was commissioned the huge project of surveying villages, mapping states, and collecting data about the native Indians. In a similar vein, Thomas Metcalf depicted how the India the British thought was “real” was an “imagined” India--- constructed in their own minds and used by them to serve the needs of the Empire.91 In laying out the different trajectories of British legitimization of authority, Metcalf pointed to the central dilemma of British rule in India. British ideology was caught between searching for India’s similarities with Europe, while at the same time looking for qualities of enduring “difference.” It was this uneasy tension between similarity and difference that was reflected not only in their intellectual endeavors but also in practical reality and decision-making. Grappling with this paradox, the British however eventually preferred to perpetuate the claims of “difference.” The imagined India was thus linked to Britain in a shared origin, and yet it was fundamentally “different.”

88 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 89 Cohn, 5. 90 Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). 91 Thomas Metcalf , Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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It was the lack of indigenous involvement in all these characterizations of colonial knowledge formation that persuaded some historians of South Asia to propose a now famous ‘dialogic’ theory of production of colonial knowledge. The ‘revisionist’ scholars argue that the impact of the colonial state was not as pervasive and its ability to impact change in the colonial state was minimized because of their ignorance of the colonial state which necessitated their reliance on native informants and collaborators. The scholars in this group question “the assumption that the colonized were mere passive bystanders to the process,” and “some of these works have called attention to the active role of the colonized in producing colonial knowledge.”92 Challenging the hegemonic dominance of colonialism, C. A. Bayly traced elements of modern nationalism in India's pre-colonial past, building on the idea that was not a Western import. Rather, its roots can be located in fuzzy borders of land, community, clan and subaltern identities. 93 Among scholars who have debunked the role of colonialism as a hegemonic, disruptive force are Thomas Trautmann and Brian Pennington. Falling largely within the revisionist framework, Pennington stated that “colonialism was never a regime of absolute power; indeed, it often found itself ministering to the needs and desires of certain classes of Indians whose support it required.”

Dismantling Binaries

The above examination of the multiple portrayals of “India” also manifests within itself a larger, crucial theme----the power of representations, and the way that can form the dominant trope for subjugation of the colonized. The colonial representations of India, and the constant attempts to frame policies in lines with those representations indicate the hegemonic nature of colonial power. In fact, in so far as the colonial representations of “manly Englishman,” “effeminate Bengali,” or “caste” were internalized by the colonized themselves, the colonial power was indeed hegemonic. But perhaps it is not possible to draw a simple equation of colonial hegemony, because there were several strands even within the colonial discourse. Colonialism itself was not a monolith, just as the “colonizer” and “colonized” were not fixed categories, but were historically constructed, and so was the relationship between them constantly changing. While accepting that colonialism in India was a hegemonic force, I believe

92 Wagoner. 784. 93 Thomas Trautmann, and British India; Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

41 that a study of colonial knowledge formation has to analyze the nuances within the colonial discourse which would help us locate the different motives of the different parties in appropriating the overall knowledge creation. My work attempts to dismantle the polarized understanding of the role of colonialism by trying to demonstrate how there were both moments of hegemony and appropriation simultaneously. If colonial animal disease control sought to subvert indigenous healing practices, there were also interesting moments of encounter when the Bengali middle-class internalized Western notions of disease, diet, and sanitation. My study thus demolishes the binary that has characterized South Asian scholarship on colonial knowledge by showing instead how there were moments of hegemony and dialogue coexisted. Identities were forged, challenged, assimilated in response to the multiple colonial impulses. I am especially indebted to Lata Mani’s rich study on the Hindu practice of sati ( widow immolation), which is a brilliant work of discourse analysis.94 Contentious Traditions is not about the practice of sati, but rather on how sati preoccupied British colonial officials, the Bengali bhadralok community, Brahmin pundits, the missionaries in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries to the extent it led to the making of a discourse. Often the ideological battles among the different classes overlapped on the broad issues, like the scriptural sanction of sati. However, the irony of the discourse was that the actual performers of the practice, the widows, were blissfully marginalized in the debate. Neither the pamphlets nor the petitions or the newspapers portrayed the physicality of the widow’s suffering. Borrowing the theoretical model of Mani, I bring out how the animals in my study became the ground on which the debates surrounding nutrition, inspection, overloading was carried out as the upper caste Bengali bhadralok, British veterinary surgeons, humane society, sanitary inspectors, and residents of Calcutta clashed over questions of animal use and abuse.

94 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India ( Berkley: University of California Press, 1998).

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CHAPTER THREE

THE DISEASED AND THE DEAD: RINDERPEST, CONTAGION AND “WRATH OF THE GOD,” 1850-1890

We regret to hear that the dreaded cattle disease has, during the last three months again made its appearance in the districts of Kishnaghur, Burdwan, Hooghly, and the 24- Perganas. The Natives call the plague the small-pox. It is very deadly, scarcely any cattle attacked escaping. The Government which instituted an enquiry into the cattle plague might surely initiate measures of precaution similar to those which were found to answer in England.1

On February 3, 1864, John Stalkartt, having received a confirmation from R. Rutherford, the Veterinary Surgeon of Messrs. Hunter and Company, reported to the government of Bengal that a “malignant murrain” had broken out in Calcutta and its neighborhood that needed to be checked early. Deeply alarmed at the loss of his own Arab cow, four calves, and the sudden illness of his English bull, Stalkratt suggested that “the murrain which attacked the cattle at the Great Agricultural Exhibition is spreading, and some Commission should be appointed to devise means to check it early. Bengal has very few cattle, and should it pass into the villages it will be very serious.”2 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the widespread outbreak of cattle plague or rinderpest in Bengal, Punjab, Madras among other regions, caused panic in the colonial establishment. Both the speed of the disease and its impact on trade and were alarming. But most devastating were the mortality rates; the fatal disease could wipe out a herd of cattle in a week’s time. Rinderpest not only highlighted the poor position of veterinarians and their ignorance of cattle disease, but it also made animal disease a critical concern of the colonial government.

1 Extract from The Englishman in letter from H.L Harrison, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Officiating Commissioner of the , Fort William, dated 16 May, 1868. State Archive. Medical Department (General Branch), July 1868, File.No, 2427, No. 50. 2 Letter from John Stalkartt to Colonel H. C James, Private Secretary to the Lieutenant of Bengal, dated 3rd February 1864. West Bengal State Archive [hereafter WBSA]. General Department (Medical Branch), February 1864. No.20-23.

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This chapter closely follows the spread of cattle epizootics from mid-nineteenth century to early twentieth century Bengal, demonstrates the connection between disease control, animal protection and veterinary profession, and finally investigates how an empire grappled with the dilemma of tackling animal morality and preventing an agricultural economy from jeopardy. I follow the interactions between the farmers, medical surgeons, go-daga (Bengali village cow- doctors), colonial government and public attitudes to rinderpest, and explore the conflicts between these groups about how to control rinderpest. The contests over appropriate measures for rinderpest became part of wider debates over the extent of state intervention in the private lives of the colonized subjects and the politics of class that were taking shape in the reconfiguration of the meanings and boundaries of the colonized and colonizer, of “humans” and “animals.” At a theoretical level, I demonstrate the ways in which animal protection/cruelty was constructed in a space where human cruelty, submission, and control were a dominant form of governance. The colonial project of protection towards cattle and domestic animals mirrored an irony in that it exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent colonial state and a powerful, not-too-benign reality in which the colonial state constantly sought to control, subjugate and discipline its subjects—human and non-human. The historical literature on the management and control of livestock diseases has, to date, largely been restricted to studies with a national or local focus. Much of what has been written so far about veterinary medicine and veterinary interventions has referred to , the US, and South , where historians have been especially interested in examining the late nineteenth century professionalization of veterinary science within the context of expanding state bureaucracies. 3 Some of the earliest accounts of veterinary history have tended to focus on the development of the scientific techniques and medical procedures in the western world that have furthered the advancement of veterinary medical science throughout the ages.4 However, as Joanna Swabe rightly points out, these earlier works were often devoid of social context. Veterinary history has generally been written by veterinarians interested in the history of their

3 See for example, Iain Patterson, The British Veterinary Profession, 1791-1948 ( London: J.A Allen, 1983); Joanna Swabe, Animals, Disease and Human Society: Human-Animal Relations and the Rise of Veterinary Medicine (London: Routledge, 1999); Susan Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 4 F. Smith, The Early History of Veterinary Literature and its British Development. 4 volumes, reprinted from The Veterinary Journal, 1919-33 (London: J A Allen, reprinted 1976); D. Karasszon, A Concise History of Veterinary Medicine. Trans. Farkas, E. and Kecskes, I.K. (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. 1988); L. P Pugh, From Farriery to Veterinary Medicine, 1785-1795 (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1962).

44 profession. Hence, most of these early works lacked attention to socio-historical detail and instead focused exclusively on development of veterinary colleges or the work of veterinary .5 In recent years, historians have shifted the attention to studying the relationship between animals and disease by focusing on history of veterinary science and comparative medicine.6 Historians have studied that have historically caused devastating losses, most notably the cattle diseases and rinderpest.7 Although animal disease played a central role in nineteenth century debates on health, hygiene and state intervention in mortality changes in India, limited scholarly attention has been directed at the impact of cattle disease on the British Raj and on the subsequent growth of professionalized veterinary medicine. The literature on disease and empire has remained primarily concerned with studying human epidemics.8 This chapter goes some way to addressing these gaps in the literature. It offers a contextual history of how epizootics shaped the understanding of diseased animals, brought it within the protectionist crusade, and made it into a public health issue.

Comprehending Epizootics

Of the animal diseases specific to the tropics, the ones that caused great problems for domestic animals were the Trypanosoma evansi, usually known by its Indian name of surra, affecting horses and the rinderpest that mostly affected domestic cattle. Griffith Evans discovered the trypanosome causing surra in the Punjab in 1880.9 But the most described of the

5 F. Smith, A History of the Royal Veterinary Corps, 1796-1919 (London: Bailliere, 1927). 6 See L. Wilksinson, Animals and Disease: An Introduction to the History of Comparative Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); J. R Fisher, “Not Quite a Profession: The Aspirations of Veterinary Surgeons in England in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Historical Research 66 (1993): 284-302; C. W Schwabe, Cattle, Priest and Progress in Medicine ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), Veterinary Medicine and Public Health ( Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1984. third edition). 7 On rinderpest, see for example, Michael Worboys, “ Germ Theories and British Veterinary Medicine, 860-1890,” Medical History 35, no. 3 (1991): 308-27; Worboys, “Veterinary Medicine, the Cattle Plague and Contagion, 1865- 1890,” in Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 43-72; Charles van Onselen, “Reactions to Rinderpest in Southern Africa, 1896-97,” Journal of African History 13, no. 3 (1972): 473-88. 8 Some scholars studied how indigenous people co-opted imperial medicine and adapted it to their own requirements. Others like David Arnold countered the argument that Western medicine was unilaterally imposed on the different cultures, and rather demonstrated the complexity of relationships between colonized and colonizers, and the diversity of colonial impacts on native society. Others still like Birdie Andrews and Andrew Cunningham stressed that the introduction of Western medicine into non-Western societies was contested at almost every level. See for example, Birdie Andrews and Andrew Cunningham, eds. Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (New York:Manchester University Press,1997) 9 Griffith Evans, “On a Horse Disease in India Known as ‘Surra,’ Probably due to a Haematozoon,” Veterinary Journal and Annals of Comparative Pathology 13 ( July 1881): 1-10, 82-88, 180-200, 326-33; cited in William G. Clarence-Smith, “Diseases of Equids in ,c. 1800-1945: Apocalypse or Progress?” in Healing the

45 epizootic diseases was cattle plague.10 From the nineteenth century onwards, the expansion of global trade and European colonialism was a means of disseminating Old-World pathogens to different parts of the globe, causing major cattle epizootics around the world ( in , Netherlands, India, Africa) during the second half of the nineteenth century. Cattle plague received the most attention from governments around the world probably due to the high mortality and the speed of the spread---the ingredients for a social and economic disaster.11 Cases of rinderpest affecting agricultural cattle in parts of Bengal and the came to official attention in 1863. From mid-nineteenth century onward, letters circulated among commissioners of Bengal, Madras and the Veterinary Surgeons in those regions that indicate the immediate colonial anxiety and urgency to combat “cattle pestilence.”12 It was repeatedly emphasized in correspondences that the disease was “a malignant fever of an epizootic character, characterized by hot and cold stages, and diahorrea of a bilious or choleraic character with prostration of the nerve centers.”13 The symptoms of epizootics were well known to Victorian medical practitioners.14 Yet alongside with this familiarity, there was also uncertainty about the nature and cause of cattle plague in India. Information was often sought

Herds. The numerous names for the malady in India, and the resistance developed by Indian cattle, indicate that it has been present for centuries. See A. S Leese, A Treatise on the One-Humped Camel in Health and in Disease (Stamford, England: Haynes and Son, 1927), 224. 10 European accounts often referred to rinderpest as cattle plague. The disease affects all cloven-hoofed animals, including domestic cattle, African buffalo, and various species of antelope. Rinderpest in ruminants is caused by a morbillivirus, an organism closely related to the causative agents of measles and canine distemper. Virulence varies between strains, but during epizootics, the morbidity rate is often 100 percent, and the mortality rates ranges between 60 and 90 percent. It is the most lethal plague known in cattle. Animals that survive develop a high level of long-lasting . See Peter A. Koolmees, “Epizootic Diseases in the Netherlands, 1713-2002: Veterinary Science, Agricultural Policy and Public Response,” in Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies and the of Veterinary Medicine. Ed., Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 11 For an overall sketch of the trajectory of rinderest throughout the world, see Clive A. Spinage, Cattle Plague: A History (New York: Kulwer Academia, 2003). Other works include, J. Blancou, History of the Surveillance and Control of Transmissible Animal Diseases (: Office Internatonal des Epizooties, 2003; Van Onselen, “Reactions to the Rinderpest;” Daniel Gilfoyle, “Veterinary Research and the African Rinderpest Epizootics: The , 1896-98,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 133-54. For an even earlier period see, R Dunlop and D. Williams, Veterinary Medicine: An Illustrated History ( St. Louis: Mosby, 1996); L. Wilkinson, “Rinderpest and Mainstream Infectious Disease Concepts in the 18th Century,” Medical History 28 (1984): 129-50. 12 The numerous letters and official correspondence are to be found in West Bengal State Archive (WBSA), Kolkata. The word “cattle pestilence” was used by Major Agnew, officiating Commissioner of Assam while reporting the extent of the cattle disease to the Government of Bengal. Letter from Major Agnew, Officiating Commissioner of Assam, to the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated March 1864. WBSA. General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864, No. 6-20. 13 Letter from R Rutherford, to John Stalkartt, dated 1st February 1864. WBSA. General Dept (Medical Branch), February 1864. No.21. 14 Waddington, The Bovine Scourge, 12.

46 from England as to the nature of rinderpest and ways of dealing with it. For instance, in October 1867, K. M McLeod, the Civil Assistant Surgeon of , requested the government of Bengal to assist him in obtaining “the Report of the Parliamentary Commission appointed to enquire into the nature of the Cattle Plague in England” as he had failed to obtain it from any Calcutta book- seller. Applications were made to the Home Department and to the Inspector-General of Hospitals in Jessore for obtaining copies of the British cattle plague Report. There was however, considerable difference of opinion among the British veterinary surgeons and between the British and Bengali veterinary surgeons when it came to the issue of contagiousness. The idea of contagion, i.e., the transfer of disease from one who is afflicted to one who is not, though seemingly obvious to most contemporary readers, has had a complicated and chequered history within the medical traditions of the world. Following Christopher Hamlin’s fascinating work in the case of Victorian England, I will argue that seeing disease causation merely in terms of an either/or binarism between contagionism and anticontagionism is unhelpful.15 A more comprehensive appreciation of how the Bengali and British veterinarians came to talk, write and think about disease causation and transmission will require, first, an appreciation of the actual terms of their discourse, which does not usually fit into a contagion/anticontagion binary, and second, a parallel appreciation of the productive nature of this discourse, wherein it went beyond the regulatory mechanisms of control and limiting off, and also created new ideational contexts which incited new ways of acting on bodies, beings and spaces. In fact, interpretation of the appearances of rinderpest depended on an ever-shifting theory of the disease. While some British doctors speculated that it might be transmissible, others linked it to a range of causes from heredity, poor nutrition and environmental factors to a weak physical condition of the animals. In February 1864, Veterinary Surgeon Rutherford observed that the cattle disease affecting Bengal was a “species of variola, in ordinary language small- pox,” but could not however be certain.16 It was argued that the cause of the disease was “most probably the existence of some miasma or organic poison in the atmosphere acting upon constitutions with a certain amount of predisposition to disease.”17

15 Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (Cambridge Studies in the ), (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16 Letter from R. Rutherford, Veterinary Surgeon to J. Stalkartt, dated the 1st February 1864. WBSA. General Department (Medical Branch), February 1864, No. A 21. 17 Ibid.

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The symptoms among cattle were uniform with little variation in most cases. R. Rutherford, the Veterinary Surgeon while inspecting the cattle in Calcutta and its neighborhood in 1864, noted of the symptoms as: In the earlier stage of the complaint there is no doubt some slight febrile disturbance, and because the animal does not at once go off its food no notice is taken of it. Almost the first symptom noticed in ordinary cases is disagreeable breath, and even then if notice is taken the animal may be observed to have remission of shivering fits, succeeded by burning heat of skin. There is a total refusal of food; dull suffused eyes, or at times blood shot.18 Similar symptoms were reported by Captain L. Blathwayt, the Assistant Commissioner of Golaghat in 1869. He described the symptoms as: When first attacked the cattle refuse food but drink eagerly, and are troubled with cough; the eyes then becomes very red. Watery, and sores appear on the tongue; then generally a thick purulent discharge flows from the nostrils, and diarrhea or sets in, and the animals dies in from two to ten days.19 If the symptoms showed little variation, there was however confusion regarding the nature of treatment as the disease was “almost a new one to most cattle proprietors, Veterinary Surgeons.”20 Among the remedies, unsure of the nature of the outbreak in 1864, Rutherford advised the local residents to, Cut down and burn all jungle in the vicinity of your cattle, and if the water of the tanks is not clean, to have it previously boiled and strained before giving it; thoroughly disinfect your cow-house every alternate day with Chloride of Lime, or Condy’s Fluid; house your cattle near early, and do not allow them out before sunrise; burn fires to windward of the cattle sheds all night; keep them comfortable on the body and free current of air above them. It would be very advisable to give all your cattle a laxative drench in proportion to their size; taking care that Calomel be one of the ingredients, and give them in their

18 Ibid. 19 Letter from Captain L. Blathwayt, Assistant Commissioner of Golaghat, to the Deputy Commissioner of Seebsaugor , dated Golaghat, 18th June 1869. WBSA, Political Dept. (Medical Branch), July 27th, 1869, Proceedings 66-67, File no. 123. 20 Ibid.

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drinking water from four drams to one ounce of Chloride of Soda daily. Quinine at times I would also strongly recommend.21 Initial remedies prescribed by British veterinary surgeons thus emphasized the need for proper sanitation, adequate intake of water and close inspection of cattle health. While the nature of the disease in both Madras and Bengal seemed to be similar, remedies were conjectural. In Madras, Captain Nelson reported from observing the symptoms that the disease was known to the natives as “ghooty,” which was “highly infectious and contagious, and spread rapidly through the herd.”22 In Assam , Lieutenant Sconce commented that though the disease broke out in for the last 8 years, yet “the treatment of the disease is not understood and therefore it is neglected.”23

The Politics of Naming: Ghooty vs. Rinderpest

If human plague came to be identified overwhelming with ‘modern’ western categories, animal plague was often sought to be connected to older indigenous names. While reporting about the disease thus, the first decision that confronted the British -authors was which name to use. Closely tied to the question of naming the disease, was the colonial preoccupation with establishing the roots of the disease---was it an indigenous or an imported disease?24 Opinions varied regarding the exact date of origin and reasons for the outbreak of rinderpest among the local farmers, Gowalahs (milkmen) and the British veterinarians. Official discourse almost inevitably attributed the disease to “the machination of the chamars” (tanners) who were indirectly responsible for spreading the disease by burying the animal skins on the locality where the disease broke out.”25 To evade any direct responsibility for the disease, the native Gowalahs too blamed the Chamars for spreading disease. The local farmers however,

21 Ibid. 22 Minute by Dr. J. B. Barry. dated March 1864. WBSA. General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864, No. 6- 20. 23 Lieutenant Sconce, in letter from Major Agnew, Officiating Commissioner of Assam, to the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal. General Department ( Medical Branch), March 1864, No. 6-20. 24 This was a question that preoccupied the veterinarians and authorities in different parts of the globe, wherever cattle plague broke out. Martine Barwegen argued in the context of nineteenth century Java () that it was thought that, by resolving this question, answers on how to combat the cattle plague would emerge. Berwegen, “For Better or for Worse,” Healing the Herds, 102. 25 Letter from John Stalkartt to E. C. Craster, Magistrate of Howrah, dated December 1863. General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864. WBSA. Stalkartt was convinced it were the chamars because he noted that, by not permitting them to have the animal skin buried in the compound, no animal of that year was affected.

49 considered it to be an outside intrusion into Bengal. Reporting on the native farmers’ opinion on the outbreak of the disease in Culna district, A Sawers wrote, The disease has not been known in this District over 25-30 years, and by the Natives here is believed or supposed to have been imported from the North-West by the bullocks of the cartsmen, who previous to the opening of the Railway, carried on an extensive carrying trade between Calcutta and . Now the disease is a resident and established epidemic of the District varying in its intensity according to different years, but what peculiar feature in the climate of the year tends to aggravate the disease I cannot yet say. This year it has been in a mild form, while last year it proved most destructive, but all admit that the disease is always worst in the months of April and May. 26

If the native farmers understood the disease as an import into Bengal led by north- western bullocks, colonial authorities were quick to dismiss any responsibility for the disease outbreak. Denying the role of agricultural exhibitions and cattle fairs, they linked rinderpest to the nineteenth century miasma-theory.27 Dr. C. Palmer, the Presidency Surgeon appointed to conduct an enquiry on the nature of the disease pointed out that “the disease of cattle recently so prevalent about Calcutta may be more consistently ascribed to the atmospheric or other causes of the epidemic co-existing with it than to the assemblage of cattle brought together at the late Exhibition, and that the cattle disease would have probably taken place just the same had no cattle Show taken place.”28 Palmer mentioned that the disease had originated not at the exhibition at Belvedere in 1862, but had existed even before 1862. According to the colonial authorities, the exhibitions acted as a catalyst in spreading the disease quickly as healthy cattle contracted the disease there, and carried it to their farms and infected others.29 Little had changed in 1868, when Henry H. Purves, Civil Assistant Surgeon of Gowhatty observed that “the active principle at work may be very similar to the poison of ,” adding that the absence of

26 Letter from A. Sawers, to A Grote, dated Culna, the 16th Dec 1863. WBSA 27 In miasma theory, diseases were caused by the presence in the air of a miasma, a poisonous vapor in which were suspended particles of decaying matter that was characterized by its foul smell. See S. Halliday, “Death and Miasma in Victorian London: An Obstinate Belief', British Medical Journal, 323, no. 7327 (2001): 1469-1471. 28 Memorandum with Dr. Collin’s Remarks. Pro: 22. WBSA. General (Medical), March 1864. 29 Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C Palmer, Presidency Surgeon to S. C Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71.

50 rainfall caused increased virulence of the disease.30 The British medical surgeons’ attempts to link the animal disease in Bengal to a familiar form of plague prevalent in England during this period can only be understood against the backdrop of their repeated appeals to the Cattle Plague commission in England to enlighten them about the nature of British animal plague. Worboys has demonstrated how in the context of Britain, animal plagues assumed an epizootic character after the as the repeal of protectionist legislation and improvements in speed of transportation combined to allow diseased animals to be imported more readily.31 Outbreaks of foot-and-mouth and sheep-pox in 1848 confirmed fears that free-trade in livestock would bring an easier exchange of animal diseases. Both diseases were seen as ‘foreign’ and the British government adopted a policy of ‘stamping out’ using legislative orders that allowed slaughtering and the exclusion of affected beasts through quarantines and port inspections. In India, by the mid-nineteenth century, the disease had affected almost all districts of Bengal including Birbhum where it was presumably first noticed during the Santhal insurrection, , Burdwan, Hooghly, and ravaged the dairies and farm-yards in the suburbs of Calcutta. Establishing the disease as “rinderpest” or cattle plague meant ascertaining the exact date of first outbreak of rinderpest in Bengal. If the Commissioner of Burdwan, C. F Montresorm in 1863 traced the epidemic back to the , others like Sawers believed that it was a “new” disease that was unknown in early nineteenth century.32 Colonial authorities considered it logical to accept the fact that cattle plague was already known in India before because local Bengali farmers had a variety of indigenous names for the disease, like “mata,” “ghooty” and they also seemed to have their own ways of dealing it. One of the earliest official Reports on the Calcutta epizootic, submitted by C. Palmer put the date of rinderpest outbreak to 2nd January, 1864. He however, added that “the disease existed to a considerable extent for some time even antecedent to this.” He declared that a disease, very similar to the 1864 rinderpest, broke out in , Calcutta in 1862. Whatever the official confusion concerning the first occurrence of the disease, the British were consistent in their claims of having first ‘discovered’ the disease. Captain Campbell, Deputy Commissioner of Nowgong, for instance, reported that a disease that claimed 21,625

30 Letter from Henry H. Purves, Civil Assistant Surgeon of Gowhatty to the Deputy Commissioner of Kamroop, dated Gowhatty, 30th August 1868. WBSA. Medical (General Branch), October 1868, F.N. 73, No. 50. 31 Worboys, 47. 32 Letter from C. F. Montresorm, Commissioner of Burdwan to the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 1863. WBSA. General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864.

51 head of cattle in 1853 was considered to be “cholera” by the natives who were dying in huge numbers in the same year. However, dismissing the native opinion that it was cholera that carried off the cattle, Campbell opined, “here we are dealing with a disease of the nature of the Calcutta epizootic.”33 Writing off native understanding of the cattle plague was a common factor that ran through several official reports. The Deputy Commissioner of Jessore, to give another example, wrote that the cattle disease was known by the name Mardrishtee among the natives, which meant “the look of mother Shitala, the goddess of small-pox.” He however, offered his opinion on the disease, calling it the “eczema epizootic.” Likewise, while acknowledging that the natives were aware of another disease---the Puschima (because it was supposed to have traveled from the West) --- he was quick to dismiss the validity of indigenous disease knowledge. He wrote, the “natives appear to think that the two diseases are distinct, and that what cholera is to man, puschima is to the cattle.” Subverting local, indigenous knowledge of the diseases, Palmer in his Report pointed out that “thus there existed throughout India, very extensively, two distinct and very fatal epizootics.” One was the eczema epizootic that corresponded to the foot-and-mouth disease of England, and the other was the Calcutta epizootic of 1864 that was identical to “Rinderpest, which has for so many years past have devastated .”34 Not only were the British veterinarians keen to impose their familiar European disease-names and knowledge systems on the cattle diseases of Bengal, but they also brought out claims of “science” and “sanitation” in the spread of disease across the world. Commenting on the origins of cattle plague in Bengal, a certain Professor Symonds, argued that, The Steppes of Russia are the home of this disease, and that it has spread from there by , and that by severe sanitary prohibitions its progress might be limited. It is a highly interesting and important fact that this same disease has traveled eastward, as it has been unchecked by any sanitary restrictions, its progress has been, perhaps, more rapid in an eastwardly and unguarded and unprotected direction than it has been

33 Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C. Palmer, Presidency Surggeon to S. C. Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71. 34 Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C. Palmer, Presidency Surgeon to S. C. Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71.

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westwardly, where science backed by arbitrary and even despotic government aid, has been called in to check its march.35 The spread of cattle disease was thus, according to this logic, directly linked to the absence of sanitation and lack of “science” in the eastern part of the world, where diseases could very easily find a happy home. It was however, not enough to establish the origins of the disease in an “unscientific” world, but also to name the disease as an extension of European “rinderpest,” and distrust native Bengali understanding of the disease. Thus the colonial authorities, unsure about the native familiarity with European rinderpest, repeatedly confirmed that “the Natives know no cure for it; the disease is therefore allowed to take its course.”36 A partial consensus was reached by 1865, that this was indeed a new disease---“rinderpest”--- that was the “unrecognized in the neighborhood by either cattle proprietors” or by civil surgeons.37

Constructing Rinderpest: “The Calcutta Epizootic of 1864” and the Bengal Cattle Plague

Between January to April 1864, Calcutta and its suburbs were hit by a cattle plague that found numerous references in official records. In his Report on the Calcutta Epizootic of 1864, C. Palmer wrote in September 1865 that the “havoc this epizootic committed during this period was great and serious; it spared but few; neither condition, nor age, nor sex, was a protection. Instead the best fed and cared for, and in the highest condition, were at least as liable to be attacked as cattle in poorer condition and indifferently housed and fed. The disease, as a rule, made a clean sweep of all the cattle in a yard where it had found ingress.” 38 Unable to provide exact mortality statistics, Rutherford noted that “probably not less than 90%” of the cattle of Bengal died between January and April 1864. That there had been a delay in submitting reports on the Calcutta epizootic of 1864 is repeatedly mentioned in the official records. However, the delay was covered up by talks of having made the observations of “greater interest,” or to have

35 Ibid. 36 Letter from A. Sawers, to A Grote, dated Culna, the 16th Dec 1863. WBSA. 37 Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C. Palmer, Presidency Surgeon to S. C. Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71. 38 Captain Cambell, Deputy Commissioner of Nowgong. Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C Palmer, Presidency Surgeon to S. C. Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71.

53 used to delay to an “advantage.” Describing the outbreak of the 1864 Calcutta epizootic, C. Palmer, Presidency Surgeon of Calcutta wrote, The year 1864 will be memorable in the annals of Bengal as that in which the first Agricultural Exhibition was held in India. The collection of animals of various kinds was such as the most sanguine promoters of this undertaking scarcely ventured to anticipate. There was no crowding of the varied, numerous and interesting gathering of cattle, hordes, goats etc. all of which were well housed and cared for. It was not long, however, after the opening of the exhibition on the 24th January that one of the cows exhibited, was taken ill, and died. Several exhibitors took alarm and early removed their cattle; and rumor fast gained ground that a ‘murrain’ had broken out. This fear was soon confirmed by the fact that other cattle became ill and died, and it was considered so serious, that the subject was brought officially to the notice of the government, and the government was requested to take the matter into consideration and cause an investigation to be instituted and reported upon. The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Bengal, through the representations of Mr. John Stalkartt, took an active part in the enquiry and suggested to the Lieutenant-Governor for the appointment of a medical officer to assist in enquiry. 39

From 1863 to 1868, several bouts of cattle plague were reported from all over Bengal, with varying local, native names---“gotee,” “chupkah,” or the “mour” or “lohomy muska” in Assam, which was a combination of “cholera and dysentery” and appeared to be similar to the “Puschima” of Bengal.40 It was estimated that not only cattle, but also sheep, goats, pig were the victims of the plague. Panic in the official camp was at times matched by efforts to downplay the severity of cattle plague. For instance, in 1868, as the colonial government still pondered on the nature of the disease and tried to reconfirm “rinderpest,” an article in the editorial column of

39 Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C Palmer, Presidency Surggeon to S. C. Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71. 40 Letter from Henry H. Purves, Civil Assistant Surgeon of Gowhatty to the Deputy Commissioner of Kamroop, dated Gowhatty, 30th August 1868. WBSA. Medical (General Branch), October 1868, F.N. 73, No. 50.

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Englishman announcing the re-appearance of cattle disease in Krishnanagar and 24-Perganas, triggered mixed official reactions.41 The Englishman reported, We regret to hear that the dreaded cattle disease has, during the last three months again made its appearance in the districts of Kishnaghur, Burdwanm Hooghly, Howrah and the 24-Perganas. The Natives call the plague the small-pox. It is very deadly, scarcely any cattle attacked escaping. The Government which instituted an enquiry into the cattle plague might surely initiate measures of precaution similar to those which were found to answer in England.42 While on one hand, evidence suggests the rising anxiety of a colonial government that now tried to verify the authenticity of Englishman’s report, on the other hand, the commissioner of Burdwan division himself tried to refute the claims of Englishman by playing down the intensity of cattle plague. W. J Herschel, the Officiating Commissioner of Burdwan Division asserted in June 1868 that based on the reports of the local district officers he was certain that cattle disease had not made its appearance in any part of Burdwan.43 He added, based on enquiries of the Civil Assistant Surgeon of Hooghly that the cattle disease that affected was “not cattle plague,” but that the Surgeon attributed “this sickness to the use of new grass and paddy straw.” Likewise, the disease affecting cattle in Midnapore, was “an ordinary disease,” and not the cattle plague reported in the Englishman.44 After reconciling to the massive animal mortality and agricultural destruction caused by the Calcutta rinderpest of 1864, the colonial authorities proposed that they considered the disease as the “Calcutta epizootic of 1864” ---a phrase which they believed was “more correct than murrain/cattle plague.”45 One of the worst attacks of animal disease in Bengal came in 1869 that triggered tremendous cattle mortality, disrupted cultivation, frustrated local farmers and baffled the

41 Extract from The Englishman in letter from H.L. Harrison, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Officiating Commissioner of the Burdwan Division, Fort William, dated 16 May, 1868. WBSA. Medical (General Branch), July 1868, F.N, 2427., No. 50. 42 Ibid. 43 Letter from W. J. Herschel, Officiating Commissioner of the Burdwan Division to the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Burdwan, dated 27th June 1868. WBSA. Medical (General Branch), July 1868. F.N, 104, No. 51. 44 Letter from W. J. Herschel, Officiating Commissioner of the Burdwan Division to the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Burdwan, dated 27th June 1868. WBSA. Medical (General Branch), July 1868. F.N, 104, No. 51. 45 Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C Palmer, Presidency Surgeon to S. C Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71. In the Report, Presidency Surgeon, C. Palmer emphasized that “the word ‘epizootic’ has the same technical significance in veterinary medicine that ‘epidemic’ has in human.”

55 colonial government. Added to the huge loss of cattle, there were anxieties as to whether the fatal disease affected human life. Based on observations of the symptoms, the British civil surgeons attempted to relate the disease to something identifiable---they believed it corresponded to the “Puschima” of Lower Bengal and the Rinderpest of Europe.46 In October 1869, still lacking sufficient evidence to confirm the cattle disease as “rinderpest,” the Governor-General in Council considered convening a special committee at Calcutta, comprising of district officers with “ a good knowledge of agriculture,” veterinary surgeons and “two native gentlemen” to enquire into the outbreak of cattle plague in Calcutta.47 Finally, in November 1869 a commission was formed to enquire into the cattle epizootic of Calcutta. The commission was to consist of Veterinary Surgeon, J.H.B Hallen of the , the President; and three other members- --Assistant Surgeon, Kenneth Macleod, A.C Mangles, and Baboo Hem Chander, Deputy Magistrate and Collector.48 Efforts were made to constantly verify if the cattle plague ravaging India was of the “same type” as the one that affected England.49 The colonial anxiety to construct the animal disease in Bengal as “rinderpest” is an interesting story that reveals that even the act of determining animal plague was disputatious and not devoid of power dynamics. Global histories of the disease continue to be written within a framework that accents the spread of a common disease. Even the dissonances highlighted within the colonial medical establishment by authors like Prashant Kidambi fail to register in these global histories.50 William McNeill base their works on the assumption that the historian can now with relative certainly what was and what was not “plague.”51 It is this conception that allows Myron Echenberg to assert that the plague in Calcutta till May 1898 was a “threat [rather] than a reality.”52 However, sources are not mere repositories of value-neutral facts. They are socially constructed objects that need to be

46 Letter from K.. McLeod, Civil Assistant Surgeon, Jessore to H.L Harrison, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 8th October, 1868. WBSA. Medical (General Branch), October 1868, F.N. 582, No.51. 47 Letter from E. C. Bayley, Secretary to the , Home Department to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Department, dated Simla, 7th Oct, 1869. WBSA. Municipal (Medical Branch), December 1869, F.N. 4566, No. 43-46. 48 Letter from E. C. Bayley, Secretary to Government of India, Home Department to the Government of Bengal, dated 27th November, 1869. WBSA. Municipal (Medical Branch), December 1869, F.N, 5186. 49 Letter from H. L. Harrison, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Officiating Commissioner of the , Fort William, dated 16th May 1868. WBSA. Medical (General Branch), July 1868, F.N., 2426, No. 50. 50 Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis : Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920 (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2007) 51 William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples. (New York: Anchor Press, 2007). 52 Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of , 1894-1901 (London: New York University Press, 2007).

56 read with reference to the context of their production, and in the case for animal disease it seems that constructing rinderpest ( at least in Bengal) was an contentious act. That the native farmers and cattle-owners were familiar with the diseases affecting cattle is evident from the reference to commonly circulated local, indigenous names. Table 3.1 demonstrates the native familiarity with the diseases in the cattle murrain affected districts of Dinajpore, Moorshedabad, Malda, , and Rungpore of Bengal, and how they coped with them often using their own healing practices.53

53 Copies of Reports from the Divisional Commissioners and from the Agricultural and Horticultural Society containing information regarding the nature of the disease prevalent among Cattle in the forwarded to the Govt., with a request to furnish any further information that may be available relating to the disease in that Presidency. WBSA, General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864. Pro.No, 6-20, No. 15.

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Table 3.1: Diseases to which Cattle are Subject

Nature of disease and Treatment followed Period of Illness Remarks symptoms by Natives This disease prevails “BOSUNTO” throughout Bengal, Small-pox or cow-pox, a No water allowed; Fatal in five or six and judging from its contagious disease shewn fed by dhye (curdled days; in some cases ravages in this part by refusal of food, hot and milk), ripe plantains, 10-12, not above of the country, it inflamed skin, eruption of and pulp of boiled 25% of the cattle may be said to occur the skin, and in some cases Jow; very few attacked by this at intervals of from purging recoveries under this disease recover 2-4 years, causing treatment from. immense loss to Ryots and other cultivators. The disease seems to be “BUTTUSSIA” on the increase This may be translated No treatment known When fatal, death during the past 3-4 “palsy,” the whole body ensues in two or years becoming paralyzed three hours, but it is not generally so

This disease is of Keeping the animal Curable in about 10 recent date, being “KHOOREA” standing in the soft days by careful only known for the Sores in the mouth and mud for several treatment last 12 or 15 years feet days, also applying coal tar

Cured with careful Occurs generally in “BADLA” Linseed, bhoosee. treatment. Not fatal the rainy season, not Fever. Water prohibited fatal

Of common “GOLA-HAR” No treatment known Generally fatal occurrence, at no Ulcerated sore throat particular season.

“TEPAMINA” Purging Not generally fatal Swollen stomach Not of frequent occurrence “SOOKMINA” No treatment known Not generally fatal. Withering The disease continues for several months Source: S. D Cockburn. WBSA, General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864. Pro: 6-20, No. 15

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Table 3.1 continued…… Nature of disease and Treatment followed Period of Illness Remarks symptoms by Natives “ROSSBATT” Firing, sulpher and Frequent occurrence, Most cattle have this Rheumatism, pain and oil linament rendering the animal disease swelling of the joints useless for months, at times for longer periods, but not fatal

Sulphur and oil Easily cured The disease is not of “DAAD” frequent occurrence Ring-worm

If not perceived and Firing around treated on the very “SAMKAL” swelling first appearance the This disease has Sudden swelling of the disease proves fatal, only appeared body with sores. and death ensues in within the past few five or six days years, it is not of frequent occurrence.

Hot fomentations Generally fatal in “BHAIL” one or two days Cholera

It is indeed curious that while the Bengali farmers had different indigenous names for the various types of cattle disease (depending on the symptoms), the British medical surgeons often overlooked the native understanding of cattle plague. Voelkar, in his Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture underplayed the native farmers’ knowledge concerning the animal diseases by portraying it as both superstitious and vague. He commented, “The Natives believe that cattle epidemics are visitations of the goddess “Mata” and that they can only get rid of the epidemic by propitiating the goddess. The variety of names by which diseases are known to the Natives in different parts makes it hard to ascertain how far they really recognize the particular ones and the respective symptoms.”54 Similarly, reporting on the Calcutta epizootic of 1864, C. Palmer,

54 J. A. Voelkar, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, 1897. Paragraph 271, p. 213. Accessed on January 7, 2012. http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924001039324#page/n4/mode/thumb

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Presidency Surgeon of Bengal asserted that while different varieties of epizootics had ravaged Bengal from the mid-nineteenth century, the natives, unable to understand the subtleties of the disease, as a rule described all epizootics or cattle plagues as small-pox---ghotee. Emphasizing the British ‘discovery’ of cattle plague in Bengal, Palmer wrote, Under this name ( ghotee), it was for years known as existing amongst the cattle belonging to the municipality of this city, and it was only in 1861, when a veterinary surgeon was, on our recommendation, appointed to the care of municipal cattle, that the disease was accurately described and recognized, not as small-pox, but as an alarming, fatal and highly infectious epizootic, the ‘foot-and-mouth disease’ of .55 The colonial project of identifying and naming the cattle disease of Bengal as “rinderpest” was a powerful hegemonic exercise that not only subverted the native ghotee as an existing system of knowledge, but also carried with it strong undertones of cultural imperialism. Paul Lawrence Farber has drawn our attention to the European political project of naming and classification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.56 Enumerating the growth of natural history as a scientific discipline in the 18th century, Farber has shown how the students of the Swedish traveling-naturalist, Carl Linnaeus traveled to distant lands and aided in the process of cultural imperialism through nomenclature and classification.57 The nineteenth century British veterinarians’ attempts to invalidate the native Bengali names came very close to Linnaeus’s understanding that the natives in distant lands were unaware of the basic knowledge of the abundant life on earth, and the naming of the several plants and animals that abound them. Similarly, the cattle disease of Bengal, lacking a common vocabulary or “scientific” language, was easier to be appropriated with a known nomenclature than adopt the multiple exotic names given by the natives.

55 Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C Palmer, Presidency Surgeon to S. C Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71. Italics mine. 56 Paul Lawrence Farber, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E O Wilson, Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 57 Farber, 12.

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The Trail of Mortality

Cattle mortality rates in the plague varied between districts of Bengal, but overall high deaths were reported especially from Assam and Chotanagpur sub-divisions.58 In addition to domestic cattle, the rinderpest seemed to have affected larger animals like tigers, wild buffaloes, deer, pigs, goats, ponies, ducks, fowls, and pigeons, all of which were reported to have been found dead from the disease. But interestingly, while arguing that the plague affected all classes of animals, Assistant Commissioner of Golaghat made a distinction between the impact of the disease on animals owned by the native farmers and the planters. He stressed that the disease was “nearly always as fatal to cattle belonging to natives, but that among those belonging to planters a greater proportion recovered.”59 In 1869, when the treatment of the disease was yet “unknown” and shrouded in uncertainties even among the official circles, he confidently attributed relative low mortality among planters’ animals to “their superior food and treatment.” That the planters, who were mostly Europeans or upper class Indians, were better-equipped to deal with the dangers of contagion is a somewhat steady theme that runs throughout the official records. The class bias is evident again in 1870, when the Veterinary Surgeon on special duty, R. Rutherford commented that it was the planters’ “energy and intelligence” that saved the remaining cattle from the clutches of rinderpest.60 The trail of mortality in cattle disease, believed Voelkar, was especially higher than in Britain and a cause of “great agricultural importance” because when an epidemic broke out, the Indian “cattle perish in thousands and do not seem to have a power of resisting it equal to that possessed by English cattle.”61 Not only was the “treatment” of the planters lauded, but colonial authorities, often skeptical of the high mortality rates, were eager to play down the statistics. They were distrustful of statistics furnished by native farmers and residents of the sub-divisions, which they thought were often at “variance.” They were equally concerned to make the rinderpest appear

58 The list of deaths reported by the mouzahdars of Seebsaugar, Golaghat and Jorehaut in Assam indicated very high mortality. Letter from Captain A. E. Campbell, Deputy Commissioner, Seebsaugor to the Personal Assistant to the Commissioner of Assam, dated Seebsaugor, 22nd June 1869. WBSA. Political (Medical), July 1869. No.384. 59 Letter from Captain L. Blathwayt, Assistant Commissioner of Golaghat to the Deputy Commissioner of Seebsaugor, dated Golaghat, 18th June 1869. WBSA. Political (Medical), July 1869, No. 123. 60 Letter from Mr. H. Farrell, Veterinary Surgeon on special duty, to the Hon’ble Ashley Eden, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Dept., dated Calcutta, Hastings, the 2nd April 1870. WBSA, Political (Medical), May 1870, No. 5. 61 J. A. Voelkar, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, 1897. Paragraph 271, page 213. Accessed on January 7, 2012. http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924001039324#page/n4/mode/thumb

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“manageable.” Hence, when in 1869, touring the province of Assam, the veterinary surgeon on special duty, H. Farrell, furnished an estimate of the mortality rates in the different sub-divisions within Assam (see Table 3.2 below), it was quickly brushed aside by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal as inaccurate. He declared, “the mortality, stated in the official return at 177,659 head, is no doubt much exaggerated.”62

Table 3.2: Cattle Mortality in Assam districts, 1870

Kamroop 7,234 Durrung 1,888 Nowgong 5,321 Seebsaugor 154,531 Luckimpore 8,685 TOTAL 177,659 Source: Letter from Mr. H. Farrell, Veterinary Surgeon on special duty to the Hon’ble Ashley Eden, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Dept., dated Calcutta Hastings, the 2nd April 1870. WBSA, Political (Medical), May 1870, No.5.

62 Resolution by His Honor the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, dated Fort William, the 5th May 1870. WBSA. Political (Medical), May 1870. No, .62.

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The devastation in Assam was not only massive, but the heavy loss of cattle occurred within a brief span of only 15 days. The following table testifies:

Table 3.3: Animal mortality rates in Assam from 16th to 31st May 1869

Type of Number of Number of Increase or Report on Animals deaths deaths decrease in the Affected during the during the the number progress of fortnight preceding of deaths as the disease from 16th to fortnight compared 31st May with 1869 previous fortnight Increase Decrease Buffaloes 737 …….. ……… …….. The disease still prevails in the vicinity of Janjee but in other parts of the district it has almost disappeared Cows and 6,536 ……………. …………. ……….. Bullocks Goats 10 …………. ………….. ……….. Horses 45 ………… …………… ………… TOTAL 7,328 Source: Statement showing the progress of cattle disease from 16th to 31st May 1869, as required in the Commissioner’s letter No. 699, dated the nineteenth May 1869.WBSA. Political (Medical Branch), 27th July 1869, No. 66 and 67.

The impact of epizootics on farmers has always had both a financial and an emotional component as animal died or had to be killed. In 1864, the Collector of reported that the cattle deaths were shooting up the price of animals and that the farmers were “reduced to great distress by the increased value of bullocks, and are ruined by their death from the disease.”63 The Assistant Commissioner of Golghat reported in 1869 that “the ryots will find great difficulty

63 Letter from A. Hope, Collector of Bihar to the Commissioner of , dated March 1864. WBSA. General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864, No. 18.

63 in ploughing their land, and in those mouzahs where it has been most fatal a large portion of the lands will, I fear, not be cultivated at all this year.”64

Controlling Cattle Disease: Local Knowledge, Acquired Knowledge and “Science”

A crucial question relating to disease and environment concerns the impact of colonial administration and Westernized veterinary regimes upon local or indigenous knowledge and practices of disease control. Martine Barwegan has argued in the context of nineteenth century Java that that veterinary policy could be misconceived and damaging, an imposition of metropolitan methods on indigenous populations under a colonial regime that ignored popular beliefs and practices.65 Her chapter questions a too-ready acceptance of progress in the control of animal diseases during the early twentieth century. David Anderson in the context of colonial shows how veterinary interventions among Africans were aimed at protecting European- owned cattle from disease through the imposition of disruptive and damaging quarantines. He reminds us that veterinary medicine was by no means for the benefit of all, by illuminating how veterinary policy was skewed toward the aim of obtaining supplies for an embryonic meat- packing industry.66 Others like Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle have argued that as in many European colonies, the practice of veterinary medicine was as much about reordering indigenous society as it was about controlling disease. 67 Much has been written on the relationship between “western” science and the project of colonialism in South Asian historiography. The one question that has dominated South Asian scholarship on the history of medicine in colonial context since the early 1980s is, ‘What is “colonial” about “colonial medicine”?’ The South Asian historiography has moved away from the Basalla model that began to lose much of its validity from the 1980s, when scholars began to question the linear diffusionist framework. 68 In his three-stage model, George Basalla had suggested that modern science emerged in Western Europe that witnessed a Scientific

64 Letter from Captain L. Blathwayt, Assistant Commissioner of Golaghat, to the Deputy Commissioner of Seebsaugor , dated Golaghat, 18th June 1869. WBSA, Political Department (Medical Branch), 18th June 1869. 65 Martine Barwegan, “For Better or for Worse?: The Impact of the Veterinarian Service on the Development of the Agricultural Society in Java ( Indonesia) in the Nineteenth Century,” in Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine. Ed., Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 66 David Anderson, “Kenya’s Cattle Trade and the Economics of Empire, 1918-48,” in Healing the Herds. 67 Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle, “Introduction,” Healing the Herds, 12. 68 George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science, CLVI, 5 May, p.611-22; George Basalla ed., The Rise of Modern Science: Internal or External Factors ( Lexington, Massachusetts: D C Heath, 1968).

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Revolution in the 17th century, and that it gradually diffused to non-Western regions. Basalla had triggered writings on science and imperialism that largely saw science as an instrument of colonial expansion and “tool of Empire” in the non-Western regions.69 From the onward, historians began to dismantle the rigid framework of Basalla. William K. Storey attacked the Eurocentric bias in Basalla’s model by arguing that there are evidences to suggest the influence of Amerindian knowledge of European map making, and indications of Portuguese doctors learning from Indian vaids and hakims. 70 Roy MacLeod blamed Basalla for failing to take into account the differences in cultural environments of the diverse non-Western societies.71 Basalla, according to Roy Macleod, has homogenized western science a whole and ignored the cultural and political factors that affected science in its three distinct phases. A major fault with the Basalla model in his study of India is the fact that he tends to analyze whether the native cultures responded positively to western science rather than engaging with what Dhruv Raina has called, “the politics of knowledge” in India.72 Basalla describes his three stages as first the exploratory stage of natural history, second the colonial science and the final stage of an independent institutionalized science in the colonies. However he is cautious to argue that the term “colonial science” does not imply “some sort of scientific imperialism whereby science in the non- European nation is suppressed or maintained in a servile state by an imperial power.”73 But as Macleod rightly identifies, the problem with Basalla’s treatment of “colonial science” is that it ignores the different meanings that imperial science acquired when viewed from the center and the periphery. Dhruv Raina strikes at the heart of the Basalla model when he argues that there is a basic flaw in the very conceptualization of “science” in Basalla’s schema. He writes, Studies informed by the Basalla model read science as a cultural universal, no matter what the geographic or cultural context within which it is transplanted, and imperialism as

69 The phrase “tool of Empire” was first used by Daniel Headrick in 1981 in his work, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, to argue that Western imperialism succeeded because of the application of large-scale technology( for example, steamships and railroads in British India) to the colonies that made imperialism cheaper. See Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century ( Oxford University Press, 1981). 70 William K Storey, “Introduction” in William K Storey ed. Scientific Aspects of European Expansion---An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History 1450-1800 ( Vol 6) Adershot: Variorum, p. xiii-xxi, 1996, cited in Dhruv Raina, Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity in India ( New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 71 Roy Macleod, “On Visiting the Moving Metropolis: Reflections on the of Imperial Science” in N Reingold and M Rothenburg erds. Scientific Colonialism: A Cross Cultural Comparison. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987, p. 217-49, cited in Dhruv Raina. 72 Raina, p. 183. 73 George Basalla, 1967, p. 611-22

65 another universal altering the institutional destiny of science within these contexts. The focus of attention is how colonial scientists transplanted in the colonies established the of Western science. 74 One of the consequences of this ‘encounter frame’ has been an internal bifurcation of the field of colonial medicine itself. On the one hand there has emerged a wealth of studies on public health in colonial societies, where the emphasis has been on understanding the relationship between medicine and colonial dominations. In South Asia, David Arnold and Mark Harrison’s works have provided some of the best analyses of these connections.75 On the other hand another rich corpus of studies has emerged on the histories of the ‘indigenous medical systems’ of India. The works of Brahmanad and Poonam Bala have played a pioneering role in this area.76 Projit Mukherji in his very recent work on daktari medicine in Bengal, Nationalizing the Body, has pointed to the limitations of using the binary model of “western” medical imposition and “indigenous” opposition to a “western” science.77 He demonstrates that the binary framing of the history of the plague as a moment of colonial imposition and “indigenous” resistance in clearly limited because the plague epidemic was also an impetus for the rapid vernacularization of ‘western” medicine in colonial Bengal. Likewise, Guy Attwell, who has heavily influenced Mukherji’s study has highlighted how in Delhi and Punjab the unani tibbs, faced with the enormous crisis of both human health and tibb’s authority urgently sought to adapt their practice and theory to develop a viable alternative to allopathic measures to tackle the plague epidemic.78 In some ways, this chapter will follow Attewell’s lead in challenging the implicit division between the variable ‘local” perceptions of the disease and the seemingly stable “global” identities. Like Mukherji’s work on daktari medicine, I will try to show how “locally” specific responses could also shape the identity of the disease itself.79 At the end however, the colonial

74 Raina, p. 189. 75 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in nineteenthCentury India (University of California Press, 1993); Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859- 1914, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 76 B. Gupta, “Indigenous Medicine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Bengal,” Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study I. Charles Leslie ed., (Berkley: University of California Press, 1976): 368-78; Poonam Bala, Medicine and Medical Policies in India: Social and Historical Perspectives (Lexington Books, 2007). 77 Projit Bihari Mukherji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine. (London: Anthem Press, 2009). 78 Guy, Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India. (: Orient Longman, 2007). 79 Mukherji, 149.

66 project at controlling cattle plague became a largely hegemonic process of disciplining and regulating native farmers and cow-doctors as much as the diseased animals themselves. Animal-disease control in nineteenth century Bengal can be understood as a complicated interactive process of continuous crisis-management in which legislation and remedies were constantly altered in response to the practicalities of enforcing it on ground. Without oversimplifying I would argue that, at the beginning of an epidemic, the initial laws prohibited activities that the authorities considered to be possible agents for the spread of the disease.80 However, in the course of time, once an epidemic had prevailed for several months, these strict measures had to be adapted to accommodate other interests as well. When a serious epizootic continued for several years, as in the case of the 1869 outbreak, the authorities eventually surrendered to the fact that efforts to contain the cattle plague had failed, as it had spread through the districts. Local knowledge of the environment, animals and the native communities was highly sought after, while at the same time that colonial authorities grappled with the task of finding parallels with the British cattle plague of the nineteenth century, and applying metropolitan disease control measures to the Indian colony. Some of the earliest inspections by the British officers on cattle plague in the different districts of Bengal brought out the dual anxieties in the colonial camp to prevent cattle mortality and find an appropriate remedy. In 1864, as a major epizootic struck Calcutta and the suburbs, “medical skill and supervision of the professional cow leech” was sought to be “indispensably necessary for checking the progress of this fatal disease.”81 Attempts were made to contact the “Veterinary Surgeons of Calcutta” and Messrs. Hunter and Company especially, through whose treatment a large number of cattle belonging to was believed to have been saved were saved the year before.82 It is not clear whether the professional cow leech was to be a native Indian, but it is evident that indigenous remedies were not trusted. While attempting to project the Bengal epizootic as an Indian equivalent of the more-familiar European “rinderpest,” the British veterinary surgeons appointed to inspect the cattle plague in parts of Bengal were deeply skeptical of the folk healing practices. Caste and religion were afforded scant recognition except

80 A plethora of measures were tried to tackle the cattle disease, from legislations to strict quarantines. A similar study that closely examines the role of the state in cattle plague is Dominik Hunniger, “Policing Epizootics: Legislation and Administration during Outbreaks of Cattle Plague in 18th-Century Northern Germany as Continuous Crisis Management,” in Healing the Herds, p. 85. 81 Letter from From C. F. Montresorm, Commissioner of Burdwan to the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal. WBSA. General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864. No. 6-20. 82 Ibid.

67 as “superstitious” obstacles to the implementation of scientific practices. For instance, in 1864 the Collector of Bihar reported after inspecting the plague epidemic that “the Hindoo look upon it as an expression of displeasure and wrath on the part of some god, or ascribe it to a spell exercised by some enemy; that in the former case they abandon themselves to worship, and in the latter to acts of violence on the person of the supposed exorcist.”83 Likewise, reporting on the Calcutta epizootic of 1884, the Evening expressed concern over the efficacy of native remedies that bordered on “.” It reported, The treatments adopted by the natives of this country has been generally utterly inefficacious, based, as they frequently are, upon . “Poojahs” with some rice grown at Juggernauth, raw fish and the dried tongues of tigers and leopards with others, have had and continue to remain on trial.84 Treatment of animal disease and ethno-veterinary practices were not unheard-of in the heavily the agrarian society of India.85 In agrarian Bengal, to order to ensure a steady supply of healthy animals, farmers were often compelled to develop the basic practical knowledge and skills necessary to maintain good animal health. The onus of responsibility for the daily tending and feeding of animals generally lay with the animals’ owners. Cattle diseases and their treatment featured prominently in native healing practices as is evident from Table 1, as also in several nineteenth century Bengali agricultural tracts and periodicals like Krishak, Krishak Bandhab. Treating food-producing animals most certainly belonged to the realm of agriculture, rather than cultivated urban life. If the Bengali farmers were familiar with the more common cattle ailments like Basanta (cow-pox), Daad (ring-worm), Bhail (cholera), it is not very clear from the records whether the Bengali farmers were already familiar with rinderpest attacks or its cures. However, colonial records point to a stiff resistance by the farmers in using the cattle

83 Letter from A. Hope, Collector of Bihar to the Commissioner of Patna. WBSA, General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864. No.18. 84 Evening Mail, Calcutta edition, August 7, 1885. 85 The treatment of animal diseases in ancient India was well developed and carried out with great care and precision by well-trained personnel. Vedic literature, the Samhita and Harita Samhita, for instance contained references about care of diseased and healthy animals, while , was one of the earliest Indian physicians to specialize on the treatment of animal diseases. See G. R Singh, “Animal or Pashu Shalya Chikitas in ancient India,” Third Convocation of National Academy of Veterinary Sciences (India) and National Symposium on Historical Overview on Veterinary Sciences and in Ancient India (Vedic and Ashokan Period), 16–17 April 2002, Indian Veterinary Research Institute, Izatnagar, , India. p. 12; R Somvanshi, Prachin Bharat main Pashu Palan evum Pashu Chikitsha Vigyan (In Hindi). Part I. Rajbhasha Anubhag, Indian Veterinary Research Institute, Izatnagar, Uttar Pradesh, 1993.

68 management strategies advocated by the British civil surgeons, as the latter were still oscillating between finding the best remedy and preventing further cattle mortality. Owing to the relative unfamiliarity with the disease, the civil surgeons all through the nineteenth century were at a loss to determine appropriate treatment. In August 1887, the Evening Mail pointed to this colonial predicament. “The reports furnished by the commissioners and magistrates throughout Bengal of the cattle diseases show our complete inability to recommend any one particular treatment as likely to be a generally attended with successful results. We have already recorded the almost fatality amongst all the cattle submitted to treatment.”86 While unable to prescribe a treatment that would halt the spread of rinderpest, control of animal disease was also tied to questions of power and knowledge of the Indians: who has knowledge about the native farmers and their cattle, and who could be a friend of the natives. By virtue of his profession, Revd. A. Cloike, the Christian reverend of the American mission was believed be a friend of the natives and to have taken a “lively and active interest in the rinderpest, of which he has some knowledge.” When Revd. A. Cloike tried to inspect the cattle of the native Christians, he met with stiff resistance as the “Muttacks of the Madar Khat resisted all attempts to give them assistance or advice in the management of their sick cattle.” Such resistance, the reverend “regretted to record, has been general throughout the province, with very few exceptions.” He added that initially the resistance was “partial,” but when the natives came to know that “a Government officer was deputed to examine into and treat the disease, the people positively refused to let myself or salotrees render any assistance however small, stating that if English medicines were used their deity would, as a punishment, destroy all the cattle.”87 It is interesting that according to the colonial authorities, resistance to “English treatment” was led not always by the farmers, but often by the English-educated, “intelligent natives.” In a detailed and revealing description of the intensity of native resistance, the Veterinary surgeon of Bengal, H. Farrell reported, Meetings were held to invoke their deity against English-treatment, and, what is most singular and extraordinary, well-to-do and well-informed natives were foremost and prominent in their objections and in raising an outcry against interference. A native

86 Evening Mail, Calcutta. August 7, 1885. 87 Letter from Mr. H. Farrell, Veterinary Surgeon on special duty, to the Hon’ble Ashley Eden, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Dept., Calcutta, Hastings, dated the 2nd April 1870. WBSA, Political Department (Medical Branch), May 1870, No. 5.

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inspector of , that can speak English fluently, declared in open court, when questioned by Lieutenant La Touche whether I would be permitted to attend his cattle, that he would not allow me to treat them or go near them for fear of the vengeance of their ‘deity,” and again, intelligent natives, attached to the American mission for fourteen or sixteen years, went with folded hands to their pastor, and begged him to prevent English treatment being adopted, as they has attended the general meeting, and were, in common with their fellow-countrymen, dreadfully afraid of their deity’s vengeance overtaking them if they accepted the slightest assistance from the doctor . In this state of affairs, I was quite unable to take any very active part in the case of sick animals; but I can declare that every help be given was afforded by the civil authorities including the police; yet cure was a failure, and cleanliness and attention to the cattle not willingly observed.88 If the native reluctance to adopt the “English treatment” meant that cure was a “failure,” the Commissioner of Burdwan was not very hopeful of the indigenous remedies either. Commenting on native familiarity with the disease and its subsequent cure, he reported that the disease affecting cattle in Burdwan district is generally considered “incurable” by the natives and no “inoculation or other preventive measures are adopted except the separation of the sick animals from the rest of the herd.” He added that in the “in the early stage of the disease, and before purging has commenced, “moya” fish, generally known by the name “mourilla,” is sometimes given in a raw state; and that when the scourge appears, it is customary to give this fish to all the cattle in the village as an antidote.”89 Brushing aside native Indian opinion, the next step was to ascertain the infectious properties of the disease, to be able to find an appropriate cure.

Epizootics and Colonial Politics

What then, lay behind the urgency and the far-reaching nature of the state’s rinderpest operation? Disease was too pressing a problem in the profitability of British Empire to be ignored by the Company. Massive epidemics in colonial India not only killed Europeans, but also depopulated villages, and along with them depleted state revenues from

88 Ibid. Italics mine. 89 Letter from from C. F Montresorm Commissioner of Burdwan to the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal,

70 trade and agriculture. In fact, an investigation of the relationship between disease, medicine and power has been a bourgeoning area of academic research in recent years. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, the historiography of medicine in South Asia was dominated by a study of epidemics.90 Gradually however, historians began to study the social and political ramifications of disease and epidemics, drawing their inspiration from historians of Europe and who used them as “windows” to observe the societies under strain. It was now assumed that epidemics brought out the social tensions that were otherwise masked under a veneer of normality.91 By the 1980s, the historiography of epidemics acquired a new impetus from the Subaltern Studies group that investigated the nature of popular protests provoked by the state intervention in dealing with disease and epidemics.92 Drawing, not uncritically, on the work of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci, David Arnold showed how colonialism in India used the body as a site for contestation of its own authority, legitimacy and control, while at the same time tracing the paradoxical, hateful and the hegemonic Indian responses to Western medicine.93 He has shown in the context of plague how colonial interventionism was triggered by a combination of domestic and external pressures, by political and medical considerations. He has argued that apart from the international pressure on Britain to control the epidemic in India, the colonial plague measures exemplified a growing crisis of urban control as it were mostly in the cities that plague posed a composite threat. In the case of rinderpest in colonial Bengal, it was the commercial loss that weighed heavily on British minds and drove prevention measures. If human plague affected the major Indian port cities like Bombay, and Calcutta, rinderpest affected the rural regions more than the cities, with the only exception of the Calcutta epizootic which equally ravaged the city as it did the interiors of Bengal. That the panic that spread to the colonial camp was severe is evident from repeated references to the commercial loss. From 1865 onwards, textual evidence indicates the official anxieties’ concerning rinderpest which was now bound to affect the

90 See for example, Ira Klein, “Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India, Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988): 123-55. 91 For an overview of the recent historiographical trend on disease, medicine and colonialism in South Asia, see Mark Harrison and Biswamoy Pati, The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India (London ; New York : Routledge, 2009). 92 David Arnold, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896-1900,” in Ranajit Guha ed. Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 93 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in nineteenthCentury India, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

71 profitability of the Empire. By 1869, it was evident in the official circles that there was “a considerable decrease in cultivation on account of the want of plough bullocks.”94 In a similar vein, the Extra-Assistant Commissioner of North Luckimpore drew attention to the impending food scarcity. He commented, that “the cattle disease is still killing many cattle, and neatly every Mouzahdar reports a partial failure of summer crop in consequence, and as a consequence a probable scarcity. 95 Moreover, although the colonial authorities praised the European planters’ “intelligence” in halting the spread of disease among their herds, yet mortality rates indicate that the fatal disease equally devastated the cattle of both the Europeans and the native farmers. Thus, animals and diseases easily leaked across actual and invented borders, and they can constitute rich sources for understanding the imaginative class and racial boundaries in colonial India. Epidemics were rarely unified events and various communities experienced them differently, which is especially true of a vastly rural country like British India. While epidemics cannot tell us everything about the nature of social relations, they indicate, as this chapter has demonstrated, a tendency among the colonial authorities to ignore Indian cultural and religious sensibilities. The British veterinary surgeons and colonial authorities in Bengal had the dual task of maintaining firm boundaries (animal and human) with Indians and of asserting authority within the Bengali subaltern communities over native healing and naming practices. Control over animals and disease was thus often as conflicted and complex as maintaining power over subject peoples.

94 Letter from Captain A. E. Campbell, Deputy Commissioner, Seebsaugor, to the Personal Assistant to the Commissioner of Assam, Seebsaugor, dated 22nd June 1869. WBSA, Political Department (Medical Branch), 27th July 1869, Proceedings 66 and 67, No. 384. 95 Extract of a letter from John Campbell, Extra Assistant Commissioner of North Luckimpore, to the Deputy Commissioner of Zilah Luckimpore, dated the 10th June 1869. WBSA, Political Department (Medical Branch), 27th July 1869, Proceedings 66 and 67, No. 42.

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CHAPTER FOUR

THE POLITICS OF DIAGNOSIS: GERMS, VETERINARIANS, AND MEDICINE, 1860-1920

In a district like this in which the majority of the people belong to the Hindoo religion, it is impossible to take the only step which would be efficacious in staying the plague, namely, an unsparing use of the axe on the cattle suspected to be tainted with the disease.1

If the cattle are so ill-fed and so ill-tended, they are on the other hand most injuriously over-worked, partly owing to the increased prices of all articles of food, both of men and cattle, and partly owing to the diminution of the number of the cattle caused by the periodic murrain, which has of late become more fatal than before.2

If the dread of rinderpest was a constant presence and perpetual concern for the British in India throughout the late-nineteenthand mid-twentieth century, their response in checking the spread of rinderpest was however slow and uncertain, owing largely due to unfamiliarity with the disease in India. Animal-disease regulations represented a continuous form of crisis management from circulating manuals among farmers in the initial years to more detailed disease control decrees like preventive slaughter, quarantine, drugs, cleaning and hygienic measures, and even the methods of diagnosis which were deeply contested. If scholars like Daniel Headrick have interpreted various innovations in science and medicine as “tools of empire” that enabled colonists to conquer indigenous populations and overcome hostile environmental conditions, historians have more recently been concerned with the ways in which Western medicine assisted colonial administrations in extending social control over the colonized, as science underpinned

1 Letter from Captain John Gregory, Deputy Commissioner of Luckimpore, to the Commissioner of Assam , No. 346, dated Debrooghur, 30th June 1869. WBSA. Political department (Medical Branch), 27th July 1869. Pro No., 66 and 67. 2 Letter from Joteendro Mohun Tagore, Honorary Secretary to the British Indian Association to F R Cockrell, Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal. WBSA. General, March 1864. Pro No. 43.

73 militaristic public health policies and sanitary measures.3 In the context of the Bengal rinderpest, the colonial government had little choice but to respond, which means that the epizootics of the late nineteenth century were an important stimulus for both social control and the establishment of state veterinary services.4 While initially small and ineffective, colonial veterinary administration in fact gradually became an important component of state bureaucracy in India. Furthermore, in the Victorian era, the boundary between animal and human health was not so secure; indeed the pioneering work after 1870s on how germs caused infection began with studies of diseases that crossed species barriers---, tuberculosis and rabies.5 Thus, through the history of rinderpest we can also analyze how doctors and veterinarians understood and dealt with complex problems that were at the margins of their professional practice, and to the struggles over who had reliable knowledge and hence authority.6 The problem was aggravated by the fact that there no medical consensus on rinderpest until the 1890s; indeed, there were many different groups producing understandings from different starting assumptions, by different means and to different ends. Historians have recognized the importance of animal models in pathological researches that led to the construction of germ theories from the 1870s, however less attention has been paid to the other aspects of the relationship between animal and human medicine. Among the most important of these were the debates within veterinary medicine and between veterinary medicine and human medicine, on the control of contagious animal diseases. From the 1860s, unlike their medical counterparts, veterinarians accepted that most epizootics were contagious and spread by the transmission of some disease-matter from beast to beast.7 Linking the subject of animal cruelty and protectionism to veterinary science, colonialism and knowledge-formation, this chapter elucidates how rinderpest was at the center of a heated debate in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal that affected the Bengali bhadralok, colonial authorities, native farmers, Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA), and veterinarians

3 See David Arnold, Colonizing the Body; Mark Harrison; Meghan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 4 An epizootic is the equivalent in animal population of a human epidemic, i.e, high mortality due to a disease that is normally not present in that region. 5 Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 4. 6 For a similar study, see A. Hardy, “Pioneers in the Victorian Provinces: Veterinarians, Public Health and the Urban Animal Economy,” Urban History 29 (2002): 372-87. 7 Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

74 as different parties viewed disease, meat-consumption, animal cruelty, and public health in varying ways. First, I examine how the criticism and defense of the colonial rinderpest control measures like slaughter, culling and quarantines facilitated a debate on the role of state intervention, as well as a dialogue about the proper behavior towards the native farmers, animal owners and animals. In the end, the control of animals and animal disease was just as much a part of colonial rule as was the control of people. Finally, I draw attention to the persistent tension in veterinary education in nineteenth century Bengal---the need to maintain a conscious social divide between “elite” veterinary assistants and “low caste” veterinarians and “quacks.” On one hand, Bengali veterinarians in India had to establish the legitimacy of their veterinary practices as “scientific” as against the “unscientific” subaltern medical practices of the gowdaga or cow-doctors. On the other hand, they had also to assert their area of competency and define themselves as “scientific” practitioners to boost their position, especially as early nineteenth century studies of animal diseases had been dominated by doctors. By focusing on the outbreak of rinderpest in Bengal, I bring out the race and class anxieties that marked veterinary education not only on questions of respectability in handling animal diseases, but also on the boundaries between human and animal diseases in a colonial society.

Germs, Contagion, Veterinarians

Historians like Keir Waddington in his study on bovine tuberculosis affecting nineteenth century Britain has demonstrated that work on glanders in the 18th century, and experiences of rinderpest, foot-and-mouth in the nineteenth century, had led British veterinarians start to investigate the extent to which cattle diseases were contagious. 8 The devastating effects of rinderpest, which plunged the British cattle industry (and the emerging veterinary profession) into crisis, and the national responses to the disease, served to shock veterinarians into adopting a contagious model that forced a re-evaluation of disease theory, if not an immediate rejection of motions of spontaneous generation. Michael Worboys has also highlighted the role of rinderpest in giving birth to new “germ theory.” According to Worboys, attempts to control the cattle plague in Britain provided the veterinary profession with a new public role and raised its status.9

8 Keir Waddington, The Bovine Scourge: Meat, Tuberculosis and Public Health 1850-1914 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 38. 9 Michael Worboys, “Germ Theories of Disease and British Veterinary Medicine, 1860-1890,” Medical History 15 (1991):308-27.

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By the late 1860s, earlier disagreements about the nature of cattle disease were pushed to one side as most veterinarians in Britain came to accept that “epizootics were contagious and spread by the transmission of some disease-matter.”10 Worboys has also examined how scientists of tropical animal diseases tended to pursue their studies primarily in the colonies where the infections arose.11 Military veterinarians were, as some historians like Paul F. Cranefield and Karen Brown have shown in their study of cattle diseases affecting and , pioneers of these studies.12 To consolidate and expand knowledge and research into animal in the colonies, research institutes appeared in , the United States, and India from the late nineteenth century. According to Cranefield and Brown, the scientists in the colonies generated important knowledge about diseases, and their work provided an example of a field in which colonial science ran ahead of the European metropolis. In India too, British veterinary surgeons appointed to inspect the cattle disease affecting Bengal had to be first certain about the properties of the disease, especially contagion. As early as in 1867, there was some correspondence in the official circles regarding the dangers of contagion in Poschema Rog (the disease from the West). R. B Chapman, the Officiating Commissioner of the Bengal Presidency Division reported in May 1867 that further enquiry in of Bengal has “satisfied the Magistrate, as it does me, that Mr. Norman’s opinion as to the disease not being infectious, is based on insufficient data, being founded in fact only in the opinion of the Gwalas ( milkmen) and not on any observed or ascertained facts; on the contrary at Meherpore, as in Jessore, whole herds appear to be generally attacked when one animal is attacked.”13 Not only was the opinion of gwalas brushed aside as it lacked a “scientific” legitimacy, but the initial years were marked by frantic efforts to prepare detailed manuals on the nature of the cattle disease. In 1867, Dr. McLeod, Civil Assistant surgeon of Jessore was entrusted with the task of preparing a manual on cattle disease in “plain and

10 Worboys, Spreading Germs, 44. 11 On the nature of tropical medicine, see Michael Worboys, “Manson, Ross and Colonial Medical Policy: Tropical Medicine in London and Liverpool, 1819-1914” in Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience and European Expansion, ed. Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis ( London: Routledge, 1988): 21-37. 12 Paul F. Cranefield, Science and Empire: East Coast Fever in Rhodesia and the Transvaal ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Karen Brown, “Tropical Medicine and Animal Diseases: Onderstepoort and the development of veterinary science in South Africa 1908-1950,” Journal of Southern African Studies , 31 No. 3 (September 2005): 513-529. 13 Letter from R. B Chapman, Officiating Commissioner of the Presidency Division, to the Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal, no. 122, dated the 21st May 1867. WBSA, General Dept. (Medical Branch), May 1867, No. 33.

76 unscientific” language for circulation among the farmers.14 Mcleod’s report that detailed the nature, symptoms and a list of “best medicines applicable” was circulated widely among the agricultural classes along with “Bengali translations of Dr. Bensley’s instructions for the treatment of cattle disease” among the mouzadars of that Durrung district of Assam, where cattle mortality was especially high.15 By 1869, unable to cope up with the tremendous cattle loss, the Sanitary Commission for Bengal requested Dr. H. Farrell, one of the earliest British veterinary surgeons in Bengal to “draw up a sort of simple rules for the general treatment and segregation of diseased cattle.”16 Farrell was instructed to travel to Assam to investigate the outbreak of the plague in that region. The object of his tour, he suggested, was to “gain by personal observation a more intimate knowledge of the nature and symptoms of the disease, the manner, the custom, and habits of the people, and their mode of management and keep of cattle” which he believed was necessary for treating the animals and preventing future outbreaks.17 He hoped to find a remedy for the disease, presumably “something simple and easily obtainable in the country by the natives.”18 Thus Farrell embarked on his tour with a few “native assistants” as he had been approached by some zamindars in the district who had provided him with two “intelligent young men, willing to live and reside in Calcutta at their own expense, in order to gain a knowledge of the disease, to enable them to look after the cattle of the ryots in their zemindaries.”19

Disease, Diagnosis and Treatments

In the initial years of the disease outbreak, local authorities were asked to appoint inspectors to monitor markets, check cattle movements and most controversially, to use the pole- axe to slaughter affected beasts. British veterinarians in India, in lines with elite veterinarians in Britain accepted that cattle plague was at the contagious end of the disease spectrum and only disagreed whether the first case had arisen spontaneously or has been imported. They assumed that cattle plague has arisen spontaneously and then spread its influence in the atmosphere. This view was expressed forcefully in their opposition to the policing of the movement of animals and

14 Annual Report on the Administration of the Bengal Presidency, 1867-68. WBSA. 15 Letter from H. Beverly, Officiating Under-Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Commissioner of Assam, dated .WBSA, general Dept. (Medical Branch), October 1867, No. 52. 16 Political Dept. (Medical Branch) dated 27th July 1869. WBSA. Pro. No., 66, 67. 17 Letter from Mr. H Farrell, Veterinary Surgeon on special duty to the Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 17th September 1869. Political Department (Medical Branch) Oct 1869. WBSA. Pro.No., 12. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

77 to slaughtering, which they experienced as more economically damaging than the disease itself. Once the epizootic took hold, within a few months, hundreds of part-time inspectors had been appointed and veterinary surgeons found themselves enjoying the new powers and status as local functionaries.

Quarantine, Slaughter and Culling

Quarantine measures can be found from the very beginning of plague outbreaks as it was felt that the apparently healthy animals had first to be separated from sick animals because the disease was considered to be “both infectious and contagious.” Some historians have traced the origins of quarantine as a mode of treatment in Roman agricultural tracts.20 Initial colonial plague control measures in India thus focused largely on quarantine, along with other “English treatments” like recommending “mild laxatives, combined with powerful stimulants; sponging body with vinegar and water” which was considered to be the “most effectual treatment,” putting the number to “50 cures per 100 treated.”21 Pointing to the contagious nature of the disease, and the need for quarantine, A. Sawers wrote in 1863 that, “the disease, I think, is both infectious and contagious, consequently Natives deem it unnecessary, on its appearing in a herd of cattle, to remove the diseased animals, but this is, I think, absurd. I immediately detached these two and removed the entire herd from the locality; only one more case occurred.”22 That quarantine was already followed by the native farmers is evident from the reports of the colonial authorities even in the initial years. In 1864 the Commissioner of Burdwan commented about the disease that “it is generally considered by the Natives of this District to be incurable, and no inoculation or other preventive measures are adopted except the separation of the sick animals from the rest of the herd.”23 Likewise, the civil surgeon of Guwahati reported in 1868 that, “When the disease appears, the natives consider that their only chance of saving their herds is at once to completely cut off all communication between the diseased and the healthy animals. Goats placed in sheds

20 W. D Hooper and H.B Ash, Translators. Cato and Varro: De Re Rustica ( London: William Heinemann, 1934). Cited in Joanna Swabe, Animals, Disease and Human Society, 74. According to the authors, Varro, the Roman agricultural writer advocated isolation of sick animals in separate to prevent disease from spreading quickly and ruining the farmer. Such ideas about contagion were expanded on for another 18 centuries, after which “germ theory” eventually became a favored explanation of disease. 21 Extract of the letter from A Sawers, to A Grote, dated Culna, the 16th Dec 1863. WBSA. 22 Extract of the letter from A Sawers, to A Grote, dated Culna, the 16th Dec 1863. WBSA. 23 Letter from C. F Montresorm Commissioner of Burdwan to the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal. WBSA, General Dept. ( Medical Branch), March 1864. Pro. 6-20.

78 with affected cattle contract and die of the disease.”24J. A. Voelkar, the Agricultural Chemist commented on the native farmers’ familiarity with quarantines in his massive compendium, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, adding that “to a certain extent it appears that the people are aware of the advantages of isolation, and make some use of it. The herding together of a lot of miserable half-starved cattle on the village waste” is, one of the most potent means of spreading disease.25 However, the British surgeons’ mistrust of native healing techniques meant that they believed that quarantine was not universally followed by the native farmers in the plague- affected provinces. Voelkar himself hinted at the opposition of the native farmers of . He commented that, The proposed isolation of individual cattle in a village hospital pound was not so readily approved by the people and it was felt that the owners would want to go and feed their cattle, and thus would themselves be the means of spreading infection. Yet another difficulty is that of preventing the spread of the disease through sale of hides. When cattle die the Chamars or leather-dressers come at once and skin the animals, taking the hide for sale. The hide is their perquisite. It would seem that the only way of remedying the evil arising from this source is to give compensation for the hides destroyed.26 Quarantine measures and culling them were repeatedly advocated by veterinary surgeons like Farrell and the Deputy Commissioner of Assam who argued that “the country being entirely unenclosed complete isolation of diseased from healthy cattle could only be obtained by the use of the axe.”27 were however to be dealt with separately and with greater supervision. As early as in 1869, for instance, owing to the highest cattle mortality belonging to Sepoys of 42nd Regiment, the authorities adopted “the course prescribed in case of cholera breaking out amongst troops in Cantonments,” and sent “the whole of the cattle out of the lines to a Chaporie six or seven miles away.”28 In the absence of any other remedies, often dealing

24 Letter from Henry H. Purves, Civil Assistant Surgeon of Gowhatty to the Deputy Commissioner of Kamroop, dated Gowhatty, 30th August 1868. WBSA. Medical (General Branch), October 1868, F.N. 73, No. 50. 25 J. A. Voelkar, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, 1897. “Cattle Disease,” Paragraph 271, page 213. Accessed on January 7, 2012. http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924001039324#page/n4/mode/thumb 26 Ibid. 27 Letter from Captain John Gregory, Deputy Commissioner of Luckimpore, to the Commissioner of Assam, No. 346, dated Debrooghur, 30th June 1869. WBSA. Political (Medical Branch), 27th July 1869. Pro.No, 66 and 67. 28 Letter from Captain John Gregory, Deputy Commissioner of Luckimpore, to the Commissioner of Assam, No. 346, dated Debrooghur, 30th June 1869. WBSA. Political (Medical Branch), 27th July 1869. Pro.No, 66 and 67.

79 with animal disease proved to be similar as coping with human disease. The colonial authorities in the also employed prisoners to remove carcasses from the Civil Station, and have made mark boats to carry them down to the Dobroomookh and throw them into the Berhampooter.29 Everywhere, from Bihar to Assam, in the initial years of the outbreak, the colonial authorities took upon themselves the duty “to impress upon the people segregation of diseased cattle and destruction of carcasses when they die.”30 Quarantine was to be followed by slaughter and culling of the cattle. The colonial project of animal disease control in Bengal constantly drew from the experience of rinderpest in Britain and by 1873, it announced that “this Government believes it to be the opinion of the most practical men in England and Scotland that slaughtering is the only feasible means of checking the spread of cattle disease.”31

Opposition to Slaughter and Culling

While quarantine measures received the support of majority of the British veterinary surgeons, there were disagreements on the other approved measures. Palmer’s Report for instance, did not approve of “wholesale slaughtering of cattle” which he wrote, “our countrymen in England appear to have universally, and we think, unadviseably, recommend on the first outbreak of the disease.”32 The Deputy Commissioner of Luckimpore apprehended stiff resistance among Hindu farmers in resorting to slaughter and culling of their cattle, and instead recommended that the colonial authorities should let the epidemic run its course than let “ a worse evil than rinderpest” befall them by removing the putrid carcasses from the neighborhood of human habitations.33 Farrell was especially polite about government initiatives in checking rinderpest and in praising the apparent ‘successes of the colonial plague prevention measures. For instance, he lauded the efforts of Mr. Fisher, the head-superintendent of the Assam Company at Nazeerah in following the ‘English’ methods of rinderpest prevention. Farrell noted that, Mr. Fisher “acting on the warning and advice given in my circular issued under the

29 Ibid. 30 Letter from L. R Forbes, Extra Assistant Commissioner, Palamow, to R.C Money, Deputy Commissioner of Loharduggah No. 104, dated Daltongaunge , dated the 14th June 1869. WBSA. Political ( Medical Branch) , 27th July 1869. File No., No. 68 ½, Pro No., 66 and 67. 31 General Department ( Medical Branch). WBSA. February 1873. 32 Report on the Calcutta Epizootic or Cattle Disease of 1864. Letter from Dr. C Palmer, Presidency Surggeon to S. C Bayley, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 7th October, 1865. WBSA. General (Medical Branch), November 1865. No.71. 33 Letter from Captain John Gregory, Deputy Commissioner of Luckimpore, to the Commissioner of Assam, No. 346, dated Debrooghur, 30th June 1869. WBSA. Political (Medical Branch), 27th July 1869. Pro.No, 66 and 67.

80 authority of His Honor the Lieutenant-Governor---had sheds erected for the sick cattle, personally superintended their treatment, using largely carbolic acid and sulpher fumigation, he had the cattle separated and distributed in the most healthy places, carried out sanitary arrangements which were most useful, and in fact exerted himself so earnestly and intelligently that a good many of the infected cases recovered in a wonderful manner, considering the fatality usually attending the distemper; and the total destruction of the cattle in the several plantations was averted.”34 Farrell also lauded the “good effects of the admirable arrangements made by the civil and military authorities” in district he visited during his tour of rinderpest-affected areas of Assam.35 One of the most detailed sources on the colonial attempts to control rinderpest in the initial years of its outbreak comes from H. Farrell, the Veterinary Surgeon on special duty who was ordered to visit different provinces of Bengal in 1869. He provided extensive reports on the extent of cattle mortality in Assam and recorded the response of the native farmers in adopting the “English” methods of disease control. Farrell also composed a circular for controlling rinderpest which was translated into Urdu, Oriya and Bengali. The vernacularization of Western remedies was meant to be able to reach out to the larger public. Farrell’s reports were dominated by the steady theme of native resistance towards adopting the colonial measures of controlling disease which he believed stemmed from an innate backwardness and bigotry that thwarted any Western prevention measures. It is interesting to note that in commenting about the native reaction to cattle plague, Farrell began his report with an assessment of the character of different indigenous communities of Assam like the Ahoms ,Cachiries, Domes, Meeries, Mishmees, Kamptis. For instance, he was especially vocal about the Muttacks of Assam. He wrote, The Muttacks have great family pretensions and think themselves superior to all other classes in rank, wealth and intelligence; but a more bigoted, stiff-necked, and ignorant race I have not met in all my travels, even in the wildest parts of the Soonderbuns, They are so vilely superstitious that a stranger or European traveler is unable to procure a drink of water at any of their villages. And should they attempt to draw water from a well, or look down it, the well is considered polluted and immediately closed up. Each caste in a

34 Letter from Mr. H. Farrell, Veterinary Surgeon on special duty, to the Hon’ble Ashley Eden, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Dept., dated Calcutta Hastings, the 2nd April 1870. WBSA. Political Department (Medical Branch), May 1870. Emphasis mine. 35 Ibid.

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village has its own proper well. All these facts are additional proofs how impossible it was for myself or my salotrees to personally treat their afflicted cattle, or to advise them with any good results.36 Similarly, according to Farrell, an Assamese ryot exceeded the ryots of Bengal in “ignorance, indolence, apathy and superstition,” and they were, “far worse cattle owners” because while Bengali ryots paid “some slight attention to the feed and care of cattle, especially cows, for the milk, in Assam they were left almost entirely to shift for themselves in respect of shelter and food, the cows are not milked.”37 The Assamese farmers and cattle-owners resistance to adopting slaughter and culling was thus attributed by Farrell to their superstitious and stubborn nature. The enormity of the plague paranoia meant that it was not limited to the colonial authorities alone. If the colonial authorities and veterinarians’ projects of reform and sanitation projected the subaltern classes in various ways as insanitary, dirty wrenches in need of control or sanitary salvation, not enough records are available of how they sought to tackle the disease as a health problem. One possible way of recovering the subaltern medical responses from the educated Bengali sources is to look at those cures which are coded as ‘folk” remedies. Scholars have shown how with the development of the Bengali medical public sphere from the late nineteenth century, there was an ever-increasing attempt to appropriate the medical knowledge base of the subaltern orders. There also emerged the category of ‘folk medicine’ within the Bengali medical public sphere. However, the Bengali middle-class was not so much interested in animal disease in the initial stages of rinderpest attack, and hence in the absence of more detailed information about the contexts in which some native remedies were developed and used, it would be impossible to seek to reconstruct the logic which informed them. The unpopularity of inspection and slaughtering, together with the economic losses borne by farmers, were powerful reminders of the initial failure to check the outbreak. The developing sense of crisis, and the seeming powerlessness of the experts to do anything, damaged the British veterinarians in the eyes of the public and the medical profession. Thus what began as a criticism of cattle culling revealed tensions within a colonial society. Native Bengali farmers

36 Letter from Mr. H. Farrell, Veterinary Surgeon on special duty, to the Hon’ble Ashley Eden, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Dept., dated Calcutta Hastings, the 2nd April 1870. WBSA. Political Department (Medical Branch), May 1870. 37 Ibid.

82 linked animal control with the larger colonial policies of segregation, land alienation and racial discrimination. Keeping out and stamping out animal contagions became imperative, and was the aim of the most of the veterinary legislation passed after 1867. The program was enshrined in the major Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act, 1869 that scheduled as imported dangers: cattle plague, sheep-pox, foot and mouth and glanders. The disease however showed no signs of abating, losses mounted and the public was hit by rising meat and dairy prices. By the end of nineteenth century, in a disease-ravaged Bengal, a general sense of helplessness and loss prevailed. The Evening Mail captured the despair and anguish in 1885 in a very dramatic way. It reported, What strikes us most is the facility with which farmers and veterinary surgeons abandon themselves to despair, so far as regards all hope of successful treatment, and resort to the extreme measure of prohibition and destruction. We could do this, of course, if we were merest savages, ready to believe a demon had passed over our cattle and glad to fall back on our yards and plantains; but we are rather better than savages, and we profess to have some power over the diseases of man and beast. It is a humbling confession that is made by our medical authorities when they tell us to kill at once, for there is nothing at all to be done.38 The failure of rinderpest to respond to most of the western therapies made it a difficult disease to be dealt with. It not only challenged the superiority of western therapies but also emphasized the political vulnerability of colonial rule. David Arnold has examined how the early plague (human) years were a major crisis point in the history of state medicine in nineteenth century India, caused by hostile public opinion of government measures.39 Likewise, in the case of rinderpest, the colonial helplessness is evident as the colonial government faced a dual crisis of control. Despite the quarantine measures in the villages and the city of Calcutta, the epidemic had continued to spread and was affecting Bengal, Punjab and Madras. Initial attempts to control rinderpest had failed while mortality rates continued remorselessly to rise.

Scientific Experiments and Veterinary Education

Simultaneously with quarantine measures in the colony, efforts were made to initiate a process of experimentation in England on the treatment of cattle disease affecting Bengal.

38 London Times/Evening Mail, Calcutta edition. 21st August, 1885. 39 Arnold, Colonizing the Body.

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Careful steps were however taken to ensure that the disease was in no way transferred to the metropolis from the colony. For instance, the authorities in Bengal took care to ensure that while the contents of natural cow-pox should be transmitted to England secured in between glasses or capillary-tubed hermetically sealed for examination of the lymph nodes, live matter from ghotee or cattle small-pox, being highly contagious, should not be transmitted to England, as “it might lead to a reproduction of plague in that country.”40 Roger French has shown in the context of Britain that the restrictions of the Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876, which in part was stimulated by metropolitan reaction to experiments at the Brown, was a major factor in the slow development of laboratory research in Britain, as was the linkage of medical schools to hospitals rather than universities.41 Michael Worboys has suggested that there was an additional factor in the relative backwardness of British laboratory medicine, namely, that neither veterinarians nor the government’s Veterinary Department supported experimental research; indeed, they were hostile to it. According to Worboys, this was primarily because they feared that ‘research’ would produce alternative methods of control that would erode the place that veterinarians and administrative controls had established in the administration of surveillance and policing after the cattle plague crisis of 1865-66. 42 Throughout the 1870 laboratory and clinical research on animal diseases had made sure of inoculation to study two issues: First, to determine which diseases were contagious and to what degree; and second, to explore the value of protective inoculation from other diseases and modified contagia.43 Cull and slaughter continued to be a key element in state’s strategy of rinderpest control in the twentieth century, but new ways were tried to deal with rinderpest in the colonies and also in the metropole. Medical intervention from England was constantly sought as England herself was reeling under the impact of a major epizootic in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1865, when an outbreak of rinderpest---of the kind feared greatly by British veterinarian, John Gamgee--- decimated British livestock, the government realized that they required an effective body of specialists to be able to deal with the great threat to the economy and public posed by animal

40 Annual Report on the Administration of the Bengal Presidency, 1867-68. WBSA. 41 R. D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian England. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 42 Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs, 45 43 Ibid., 63.

84 disease.44 The possibility that contagious cattle diseases could be stamped out underpinned mid- Victorian attempts to limit epizootics. Efforts to eradicate rinderpest and foot-and-mouth disease asserted the primacy of slaughter in tackling epizootics and became a “consistent feature of public animal health strategies, in Western Europe…for some three centuries.”45 In Britain, the basis for eradication schemes was established through the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act passed in the wake of the cattle plague. The Act and successive legislation created a Veterinary Department. 46 Efforts made by local authorities to establish eradication schemes were also patchy. The 1894 Contagious Diseases Animals Act had affectively devolved responsibility for the elimination of epizootics to local authorities and attempts to stamp out bovine tuberculosis were an extension of these responsibilities.47 In India too, Contagious (Animals) Diseases Act was passed in 1869 to tackle the disease. However, powers conferred by the seemed limited as the assistant commissioner of Golaghat reported in 1869 that, “from all that I can learn I finally believe that the disease has spread entirely by infection, and had I possessed some such summary powers as those conferred by Act I of 1869, I have little doubt that I might have lessened the severity of the infliction.”48 A Cattle Plague Commission was established in 1870 to especially enquire into the causes of the cattle plague breaking out in different parts of Bengal. Dr. McLeod, the President of the Cattle Plague Commission and Veterinary School Committee had been insisting on the need to set up a Veterinary Institute for Calcutta which the government tardily came to recognize in 1870.49 By 1871, the President of the Cattle Plague Commission reported that a hospital had been opened at Culna, in Burdwan, for treatment of cattle affected with rinderpest.50

44 J. R Fisher, “Professor Gamgee and the Farmers, “Veterinary History 1. Vol 2 (1979-80): 47-63. Fisher has shown that the rinderpest of 1865 was a devastating one. It was traced to a shipment of oxen and sheep that had arrived in Britain on 29 May 1865 from . From then on, the disease raged throughout Britain, killing cattle by their thousands and threatening farmers with ruin. 45 John R. Fisher, “To Kill or Not to Kill: The Eradication of Contagious Bovine Pleuro-pneumonia in Western Europe,” Medical History ixlvii (2003): 314. 46 Waddington, 175. 47 Waddington, 179. 48 Letter from Captain L. Blathwayt, Assistant Commissioner of Golaghat, to the Deputy Commissioner of Seebsaugor , dated Golaghat, 18th June 1869. WBSA, Political Dept. (Medical Branch), July 27th, 1869, Proceedings 66-67, File no. 123. 49 The Medical Reporter: A Record of Medicine, Surgery, Public Health and of General Medical Intelligence, Volume 5, January-June 1895. Edited, Lawrence Fernandez. (Calcutta: The Medical Publishing Press, 1896). http://books.google.com/ebooks/reader?id=NRoCAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PP1 50 Letter from the President, Cattle Plague Commission, Culna to the Home Department. WBSA. General Department ( Medical Branch), December 1870. Destroyed.

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The last decade of the nineteenth century saw frantic colonial attempts to gain and thereby produce systematic knowledge about cattle diseases through surveys and reports, and the ultimate need to create a network of veterinary boards, dispensaries and qualified surgeons who could substitute the ‘quacks’ in the villages with their professional training and thus save cattle lives. There were regular correspondences regarding the supply of Bengali translations of the Inspecting Veterinary Surgeon of Bombay Army, J. H. B. Hallen's Manual of the More Deadly Forms of Cattle Disease in India to different officers under the government.51 One of the most comprehensive volumes on the health of Indian cattle was composed by John. A. Voelkar where in addition to discussing the ways to improve cattle health, he hinted at how the “subject of cattle diseases in India opens a great field for investigation, and that wide-spreading benefits may accrue to the agricultural community thereby.”52 The Veterinary College was established in 1882 that had a dispensary and hospital attached to it, and by 1897 it boasted of 90 students. At Poona College, a veterinary course was successfully introduced, and students who passed through it were qualified to take charge of the local dispensaries at , Nadiad and other towns in the . 53 These dispensaries, Voelkar reported, were used to some extent by the different municipalities for the treatment of their working cattle. According to Voelkar however, the most important step taken towards improving cattle health was the appointment of Dr. Lingard, “a man of established scientific reputation” as Imperial Bacteriologist to the Government of India. Dr. Lingard, “after considerable European experience under men of such note as Drs. Koch and Klein” came to Poona in 1890, and a “special laboratory” was established for him by the Government of India “for the express purpose of enabling him to pursue original research and investigate the causes and cure of cattle diseases in India.” 54Voelkar considered this appointment to be “one of great importance” because it was “almost the first in which a man trained in scientific investigation has been brought to India and enabled to follow original research.”55

51 J.H.B Hallen, Manual of the More Deadly Forms of Cattle Disease in India ( Calcutta: 1885). The correspondences can be found in Municipal Department ( Medical Branch), November 1884. WBSA. File no.,2 Pro. No. B31-62. 52 Voelkar, p. 213. Paragrah 272. 53 Voelkar, Ibid. 54 Voelkar, ibid 55 Voelkar, Ibid.

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The Bengal Veterinary College

In Bengal too, efforts were being made to introduce veterinary education as a curriculum in colleges and create a class of veterinarians who could treat animal diseases. The proposal for establishment of a Veterinary institution was mooted in 1883 and the proposal attracted the attention of Mr. M. Finnucane, the Director of Land Records and Agriculture, Bengal. Dr. Kenneth Macleod, who was one of the members of the Cattle Plague Commission of 1871 and the President of the Veterinary School Committee, also recommended the establishment of a Veterinary School and hospital as a necessity in Calcutta. Dinshaw Manockjee Petit of Bombay, Professor of Medicine at the Calcutta Medical College offered to contribute Rs. 25,000 towards the cost of Hospital.56 Belgachia was selected as the best site. One of Dr. McLeod’s patients, Rai Shew Box Bogla made a gift of 3.5 of land as a site for the Institution and further subscribed Rs. 30,000 towards the erection of buildings. The Govt. of Bengal acquired an additional 5 bighas 2 kattahs of land at a cost of Rs. 4,381 in 1890. The foundation stone was laid by Sir Charles Elliot, the then Lieutenant Governor of Bengal on twentieth April, 1892. The institution started functioning with a two years course on 10th January, 1892. In 1896 the Kenneth Macleod Veterinary School and the Sir Dinshaw Manockjee Petit Veterinary Hospital was renamed the Bengal Veterinary College and Hospital and started functioning with a three years course for the instruction of students of Veterinary Science and as a Hospital for their practical treatment of sick and injured animals. Students who passed the course with adequate training in surgery and disease treatment were certified as “Veterinary Assistants.” However, some of the earliest students enrolled in the college were believed to be from the classes who had very little knowledge of animal diseases and cure. The Superintendent of Veterinary Hospital emphasized that the Bengalis have scant knowledge of animals and hence it was necessary to extend the length of the course from two to three years so that the students could gain adequate practical training on handling animal diseases. M. Finnucane especially reiterated the need to employ well-trained veterinarians to treat cow diseases as a way to improve cultivation and agriculture in Bengal.57

56 Revenue Department, Agriculture Branch, April 1896, No. 7-8. File No. 3-E/2-1. Cited in Binaybhushan Ray, Chikitsha Bigyan-er Itihash: Unish Shotake Banglar Pashtatyyo Shikhyar Prabhabh ( Kolkata: ShahityaLok) 57 Revenue Dept (Agriculture Branch) April 1898. No. 12, File No. 3-E/2 5. WBSA.

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Socially, unlike in the case of ---where the earliest practitioners of ‘western’ medicine tended to be social outcastes---in South Asia the early practitioners came from two relatively prominent groups. Either they were Eurasians or they were Brahmins.58 In the veterinary profession however, one notices a good number of non-Brahmin enrollment. For instance in 1895, the demographic composition of the students of Bengal Veterinary College demanding an increase in their salary was quite eclectic. Among the 43 that signed the affidavit, nine were Brahmins, one was , four Vaidyas, fourteen , nine Sudras, three Muslims, one Eurasian and one Indian-Christian.59 If in the first year, 67 students were enrolled in the College, in 1894, about 210 students had applied for admission. Eventually however, only 35 students enrolled in the classes as increasing fears of employment and uncertainties about future projects led to disillusionment among the students.60 The students of the Belgachia Veterinary College also complained that in spite of their strong command over and the subject matter, their brilliant writing skills, they lacked the adequate practical training necessary to become Senior Veterinary Assistant. Repeated requests were thus made by Finnucane to the Land and Peasants’ Association of India to increase the course of study to three years so that fully-trained veterinarians could treat the cattle diseases, especially the diseases affecting cows in parts of Bengal.61 The ever-growing numbers of Bengali class medical graduates and the low salaries offered to them in government service, as well as the limited opportunities for career advancements, thus seemed to have driven an increasing number of qualified men away from government service and into private medical practice. This is turn had led to a crisis of qualified manpower at the lower end of state’s medical establishment, which led to the increasing employment of “locally trained native doctors.”62 Some historians have raised objections against considering this last category as practicing ‘western’ medicine. Anil Kumar, for instance, refuses to accept the majority of those in private practice dismissing them as “hybrid quacks of both indigenous as well as alien medical systems.”63 In the context of veterinary education in Bengal, what strikes us is the persistent

58 Projit Mukherji, 3. 59 Revenue Dept (Agriculture Branch) April 1896. WBSA. No. 10-11, File 4-P/6 2 of 1895. 60 Revenue Dept (Agriculture Branch), October 1894. WBSA. No. 181, File No. v-P/94, Appendix B. 61 Revenue Dept (Agriculture Branch), April 1898. No. 21, File. 3-E/2 5. 62 Projit Mukherji, 6. 63 Anil Kumar, “The Emergence of Western Medical Institutions in India 1822-1911,” in History of Medicine in India: The Medical Encounter. Chittabrata Palit and Achintya Kumar Dutta, eds. Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2005, 172. In the context of Bengal, Projit Mukherji has argued for the vernacularization of western medicine through the

88 tension concerning the need to maintain a conscious social divide between ‘elite’ veterinary assistants and ‘low caste’ veterinarians among the governments of Bengal, India and the students of the College. Even in the official circles, care was taken to create a class of veterinarians who would be distinct from the “lower class” veterinarians and the “quacks” flooding the towns and cities. In 1895, the government of India announced that before the training of upper class, highly- qualified, elite veterinary assistants, it is essential to create a professional category of lower class veterinarians because the main task of the elite veterinarians would be to inspect only. According to the government, it would be disgrace to let the elite veterinarians personally inspect the villages as that did not befit the status of a upper class gentleman but a lower class veterinarian.64 In this context, the Superintendent of the Civil Veterinary Department, Redmond suggested that it was however necessary for all classes of veterinary assistants to obtain adequate practical training and visit the villages in order to treat the diseased animals. Emphasizing a marked class distinction from other practitioners, Redmond stated that the elite Veterinary Assistants’ duty would be to travel to the villages, and treat the diseased animals currently being treated by ‘quacks.’ From the 1890 onwards, for practical training, the students in the Veterinary Institution were taken to places where cattle disease broke out.65 Apart from treating diseased animals in the villages, animals with “contagious cases” were removed from Calcutta gowkhana (cow sheds) to the Belgachia Hospital for treatment.66 A Veterinary Assistant was often directed to pick out all infectious cases, and an ambulance from the College was permanently stationed in the southern gowhhana for the transport of the worst cases. It was also arranged that all newly-purchased ponies should be malleinized and kept separate, so that they, at any rate, should be free from glanders.67 The cattle thus removed from the Calcutta gowkhana were all inoculated with anti-rinderpest serum to prevent further spread of the disease in the city. In 1900, the veterinary hospital attached to the Bengal Veterinary very diverse and hybrid class of daktars. Daktari medicine is thus the medicine is a narrow category designating a vernacular version of the western medicine. According to Mukherji, daktars were not a homogenous group. Even while recognizing many varied people as being daktars, contemporaries still distinguished between different levels of daktars. Reputations, educational backgrounds, the sort of treatment pursued, social status, fees---everything varied widely. See, Projit Mukherji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine. (London: Anthem Press, 2009). 64 Revenue Dept (Agriculture Branch), April 1989. WBSA. No. 8, File no. 3-2/2. 65 Municipal Dept ( Medical Branch), May 1897. WBSA. File No., 3V/11, Pro. No., B. 11-14. 66 Municipal Dept ( Medical Branch), October 1901. WBSA. File No., 7R/10, Pro. No.30-32. 67 Annual report of the Civil Veterinary Department, Bengal, and of the Bengal Veterinary College, for the year 1900-1901. National Library of Scotland, digital collections. Accessed on , 2012. http://digital.nls.uk/indiapapers/browse/pageturner.cfm?id=76342584&mode=transcription

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College at Belgachia was registered as an infirmary under the Cruelty to Animals Act, XI of 1890.68 This was a significant step as veterinary science and animal protectionism merged together in the Belgachia infirmary which was meant to treat both diseased and abused animals. Science and compassion found a common ground in the newly established veterinary hospital.

Veterinary Medicine, Status and Colonial Claims

The story of the introduction of “western” medicine in colonies has been studied by several scholars who have pointed to the state-centric view of “western” science, as has already been discussed in the previous chapter. While acknowledging the nuances in the “encounter frame,” this chapter assumes that “Western” medicine despite all qualifications and localizations, remained, in the end, “state medicine.” 69 David Arnold has depicted how medicine was not merely a matter of scientific interest in India, but was closely tied with the nature and aspirations of the colonial state itself. 70 In his recent study, historian J. R McNeill has examined the relationship between disease and power in the Greater , and shown how “revolutionary mosquitoes” played a crucial role in the struggles for empire and revolution. 71 Borrowing from McNeill’s study that invests the mosquitoes with an “agency” that helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them in the late 18th and through the nineteenth century, I demonstrate how in the context of colonial India, rinderpest acted as a powerful stimulus for the establishment and consolidation of veterinary services. As commerce was central to the spread of disease, the colonial government in Bengal became increasingly concerned about the agricultural yields and slowly realized the economic impact of contagious disease of livestock. The pressure on agriculture rose during serious disease outbreaks when casualties among livestock were high, and government thus began to fight diseases systematically and scientifically.

68 Judicial Department ( Judicial Branch), November 1900. WBSA. File no., 3 4C/2 1.3 Pro No. 1.4 69 Projit Mukherjee, Nationalizing the Body, 18. 70 Arnold, 8. Arnold has demonstrated how medicine “remained integral to colonialism’s political concerns, its economic intents and its cultural preoccupations.” 71 J. R McNeill, : Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). According to McNeill, because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

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Veterinary knowledge and treatment of animal diseases had a long history in India. In ancient India, saints like Nakula, Salihotra and Parasara composed treaties on Asvayurveda, Gajayurveda, Gavayurveda and Vrksayurveda, for the treatment of ailments of horses, elephants, cattle and trees respectively.72 Ayurveda too dealt with the treatment of diseases of animals and even plants. Skillful surgeons treated animals with precision and great perfection. Various techniques of surgical operations along with instruments have been dealt in detail in Shalihotra’s and Palakapya’s works. If in Europe, veterinary school appeared towards the end of 18th century, in India they appeared towards the end of nineteenth century.73 Research remained free from nationalistic rivalries and received stimulus from two outside bodies. One was the network of Instituts Pasteur, radiating out from Paris from 1888, researching both human and animal diseases. Some Instituts Pasteur were located in French Indochina, and three were founded in India between 1900 and 1917, one in Bangkok in 1912, and one in Rangoon in 1915.74 The other outside stimulus came from the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory of British India, renamed the Imperial Institute of Veterinary Research in 1925. Founded in Poona in 1889, it moved to Mukteswar, west of in 1893, with an offshoot at Izatnagar in the north Indian plains from 1913. 75 Veterinary science in India struggled from the beginning due to a shortage of veterinarians, poor communications, and lack of research facilities. Climate, culture and diseases, as well as some animals were new; and hence, understanding of India’s disease environment developed slowly. Moreover, veterinarians hardly made any use of local knowledge. At the same time, native cattle holders were reluctant to discuss infections or reveal incidence of disease because that could result in the slaughter of livestock. During the mid-nineteenth century when rinderpest first drew the attention of British officials, veterinary medicine was largely an unreformed profession. Historians studying British veterinarians have shown that in the nineteenth century, veterinary medicine had a low status and elite veterinarians were struggling to define their professional domain and to escape the tarnish

72 Vaidya Bhagwan Dash, Fundamentals of Ayurvedic Medicine (Delhi: Konark Publishers Pt. Ltd., 1978). 73 Joanna Swabe has shown how in nineteenthcentury England, the animal plagues and other social, economic and intellectual factors influenced the gradual formalization and intensification of the veterinary regime within Europe. Swabe, 88. 74 Sir Frank Ware, “India,” in A History of the Overseas Veterinary Service, Part I, ed. G.P West (London: British Veterinary Association, 1961), 25, 32. 75 Ware, “India,” 32-37.

91 of the farrier’s trade. 76 However, veterinarians had an ambivalent attitude towards medicine and the medical profession. They acknowledged that they too practiced ‘medicine’ and were engaged in a similar campaign for status. In a similar vein, qualified veterinarians tried to distance themselves from farriers, cow leeches, knowledgeable farmers and ‘veterinary quacks.’77 Worboys has argued in the context of Britain that the usual defense of veterinary surgeons that their knowledge was practical rather than scientific counted for little against the growing power of organized medicine.78 Education, practice and income were dominated by the horse; other livestock and domestic companion animals received less attention. For different economic reasons, veterinary surgeons in England saw relatively few farm animals, for as soon as a beast showed any signs of disease it was expedient to slaughter it before its value fell, or if the disease was catching, for contagions to spread. Also many farmers treated their own animals using traditional remedies, or utilized a range of lay healers, as was only too evident during the cattle plague crisis. William G. Clarence-Smith in his analysis of diseases of equids in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth century, has argued that the dominance of white veterinary officers, with a poor command of native and an arrogant attitude towards local knowledge, undermined the impact of Western veterinary medicine and helped to perpetuate non-Western forms of healing.79 British veterinarians in India had a dual agenda. On one hand, they had to establish the legitimacy of western veterinary practices as “scientific” as against the “unscientific” native medical practices. On the other hand, they had also to assert their area of competency and define themselves as “scientific” practitioners to boost their position, especially as early nineteenth century studies of animal diseases had been dominated by doctors. British veterinarians in India had thus to both raise their profession into a respectable occupation and legitimize it as the more “scientific” one as opposed to the trade of native gowdaga or cow- doctors. Tensions persisted not only on questions of respectability in handling animal diseases and dissections, but also on the boundaries between human and animal diseases. For instance, as early as in 1821, Surgeon-Major C. S Willis (Civil Surgeon) petitioned to the Lieutenant- Governor of Bengal that the order issued by Cantonment Magistrate of requiring

76 John R. Fisher, “Not Quite a Profession: The Aspirations of Veterinary Surgeons in England in the Mid- Nineteenth Century,” Historical Research 66 (1993): 284-302. 77 Worboys, 46. 78 Worboys, 46. 79 William G. Clarence-Smith, “Diseases of Equids in Southeast Asia,c. 1800-1945: Apocalypse or Progress?” in Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine. Ed., Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).

92 him to dissect a poisoned cow, was professionally demeaning because the job of removing the viscera of a poisoned cow was not befitting a civil surgeon.80 The Surgeon-Major was “indignant” and “professionally hurt” because he “was told to do the job of a butcher.”81 If British civil surgeons were comfortable dissecting human viscera, they considered the vivisection of poisoned cow to be below their dignity and thus threatening their notions of honor as a product of racial, gender, and class superiority. In this case, race anxiety and guarding imperial honor seems to have gained precedence over the claims of science. While considerable efforts were made to train locals through the creation of An All-India Veterinary School in 1877, racial hierarchies often undermined the efficacy of colonial veterinary services, with Europeans generally monopolizing top positions.82

Inoculation, Laboratory Experiments and Caste Convictions

Along with uncertainties on the nature of the disease, there were however some amount of confidence in the initial years in the efficacy of using “western” remedies of inoculation to cure the disease. Dr. J. B. Barry, for instance, reported confidently in March 1864 that “the ghooty is highly infectious and contagious, and spreads rapidly through the herd. There can be no doubt that inoculation would, as suggested by Captain Nelson, be attended with the most beneficial results.”83 The failure of slaughter and culling as a remedy universally adopted by native farmers led the colonial authorities to devise alternate forms of remedy. Experiments with inoculation began from the 1890s onwards as British veterinarians struggled to adopt 's system of inoculation for prevention of rinderpest among cattle. 84 In July 1899, Veterinary-Major, Raymond was sent on a deputation to in connection with the rinderpest experiments.85 By 1900, two methods of inoculation by using serum had gained currency in Bengal. One method was called the “single or plain serum method” and consisted in injecting a certain quantity of serum under the skin of the infected animal.86 The preventive

80 Letter from C. S. Wills, Surgeon-Major of Barrackpore to Deputy Surgeon-General, Presidency District, dated Dec 29, 1881, Proceedings of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Medical and Municipal Dept, (Medical Branch) WBSA. 81 Ibid. 82 See Frank Ware, “India,” 20-23, 26. 83 Minute by Dr. J. B Barry. WBSA, General Department (Medical Branch), March 1864, Pro. 6-20. 84 Municipal Department ( Medical Branch), November 1897. WBSA. File no., 4C/6, Pro No., B.88-90. 85 Municipal Department ( Medical Branch), July 1899. WBSA. File No., 4D/1, Pro. No., B. 32-33. 86 Annual report of the Civil Veterinary Department, Bengal, and of the Bengal Veterinary College, for the year 1900-1901. National Library of Scotland. Accessed on January 30, 2012.

93 effect took place at once. The duration of the complete immunity was not very long, but it generally outlasted an outbreak. When the immunity began to weaken, it was sufficient to prevent the death of an animal, though it was not always sufficient to prevent the attack. According to the Annual report of the Civil Veterinary Department, Bengal, 1901, “the people in Bengal raised only those objections to its application which conservative and cautious cattle owners would offer in any country.” The double method consisted in injecting a calculated quantity of serum into one side and a small quantity of virulent rinderpest blood into the other. This inoculation was believed to confer an immunity that would last for years. This method was preferable in the laboratory, but could not be effectively carried out in Bengal owing to massive resistance from the farmers. In 1901, the Veterinary Assistant reported the “difficulties and dangers in the way of its practical use in Bengal.” According to the Report, the extraction and injection of rinderpest blood offended the caste prejudices of the raiyats, and they would rather lose their cattle than have them treated in this way. Second, the system created fresh points of contagion because of the difficulty, amounting to impossibility as a rule, of getting raiyats to isolate their animals. Moreover, a very serious danger in Bengal was that connected with double infection, which meant that the blood of a rinderpest patient might carry the germs of other diseases. Finally, there was the financial loss, as it affected the owners of animals because cows would losing their milk, and bullocks be thrown out of work for considerable time, till the immunity which the double method conferred was to be durable. Owing to the objections to the double method in Bengal, the plain serum method was advocated and adopted into various provinces from 1901 onwards. Experiments were carried out in , Raniganj, Kanti, and in the Calcutta Municipal gowkhana. In Chittagong, the death amongst the inoculated cattle was 21.66%. 87 The villagers, reported to have been favorably impressed at first, however, they refused to continue the experiment, owing to the death of some of the inoculated.

The Bengali bhadralok discourse and the Rural/Urban Divide

“Western” style education had been introduced in Bengal for the longest period and as the middle class Bengalis came to realize the importance of an “English education” as a source of employment, and ever-increasing numbers took to it. As a result, by the 1890s the Calcutta elite were, relative to the other presidency towns, perhaps the most deeply indoctrinated in the

87 Ibid.

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‘western’ sciences.88 The process was aided by the establishment of ‘western’ educational institutions. Disease historiography has focused on the ways in which ‘western’ medicine was deployed in the colony, and the manner in which it was appropriated by the members of the colonized society.89 In South Asia, the works of Mridula Ramanna, Kabita Ray, Achintya Kumar Dutta and others have similarly focused on South Asian practitioners of ‘western’ medicine.90 Regarding the way in which ‘western’ medicine was received by the Bengalis, Projit Mukherji through his study of daktari medicine has revealed how the situation in Calcutta, though not unique, clearly presented some specific dilemmas. The strident Bengali professional classes that had celebrated the much vaunted Bengal Renaissance and was at this time laying the foundation of a modern nationalism premised upon rationality, would not have been comfortable with the obscurantist rhetoric of some of the plague protesters, while still needing to develop an idiom to oppose the violations of the colonial state. 91 He has argued that the Bengali bhadralok’s plague project was not merely a straightforward question of opposing government incursions; halting government violations were only a part of the project. The challenge lay in doing so in such a way as to not having to completely repudiate the authority of ‘rationality’ and ‘modernity’----and even more importantly, ‘science’ as a metaphor for both---for it was around these that the professional bhadralok’s own identity had come to be based.92 The story of Bengali bhadralok’s attitude towards cattle plague is however largely different from their response towards human plague. Although the effects of cattle plague were severe and fervently debated in the official circles as this chapter has indicated, the subject did not majorly touch the hearts and minds of the bhadralok. It was mostly the farmers, veterinarians, medical specialists and people involved in the live animal trade who actually

88 For an overview on the introduction of Western science in Bengal see, Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj: A Study of British India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Chittabrata Palit, Scientific Bengal: Science, Technology, Medicine and Environment under the Raj. (Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2006). 89 See Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); . John Iliffe, East African Doctors: A History of the Medical Profession. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 90 Mridula Ramanna, Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, 1845-1895 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002); Kabita Ray, History of Public Health in Colonial Bengal 1921-1947 (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co., 1998). 91 Mukherji, 149. According to Mukherji, it is precisely this idiomatic difference that is glossed over in the pan- Indian histories of protest against the antiplague measures, since they tend to ignore the actual idioms of protest. Mukherji believes that partly, this is the consequence of almost exclusive reliance on government archive. 92 Mukherji, 150. According to the author, the dilemma of the bhadralok was how to oppose the antiplague measures without having to say that the science it was based on was itself wrong or inapplicable. They had to find a way to oppose the plague measures without demolishing the authority of ‘medical’ science itself.

95 participated in the debate about the spread and containment of cattle plague.93 Did the estrangement of the bhadralok from the realities of agricultural life also remove them from the immediate economic effects of animal disease? Keith Thomas in his magisterial Man and the Natural World has charted the development of domestic pets as part of his larger study of the waning of anthropocentrism and the growth of sentimental attitudes towards animal. Thomas attributes this development, first seen among the wealthy, to declining eco role of animals and the separation of domestic life from immediate contact with the exploitation and killing of animals. However in Bengal, the extent to which any section of society was insulated from contact with working animals and livestock is a moot point. All kinds of beasts were omnipresent in Indian cities, and links between town and country remained close in Bengal. However, the animals that seem to have attracted the most attention in the city among the colonial authorities and also Bengali bhadralok was the horse. Rinderpest received very little space in the Bengali newspapers.94 It did not linger in popular memory in the city though it affected Calcutta in 1864. The Bengali bhadralok’s alarm over cattle health and disease came much later, through two distinct trends. One trend can be noticed from the late nineteenth century onwards, when there emerged a pervasive anxiety among the Bengalis about the declining health of village cattle and rural life. A second anxiety among the Bengali bhadralok concerned the extent to which the great livestock diseases--- rinderpest, foot-and-mouth, and pleuropneumonia---affected humans; indeed, the main threat was food poisoning from meat. By relying upon a variety of government and nongovernmental archives---Bengali medical periodicals, pamphlets----we can to seek to retrieve the actual idiom in which the bhadralok anxieties and protests in Bengal were articulated.

93 For a similar analysis on the impact of cattle plague in Britain, see Joanna Swabe, 101. 94 This is in sharp contrast to the story of rabies in nineteenth century England. Michael Worboys and Neil Pemberton have shown that while the actual number of hydrophobia deaths was very small in England, the Victorians however had to worry about any dog bite they received, and there were many because of the sheer number of stray and wild dogs around. Victorians were regularly reminded of the threat of rabies in popular memory, by word of mouth and through reports in newspapers. See Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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Cruelty, Murrains and Crisis of Cattle Health

Scholars have shown how by the end of the nineteenth century, there began to emerge among the educated Bengalis a critical image of the Indian village.95 Influential daktari author and the first Chemical Examiner to the government, Rai Chunilal Bahadur in his Village Sanitation and a Manual of Hygiene appealed to the villagers to take up the project of restoring the health of their villages.96 Central to this formulation of a “national culture of hygiene” was a nation of decline. The idea of decline from a glorious past was available in a wide variety of discourses in late-colonial South Asia, and even formal political nationalism. It argued that the nation had in the past been much healthier and stronger and that the health problems faced in contemporary times was a consequence of modern changes rather than long-term factors. Veterinary ideas too revolved around notions of decline of Indian cattle health. Animal disease and cruelty came together in the analysis of Babu Joteendro Mohun Tagore, Honorary Secretary to the British Indian Association and Landholders’ and Commercial Association in 1864. In his letter to the Government of Bengal on the “best means of improving the breed of Bengal Cattle” which was also forwarded to the Agricultural and Horticultural Society, Tagore pointed out the reasons for the “visible deterioration in the breed” of Bengal cattle, as: first, the want of good pasture; second, over-work; third, periodical murrain; and fourth, defective breeding.97 The enemy was thus, the entire colonial state---British land revenue administration and were viewed as culprits behind shrinking pasture grounds. Romanticizing a pre-colonial Hindu past, Tagore pointed out that “in the days of the Hindoo Kings of this country there were cattle ground, cattle roads, and cattle tanks,” and “pasture lands were kept by the Zamindars exclusively for the grazing of the cattle, on the charge of a moderate rent or quota of .”98 However, ever since the Permanent Settlement had been introduced by the British in Bengal, the landholders obtained absolute freedom in settling their pasture lands any way they wanted. Waste lands were hence brought into cultivation, pasture lands for cattle

95 Mukherji, 139. 96 Meera Nanda has demonstrated how sanitation itself was equated to an ancient ‘national’ cultural practice that was only too often equated with ‘Hindu national culture.’ Every aspect of sanitation and hygiene was therefore found to be identical to ‘ancient Hindu lifestyles.’ See Meera Nanda, “ and Vedic Science,” Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press 2003): 37-124. 97 Letter from Babu Joteendro Mohun Tagore, Honorary Secretary to the British Indian Association to F R Cockrell, Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal. General Department, March 1864. Pro.No. 43. 98 Ibid.

97 increasingly disappearing. Tagore also blamed the commercialization of agriculture as a reason behind shrinking pasturage. He complained, “twenty or thirty years ago there was scarcely an Estate which had not a large pasturage for grazing of cattle, but the enhancement of the prices of agricultural produce and the consequent profitableness of cultivation have led the Ryot to gradually encroach upon every pasture field susceptible of cultivation with or other crops. Deprived of the healthy, generous and invigorating food of nature, the cattle are left to subsist upon such allowance of straw and other food as the Ryot is able to supply.”99 To Tagore therefore, it was the colonial penetration into a pristine pre-colonial rural society that led to the deterioration of cattle health because “the Hindoo Kings of India always held the proper tending and improvement of the cattle an object of primary importance.” The “indifference and apathy” towards cattle came with British rule. Furthermore, Tagore explored the connection between disease and cattle health when he enquired before the government how far the animal diseases have led to the physical deterioration of cattle in Bengal. Veterinary thinking among the Bengali landowning classes thus structured more around the health of the livestock economy rather than diseases of organs and tissues. Tagore’s letter, while attacking colonial land revenue policies, reinforced the perception of the vulnerability and fragility of Bengal livestock economy. Joteendro Mohun Tagore’s line of argument was however quickly brushed aside by J. Beckwith, Secretary to the Landholders and Commercial Association who refuted the very idea of “degeneration” among Bengal cattle, by instead pointing out that the “increased difficulty in procuring draught bullocks” due to periodic murrains has given rise to the idea that the breed of cattle has degenerated.100 Indian cattle health however did attract the attention of the colonial authorities as it was too valuable an economic resource to be ignored for agriculture or revenues. One of the earliest manuals on Indian cattle breed was thus composed by John A. Voelkar in 1897 who enumerated the ways to improve Indian cattle health.101 Colonial views on improvement of cattle health tended to revolve around the superiority of western practices and the backwardness of native breeding techniques. Voelkar in his monumental volume, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture mirrored this sentiment as he commented at the very outset of his chapter on “Livestock and Dairying” that on this subject “there is not much to be

99 Ibid. 100 Letter from J Beckwith, Secretary to the Landholders and Commercial Association to F R Cockerell, Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal. General Department, March 1864. Pro.No. 43. 101 John A Voelkar, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, (Calcutta: 1897).

98 learnt from the ordinary cultivator and his methods, and in attempting improvement. The experience of Western practice will have to be drawn upon largely.”102Voelkar was especially categorical in his recommendations to improve Indian cattle when he suggested that “in effecting any improvement in cattle the examples of native practice will not suffice, but the experience of Western practice must be applied also. The enforcement of regulations for affected animals will have to be firmly carried out, even if opposition be at first shown by the people.” In sharp contrast to Joteendro Mohun Tagore’s arguments, Voelkar stated that the reason why better agricultural cattle are not to be found in parts of India is because of “the inattention paid to the matter of breeding and selection.”103 The Bengali periodical Krishak (Agriculturist) that dealt with techniques of cultivation, gardening and routinely published writings from the twentieth century onwards that demanded greater government supervision into the health of Indians cows. Expressing serious concerns over the deteriorating health of cows in Bengal, the author in 1913, noted that a possible way to improve Indian cattle health was to introduce “scientific education” in India.104 Such an education meant reading works like The Origin of Species and Alfred Wallace’s Animals and Plants under Domestication, which in turn would enable Indians to effectively learn techniques of cow rearing and protection. The author further demanded appointment of professional cow- doctors in villages who would tend to the diseased cows, given the huge cow mortality in several districts. Cow, the favored animal of the Hindus, definitely found a privileged space in the Bengali periodicals among other diseased domestic animals. Advertisements appeared in Krishak in 1913 where farmers were offered to register for copies of the newly published pamphlet, Go- Bandhab (Friend of Cow) edited by Prakash Chandra Sarkar that sought to detail scientific techniques for improvement of the breed of cows, cow protection and care.

Animal disease and Humans

The boundaries between animal and human disease were not very clear during the nineteenth century. In the British veterinary profession, George Fleming spearheaded the interest in bovine tuberculosis, forcing it onto the agenda. Convinced by studies that pointed to the threat

102 J.A. Voelkar, “Livestock and Dairying” (Chapter XI), Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, (Calcutta: 1897), 198. Paragraph 245. 103 Voelkar, paragraph 249. 104 “Gojatir Upakarita,” (The Usefulness of Cow), Krishak Volume 14, 1913.

99 posed by diseased meat, and work on glanders, he argued that certain cattle diseases were transmissible from animals to humans. As an advocate of hygiene, Fleming saw an intimate connection between veterinary medicine and public health. 105 Despite the growing support in veterinary circles in the 1860s and 1870s for the idea that tuberculosis was inter-communicable, it was ultimately Robert Koch’s claims in 1882 that bovine and human tuberculosis were caused by the same micro-organism that offered doctors conclusive proof. The disease was able to generate concern not only because it was clearly identified as infectious, thereby offering conclusive evidence that diseased meat was dangerous to health, but also because it was felt to be “much more disastrous in its results than all the other infectious diseases put together.”106 Manuals directed at public health officials and at veterinarians started to devote whole sections to the disease and the implications of consuming products from tubercular livestock.107 The veterinary profession in England in general was increasingly blamed for its inability to protect Britain from the livestock disease. 108 The threat of animal diseases was thus all too familiar to the Victorian and Edwardian public in the nineteenth century and was widely reported in the press. Rabies prompted hysteria, whilst cattle epizootics raised the specter of contagion and generated alarm about the safety of meat from infected livestock.109 Keir Wddington has demonstrated that between 1898 and the outbreak of war in 1914 efforts to protect the public (from diseased meat and milk) and campaigns to eradicate the disease in cattle went hand in hand. 110 A close relationship has always existed between animals and human disease, but the increasing domestication and exploitation of animals in the nineteenth century in different parts of the world created new opportunities for the spread of disease from animals to humans, while the growing urban consumption of meat provided an effective path for the transfer of epizootic diseases. As in Victorian England, in nineteenth century India the very visibility of epizootic and

105 George Fleming, Animal Plagues: Their History, Nature and Prevention ( London, 1871); idem, The Contagious Diseases of Animals, their influence on the…Nation, and how they are to be combated, etc. ( London, 1876); Anne Hardy, “Pioneers in the Victorian Provinces: Veterinarians, Public Health and the Urban Animal Economy,” Urban History 29 (2002): 379. 106 Henry Behrend, Cattle Tuberculosis and Tuberculous Meat ( London, 1893), cited in Keir Waddington, 86. 107 Waddington, 51. 108 M. Worboys, “Killing and Curing: Veterinarians, Medicine and Germs in Britain, 1860-1900,” Veterinary History no. 7:2 (1992): 53-71. 109 Keir Waddington, The Bovine Scourge: Meat, Tuberculosis and Public Health 1850-1914 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 3. 110 Waddington, 175.

100 endemic cattle diseases led to increasingly fear about the threat to human health from diseased meat, encouraging investigations and debates into the diseases of animals and their relationship with disease in humans. In July 1889, medical doctors were “directed to observe and report to what extent cattle disease was contemporous with human disease, or affected the health of the people.”111 Along similar lines, the Magistrate of demanded “for submission by the police of two separate reports respectively, through the Civil Surgeon and the Veterinary Assistant, of cattle disease amongst human beings and amongst cattle.”112 From the 1880s onwards thus some doctors began to argue that rinderpest posed a threat to public health. As early as in 1869, the Inspector-General of Hospitals were requested to instruct the Medical Officers in Assam to observe and report the extent to which cattle disease now prevailing in that province was “calculated to affect the health of the people.”113 Anxieties were also expressed concerning the spread of germs from animals to humans through water. The Civil Surgeon of Nowgong, Dr. R. O’ Conner gave voice to his fears when he reported in July 1869: The animals are seized, in the first instance, with enteric fever, which they fly to the water-holes and tanks or bheels, and drink largely of the water impregnated with effete animal matter, and in a few days a typhoid form of the disease comes on. If the water is injurious to the lower animals, the question naturally arises---what must it be to man? ---particularly after pest- stricken cows and buffaloes, in the height of their fever, have poisoned it their excretions, which are known to be most virulent. I make this remark under the supposition that poor, uneducated villagers, with the usual hardihood of ignorance, so common throughout Bengal may at times drink of water polluted by diseased cattle. The possibility of anything so resulting should be most anxiously guarded against. 114 Conner also recommended that it might be essential for the government “in the interests of the people” to “request Civil Surgeons to be on the alert to observe and record any possible connection discernible between the dissemination of murrain and the propagation of cholera or any other zymotic disease amongst human beings.”115

111 Municipal Department ( Medical Branch), July 1889. Pro No., 66-67. 112 Industry and Science Department, March 1900. File no., 4C/4, Pro No., 52-56. 113 Political Department (Medical Branch), dated 27th July 1869. Pro No.: 66, 67, July 1869. 114 Letter from David B Smith, Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal to A. Mackenzie, Officiating Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated , the 16th July 1869. Political Department ( Medical Branch), dated 27th July 1869, Pro. No., 66 and 67. 115 Ibid

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The debate over the safety of meat from animals with rinderpest became fiercer with time. Authorities panicked over the sale of diseased animals which might thereby find its way into the city markets. In 1870, H. Farrell reported that cattle owners in Seebsaugor, where the cattle murrain was very strong, were routinely and clandestinely removing all the animals to Debrooghur for sale.116 Cattle from Debrooghur were sent to the other side of the river to the churs to graze. Farrell, fearing rapid spread of the disease, suggested to the civil and military authorities that such animals should be prevented from crossing and from entering the station at all, unless their healthy condition was beyond question. Colonial paranoia found expression in Farrell who insisted placing a police guard at the Dehing ghat on Borally, who would command the Seebsaugor and Debrooghr districts. Police were likewise placed at the outlets of the station for a similar purpose.

Health, Hegemony, Control

In highlighting the repeated attempts to enforce cattle quarantines, and restrictions on livestock trade and slaughtering, we can draw parallels with colonial efforts to control "plague" in humans. By focusing on three major epidemic diseases---, cholera and plague, David Arnold, for instance, has demonstrated the range of colonial interests that informed state polices on medical intervention in India. He has shown how the early plague years were a major crisis point in the history of state medicine in nineteenth century India, caused by hostile public opinion of government measures.117 Studies on the introduction of western medicine in India have in fact emphasized that native response to western medicine was never unified and homogenous. The story of cattle plague and veterinary interventions in nineteenth century Bengal have further exposed the nuances within Indian responses to western medicine, thereby revealing the internal fissures within Bengali society itself---the subaltern reaction to disease and colonial intervention differed significantly from the responses of the English-educated Bengali intelligentsia and doctors. Moreover, “scientific” veterinary medicine was both expensive and erratic, whereas local healers had an intimate acquaintance with their environment. If native

116 Letter from H Farrell, Veterinary Surgeon on special duty, to the Hon’ble Ashley Eden, Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Judicial Dept., dated Calcutta Hastings, the 2nd April 1870. Political Department ( Medical), May 1870, No. 5. Copy forwarded to the Inspector-General of Hospitals, Indian Medical Dept, for information with reference to his letter No. 1063, dated 12th Feb. 117 Arnold, Colonizing the Body.

102 responses were dynamic, in terms of state intervention towards cattle disease and building a veterinary infrastructure, from the beginning of twentieth century, one notices a major shift. Simultaneously with newer remedies aimed at decreasing cattle mortality, from the late nineteenth century onwards the colonial authorities diverted its energies towards improving the breed of Bengal cattle for agricultural purposes and creating a well-defined veterinary apparatus that could effectively prevent animal diseases and also improve the breed of horses and cattle. While in the nineteenth century state interference with cattle diseases remained limited, in the course of the twentieth century however, a shift occurred from local and provincial control to national legislation regarding measures to deal with epizootic diseases. The crusade to combat cattle plague became a battle for power politics between diverse state machineries and native agencies that in turn brought out the fractures within a society grappling with the crisis of controlling a virulent disease. In 1885, a bill was moved to amend the Bengal Local Self- Government Act of 1885 in order to “enable District Boards to devote a portion of the funds at their disposal to the provision of veterinary staff and veterinary hospitals for the treatment of cattle and horses.”118 The bill specifically attempted to empower District Boards so that it could “establish and maintain veterinary dispensaries for the reception and treatment of horses, cattle and other animals”; and appoint and pay qualified veterinary practitioners (especially “female medical practitioners”) to prevent and treat diseases of animals.119 The move to open more veterinary schools in Bengal however soon turned into a story of tussle between provincial and local boards. Immediately following the proposal to amend the Bengal Local Self-Government Act of 1885, objections came pouring in from different quarters. In May 1896, C. A Bell, District Officer of wrote to the Commissioner of Orissa Division that he disapproved the sections in the bill that provided for the training and employment of veterinary practitioners.120 While acknowledging the importance of improving cattle breed and horses, which had been clearly set out by Dr. John Voelker in his Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, he however

118 Letter from H H Risley, Secretary to the Government of Bengal to all Commissioners ( except Chota ). Municipal Dept. (Local-Self-Government Branch), June 1899. WBSA. File No., 9A/1, Pro: 15-191, Circular No. 2T-M. 119 The phrase “The training and employment of female medical practitioners and vet practitioners,” was recommended by C. Fisher, Magistrate of Burdwan. Letter from C Fisher, Magistrate of Burdwan to the Commissioner of the Burdwan Division. Municipal Dept (Local-Self-Government Branch), No. 90 M, dated Burdwan, the 23rd May 1896. 120 Letter from C A Bell, District Officer of Puri to the Commissioner of the Orissa Division. Municipal Dept. (Local-Self-Government Branch), File no., 626.

103 argued that the vital task of preserving live-stock by veterinary aid “should not be delegated to District Boards, but should be kept under the direct control of the Central Government of the Province.”121 According to Bell, the improvement of agriculture was a public function, especially in a country like India, where people were primarily agriculturists, and that alone was a “weighty reason” for entrusting it to the Central Government. Besides emphasizing the agrarian character of the country, Bell added “the higher intelligence and skill” of the Central Government and its “greater ability” to coordinate, as two other reasons in favor of such centralization. Similar sentiments were expressed by the Honorary Secretary to the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce, Babu Sita Nath Roy in June 1899 who echoed the opinion of the Chamber that while the training of the students in veterinary schools and the maintenance of a veterinary staff and hospitals were desirable, such works however could not be adequately carried out from limited District Boards funds.122 From the late nineteenth century onwards, with increasing participation of educated Indians in the government machinery, greater pressure was put on the colonial authorities to create a veterinary infrastructure that could effectively address the health problems facing India’s cattle. In this context, it is perhaps pertinent to echo the question raised by Mark Harrison in his Public Health in British India where he has rightly questioned ‘what was specifically colonial about ‘colonial medicine’?123 Should we speak of ‘medicine in the colonies’, rather than of ‘colonial’ or ‘imperial’ medicine? Particularly important in this respect is the relation with colonial power/knowledge, as also the response of the local communities mediated through their positions of class, caste, ethnicity and gender. Mark Harrison has argued that “decision-making” in matters of medical and sanitary policy was increasing coming from within the competence of Indians themselves, thereby implying that colonial medicine was not hegemonistic. It is true that from the late nineteenth century onwards, more educated Indians are indeed visible in the colonial archives as members of municipal and district boards. Participation in municipal bodies was also seen as a way to cement ties with the ruling power and advance a community’s exclusive claims in the government. The anxiety among the to secure sufficient

121 Ibid. 122 Letter from Babu Sita Nath Roy, Honorary Secretary to the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Department. Municipal Dept ( Local Self-Govt Branch), dated Calcutta, 6th June 1899, File No. 139. 123 Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

104 positions in the District Boards comes out clear in the appeal of Syed Ameer Hossein Khan Bahadur, Honorary Secretary to the Central National Muhammadan Association. In June 1896, Hossein implored the government to allow for “increased appointment of eligible Muahmmmadans, as, except in the Bihar district, the community is at present very poorly represented at those Boards, from an administrative and political point of view, in consideration of this important and loyal community.”124 Syed Ameer Hossein also channelized the insecurities of the Muhammadan Association in a Hindu-majority elective system as he argued that, A Muhammadan is always outvoted by the overwhelming majority of Hindu votes for Hindus, it would be wise and fair, if the Government should either fix a proportion of Hindus and Muhammadans to be elected at each Local or District Board, or make it a rule…that a Muhammadan should be elected if he can secure one-third of the number of voted required for the purpose. Some such provision would remove a good deal of just heartburning and discontent among the Muhammadan community in Bengal, which is almost deprived of all the benefits of the elective system and whose interest considerably suffer for want of sufficient representation in the Boards and the Municipalities.125

The demands of the Muslim community to seek greater representation in the District Boards find resonance with its demand for increasing recruitment of Muslim students in the Belgachia Veterinary School. In this story of increasing recruitment of Indians in the government machinery, what Mark Harrison seems to have ignored is that the actual ability of educated Indians in local bodies to influence policy decisions was a much later development---until after ---and not even during the late nineteenth century when local municipal bodies were coming up to share power/knowledge with the ruling authority. While more educated Indians are visible in the colonial archives from the late nineteenth century onwards in the municipal and district boards, however, their decision-making authority remained limited. Crucial decisions regarding the nature of prophylactic intervention to improve cattle health, combat epizootics, and their methods of execution rested with the imperial authority alone.

124 Letter from Nawab Syed Ameer Hossein Khan Bahadur, Honorary Secretary to the Central National Muhammadan Association, to the Sec to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Dept. Municipal Dept (Local Self- Govt Branch), dated Calcutta, the 5th June 1896. File No., No. 398. 125 Ibid.

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opinions remained divided on the issue of instituting more veterinary schools in Bengal. If some pressed for greater power to the District Boards and introduction of veterinary education, others resisted it on different grounds. The Magistrate of Malda pressed for greater employment of lady doctors who could travel throughout the district, administer simple remedies, and give the necessary instructions required to cure cattle of foot-disease and cow-pox, which caused tremendous mortality among the cattle of the district. Venting his frustrations at how little was currently done by District Boards to alleviate cattle-disease, he added that the establishment of a few dispensaries in the interior to give medical aid to the great mass of the people would achieve much because in every district there were places where people were always without any medical aid or attendance whatever.126 There were voices however that opposed the nature of governmental control over improvement of cattle health and disputed the class of animals that should receive utmost priority. For instance, the Konnagar Ratepayers’ Association opined that “District Boards should be more concerned about the improvement of milch and ploughing cattle in the villages than that of horses and asses in the head-quarters, much less about the improvement of the breed of ponies.”127 Rai Surya Naryan Singh Bahadur, Honorary Secretary of the Landholders’ Association too noted that the treatment of horses, however desirable, was “not of such urgency as improvements in other directions.”128 There were suggestions as to the accessibility of the veterinary network that should be laid out in Bengal. The Konnagar Taxpayers Association asserted that few people in the remote interior of a district would benefit from veterinary establishments maintained in towns. Hence veterinary dispensaries should be established in places that were sufficiently remote from its municipal towns. The Bihar Planters’ Association was even more categorical. It vehemently objected the decision to introduce veterinary schools, proposing instead that the funds could be used in those districts of North Bihar on the proper upkeep of roads, which demanded greater attention.129 Skeptical over the use

126 Letter from J C Price, Magistrate of Malda to the Commissioner of Bhagalpur Division and Santhal . Municipal Dept. (Local-Self-Government Branch), No. 491L, dated Malda, 27th May 1896. 127 Letter from the Secretary, Konnagar Ratepayers’ Association to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Dept. Municipal Dept (Local-Self-Government Branch), dated Konnagar, the 6th June 1896. File No. 141, Pro No., 212. 128 Letter from Rai Surya Naryan Singh Bahadur, Honorary Secretary, Bhagalpur Landholders’ Association to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Dept. Municipal Dept (Local-Self-Government Branch), dated Bhagalpur, 6th June 1896. File No., 2. 129 Letter from E. Macnaghten, Secretary, Bihar Indigo Planters’ Association to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Dept (Local-Self-Government Branch), May 1896.

106 of District Board funds for veterinary purposes, the Association stressed “the native public generally would not make use of veterinary establishments, which would, therefore be conducted at dead loss.” It also emphasized that such veterinary establishments would have to depend solely on European support because some such establishments already set up at and were freely used only by European gentlemen.130 Controlling animals thus by the turn of the century became more of an exercise in controlling humans---farmers, cattle owners, native veterinarians, female practitioners---and most importantly, a power play between the District Boards and the local bodies, each asserting its authority over improving cattle health.

Veterinarians and their Patients

Colonial authorities kept vacillating on the weight to be granted to native practitioners in treating animal diseases. At the Second Ordinary Meeting of the District Board in May 1896 however, the Board declared that it would place no restriction as to the class of practitioners who might be employed. Attempting to co-opt native veterinary practitioners, it announced that “there are skilled cattle doctors in the native community, and the Board should be allowed to employ them, if necessary and should not be restricted to the employment of diplomaed or passed students in veterinary service.”131 Along those lines, the Commissioner of the Presidency Division seconded that “the powers of the District Boards should not be restricted to the employment of only passed students in veterinary science, but they should be allowed to employ skilled native doctors.”132 The composition of the new class of veterinary practitioners proposed as per the amended Local Self-Government Act brought out the colonial ambiguities concerning native and western knowledge systems. The President of the Sibpur Representative Ratepayers Association reacted sharply to the District Boards’ decision to employ native veterinarians by arguing that “the number of passed male practitioners, native doctors etc. is now so large, that that class of practitioners do not require further encouragement from the District Board.”133 Instead the Board should consider training female medical practitioners under section 67 (2) of

130 Ibid. 131 Extract paragraph VI of the Proceedings of the Second Ordinary Meeting of the District Board, 24-Parganas, held on the 28th May 1896. Municipal Dept (Local-Self-Government Branch), June 1899. File: 9A/1, Pro: 15-191. 132 Letter from E. V Westmacott, Commissioner of the Presidency Division to the Sec to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Dept. Municipal Dept (Local-Self-Government Branch), dated Calcutta 12th June 1896. File No. 40G. 133 Letter from C. R Pitt, President of the Sibpur Representative Ratepayers Association to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Dept. Municipal Dept (Local-Self-Government Branch),dated Sibpur, the 5th June 1896. File No. 103.

107 the Act. The Officiating Magistrate of Hooghly too seemed to be keenly aware of the lowly status of veterinary profession in late nineteenth century India. In order to make the veterinary profession “respectable,” it was thus necessary to reform the class of veterinarians substantially. He wrote, The Veterinary profession is looked down upon in the country as one befitting low-caste people, who now practice it here and there. To make a school of the kind successful, we must hold out liberal rates of scholarship to attract students of a better class. The best way to attain our end would be for the Government to establish two or three veterinary schools or colleges at the selected centres, such as Patna and Calcutta, as it has already done in one instance.134 In addition to appointing well-trained professional veterinarians, the “promotion of free vaccination” was considered by him as “a very necessary provision, especially among classes of people who object(ed) on religious grounds to vaccination.”135 If the initial years, British veterinarians like Greenhill and Woolcott were appointed as veterinary surgeons in the town of Calcutta, the trend reversed towards the beginning of the next century.136 Increasingly Bengali names now appeared which indicate that more and more native students came to be employed as veterinarians.137 In October 1901, for instance, the students employed as Veterinary Inspectors and Practitioners in the districts of the Santhal Parganas and Dacca and within the town and suburbs of Calcutta were Babu Biswas, Satyendra Kumar and Babu Surendra Krishna Mittra. Moreover, in 1901, three Bengali graduates were recommended for higher appointments---D. K. Dey was given a lectureship, and S. K. Mitter and S. K. Biswas, Inspectorships. If in the last nineteenth century, the Bengal Veterinary College had relied on the Bombay College for men to fill these appointments, from the 1900 onwards most Bengali students found employment as soon as they passed. 138 The Bengali veterinarians were faced with serious challenges. On one hand, they had to establish themselves as credible as against the subaltern gowdaga, and establish themselves as ‘scientific’ in the eyes of the British veterinarians. Second, they had to

134 Letter from J. Lang, Officiating Magistrate of Hooghly to the Commissioner of the Burdwan Division. Municipal Dept (Local-Self-Government Branch), dated Hooghly, the 6th June 1896. File no., 150, PN., 439M. 135 Ibid. 136 Municipal Dept ( Medical Branch), April 1881. WBSA. File No., 2, Pro. No., 20-23. 137 Municipal Dept ( Medical Branch), October 1901. WBSA. File No., 1A/6, Pro No., 83-86. 138 Annual report of the Civil Veterinary Department, Bengal, and of the Bengal Veterinary College, for the year 1900-1901. National Library of Scotland. Accessed on January 30, 2012. http://digital.nls.uk/indiapapers/browse/pageturner.cfm?id=76342596&mode=transcription

108 assert their supremacy and establish their legitimacy above medical doctors as veterinary medicine still struggled to find a ‘respectable’ place within the medical professions. Bengali veterinarians were thus torn apart by divisions not only within their own profession, but also within the boundary between human and animal medicine/disease. Gradually, elite veterinarians therefore borrowed a medical and administrative language that had parallels with the public health movement as they asserted their credentials to speak on animal health issues when they related to public health. These ideas were voiced with increasing frequency throughout the 1870s and were accompanied by efforts by veterinarians to move into local government and public health at a time when their role was expanding following the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act, VIII of 1890. By identifying cattle plague as a danger to humans, and by insisting on their ability to detect the disease in living cattle and dead meat, elite veterinarians were seeking to move into public health work. 139 Cattle epizootics made diseased meat into a concrete threat. It pushed the issue of diseased meat into the political arena and quickly came to stand at the heart of Victorian and Bengali bhadralok paranoia on animal disease and public health. As diseased animals began to enter the markets in Calcutta, inspection of meat became a critical concern of the colonial government. The following chapter examines the question of meat inspection and the studies trajectory of slaughterhouses as they came to be intertwined with new debates on health, hygiene, animal cruelty and diet.

139 Waddington, The Bovine Scourge, 40.

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CHAPTER FIVE

MEAT, MORALITY, MERCY: DIGGING THE DISCOURSES ON THE DIETARY CULTURE OF BENGAL

Whenever authorities are able to detect diseased/infected animals, they are sent away to kasai-khanas to be slaughtered by butchers. While there are veterinarians appointed to check diseased meat, it is not possible for them to inspect the numerous animals brought to the slaughterhouses every day, twenty-four hours.1

The outbreak of rinderpest in parts of Bengal from the mid-nineteenth century onward had far-reaching consequences beyond severely crippling an agrarian economy and causing enormous animal mortality. The animal disease impacted upon the culture and politics of diet, nutrition, sanitary science and led to a new reordering of the colonial city of Calcutta. This chapter attempts to closely scrutinize those new developments that hinged on the multilayered discourses of animal cruelty, public hygiene and slaughterhouses. As diseased animals regularly flooded the market, inspection became a crucial concern of the colonial government. The inspected animals made their way into the slaughterhouse in order to be transformed into meat and the discourse on animal cruelty, meat-eating and public health soon coalesced around the larger question of the condition of slaughterhouses in colonial Calcutta. Concern for slaughterhouses surfaced fast with the expansion of the city, as part of problem of public hygiene. Located in markets amidst human habitations, the slaughterhouses were often sites of public nuisance as they polluted the city by letting the entrails, blood, bones, flesh of the cattle to rot on the ground. In the twentieth century however, new notions of social hygiene emerged which insisted on the removal of the abattoirs to the city margins. Against the backdrop of these new sensibilities, this chapter situates the trajectory of Calcutta slaughterhouses and views their multiple dimensions as sites of contestation between public hygiene, official thinking and sanitary measures. I explore the historical and social changes that underlay the establishment of

1 Shree Manicklal Mallik, “Niramish Bhojon” (Vegetarian Diet), Swasthya-Samachar, Volume 5 (1916).

110 public slaughterhouses in Bengal and the increasingly important demand for veterinary meat inspection. Three broad research questions drive this chapter: First, using the slaughterhouse as a site of tensions, I explicate the conflict between Christian sensibilities as mediated through the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA) and the material foundations of a colonial society. Second, I investigate how the spatial configuration/physical space of Calcutta was transformed due to the growth of new notions of social discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the slaughterhouses became flashpoints of tension between animal cruelty and protectionism as the CSPCA, butchers, Victorian doctors and residents of Calcutta clashed on questions of environmental pollution, hygiene and vegetarianism. Third, by perusing late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengali periodicals, I demonstrate the interface between slaughterhouse hygiene, nutrition science, and animal disease. Bengali and British reactions to disease were socially and culturally revealing--- the great livestock diseases---rinderpest, foot-and-mouth, and pleuropneumonia---did not affect humans; indeed, the main threat was food poisoning from meat. Cattle epizootics in nineteenth century Bengal thus made diseased meat into a concrete threat. It pushed the issue of diseased meat into the political arena and quickly came to constitute a major stuff for Bengali bhadralok debates on animal disease and public health.2 At a theoretical level, this chapter unravels how the history of Calcutta slaughterhouses betrayed the perennial tension of modernization---the need to suppress the sight of slaughter with the need to procure meat in a “civilized” society.

The City, Citizens and Diet

By the early nineteenth century, Calcutta was the colonial city par excellence: it was river port close to a harbor, the center of colonial political power, had a mixed population, and was the

2 I am using the term bhadralok very loosely to indicate the educated, Bengali middle class. In reality, it was an extremely complex and diverse group marked by huge heterogeneity in terms of its social position, relationship to commerce, bureaucracy, intellectual or cultural values. The Bengali term bhadralok derives its origin from the words bhadra meaning refined or respectable and lok meaning men. The bhadralok can thus be very broadly defined as the Bengali middle income group, characterized by English education, professional occupation and overwhelming Hindu and upper caste. For an overview on the role and shifting identity of the bhadralok in colonial Bengal, see , Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal ( Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); , Writing Social History ( Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta ( Calcutta: Seagull, 1989); John Broomfiled, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

111 key center of trade and communication.3 The function of the metropolis as an innovative agency in the process of socio-cultural or economic change is of special significance in a colonial context. The metropolis was hardly free to develop along indigenous lines. Despite the noticeable increase in the masonry buildings in the first half of the nineteenth century, the city of Calcutta was still essentially a city of hutments. The thatched huts were replaced by tiled ones in1837.4 In the classical colonial city, a division between native and alien population was materialized through segregation in layout, density, housing and everyday life.5 The spatial segregation was visible in the dual city of Calcutta.6 The center of “European” Calcutta contained ornate administrative buildings, the viceroy’s residence, surrounded by homes of colonial officers and the wealthier white population. This “city of ” adjacent to a large open space, the , was set apart, spatially and conceptually, from the “black town.” The boundaries between the “white” and the “black town” were both solid and eminently permeable-- -natives of the black town regularly crossed the borders to serve the white population, they were also aware that these were homes they could occupy but not own. The duality was maintained and reiterated in colonial discourse, despite everyday border-crossings by native servants, Indian bibis. The dual city, reminiscent of a period of relatively harmonious intercourse between black and white populations and an Orientalist fascination with Indian arts and sciences, presented a particular way of drawing the borders of the self and of negotiating the threat of eastern corruption.7 Around the fringes of the saheb para (white town) had developed what the urban historians of Calcutta describe as a “heterogeneous intermediate zone”, inhabited by poor whites,

3 For some of the classic works on the growth Calcutta under the British Raj see, Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1978); S.N Mukherji, Calcutta: Essays in Urban History (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1993); Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989); Crane Robert, “Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century,” Bengal Past and Present, Vol XCIX, Part II, no 189( July-December 1980). 4 Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1978), 28. 5 Anthony King lists 30 flexible criteria to define the “colonial city” characterized by a dualistic economy dominated by non-indegenes. See Anthony King, Spaces of Global Culture: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity ( London: Routledge, 2004); cited in Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2010) 6 For a description of the evolution of dual city, see P. J. Marshall, “Eighteenth-century Calcutta,” in Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context, Robert Ross and Gerard J. Telkamp (eds) ( The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1984): 87-104; Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1978). 7 Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2010), 99.

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Eurasians, large numbers of Muslim service groups, and small communities of Jews, Armenians and Chinese.8 Other propertied Muslim groups were scattered in pockets like Cossipore in the north, Tollygunj in the south, Garden Reach in the south-west, all in the outskirts of the growing city. At the north-western edge of the intermediate zone but close to the European business hub, lay Burrabazar, the lynchpin of Calcutta’s commerce with other parts of the subcontinent and even beyond, by river, land and then railway.9 In 1850, Colesworthy Grant found here Persians, , Jews, Marwaris, Armenians, Madrasees, , Turks, Parsees, Chinese, Burmese and Bengalis.10 Nevertheless, while dihi Calcutta was graduating into a “town,” the suburbs on the east remained underdeveloped. Thus throughout the nineteenth century, one can notice an expansion in the population of Calcutta with an increasing settlement of people, European as well as indigenous. Sumit Guha in his study of the subcontinent's demographic development has shown how there was a sharp population increase especially in the first third of the twentieth century, which was however not the result of a rise in fertility. 11 Guha has attributed this decline in mortality rates to an increase in the stability of food production, and thus stability in food intake, and not an improvement in the long-run average food consumption.12 This rapidly growing population left its mark in a westernized culinary habit, which in turn generated a great demand for meat. The British of the early nineteenth century were renowned for extravagant consumption of food, especially of meat, which cost very little in India. David Burton notes in his monograph, The Raj at the Table that the “everlasting murghi”----roasted, grilled, boiled, stewed, hashed, minces, cutleted or curried---appeared on the table week after week with such monotony that for years after leaving India some British retained an aversion to in any form.13 Among poultry and game, chicken was the most favored bird. Turkeys were introduced into India from America in the eighteenth century, largely to supply a market. However, they were never

8 Pradip Sinha. 9 Sumit Sarkar , “The City Imagined: Calcutta of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Writing Social History ( New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 166-67. 10 Bhattacharya Sabyasachi, “Traders and Trades in Old Calcutta,” (ed), Calcutta: The Living City, Vol 1 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 204. 11 Sumit Guha, Health and Population in South Asia : From Earliest times to the Present ( London: Hurst & Co., 2001). 12 According to Guha, climatic change in the early twentieth century ensured stable food production which kept a substantial part of the population above the minimum food intake level, thus increasing overall levels of immunity from disease and infections to unprecedented high levels. 13 David Burton, The Raj at the Table: A Culinary History of the British in India ( London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 110.

113 successful as many died before they reached maturity in the damp climate of Bengal.14 Nor were domestic ducks a particularly attractive proposition to householders or farmers, as they consumed a vast amount of feed yet yielded a scrawny carcass. Burton notes that the British did not eat much beef in India, which he believed was more due to practical reasons than out of respect for Hindus. The Brahmin cow had to subsist on a miserable diet of course grasses, and hence its meat was lean, dark and tough, reared by Indians who had little knowledge of fattening cattle for the table.15 In the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras however, there was sufficient demands for beef to allow for full-scale farming around the city fringes. At smaller towns, there had to be sufficient beef-eating British to make the slaughter of a cow worthwhile to a butcher. Among other forms of meat, pork was less in demand among Indians because pork was considered unclean by both Muslims and Hindus. The British therefore had to make their own arrangements for pig farming. However, since the majority of the cooks employed by the British were Muslims, cooking pig-meat was created difficulties. Burton notes that “so ingrained was the English taste for great joints of roast beef and mutton that it followed them even to the tropical heat of India.”16 The most celebrated was the gram-fed mutton of Bengal.17 Mutton clubs existed, which was a cooperative of English residents who kept their own flock of sheep since goat meat was usually all that was on sale locally. Burton points out that by 1890s however, the mutton clubs had almost died out, as good gram-fed mutton became available from village bazaars.18 Goat meat was even tougher than mutton, but considerably cheaper and this was what the average Indian tended to eat. Goat meat never gained complete acceptability among the English as Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management noted that while goat meat was sometimes cooked in India, “it is anything but pleasant to English tastes.”19

14 Burton, 118. 15 Burton, 130. 16 Burton, 143. 17 Burton mentions that the cheap Bengal gram ensured that whole flocks of sheep were fed on it, although the high quality was probably due to the shepherds turning the young makes into wethers, a practice essential for producing good quality lamb and mutton. Burton, 143. 18 Mutton clubs were managed by an honorary secretary who supervised the accounts, the shepherds, feed and the delivery of the meat. When a sheep was killed each week, it would be butchered into five parts---necessitating that the number of mutton club members be five, or multiples of five---and each member would take, by turns, one of the tow forequarters, the legs or the saddle. Burton, 144. 19 Cited in Burton, 147.

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Food was a significant and pervasive subject in Victorian culture, offering a “culinary nationalism.”20 Diet was also a marker of nationality, region and locality that helped identify racial and religious differences in England.21 The nation’s national wealth was indicated through meat consumption: Britain was the heaviest consumer of meat in Europe.22 That the British in India thrived on an elaborate diet of meat is attested by the private memoirs, dairies and letters of British officers and memsahibs during the period. The starling array of meat consumed at Anglo- Indian alone included crumbed chops, brain cutlets, beef rissoles, devilled kidneys, whole spatchcocks, duck stews, Irish stews, mutton hashes, brawns of sheep’s heads and trotters in addition to Indian meat dishes like jhal frazie, chicken malai, and beef hussainee. The massive consumption of red meat at was merely an English custom transferred to a tropical climate, irrespective of its suitability. During the early decades of —as Elizabeth Collingham’s work has shown—such ostentatious and unhealthy dining habits “served well to underline the status of the Company grandee in India.”23 However, with the increasing racialization of the Raj after 1857, the body of the British official in India became an even more powerful signifier of ‘Britishness,’ and diet and dress became, accordingly, cultural sites on which a sense of bodily difference between the British and their Indian subjects was maintained.24 According to Collingham, the lavish consumption of food and drink by the British in India was reminiscent of the nabob and continued to construct the official’s body as an aristocratic body in the Indian context. Overtime there might have been a refinement of the eating etiquette compared with the meat-eating excesses of the earlier period, elaborate meals continued to be the norm. Some Europeans in India however, advocated vegetarianism. Tristram Stuart in his illuminating volume, The Bloodless Revolution, discusses the European fascination with Hindu-

20 James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 11. 21 Ben Rogers has argued that after language, food is the most imp marker of . Ben Rogers, Beef and Liberty (London, 2003)2-3. 22 John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 815 to the Present Day (London, 1966), 157-58. James Gregory however argues that butcher’s meat remained a rarity in England as English agricultural labourers rarely ate meat. Gregory, 14. 23 E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, 1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). 24 E. M. Collingham has examined how the British in India sought to maintain their authority over Indians by reinforcing the bodily differences between ruler and ruled, which were manifested in eating, clothing, bathing and sexual practices.

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Brahminical vegetarianism in the early years of the Company rule.25 The revered Jesuit missionary Abbe Jean Antione Dubois composed a tract, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, where he depicted ahimsa (non-injury) as a cowardly and effeminate doctrine, but sought explain the real historical origin for vegetarianism through climatic compulsions. According to Dubois, meat was indigestible and putrid in a tropical climate.26 His suggestion was endorsed by a widespread tradition of European tropical medicine like the work of British naval surgeon, James Johnson, who in his The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Especially the , on European Constitutions (1813) applied the principle of temperance very strictly. Having identified over-stimulation and a tendency to plethora as the greatest risk to the European newly arrived in a tropical climate he recommended a cooling diet. 27 Johnson’s recommendations were based on the eighteenth century view of a vegetable diet as an antiseptic regimen which cleansed the bodily fluids of impurities while meat, as a stimulant, induced plethora, especially if taken in large quantities. Collingham argues that the Brahminical prohibition of wine and meat, as well as the simple diet of rice and of the Hindu poor, appealed to the temperance-minded British physicians as laudable Indian custom which contributed greatly to the health of the Indian population. Thus British physicians like Johnson held up the Brahmins as models of ascetic, suitable behavior.28 Having said that however, Collingham notes that most Anglo-Indians took little heed of arguments in favor of the vegetable diet, and many resisted medical attempts to indianize their constitutions.29 Stomach disorders, inevitably, were common, but everyone blamed the climate rather than the unsuitability of their diet.30 The Governor, Philip Francis, thus wrote in 1775 which attests to the over-indulgence in meat: “I am tormented with the bile and obliged to live on mutton chop and water. The Devil is

25 Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India (London: 2006). In chapter Four, “Pythagoras and the Sages of India,”Stuart discusses the 17th century “discovery” of Indian vegetarianism by Europeans. According to Stuart, what was most surprising to the western travellers in India were the masses of ordinary people who lived on what Europe considered an exceptionally abstemious diet. Stuart closely examines a few European travellers in India---Thomas Tryon and John Evelyn among others, to demonstrate how they drew from Hindu theology and enshrined Indian vegetarianism in the mainstream of intellectual debate. 26 Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India (London: 2006), 268. 27 J. Johnson, Influence 433; cited in E.M Collingham, Imperial Bodies. 28 Collingham, 27; Stuart, Chapter Four, “This proud and troublesome Thing, called Man:” Thomas Tryon, The Brahmin of Britain, Bloodless Revolution. 29 Collingham, 27. 30 Belief in the distinctiveness of the environment raised the fundamental question of whether or not it was possible for Europeans to acclimatize their bodies to their new surroundings. Most medical men believed that there was nothing inevitable about sickness in the tropics, and that much could be done to prevent it. For a discussion on the environmentalist paradigm in the tropics, see Mark Harrison, Public health in British India. Anglo- Indian Preventive Medicine,1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 40–1.

116 in the climate I think.”31 These ostentatious eating habits were deployed as the cultural markers of a masculine, physically superior British Raj. In a similar vein, John Beames wrote about their daily eating habits, Our chota haziri, or little breakfast, was at five-thirty to six, and consisted of tea, eggs boiled or poached, toast and fruit. Breakfast at eleven consisted of fried or broiled fish, a dish or two of meat—generally fowl cutlets, hashes and stews, or cold meat and salad followed by and rice and dessert. We drank either bottled beer—the universal Bass—or claret. Between four and five there was tea and cakes. Dinner at half past seven or eight consisted of soup, and entr´ee, roast fowls or ducks, occasionally mutton, and in cold weather once or twice beef, an entremet of game or a savoury, and sweets.32 If the gastronomic delights of the British were considered to be a metaphor for a physically superior Raj, the native kitchen was however very bleakly portrayed as symbolic of all that was filthy, dirty and uncouth about Oriental cultures. The author of a cookbook described a typical kitchen in an Anglo-Indian compound as “a wretchedly mean, carelessly constructed, godown [outbuilding] . . . inconveniently far from the house, and consequently open to every passer-by.”33 While the British were glorified as “manly” for their love for sports, and chivalry towards women; the Bengali babu was effeminate, bookish, over-serious, lustful and lacking in self- discipline. Historians like Mrinalini Sinha have investigated how the trope of effeminacy against the Bengalis was constructed by the British to justify their domination over the “unmanly” Indians.34 According to Sinha, after the revolt f 1857, once the Western educated Indians started demanding a share in the exclusive privileges of the British elite, the colonial discourse began to dub the Indians as “unnatural” class of persons; the “effeminate babus.” Sinha studies the controversy, the native volunteer movement, the Public Service Commission and the revision of the age of consent to analyze how these crises were always operating within gender stereotypes and issues of imperial rule and domestic self-image. Among the “rice-eating babus,”

31 Quoted in Burton, 7. 32 John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), p. 197. Cited in Charles Allen ed., Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century (London: Futura, 1988). Originally published by Andre Deutsch, 1975. 33 Arthur Kenney-Herbert Wyvern, Culinary Jottings: A Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles (Madras: Higginbotham and Co., 1885), 499; cited in David Burton. 34 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995).

117 it was their “enfeebling diet” and the premature maternity of women that led to such effeminacy, according to Herbert Risley, the amateur British ethnologist and physical anthropologist.35 Recently, scholars like Jayanta and Srirupa Prasad have drawn our attention to how among the “rice-eating Bengalis,” to counter the challenge of emasculation or effeminacy, from the 1880s onwards, there was a proliferation of medical journals that emphasized the Bengali need for consuming animal protein.36 The increasing importance of this theme is attested to by the space that diet and nutrition regularly commanded in medical journals like Chikitsa Sammilani, Bhishak Darpan, and Swasthya. Between 1885 and 1935, more than 600 books, pamphlets and periodicals dealt with issues related to health and hygiene. The one constant theme in these journals was the view among the Bengali doctors that the Bengali diet was far too rich in carbohydrates but markedly deficient in protein, the “muscle-forming element.” In order to make up for the deficiency in protein, doctors prescribed protein-foods of animal origin. Some examples of this trend can be noticed in Swashthyo-Samachar, Volume 1, where in an article, “Relationship between Food and Health,” the author enumerated the benefits of a protein-based or meat diet in regulating body metabolism, or in Swashthyo- Samachar, Volume 5 where the author emphasized how meat consumption was good for heart, nerves and immunity.37 Recent studies by some scholars have focused on the relationship between food, nutrition, bhadralok identity and nationalism. Srirupa Prasad, in her illuminating recent article, has argued that, faced with a persistent lack of political power and an ever-growing social marginalization through extensive influx of non-Bengalis, the Bengali bhadralok came to articulate a highly charged sense of embodied crisis around issues of diet and nutrition. This crisis in turn allowed

35Sir Herbert Risley, (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1908), 57. Cited in Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the LateNineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 20–21. 36 Jayanta Sengupta, “Nation on a Platter: the Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 44 (2010): 81-98; Srirupa Prasad, “Crisis, Identity, and Social Distinction: Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Consumption in Late Colonial Bengal,” Journal of Historical Sociology 19, no. 3 (2006): 245-65. 37 Several such examples can be found in the Swashthyo-Samachar during this period. See for instance, “Shupothyo”/“Pushtikar Khabar” (“Nutritious Diet”), Swashthyo-Samachar Volume 5 (18); “Khadyer Shohith Shorirer Shomommdho” (“Relationship between Food and Health” ), Swashthyo-Samachar Volume 1( 18); Especially illuminating is an article, “Niramish Bhojer Bipod” (Dangers of a vegetarian diet”) published Swashthyo- Samachar , Volume 1, which is a satirical narrative of the author’s personal experience with an English-educated doctor. The author, a vegetarian for 12 years, goes to the doctor to get tested in order to obtain a health insurance (as per the rules of the insurance). The doctor after performing few tests (stool etc.) confirms that the patient’s levels of salt, urea were lower than required. Hence, the doctor prescribes a diet of animal proteins, especially meat to get his salt levels back to normal. The patient reluctantly follows a diet of meat, fish, for the next three days, and his salt levels return to normal.

118 the bhadralok to distinguish themselves clearly from the other groups with whom they increasingly had to compete was well as to aspire for social and political supremacy. Indeed, during this period, numerous essays, tracts and books appeared on the role of diets in making bodies susceptible to certain kinds of contagions. Pratik Chakrabarti has shown that the necessity to improve the Bengali diet was a shared concern of many Bengali and British authors, even in the 1930s.38 Projit Mukherji has studied the emergent daktari discourse on national diets by focusing on a “progressive numeralization of diets” which meant that the daily dietary requirements of an individual were expressed in terms of the numerical weights of the respective “necessary” foods. He has also closely interrogated how bhadralok the paranoia about maintaining the dietary balance was matched----if not outdone----in intensity by the fears over the contaminations/adulterations of foods.39

The Economics of Meat Demand and a Sanitary City

We do not know if this propaganda for increased meat consumption boosted the demands for meat, but from 1850s, 60s onwards, official records show that a large number of cattle were brought from the districts of Burdwan, , Nadia, Hooghly and to the metropolis for the purpose of being butchered. The slaughter of an increasing number of cattle to provide meat for the Calcuttans as also the troops stationed at Fort William, diminished the supply of cattle for agricultural uses, and thus tended to raise its price. What the cattle traders of Ultadanga market in Calcutta complained to the Cattle Plague Commission in 1860s was only a slightly exaggerated truth, ----“cattle have become rare, the butchers are buying up all the cattle of the country.”40 Increasing demand for meat meant that innumerable, unlicensed slaughterhouses came up in Bengal, catering to the meat requirements of the urban as well as the rural population. With increasing in Calcutta, the need for public hygiene became a pressing imperative. Sanitary commissions came up all over Calcutta, and the entire discourse of cleanliness was soon divided along the lines of European and native towns.41

38 Pratik Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India: Metropolitan Methods, Colonial Practices (Delhi: Permanent, 2004), 284. 39 Projit Bihari Mukherji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Dakdari Medicine (London: Amthem Press, 2009), 125. 40 Report of the Commissioners appointed to enquire into the Origin, Nature etc, of Indian Cattle Plague, 1871. West Bengal State Archive, Calcutta, 1871, p 64. 41 For an overview on sanitation and cleanliness drives among the British and the bhadralok see, Gyan Prakash, Chapter Five, “Body and Governmentality,” Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (

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By 1864, the sanitary commissioner for Bengal drew attention to the unsatisfactory condition of the slaughterhouses in the neighborhood of Calcutta, and argued that it was a disgrace that a city like Calcutta should have no decent public slaughterhouses.42 To the sanitary commissioner, Calcutta was a “scandal and disgrace” to “civilized Government.” Indeed colonial reports throughout this period projected dirt, filth and disease as signs of India’s otherness. Filth, as scholars have suggested, is essentially a term of censure and reproach. In the course of the nineteenth century, filth emerged as a powerful marker of national and racial distinctions.43 A general fear of contagion thus became materialized in the form of filth. Gyan Prakash argues that it was not simply colonial prejudice that was at work in these denunciations, but more importantly, a “language of governance, discipline and knowledge of the other.”44 Colonial representations of Calcutta’s clogged drains, garbage and filth meant that there had to be strictly demarcated zones---the European hygienic enclaves had to be guarded from the insanitary, swampy “black towns” inhabited by the native populations. A general fear of contagion and corruption, of biological and moral degeneration, developed in the form of filth. The filth abjected to the black town served to define the self and clean for the colonizers.45 By the early nineteenth century, the spatial segregation of the city seemed no longer to hold weight ----if air of the city was poison, no one was exempt from disease. In this new climate, concern for the slaughterhouses emerged as an agenda of sanitation and public hygiene. Norman Chevers, the Civil Assistant Surgeon of Bengal declared in 1863 that “sanitation, is a mere matter of common sense…it is that instinctive feeling of self-preservation with which every savage is gifted, moderately developed and cultivated. The natural man washed himself, occasionally…the highly civilized man keeps his city clean, and in doing so, becomes a

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere.” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (1997): 83-113. Gyan Prakash has argued that sanitation in colonial India functioned as a powerful colonial tool for regulating and disciplining indigenous habits. 42 Letter from J P Walker, Secretary to the Sanitary Commission for Bengal to the Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 16th May, 1864. General Department, June 1864. WBSA. Proceeding No. 303, File No. 56. 43 William A. Cohen, “Introduction: Locating Filth,” in William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xiv. 44 Gyan Prakash, 133. 45 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), cited in Pande.

120 sanitarian.”46 Making Calcutta sanitary was thus closely tied to the project of curing and civilizing the native of Bengal. Ishita Pande studies how a “sanitary city” was imagined between the 1830 and 1850s to replace the dual city of the days of the ’s nabobs.47 The Fever Hospital Committee commissioned by Lord Auckland in 1835 soon became an instrument for policing, cleansing and ordering the city. Besides questions on drainage, tanks, ventilation, roads, the Committee was asked to report “any native habit” that it considered “injurious to health.”48 The food bazaar was first to be perceived as a place of contamination followed by the meat markets and slaughterhouses. Laden with offal, urine of frightened animals, these spaces were made filthier by lack of water, want of proper drainage and the “slovenly habits and total disregard of cleanliness” in Bengal.49 To the sanitary gaze, the slaughterhouses were not just sites of abysmal filth and horrific stench, but they epitomized the barbarity of “Mohammedan butchers” in their unaesthetic mode of animal slaughter---halal. Slaughterhouses thus became a key site for regulating filth, pollution and determining the boundaries between clean and unclean. Only sanitation could remedy the Bengali Muslims’ barbarism. Demand for a proper slaughterhouse also came from another quarter---the Calcutta Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that was formed in 1861. During its inception, it was stated that the main purpose of the CSPCA was “not merely to prevent cruelty towards dumb animals by deterrent influence of legal punishment, but also to foster those merciful impulses that tended to the growth of humanity.”50 The CSPCA, an elite humane body, was anxious that “the bulk of the people on whose conduct the treatment and happiness of the dumb creation in India rest are unable to read.”51 Hence, the Society concerned itself with the dissemination of its principles amongst the uneducated, “through the instrumentality of their own

46 Norman Chevers, The Sanitary Position and Obligations of the Inhabitants of Calcutta. A Lecture Delivered before the Bethune Society, Calcutta on the 13th November, 1862 (Calcutta: B C Lepage and Co., 1863), 2; quoted in Ishita Pande, 97. 47 Pande, Chapter Five, “Sanitary Subjects: fever, Filth and Freedom in a Dual City,” Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal, 97. In this chapter Pande demonstrates how sanitation, a tool of modern governance, was shaped in Calcutta by a juxtaposition of colonial ideas---liberal racism, and a mission to civilize. She has closely examined the move from a dual city under the Company Raj to a sanitary city in the nineteenthcentury. 48 Fever Hospital Committee, “Abridgement,” 2; cited in Ishita Pande, 109. 49 Reginald Craufuird Sterndale, Municipal Work in India; or Hints on Sanitation, General Conservancy and Improvement on Municipalities, Towns and Villages. ( Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1881), 78; cited in Pande, 109. 50 Report of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for the Year 1861, National Library, Calcutta. 51 Report of the CSPCA for the Years 1865-1868. Uttarpara Jaykrishna Mukherjee Public Library (hereafter UJKPL).

121 gentry----the higher and educated class.” 52 Very soon, the CSPCA turned its attention to the condition of slaughterhouses in Calcutta and shuddered at the cruelty perpetrated towards the “hapless animals.” To the CSPCA, what needed immediate consideration was the amount of pain inflicted towards the animals than a reordering of the city.

Enter the Slaughterhouse

The reports of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty towards Animals (CSPCA) are replete with evidence of brutal ways in which the animals were slaughtered in most of the slaughterhouses. The reports are especially revealing as they are dramatic. The slaughterhouse at Kurriah was used for the slaughter of bullocks. According to the CSPCA, the Kurriah slaughterhouse harbored a mere shed, open to all sides to the gaze not only of all the children of the neighborhood, but also of the animals tied on the outside. 53The cattle were then taken in one by one, till half a dozen or more were gathered together. While one man pulled the limb from the ground, another man, by a violent wrench of the neck, threw the creature down upon its side, and tied its legs. Thus bound and bruised upon the floor of the slaughterhouse, the animals were kept for about 10 to 15 minutes till the mollah, the official killer, made the halal--- the first cut, which was partial.54 A second man then made the final cut, by severing the spine. The CSPCA reported a further violence used towards the bullocks, which was to twist their heads into a position “favorable for the first butcher’s cruel ceremony.”55 C. Grant, the President of the CSPCA reported that “much greater barbarities” were perpetrated in the killing of the calves in the slaughterhouses at Kurriah. The calves were first brought, tied together in a batch. “There, one by one, the animals were thrown down, and one man used to put his foot on the body and cut the throat. After the animals were allowed to remain only a few minutes, while still alive,

52 Ibid. 53 Letter from C. Grant, Honorary Secretary to the President and Members of the Committee, Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, dated Calcutta June 30, 1870. WBSA. Judicial Department, June 1871. 54 The method of slaughter that was so horrifying to the colonial observer was the halal—permitted way of animal slaughter according to Islamic law. The meaning of the halal is “lawful” as against haaram which means “unlawful.” According to the hygeinics of halal, the process of purification involved a deep swift cut to the blood vessels of the neck, the jugular veins, so that the animal lost consciousness immediately, and the blood could be efficiently drained away to make it healthier for consumption. 55 Letter from C. Grant, Honorary Secretary to the President and Members of the Committee, Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, dated Calcutta June 30, 1870. WBSA. Judicial Department, June 1871.

122 they were seized by the hind and foreleg and inhumanly flung into the slaughterhouse in a heap one upon the another – all still alive, and left to die.”56 The two major slaughterhouses at Chitpore were used for the slaughtering of sheep. The Chitpore buildings were pucca (built by bricks), cleaner and in much better condition than those at Kurriah. However, the operations here were conducted in the “same barbarous manner as in the killing of calves,” with exception that the animals were allowed to lay until dead and not thrown about. C. Grant opined that the slaughtering of pigs also “revealed an element of cruelty culminating in a degree of barbarity that seems hardly credible.”57 “The unfortunate beasts” were dragged together into the slaughtering ground and left to plunge about until the following morning. “The object of this atrocious cruelty appeared to be to weaken the wretched animals in order to lessen their struggles at the time of killing.”58 About daylight they were dragged one by one, by either a leg or the tail, and slaughtered by the customary sticking of the throat and were kept tied until dead. Fowls were brought from different parts of the country in boats, some from Ulubariah, some from Dum Dum, and great numbers from a place called Pyeggatta, near to Belliaghatta. From there the dealers brought them to Dhurromtollah markets in baskets, all with their legs tied together, and so crowded that the men had to frequently take some of them out for the sake of air to preserve them alive. Pigeons were subjected to the further cruelty of having their wings hooked back into each other. In the Tireetee bazaar, the CSPCA reported that the ducks were kept in stalls in good condition. But all came to the market in the crowded and bound state. Geese were brought to the market six in the basket lying in a straw, beaten and fettered by the legs being tied together. Interestingly, in the Reports of the CSPCA, the Commissariat Department was never blamed for the appalling condition of the slaughterhouses. Rather the blame was put on the butchers who supplied meat to the city of Calcutta and were “unnatural,” as well as on the contractors and cattle dealers, who supplied the troops.59 The CSPCA merely echoed the sentiments that were raging in Victorian Britain during that saw the birth of a relatively strong vegetarian movement. Scholars like Keith Thomas have demonstrated how in Victorian

56 Ibid. 57 Ibid 58 Ibid 59 Letter from J. P. Walker, Secretary to the Sanitary Commission for Bengal to the Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal, dated 16th May, 1864. General Department, June 1864. WBSA. Proceeding No. 303, File No. 56., Minute no. 63.

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England, man’s right to kill animals for food was being hotly debated.60 He argues that along with conscientious or ethical objections to meat eating went more practical considerations. British scientists like Walter Charleston, John Ray and John Wallis were much impressed by the suggestion that human , particularly teeth and intestines, showed that man had not originally been intended to be carnivorous---an argument that provided additional support for the view that meat eating was “unnatural.”61 Butchers, accordingly, were viewed with much suspicion because of a widespread aversion to the art of slaughter itself. James Gregory in his insightful monograph, Of Victorians and Vegetarians has studied British vegetarianism as a “movement” and a “lived experience” rather than as an ideology and has discussed the late- Victorian attitude towards butchers and cattle traders.62 In cities and market towns, maltreatment of animals by drovers and butchers was a common spectacle that frequently demanded inquiry. Even if killing was concealed, the butchers’ meat shops caused offense. 63 Butchers were believed to have suffered from a total loss of humane feeling and have been brutalized.64 James Gregory mentions the connection that many of the Victorian vegetarians drew between slaughter of animals and violence towards humans. As Lady Wahlburga Paget believed, “often butchers become murderers, and I have known cases where butchers have actually been hired to murder persons.”65 It is not surprising that C. Grant’s repulsion for butchers was only an extension of late-Victorian attitudes towards the horrors of slaughterhouses and butchers, though in colonial India, butchers were doubly brutal for being inherently “unnatural” and also “Mohammedan.”

The Slaughterhouse as a Site of Cruelty

Cruelty concerns came flooding in from among the members of the CSPCA that quickly turned the slaughterhouse into a much contested site of debates surrounding animal welfare, vegetarianism, public hygiene and sanitation. The discourses were varied but converged around slaughterhouse horrors. Colesworthy Grant, honorary secretary of the CSPCA, pleaded for intervention of the lieutenant-governor in the practices of animal slaughter, which were so

60 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (New York: Allen Lane, 1983) 61 Thomas, 31. 62 James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 2. 63 A. W. Malcolmson, The Aesthetic in Food ( Manchester, 1899); cited in Gregory, 91. 64 Gregory, 91-92. 65 Forward, History, 114, quoted in Gregory, 97.

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“repugnant to humanity, and to the spirit of a community under British rule.”66 He further observed that both the dealers in cattle and the men employed in slaughtering were Mohammedans. But he argued that disclaiming any desire of interference with the Muslim religious sentiments, the committee would submit the claim of the Christian community to equality of exemption from compulsory participation in practices, which were “altogether antagonistic to Christian views and feeling.”67 In insisting the government to interfere in the methods of slaughter, especially halal, C. Grant was however aware that it would be difficult to introduce immediately the “European method” of slaughtering animals as the Muslims would be extremely reluctant to accept it. Moreover, he was conscious of the fact that the British government would also be hesitant in enforcing it because the memory of the revolt of 1857 was still fresh in their minds. Nevertheless, while being skeptical on government interference with halal, Grant however insisted on the prohibition of the preliminary cutting of the animals by the official mollah which he hoped to assure the Muslims as “unnecessary.” Second, he demanded the isolation of every animal at the time of killing; third, cleanliness and thorough ventilation of the sheds for accommodation of the animals during detention; fourth, placing the entire arrangements under rigid municipal control; fifth, the total prohibition of the atrocious cruelties practiced upon swine, and enforcement of the European method of slaughtering by rendering the animals insensible before bleeding.68 Finally, Grant demanded the prohibition of the “cruel manner of carrying foul, or any other animals, slung by the feet, head downwards, a practice which was a penal offence in England and America.”69 These provisions, according to Grant, while eliminating cruelty towards slaughtered animals also ensured that there were to be “no interference with religious observances.”70 C. Grant’s demand for a complete reform of slaughterhouses in Calcutta can be placed within the larger debates concerning animal welfare

66 C. Grant, Honorary Secretary to the President and Members of the Committee, Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, dated Calcutta June 30, 1870. Proceedings of the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, June 1871, pp 117-19, WBSA. 67 Ibid. 68 Emphasis added. 69 Letter from C. Grant, Honorary Secretary, Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to Rivers Thompson, Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Revenue Department (Judicial Branch), dated Calcutta, June 1871. WBSA. 70 Letter from C. Grant, Honorary Secretary, Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to Rivers Thompson, Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Revenue Department (Judicial Branch), dated Calcutta, June 1871. WBSA.

125 waging in late-Victorian England led by the founders of a vegetarian movement like Henry Salt, James Simpson and William Horsell. The Vegetarian Society founded in September 1847 in Alcott House formally launched the movement which had multiple agenda and thrived successfully in urbanized, industrialized and midland England.71 In the Vegetarian in 1898, articles on slaughterhouses demanded that the Jewish methods of slaughter be investigated. Along with the horrors of slaughterhouses that found repeated mention in the British vegetarian journals, vegetarian societies in England petitioned against the cruelty of cattle transit.72 It is doubtful however, to what extent Grant’s insistence on “European methods” of animal slaughter would have appealed to the Muslim members of the CSPCA. Moreover, to be sympathetic towards animals did not necessarily translate into vegetarianism. Thus, though inspired by the Victorian vegetarian movement, the CSPCA was not as keen on championing vegetarianism as on more “humane” methods of animal slaughter. The British physicians in Calcutta espousing a vegetarian diet were not always affiliated with the CSPCA.73 Indeed, concern about animals was not necessarily compassion for the animals.

Cruelty, Human Health and Medical Orthodoxy: The Victorian Doctors

The manner of slaughter in these illegal slaughterhouses also attracted the attention of European doctors in the Calcutta Medical College who were aghast with these cruel methods and suggested that butchers should follow the English method of “painless” death by striking a blow in the brain followed by immediate bleeding and death. Joseph Ewart, Presidency Surgeon of Calcutta and the Professor of Midwifery at the Calcutta Medical College, opined that the English practice of instantaneous death of all consciousness by means of a pole axe, immediately followed by bleeding from the jugulars, was when properly performed, a perfectly painless mode of death. Moreover, it was also one, which was calculated to preserve the purity and wholesomeness of the flesh of animals intended for human consumption. Ewart suggested that to secure the provision of healthy and sound animal food for the community of Calcutta, skilled supervision was needed to ensure the slaughtering only of healthy animals and for the rejection

71 James Gregory, 34. The London Food Reform Society was founded in 1875 along with the society’s impressive journal Vegetarian. 72 Samuel Plimsoll’s ‘Merchant Shipping Act Amendment [no.2] Bill.’ Cited in Gregory, 90. 73 James Gregory shows in his study of Victorian vegetarianism that British vegetarians were unwelcome in the respectable, orthodox Christian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Despite RSPCA’s exposure of slaughterhouse cruelty, vegetarianism was avoided by it. Gregory, 94.

126 of all animals ill-fed.74 Questions were thus raised about the effects of halal meat on humans. The doctors noted the retrogressive effect that cruelty to animals could have on public health. Citing the opinion of medical inspectors in America, Norman Chevers, the principal of Calcutta Medical College, sought to emphasize a connection between animal treatment and public health. He commented, If, as Prof Hordsford says, cattle, by reason of their cruel transportation, lose on an average 200 pounds weight between the West and Boston; if, as Prof. Agassize says, there are dangers arising from the ill-treatment of beef cattle before slaughtering them; if, as Medical Inspector Hamlin says, the flesh of a mammalian becomes deleterious by reason of , disturbance of sleep, and long continued suffering; if a large percentage of cattle brought from the West have ulcers; if the blood of these cattle will kill swine, and these sleepless, starved, thirsty, feverish animals are being turned into our slaughterhouses day after day to feed our citizens, what is the effect upon the public health?75 Chevers claimed to have consulted various physicians and authorities, and to have come to the conclusion that the cruel and improper treatment of animals rendered their meat and milk unfit for use, and that a large portion of human diseases arose from such sources. Cattle which were cruelly treated, improperly fed, or housed, or kept without air, exercise or sunshine, or kept long times in solitary confinement, became diseased and their meat unfit to eat. Chevers was thus not operating in isolation to the larger socio-political developments at home. His claims to have consulted different physicians indeed leave us without any doubt that the Victorian vegetarian movement had significantly influenced Chevers’ medical-hygienic claims. Vegetarian journals in London during this period often featured “health” in their titles. The first vegetarian lectures in London reiterated that vegetarian diet was “best adapted to man’s constitution” through anatomy, physiology and chemistry.76 The British doctors in India, strongly influenced by the newly-emerging body of medico- hygienic arguments in Britain, likewise attempted to establish a causal link between animal

74 Letter from C. Grant, to the President and Members of Committee, Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Proceedings of the Government of Bengal. Judicial Department (Revenue Branch), dated Calcutta, June 1871. WBSA. File no. 127. 75 Ibid. 76 James Gregory, 79.

127 cruelty and human health. Thus “all bad feeding, cruel handling, all inhumanity in the modes of conveyance, all tortures for being tied for days before they were slaughtered, all brutal modes of killing, had an uniform effect in rendering the flesh unwholesome and unfit for use.” 77 Chevers opined that as against Islamic halal, in Europe stringent laws had been made to prevent the bleeding of calves before they were killed as bleeding made their meat innutritious. The doctors thus worked around the argument that beasts had been created for man’s sake, but there was no reason for ill-treating them “unnecessarily,” as was done by the Muslim butchers in the slaughterhouses of Calcutta. So within a predominantly man-centric mode of reasoning, there was now a good deal of room for argument of what was necessary and what was avoidable. Hence, while anthropocentrism was very much in place, the discourse focused on the feasibility of “civilized” European slaughter tactics versus “barbaric” halal, which in turn mimicked and informed the larger divide between the colonized and the colonizer.

Cleanliness, Sanitation and Hygiene: The Native Calcuttans

The inhabitants, shopkeepers, and other residents of Narcoldangah in the suburbs of Calcutta petitioned to the government in early 1869 that they had been suffering most intensely for about six years from disease and other evils, engendered by a slaughter yard established in Narcoldanga by Shaik Rahamutoollah.78 They argued that although the Municipal Commissioner had often punished Rahamutoollah with fines for not keeping the surrounding area clean, the nuisance was as loathsome and injurious to health as ever. The inhabitants of the locality complained that while hundreds of cattle were daily slaughtered, the entrails, blood, bones and flesh were not thoroughly cleaned of. Rather, they were left partly to accumulate on the ground, partly to be buried on the mud, and partly to run into the adjacent drains. Hence, there was always a horrible stench issuing from their putrefaction. Moreover, they reported that few of their family members were ever free from disease. Vegetation on their lands and gardens was almost all destroyed by the large number of dogs, jackals, vultures and other large carrion birds that congregated in the locality owing to the filth. Ishita Pande in her recent monograph, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal has argued that in colonial Calcutta, a particular political rationality---liberalism----was articulated that had to be realized not through

77 Ibid 78 Proceedings of the Government of Bengal. Judicial Department (Revenue Branch), dated Calcutta,, April 1871. WBSA. File No 101.

128 coercive public health measures alone, but also through an everyday and intimate control of hygienic behavior. According to her however, the conduct of hygienic behavior was just the “domain of the colonial state, but was seized by the Bengali as a form of modern self- expression.”79 In this context, by focusing on colonial reforms in the realms of sanitation, law and education, she asserts the “birth of the modern subject” in colonial Bengal. Indeed, the inhabitants of Calcutta gave voice to their anger and exasperation as they repeatedly petitioned to the government to clean the filth around the slaughterhouses and in fact to banish the yards from their locality. However, in my story, the birth of a modern Bengali subject probably had to wait till the next century when the Bengali bhadralok inspired by Upton Sinclair’s Jungle and developments in Brooklyn Yards challenged the colonial authorities to create a sanitary city, and called upon fellow-Bengalis to shun the temptations of meat produced in the insanitary slaughterhouses.

Regulating the Slaughterhouses, Redefining the City: The Government

Acting upon the importunities of the CSPCA, the general public as also the report of the Sanitary Commissioner, the government of Bengal appointed a Committee for the purpose of enquiring into the state of the slaughterhouses.80 The Committee consisted of V. H. Schalch, Major Willes and H. A. Cockrell, and by the end of the year, the Committee submitted a report to the government condemning the existing slaughterhouses in the most unqualified terms and declared that nothing could be more disgraceful and more injurious to the purity of the meat than the condition in which they found them. The remedy proposed by the Committee was to establish one slaughterhouse and to place it under strict municipal control. As regards the most convenient site for the proposed abattoir, the Committee observed that the imperative requirements were, twofold: First, facilities for drainage for a supply of water and for the disposal of the refuse from the slaughterhouse. Second, the slaughterhouse should be centrally located in terms of accessibility for the consuming districts.81 After many deliberations, the Magistrate of 24 Parganas suggested to the Sanitary Commission to remove all the slaughterhouses from Calcutta and its vicinity, and to establish a large abattoir under the supervision of the Government officers

79 Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2010), 14. 80 Letter from Stuart Hogg to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Proceedings of the Government of Bengal. Judicial Dept ( Revenue Branch), August 1876. WBSA. Pro. No 12, File No 62. 81 Ibid.

129 at some convenient spot. The example of the Paris abattoirs was cited to show that a slaughterhouse need not be a nuisance. But if building a licensed slaughterhouse was difficult, it was even trickier to control the Kalisthans.82 Calcutta abounded in Kalisthans----places where goat’s meat was offered as ‘gift’ to Hindu deity to prove that the animal had been consecrated to the goddess before it was sacrificed.83 Attempts were made to distinguish between bona fide Kalithans, where worship was carried on and goats duly consecrated and the sham Kalithans, which were mere slaughterhouses. It was however, impossible for the inspecting officers to establish this distinction, and the control of the Municipality proved illusory. Finally, in April 1865 the first Slaughterhouse Act was passed by which the justices of Calcutta and the suburb commissioners finally agreed that Calcutta municipality, for the use of both Calcutta and the suburbs, should erect one large new slaughterhouse at Tangra near Palmer’s Bridge.84 The Act declared that all butchers using the Tangra slaughterhouses should apply to the suburban municipality for a license and a ticket for each of their assistants. To meet the challenge of “unwholesome” meat, it stated that all animals should be brought to the slaughterhouses twelve hours before the time fixed for slaughtering. 54 On August 12, 1869, the Tangra slaughterhouse was ready for commissioning, and the Chairman of the Suburban Commissioners served notices on all the suburban slaughterhouse keepers warning them that their licenses would not be renewed after March 31, 1870. 85 With two exceptions, one at Kurriah owned by Amanuth Ali who farmed it to Meajan Mullick, and the other at Narcoldangah owned by Rahamutoollah, all the slaughterhouses were immediately closed. The unlicensed

82 There is widespread belief among worshipers of Kali in the powerful efficacy of sacrificial offerings to the goddess, and bali (animal offering) continues to be performed in vast numbers today even in urban Bengal. In present-day Calcutta male goats are the most commonly used live animals offered in sacrifice. This rite is performed on a daily basis at the many Kali temples in the city. On Kali's annual festival (Kalipuja) in the seventh lunar month of Karttik (October- November) bali is performed at both temples and at worshipers’ homes. At Temple in Kolkata a daily sacrifice of a single goat is commissioned by the Brahmans in charge of ritual. The meat of this animal is later cooked and offered to the deity as part of her daily food offering (bhog). Portions of bhog are subsequently purchased and consumed by worshipers as prasad (divine grace). For an interesting anthropological discussion of the cultural meaning and central logic of the rite of bali (animal sacrifice, especially goat) see Suchitra Samanta, “The “Self-Animal” and Divine Digestion: Goat Sacrifice to the Goddess Kali in Bengal,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (Aug 1994): 779-803. 83 S. W. Goode, Municipal Calcutta: Its Institutions in their Origin and Growth (Calcutta: Macmillan Publications, 2005). First published in 1916. 84 Letter from Stuart Hogg to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Proceedings of the Government of Bengal. Judicial Dept ( Revenue Branch), August 1876. WBSA. Pro. No 12, File No 62. Municipal reports indicate that some 20 to 25 unlicensed slaughterhouses had existed in the suburbs of Calcutta when the Act VII of 1865 was passed. 85 Letter from C. H. Campbell, Commissioner of the Presidency Division, to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal. Judicial Dept (Revenue Branch), April 1871. WBSA. File No 105.

130 slaughterhouses at Kurriah and Narcoldangah continued in full swing and escaped repeated convictions. In fact, despite the refusal of the Commissioners to renew the licenses, the owners had been successfully able to resist all attempts to close them down.86 For instance, on April 8, 1871, Meajan Mullick, the former license-holder of Amanuth Ali’s slaughterhouse at Kurriah, was prosecuted before the Deputy Magistrate of Sealdah for keeping an unlicensed slaughterhouse and was fined Rs. 100 and Rs. 20 daily if the offence continued. 87 In spite of the conviction, the clandestine slaughterhouse continued in use, Meajan was again charged under Section 1 of Act VII, but absconded and left the suburbs. As the slaughterhouse was still functioning apparently under the real owners Amanuth Ali and brothers, a fresh prosecution under Section 1 was brought against them, but even they managed to evade the charge.88 Part of the reason behind the successful evasion of charges by the Muslim slaughterhouse owners stemmed from the confusion among the judges on the official management and responsibility towards the slaughterhouse. The buildings at Tangra were erected by the Justices of the Peace for the town of Calcutta and it was initially proposed that the management and control should remain in their hands. However, the Justice of Peace soon claimed that the slaughterhouses were not within the limits of Calcutta and that the Municipality had no control over them. Rather the slaughterhouses should to be placed within the jurisdiction of the Magistrate of the 24 Parganas who in turn claimed that the Calcutta slaughterhouses were subject to the supervision of the Police and Conservancy Overseers.89 He suggested to the Sanitary Commission to remove all the slaughterhouses from Calcutta and its vicinity, and to establish a large abattoir under the supervision of the government officers at some convenient spot a few

86 Administrative Report of the Municipality of the Suburbs of Calcutta for 1870-71. Appendix to the Proceedings of the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, August 1871. WBSA. 87 Ibid. On an appeal to the Session Judge, the daily fine was however reduced to Rs. 5 as the judge established that the appellant had not intentionally committed the offence. 88 Amanuth Ali was convicted on July 28, 1870 and sentenced to a fine of Rs. 51 by the Deputy Magistrate of Sealdah. On August 29, 1870, the judge reversed this conviction on appeal on the ground that Amanuth Ali had leased his slaughterhouse to Meajan who had in turn subleased it to Shahadut Ali. The defendant argued that the slaughterhouse was carried on for Shahdut Ali’s profit. Hence, Amanuth Ali daily received the major portion of the receipts and could not be held to have used it himself. Letter from H. T Princep, Officiating Chairman, Suburban Municipality, to the Commissioner of the Presidency Division, Proceedings of the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, April 1871. WBSA. 89 Letter from the Magistrate of 24 Parganas to the Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal. General Department, dated Calcutta, June 1864. WBSA. File No. 55.

131 miles down the South Eastern Railway.90 The slaughterhouse, it was pointed out, would be better looked after if it was within the reach of easy supervision from Calcutta, than if it was removed to a distance. Interestingly, though the Tangra slaughterhouse was opened with much fanfare, the butchers refused to use these new buildings apprehending that their clandestine hide trade would be severely compromised. In order to avoid government supervision, the butchers started erecting unlicensed slaughterhouses at the outskirts of the city. Unlicensed slaughterhouses at Kurriah and Narcoldangah also continued in full operation.

Slaughterhouses and the City

Thus, till the mid-nineteenth century, the official concerns around slaughterhouses were more towards ensuring cleanliness, sanitation, and considerations revolved around the physical space of the city. For instance, in 1866 the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal wrote that the “great wants” were “establishment of slaughterhouses outside the towns and villages.” He stressed the “difficulty of supervision, the want of funds and most of all, the apathy and even passive resistance of the people themselves” as major obstacles to the establishment of a municipal slaughterhouse. “The spread of education and the earnest practical endeavors of the local officers to institute reforms and to instruct the people in the value of hygiene” was believed to bear fruit in time. Creation of public slaughterhouses was thus part of the larger colonial design of disciplining the natives and sanitizing the city. The city in this context, however acquired special spatial significance in the colonial choice of Tangra as the preferred spot for the new municipal slaughterhouse. The question that deserves merit is why was Tangra chosen as the “convenient spot” for establishing the municipal slaughterhouse? The answer perhaps lies in the fact that in mid-nineteenth century, Tangra boasted of newly-arriving bands of Chinese immigrants and had thus the largest Chinese concentration in the city. Establishing a slaughterhouse in a locality heavily populated by the Chinese seemed to be the safest option to the colonial authorities---a spot that was away from the predominantly vegetarian community of Brahmins and Vaishnav influences and where the non-halal experiments could conveniently be performed. The Chinese were expected not to have any inhibitions against animal slaughterhouse and any varieties of meat.

90 Plans were also made to establish a separate slaughterhouse for meat required by the troops. The meat supplied to the troops by the Commissariat Department was killed at the same place which was used by the butchers who provided for the Calcutta markets.

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However, although by the mid-nineteenth century most of the slaughterhouses were driven out from Calcutta and the more populous parts of the suburbs to the outskirts of the town, the suburbs were rapidly spreading, and new slaughterhouses in the suburbs becoming a great nuisance to public health.91 At suburbs like Berhampur, the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal reported that most of the butchers lived at the lower limit of the Gorahbazar, killing the animals at their houses. The surrounding of their houses was filthy and they disposed of the offal in the .92 The internal fat was purified by the butchers and sold to the soap-boilers. In Dacca, the hides were purchased by the chumars, and the caul was used in the construction of the native drum, dug-dugi. The Sanitary Commissioner blamed the chamars for their “filthy” habits---they reportedly cleaned the hides on the banks of the tanks which meant that the fat rubbed off from animal skins was allowed to flow into the water.93 As against the unorganized suburbs, the only place where sanitation rules were not brushed aside was the organized world of cantonment circles.94 The Slaughterhouse Act of 1865 categorically stated that no person should kill within the limits of the cantonment any animal for public slaughter except at the public slaughterhouse. Moreover, it stated that no owner of slaughterhouse or market within the limits of the cantonment should keep slaughterhouses in a filthy or unclean state, cause any offensive smell to arise, or neglect to carry out any Rules laid down for management of slaughterhouses. Slaughterhouse regulations undoubtedly privileged the cantonments and “white towns” as it reinforced the colonial logic of a discriminatory sanitary order. While such hygienic enclaves were expected to reduce the threat of disease among Europeans, the British however soon realized that their sanitary protection could not be fully secured unless the “black towns” and Indian habitations were also regulated. Such fears explained why the municipal authorities attempted to extend sanitary regulations and regulate slaughterhouses in the “black towns” which had acquired a menacing meaning since the Revolt of 1857.

91 Letter from J. P. Walker, Secretary to the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, to the Officiating Secretary to the Government of Bengal. General Department, June 1864. WBSA. File No 56. 92 First Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1868. National Library, Calcutta. Tanneries were a major source of nuisance too, but they were not numerous in nineteenth.century Bengal. For a discussion on cattle poisoning, tanneries and chamar identity see, S. Mishra, “Of poisoners, tanners and the British Raj: Redefining Chamar identity in colonial North India, 1850–90,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 48, no. 3;48(2011):317-38. 93 First Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1868. National Library, Calcutta. 94 Sanitary Report for Bengal, 1866. Rules and Regulations for the Administration of the Cantonments Passed under the Provisions of Section XIX, Act XXII of 1864. National Library, Calcutta.

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The colonial debates surrounding slaughterhouse thus affected the spatial configuration of Calcutta as it attempted to define and redefine the contours of the civic city. But closely tied to the pertinent question of hygiene and sanitation was another crucial theme---alienating the animal from the tables and ‘civilization.’95 Scholars have studied how in the context of nineteenth century America, thanks to technology and managerial techniques, meat became less a product of first nature and more a product of human artifice. The commodification of meat was complete when the packers extended the alienation to the ecosystems that created it. As William Cronon says, “Meat was a neatly wrapped package bought at market and nature did not have much to do with it.”96 This tendency to break free from space and the emphasis on the function rather than the geography is what Cronon calls “annihilating space.”97 “Alienation” was rooted in the culture of mechanization of United States. While improved technology could alienate the animal from meat, so also a meat-eating consumerist society with its “modern” sensibilities succeeded in distancing the stockyards from the “civilized” gaze. Paula Young Lee echoes this sentiment as she argues that perhaps there is a certain level of historical forgetfulness in acknowledging the death of the very animals that grace the civilized tables.98 According to her, this silence is largely reinforced by the physical space of the city that distances the act of slaughter from the act of consumption. The packers with their attractively cut, carefully wrapped packages distanced their customers from the act of killing. In Bengal too, the idea of the “modern” slaughterhouse evolved largely with both urban industrialization, free trade, and the development of new notions of social hygiene and sensibilities. The act of killing had to be dispelled as a spectacle from human gaze, , which explains the colonial reordering of the city and the banishment of the slaughterhouses to the outskirts. For the CSPCA, Calcutta’s slaughterhouses were the signifiers of Oriental backwardness and barbarity that manifested itself in the painful methods of slaughter. The blatant barbarity was all the more visible as, according to C. Grant, “no efforts whatsoever were made to mitigate in any way the inflictions and horrors, or to disguise the approach of death, of which it is believed

95 The theme of “alienation” was first developed by William Cronon. See William Cronon, Chapter Five, “Annihilating Space,” Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York:WW Norton and Company, 1991). 96 Cronon, 1991. 97 Cronon, 1991. 98 Paula Young Lee, “The Slaughterhouse and the City” p.7-25, and “Hide, Seek, Slaughter, Meat: The Slaughterhouse as Site,” Food and History, Volume 3, (2005): 241-291.

134 animals are as conscious of the threats and as sensible to the terrors as are human beings.”99 Along those lines, the cultural divide between Oriental “savagery” and British humanitarianism was emphasized as Grant drew attention of the government to the conditions of slaughterhouses in Calcutta: It appears that in the case of nearly every animal destroyed for human food the utmost barbarity that it might be thought ingenuity had invented, rather than mere ignorance occasioned, was exercised towards him or her. No means, such as those prevailed in Europe and elsewhere were adopted to produce insensibility to pain, or to lessen its duration. On the contrary, pain was inflicted to increase the one, and prolong the other…. Moreover, to all this cruel and prolific sense of detriment to the flesh of such animals as food were added those of the utmost impurity, filth and privation.100 Slaughterhouses, grounds, water supply also provided the basis for sharpening proper self-conduct amongst the natives of the city.

Animals, Vegetarianism and Humanitarianism

Side by side with the proliferation of slaughterhouse regulations, one could notice changes in the Bengali diet, especially in the attitudes towards meat-eating. If the bhadralok discourse on meat-eating in the mid-nineteenth century stemmed from an imperative to counter charges of emasculation, the discourse had however shifted by the beginning of the next century. A different thread that gathered strength during this period was an argument that went against meat-eating, rather an increasing emphasis on vegetarianism. A compelling force in favor of vegetarianism in India has always been the ethical one. Such perceptions like Vaishnav, Jain have a long history in the country, and, so, the propaganda for privileging vegetarianism should not surprise us. 101 What is however surprising is the sharp shift in the Bengali discourse from emphasis on meat-eating to vegetarianism within a short span of time. From the late nineteenth

99 C Grant, Honorary Secretary to the President and Members of the Committee, Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, dated Calcutta June 30, 1870. Proceedings of the Government of Bengal, Judicial Department, June 1871, pp 117-19, WBSA. Emphasis mine. I believe that C. Grant’s idea of “disguising” death is significant here because he indicates that the “civilized” British were humane enough to disguise death unlike the barbaric Indians who were devoid of any sympathy for their fellow-creatures. Disguising death here therefore implies British concern for animals’ feelings which the Indians lacked. 100 Ibid. 101 For a history of vegetarianism in India see, K. T. Acharya, A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

135 century, the same periodicals that advocated meat-diet, began to stress on the importance of vegetarianism, and more significantly writings advocating meat-eating completely disappeared by the turn on the twentieth century. These new Bengali vegetarians marshaled physiological evidence of unimpaired physical and mental efficiency. Vegetarianism was seen as the remedy--- a curative, prophylactic, or reliever of all diseases. Before we examine the reasons behind this shift, it is imperative to take a closer look at the shifting discourse itself. As early as in 1858, Akshyay Kumar Dutta provided ethical arguments as to why humans should shun meat and become vegetarians and countered all the doctors who advocated a meat- diet.102 According to Dutta, since killing of animal for food went against Hindu dharma (spirituality) and prabritti (attachment), it must not be considered as something willed by God. He countered the charges of Bengali doctors that animal protein provided physical strength and vigor by arguing that vegetarian “Hindustanis” (North-Indians) were more vigorous than meat- eating Bengalis. He also cited the example of widows, arguing that widows of India living on vegetarian diet, instead of being disease-prone, weak and emaciated, were in fact stronger and had greater live expectancy than people who essentially thrived on a non-vegetarian diet. Religious arguments came from unusual quarters. For instance, a Muslim gentleman, Mir Musharaff Hossain composed a pamphlet Go-Jibon in 1889 where he drew from religious texts like the Shashtras and Koran.103 Condemning meat-eating, Hossain pointed out that it was the method of slaughter, “halal” that had religious sanction in the Koran, but Koran did not necessarily dictate what to eat and what not to eat. In his words, “Koran did not state that a person would suffer in hell if she/he did not consume beef.” Along with ethical arguments, there were more nationalist ones. Arguments were advanced by some Bengali writers like Nirendranath Basu who claimed that certain nations like Britain were intrinsically belligerent because they followed a meat-diet.104 In his essay, “Mangshaharer Fol” or “The Consequences of Meat-eating” Basu even blamed the World War I as the result of animal slaughter because animal blood awakened animal instincts. He wrote, “The current war in Europe can certainly be attributed, in part, to unrestrained animal slaughter. Before the start of war, both England and Germany were well-known for their huge consumption of meat. All of Europe is now paying the

102 Akshyay Kumar Dutta, Bajhyabastur Sahit Manabprakitir Sambandha Bichar , Part I. (Calcutta: 1858). 103 Mir Musharaff Hossain, Go-Jibon. (Calcutta, 1889). 104 Shree Nirendranath Basu, “Mangshaharer Fol,” Swashthyo-Samachar, Vol 7 (1881): 94-96.

136 price for that. Europe is paying the price for violating nature.” 105Jayanta Sengupta in his study of Bengali diet and nutrition has argued that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourse on food, the issue of vegetarianism versus non-vegetarianism became a cultural question with much significance for nationalist thought---whether one ate animal flesh or not became a marker of civilizational characteristics or distinctions.106 The material/spiritual dichotomy—a rhetorical creation of nationalist thought, in which the difference between western and Indian civilizations is reflected—was used freely in the comparative discussion of food as well. The flesh-eating habits of the west were argued to have contributed to what was considered to be a grossly materialistic civilization, thriving on crude physicality/coarse vulgarity. Conversely, the refinement and spiritual superiority of Indian civilization was reflected in the immense variety of its .107 Arguments in favor of vegetarianism in late-nineteenth century Bengal thus came from different quarters and stemmed from varied impulses. If some Bengali intellectuals equated meat-eating with intrinsic violence and national degeneration, others closely examined Indian religious texts to justify the “evils” of meat-eating. Against the backdrop of a sudden switch towards vegetarian propaganda among the bhadralok in late-nineteent hcentury, the larger questions that deserve to be investigated are: What caused the sudden shift? What was the nature of this shift? What was the impact of this shifting discourse on the physical space of Calcutta? Perhaps most importantly, what does this shift bring to the story of colonialism? In order to effectively answer these questions, we need to critically scrutinize the Bengali bhadralok campaign for vegetarianism in late-nineteenthand early twentieth century. By perusing some of the Bengali articles on vegetarianism published in Swasthya Samachar, Chikitsa Sammilani and Bhisak Darpan, I demonstrate that the language of the discourse was new---disease, human health and science now came together to determine the Bengali bhadralok attitude towards meat

105 Ibid. 106 Jayanta Sengupta, “Nation on a Platter: the Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 44 (2010): 81-98. 107 According to Sengupta, meat-eating became a powerful signifier of “Britishness” which was evil because meat- eating was against the natural laws of nature. India therefore had to mark herself against the meat-eating Other. There were deviations within this trend as Sengupta shows that the person who brought the vegetarianism versus nonvegetarianism issue directly within the orbit of contemporary nationalist concerns about masculinity and physical culture was . For him, meat-eating provided the only way to a robust health, which was indispensable for community’s “honor,” and nation’s “progress.” Vegetarianism, on the other hand, was an emasculating habit that put insurmountable obstacles on the path of nation-making.

137 consumption during this period.108 The following examples will support my contention that the vegetarian propaganda of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century was not mediated by genuine concerns for animal welfare, though at times the writers employed a protectionist paradigm. Instead, I draw attention to a new development in nineteenth century Bengal that created panic among the Bengali bhadralok and the colonial government alike and strongly influenced the Bengali dietary discourse.

Meat: To Eat or Not to Eat?

From the early twentieth century onwards, the champions of vegetarianism were no longer defending a vegetarian diet from purely ethical or religious grounds. Rather, the focus among the Bengali doctors had begun to shift towards the practical need for detecting unwholesome meat. Meat was suddenly considered responsible for diseases such as tuberculosis. Concerns about diseased and adulterated food allowed vegetarianism to be presented as a public heath question. Manifold scientific-hygienic claims were expressed in books tracts, pamphlets, and lectures. Writings appeared in the Bengali health periodicals that reflected the bhadralok paranoia as they warned people from consuming meat apprehending that consumption of diseased meat led to a serious medical condition called “Ptomaine Poisoning.” The following examples testify to the trend. In 1916, the writer in Bangabashi expressed his anxieties over the fact that Calcutta was flooded with British-styled eateries. He raised serious alarm, “no one knows what meat they serve, or how fresh it is. They just season it well with and chilies, and serve it hot to cover up the staleness.”109 An interesting twentieth century article that deserves special mention in this context is “Niramish-Bhojon,” (Vegetarian Diet) by Sree Manicklal Mallick. In 1916, Mallick wrote this insightful piece, in Swasthyo-Samachar where he asserted that in addition to the question of whether human body was meant for meat consumption; there was also the need for inspecting

108 The greatest boom of Bengali medical periodical publishing came in the period after 1875 right up to the 1930s and 1940s. Of the three periodicals known to have run with the greatest success, the Bhisak Darpan , which is known to have been published more or less regularly for at least 23 years since 1890, the Chikitsa Sammilani, which appeared for at least 12 years from 1887 and the Swasthya, which appreared for at least 7 years from 1897, none ever made a profit. For an analysis of Bengali medical printing as it emerged in the nineteenthcentury, see Projit Mukherji, Chapter Two, “Daktari Prints: The World of Bengali Printing and the Multiple Inscriptions of Daktari Medicine,” Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Dakdari Medicine (London: Anthem Press, 2009). 109 Anonymous writer, Bangabashi, 1916.

138 the meat. 110 The author begins his essay by dwelling on the humanitarian dimensions of a vegetarian diet, arguing that consumption of meat transforms humans into beastly creatures. Drawing from Sidney Smith’s essay, “Is Meat eating Morally Defensible?,” Mallick holds that meat-eating kindles animalistic instincts in humans. Ved Vyas, Gautam Buddha, Shankaryacharya, Prophet Mohammad and Plato are all lauded for being staunched vegetarians. The author however, is quick to point out that apart from religious consideration; even “scientifically” meat-eating is harmful for health. He builds up the scientific claim by borrowing from French naturalist, Georges Cuvier and the British medical surgeon, William Lawrence to argue that though humans have teeth like that of dogs, yet not all human dental structure is suitable for meat consumption.111 Having established the scientific claim for a vegetarian diet through his understanding of European medical orthodoxy, Mallick next raises the question of meat inspection. In this context, he argues that while it is easy to inspect the flesh of diseased goat, it is not that easy for other animals. He writes, Whenever authorities are able to spot diseased animals, they are sent away to kasai- khanas to be slaughtered by butchers. While there are veterinarians appointed to check diseased meat, it is not possible for them to inspect the numerous animals brought to the slaughterhouses every day, twenty-four hours. Slaughterhouse inspection thus came to assume a significant space in the bhadralok fears concerning their meat diet. The defense of vegetarianism began to be identified as a rational, scientific logic that had to be promoted among fellow-Bengalis. Mallick attempted to support his argument by citing examples of “medical tests” performed by the London Vegetarian Society. According to him, the London Vegetarian Society tested 1000 boys and girls on both vegetarian diet and meat-diet, and the results indicated that the children on a vegetarian diet turned out to be stronger in terms of their physical strength, intelligence and weight. Mallick was however not content with providing a scientific rationale behind vegetarianism derived from the West. In order to provide a historical basis to his arguments, he cited Rollin’s work, “Ancient History” to argue that ancient Romans and Hindus were so successful because they were vegetarians. Ever since they took to a meat-diet, there has been deterioration in their intelligence. Mallick provided

110 Sree Manicklal Mallick, “Niramish-Bhojon,” Swasthyo-Samachar volume 5 ( 1916): Emphasis mine. 111 Mallick draws from Cuvier’s argument that there is a striking resemblance between vegetarian animals and humans, but not between carnivorous animals and humans.

139 several examples throughout his essay to establish the connection between vegetarianism, national vigor and strength.112 The bhadralok fear of a meat diet was also manifested powerfully in another essay that appeared in Swasthya Samachar in 1916.113 The author of “Mangsher Bisha-Kriya” or “Unwholesome Meat” warned that those who relished eating meat in the roadside food stalls in Calcutta were not aware of the reality of what went on in the slaughterhouses---most of the animals slaughtered were not free from diseases. The reasons were not far to seek. According to the author, the doctors hired for inspecting diseased meat in the slaughterhouses did not have adequate time to inspect all the animals meant for slaughter. As a result, several such diseased animals pass through the kasai-, uninspected. He cited the example of Brooklyn yards, New York as published in the Evening Globe in Feb 1916 to argue for the prevalence of diseased meat in New York slaughter-houses. Furthermore, he went on to argue that when medical scientists in New York were campaigning for vegetarianism, the why would Indians, influenced by British consumerism continuously devour whatever meat was served in these British-styled hotels in Calcutta. According to the author, the Bengalis should learn from the example of the United States. Since Indians were not “naturally” meat-eaters but vegetarians, they should not be blindly influenced by a “foreign culture” like Britain. Reiterating his motive behind vegetarianism, he reminded the readers that in order to persuade people to become vegetarians, in England and in the United States several “vegetarian societies” have been founded. The purpose of these societies was not so much to practice ahimsa ( “jib-e daya”), but to protect people from the onslaught of diseases. Evidently, it was not his allegiance towards ahimsa ( non- violence) that drove the author’s paranoia. It is tempting to wonder if the Bengali doctors demanding tighter inspection of Calcutta’s slaughterhouses and advocating vegetarianism were indeed influenced by Sinclair’s Jungle that

112 According to Mallick, the Arabs have high because they survive on a diet of dates and milk; Bolivians survive on a diet of mostly corn, coconut and and are sturdy enough to walk miles. Few people are as industrious as the Egyptians who live on a diet of , corn, millets and dates. The Irish are well-built and stronger than the British and Scottish who follow a diet rich in meat. The Irish by contrast survive mostly on potatoes. 113 “Mangsher Bhisho-Kriya,” Swasthya Samachar, vol. 5 (1916): 149-52. Other essays that appeared during this period and campaigned for vegetarianism are “Amish Aharer Bipod,” ( Dangers of a Meat Diet), Swasthyo Samachar Volume 9 ( 1920): ; “Go-Rakkhya,” ( Cow Protection) Swasthyo Samachar Volume 9 ( 1920).

140 was first published in 1906 and became a rage in the United States soon.114 The question about whether to eat meat or meat was therefore now increasingly tied to the question of diseased meat/meat inspection, and it is here that the kasai-khana came into the picture. The bhadralok anxieties about adulteration, their attack of the meat shops, meat diet and leaning towards vegetarianism force us to raise the crucial question: Why did the bhadralok discourse on diet suddenly shift towards meat inspection? In other words, why did the Bengali doctors and bhadralok literati begin to warn people of the dangers of consuming diseased meat? The answer is clear and evident: Because one development began to affect Bengal from the mid-nineteenth century onwards but reached disastrous levels by the end of the century---rinderpest or cattle plague. As the author of an article in Swashthya-Samachar noted: “When the essentially meat- eating nations and races of the world are uniting to campaign for a meat-free world, then the historically vegetarian nation of the world (India) should follow their example, and prevent the consumption of diseased meat. We hope that the vegetarian movement gains strength in this country, and that we embrace it for the sake of our lives, and substitute meat with sweets and fruits.”115 This call for a vegetarian diet reflected a strange tension---acknowledging the uniqueness of Indian vegetarianism and yet borrowing from the west in matters of disease control. Many Bengali doctors were also interested in exercising their bodies, reforming their clothes, and cleansing their homes. If this was personal or domestic reform, it was also a crusade for public health. The Bengali periodicals emphasized the importance of for personal health and spiritual upliftment. Whatever the emphasis was ---health, economy, animal welfare or spiritual purity---the physical health, stamina and longevity of activists were important.116 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the widespread outbreak of cattle murrains in Bengal, Punjab, Madras among other regions, caused panic in pockets of colonial establishment.117 Speed of the disease as also its impact on trade and agriculture was alarming. But most devastating were the mortality rates; the fatal disease could wipe out a herd of cattle in just one week’s time. Rinderpest not only highlighted the sad and pitiable plight of veterinarians and their ignorance of cattle disease, but it also made animal disease a critical

114 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906. Several contemporaries in the United States stressed on the unhygienic working conditions on the Chicago stockyards. For examples are Charles J. Bushnell, The Social Problem at the Stockyards, 1902; John C. Kennedy et al., Wages and Family Budgets in the Chicago Stock Yards District, 1914. 115 “Mangsher Bhisho-Kriya,” Swasthya Samachar, vol. 5 (1916): 149-52. 116 James Gregory calls this “hygienic vegetarianism.” 117 For a detailed analysis of rinderpest and colonial disease control measures, see Chapters Two and Three.

141 concern of the colonial government. Rinderpest introduced diseased meat into the discourse. Although there is little quantitative evidence to suggest the exact amount of diseased meat sold, there are reasons to believe that sick animals proliferated the market for the simple reason that it was more profitable for the farmers to sell diseased cattle for food than seek veterinary attention for affected animals. Farmers often sold diseased livestock to butchers when the infected animals started to show any sign of disease. A shadowy business in diseased meat thus steadily grew as a result of these factors “which offered farmers a far greater return for diseased cattle than the paltry sum that they would receive for the dead animal’s hide.”118 The Bengali discourse on the benefits of a vegetarian diet was intertwined with varying threads. The vegetarian proponents, used a multitude of justifications, and a neat classification of their defense into “ethical” or “hygienic” is often unhelpful because the motives overlapped, reflecting the sometimes competing ethical, medical and economic agenda. Two broad and distinct trends can however be identified within the larger discourse on vegetarianism proposed by the Bengali daktars and reformers. One has already been discussed above---a call for vegetarianism stemming out of the fear from the “realities of slaughterhouse horrors” and disease-related anxieties. A second trend found its voice in the Bengali anxiety over deteriorating cattle health and the need to preserve cattle by taking recourse to the ancient Hindu diet of vegetarianism. Tied to this notion of decline ( of cattle culture) was a strong sense of Hindu self of Scholars like Projit Mukherji and Ishita Pande have demonstrated how by the second half of the nineteenth century, the entire assemblage of patriotic “sanitary” and “hygienic” activity, in time came to be framed as “national culture.”119 Every aspect of sanitation and hygiene was therefore found to be identical to ‘ancient Hindu lifestyles.’120 Dr. D. D Gupta’s periodical Swathsya devoted to “Health and Sanitary Science” was especially influential in this sphere. Contributing authors sought to prove that modern sanitary ideas and practices were not alien incorporations, but rather an integral element of Bengali Hindu heritage and lifestyles. Central to this formulation of a “national culture of hygiene” was a nation of decline. The idea of decline from a glorious past appeared in a wide variety of discourses in late-colonial India. For instance,

118 Joanna Swabe notices a similar obscure meat business in nineteenth century England that was the direct outcome of cattle plague in the country. See Joanna Swabe, Animals, Disease and Human Society ( London, 1999), 7. 119 Projit Mukherji, 141; Ishita Pande, Chapter Six, “Sending modernity: Civility, class and citizenship in a sanitary city,” Race, Medicine and Liberalism in British India. 120 Meera Nanda, “Hindu Nationalism and Vedic Science,” Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India ( Piscataway: Rutgers University Press 2003): 37-124; cited in Projit Mukherji, 141.

142 in an article titled, “Go-Rakhshya” (Cow Protection), the author mocks the “shallow” Hindu attempts at cow protection.121 He chides Muslim cow-protectionists of the All-India Cow Protection Society (Nikhil Bharat Go Rakhsya Samiti) by doubting Muslim attachment towards cow. He questions, “how long will the Muslims stay away from eating beef, simply on grounds of political reasons when their religion not only does not forbid beef consumption, but as some Muslims believe, it actually brings them closer to Allah?” Moreover, he seems skeptical of the Hindu loyalties in the adding that Hindus customarily sell cows to the butchers. Lauding the Muslims and Christians/Anglo-Indians as genuine in caring for their animals, the author advises Hindu to learn from them. He laments, “It is largely due to the indifference of Hindus, that cows are on the verge of extinction in India. Only solution is to retreat to the pristine Hindu past where every Hindu home boasted of a healthy cow.” The author suggests that the one possible way out of the crisis is for Hindus to begin domesticating cows. “Only then can the Hindu jati as whole survive and meet the food crisis that affects all Bengalis today.”122 By the first half of the twentieth century, the Bengali dietary trajectory had been significantly reversed--- if earlier, Bengalis advocated a meat diet to counter colonial charges of emasculation, Bengalis were now to be vegetarians and agriculturists. This call for vegetarianism however, did not stem from sympathies towards ahimsa, but was tied to a notion of revival of Hindu-Bengali identity, which was to be reinforced as against Muslims and Christians. As the anonymous author of “Go-Rakhshya” commented, “Muslims and Christians may be better protectors of cows, but they consume beef. Whereas Hindus not only do not eat beef, but can rise as a Bengali jati by becoming vegetarian agriculturists and meet the scarcity of milk.”123 The call for vegetarianism was both strategic (driven by the economic needs of the time) and cultural.124 The upper caste Hindu identity was also bolstered in arguments against consuming meat in Calcutta’s eating-houses, which were a product of increasing urbanization and

121 “Go-Rakhshya” (Cow Protection), Swasthya-Samachar, volume 9 ( 1920). 122 Ibid. By food crisis, the author indicates the shortage of milk, which was a persistent concern among Bengali bhadralok during this period. Moreover, adulteration of food was extensively discussed in the Bengali press during this time. For example, journals on domestic science such as Bangalakshmi continually reiterated how adulteration of everyday food items such as oil, rice, flour, and had become commonplace. On food adulteration, see Srirupa Prasad, “Crisis, Identity, and Social Distinction: Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Consumption in Late Colonial Bengal,” Journal of Historical Sociology 19, no. 3 (2006): 245-65; Kabita Ray, Food for Thought: Food Adulteration in Bengal 1836-1947 (Calcutta: Papyrus, 2003). 123 “Go-Rakhshya” (Cow Protection), Swasthya-Samachar, volume 9 ( 1920). 124 Numerous tracts appeared during this period that lamented the Hindu neglect of cow. Authors established a correlation between the Hindu indifference towards cow health and scarcity of milk in Bengal. Some such tracts are, “Gopal Bandhab” and “Bharate Gojatir Abonati, ”Krisak volume 14 ( 1913).

143 commercialization. In “Mangsher Bhisho-Kriya,” ( Unwholesome Meat) published in Swasthya Samachar, the author categorically blamed two classes for falling a prey to meat-eating---one, Calcutta’s leisure-loving babus, and the lower class Muslims who supposedly thronged to the inexpensive beef stalls in huge numbers, consuming stale meat which was successfully camouflaged with onions and garlic.125As a result, the incidence of tuberculosis and skin disorders was very high among these lower-class Muslims. The crisis among the Bengali bhadralok thus, even though expressed as nostalgia for the long lost idyllic past and its associated cultural richness, also represented a powerful and productive tool for social differentiation. In this context, as Srirupa Prasad has argued, translation of gastronomic practices to a moral economy for the greater good made gastronomy a central site as well as tool for bhadralok identity formation.

The Language of “Science”

By the end of nineteenth century, rinderpest came to be perceived as a serious danger to public health. The trajectory of slaughterhouses is connected with the shifting concerns about meat. If in the 1840s and 1850s, the Bengali bhadralok took to meat to fashion for themselves a sense of self, distinct from the meat-eating British, from the 1880 onwards, there was a sense that flesh from diseased livestock might be dangerous to health. A correlation existed between rising meat consumption and the emergence of debate on the dangers of eating diseased meat.126 Historians have tried to examine how the Bengali middle-class debate on nutrition was a multilayered one.127 Utsa Ray has shown how an important aspect of the debate was concerned with the question of adulteration and purity which often had a double meaning.128 Apart from denoting clean and hygienic food, “pure” also implied ritual purity. “Pure” food was something intrinsically Hindu and uncontaminated by the lower castes. If Ray has examined the ritual purity aspect of food, I study the scientific language of it. In South Asian historiography, very little attention has been directed at the history of meat inspection, quality of meat purchased and how

125 Mangsher Bhisho-Kriya,” ( Unwholesome Meat) Swasthya Samachar, vol. 5 (1916): 149-52. The author contrasted the ’ inclination towards meat with the past when Hindus were mostly vegetarians. 126 Several historians have discussed the concerns of nineteenth century medical community as latter tried to establish a connection between meat and human health. 127 Jayanta Sengupta, , “Nation on a Platter: the Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 44 (2010): 81-98; Srirupa Prasad, “Crisis, Identity, and Social Distinction: Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Consumption in Late Colonial Bengal,” Journal of Historical Sociology 19, no. 3 (2006): 245-65. 128 Utsa Ray, “Eating ‘Modernity’: Changing Dietary Practices in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 3 (May 2012) :703-729.

144 that came to be tied with bhadralok identities, and their claims of science. What made the debate all the more intriguing was that from the late nineteenthcentury onwards, what may be labeled as an intervention of scientific discourse/interest was directed at the issue. Hence, even the ethical reasons for or against meat-eating is indeed more often explained away in “scientific” terms when the Bengali doctors attempted to discover a co-relation between public health and meat- eating. Examples of this trend abound. In “Amish Aharer Bipod” ( The Dangers of a Meat Diet), the author while warning young consumers from eating meat in roadside food stalls, asserts that often animals sold in the market to the butchers are diseased.129 Moreover, not proper care is taken towards meat-producing animals than towards horses with the result that feeble, diseased animals invariably enter the slaughterhouse. The question of hygiene is repeatedly stressed in drawing the comparison between slaughterhouse and kalisthan. The author thus notes that while in the kalisthans the butchers generally wash the animals before the offering is made before the deity (this meat or prasad is consumed only by conservative Hindus), such sanitary measures are brushed aside in the slaughterhouses. The author is skeptical of Municipal efforts too. He writes, Municipalities have been more responsible these days. Licensed slaughterhouses have sprung up and hence butchers cannot slaughter animals anywhere they want. Nor can the butchers slaughter animal without it having been passed as healthy by the food inspector. However, the food inspectors might err. Moreover, often the animals inspected are carried in open, exposed baskets by the laborers to different parts of the city. Quite frequently, the crows have their own share from the meat. Besides, the butchers often pass off stale meat, unsold meat along with fresh meat as no honesty can be expected from them. An intriguing essay published in Punya by Ramendrasundar Trivedi deserves mention here.130 Tribedi, in contrast to most of his contemporaries, champions a meat diet which he believes is more nutritious than vegetables. According to him, one can actually gain from a meat diet than a vegetarian diet because “scientifically,” much of the vegetables are excreted by humans than is meat. Citing Herbert Spencer, Tribedi opines that the natural inclination of humans is towards meat. The author contests the view held by Akshyay Kumar Dutta in his Bajhyabastur Sahit Manabprakitir Sambandha Bichar who had established a connection

129 “Amish Aharer Bipod,” ( The Dangers of a Meat Diet),Swasthyo Samachar, volume 9, (1920): 130 Ramendrashundor Tribedi, “Amish Bhojon,” ( Meat Diet) Punya, 1898.

145 between violent, fierce animals and their carnivorous diet.131 Tribedi counters this view by arguing it is not a carnivorous diet but the nature of these animals (tigers, lions) that makes them intrinsically violent. Tribedi debunks the arguments put forward by Akshyay Kumar Dutta in his defense of meat. If Dutta attempted to use the language of non-violence and ethics to champion vegetarianism, Tribedi attempts to use “science” to justify his defense on a meat diet. In this context, he marks a significant break from the earlier Bengali writers as he establishes the claim- ---- science does not debar humans from eating meat. 132However, “is meat eating cruel?” Tribedi introduces the cruelty debate in his essay as he argues that it is indeed cruel to eat meat because even the person, who does not eat meat himself but eats the meat taken by someone, also perpetrates cruelty. If cruelty is irreligious (Adharma), then that person commits blasphemy ( or is a-dharmi). No one better epitomizes the Bengali ambivalence towards their diet than Tribedi. Tribedi becomes the perfect example of the dichotomy as he is caught between espousals of a meat-diet and the pangs of losing his religion. The horns of dilemma come out repeatedly in his attempts to draw on Western and Hindu ahimsa. He notes with pride that Ahimsa (non-injury to living beings) originated in India and not in Christian lands of Europe, but is deeply aware of in-built ambivalence in Vedic and Brahiminical animal sacrifices. Tribedi eventually seeks refuge in the claims of science. He concludes by hoping that one day, humans with the aid of science, will be strong enough not to be cruel to consume meat any more. Cruelty/non-violence (ahimsa) and science are fascinatingly enmeshed in his optimism as he waits for the day when science would conquer violence ( Himsa). What is the “science” that Ramendrashundor Tribedi talks about? Is it a science that grows in a colonial milieu? Indeed this very question----what is colonial about colonial medicine---has engaged scholars for over a decade.133 Warwick Anderson has pointed that historians of medicine and colonialism have been producing a number of national variations of a

131 The human-animal boundaries were still not very clear to the doctors, veterinarians and the educated Bengalis during the late nineteenthcentury. 132 Tribedi contests the argument put forward by Akshay Kunar Dutta that Hindus are by nature nonviolent and peaceful agriculturists as against the meat-eating British who are aggressive. According to Tribedi, this argument is not justified by science (“bigyan shommoto nohe”). Similarly the argument that Europeans are meat eaters because they live in colder climates (meat warms the body) is not “scientific” because meat does not raise body temperatures. 133 Shula Marks, “What is Colonial about Colonial Medicine? And What has Happened to Imperialism and Health? ”Social History of Medicine 10 ( 1997).

146 master narrative called “the emergence of modern medicine.”134 Waltraud Ernst, on the other hand, urges scholars to focus attention to studying “indigenous medicine” or “medical pluralism” and how indigenous medical traditions interacted in and post/colonial contexts because such a venture helps in actually discovering the “subaltern” voices.135 Inspired by Ernst’s approach, I demonstrate how the Bengali bhadralok came to terms with modern science and imagined it in their own cultural contexts. The other historiographical question worth investigating here is one raised by Deepak Kumar: Did Western science or medicine achieve “complete hegemonization” over South Asian society?136 This question of Deepak Kumar is subsumed within the larger historiographical debate between the postcolonialists and the revisionists on the role of the colonial state in Indian society. My research in the context of diet/nutrition science attests to the story of how the Bengali middle class mediated the language of science in their understanding of meat inspection and food adulteration.137 Their interaction with the West ranged from assimilation, experimentation to transformation and finally dissemination. The Bengali bhadralok defended their knowledge systems and did not believe that their tradition was unscientific or irrational. However, they did also strongly believe that there was nothing wrong in learning from new knowledge. It is this interesting moment of borrowing that scholars often tend to overlook. As a recent scholar rightly points out that “Western medicine’s links with repressive dimensions of (colonial and more recently postcolonial) power have been explored in depth, while its productive role in constituting new subjects and subject-positions have been relatively unexplored.”138 This has in fact led to disengagement in South Asian scholarship with the intellectual world of early South Asian doctors. This disengagement, it has been argued, has implicitly reaffirmed the view of western medicine as ‘foreign’ and having only an external,

134 Warwick Anderson, “Where is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?” Bulletin of History of Medicine 72, no. 3 (1997): 527. 135 Waltruad Ernst, “Beyond East and West. From the History of Colonial Medicine to a Social History of Medicine(s) in South Asia.” Social History of Medicine 20, no. 3 (2007):520. 136 Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj ( Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 137 Some scholars have indeed hinted at the Bengali bhadralok’s attempt to internalize modern science and medicine. For instance, David Arnold’s Colonizing the Body had ended with brief comments about Indian middle classes had appropriated ‘modern science’ and medicine and integrated these into the latter’s rhetoric of legitimation. Jayanta Sengupta in his study of Bengali diet and middle-class identity has argued that by the turn of the twentieth century the scientific quest for a suitable diet had become inextricably linked with the cultural politics of bhadralok identity. These studies however have not developed fully the extent of the middle-class scientific appropriation and dilemma. 138 Projit Mukherji, 9. Mukherji justly argues that whereas historians of “indigenous” medicine have engaged intimately with the intellectual milieu of Ayurveda, Unani etc. there has been no comparable exploration of the intellectual milieu of South Asian practitioners of “western” medicine.

147 repressive role in South Asian lives until well into the twentieth century.139 In my study of the Bengali bhadralok concern with meat, inspection, human health and science, attempt to shift the gears to examine their “productive” moments of encounter with West. I demonstrate that in the course of this meandering trajectory, there were moments when the West hegemonically talked to the East, and the bhadralok too translated western notions of science and health into their own mental worlds. The bhadralok were thus not passive recipients in the path. 140

Animal Disease, Human Health and Inspection

This changing discourse on meat/vegetarianism within the Bengali middle-class impacted slaughterhouses which were part of the urban structure of Calcutta. In the nineteenth century, the need for reforms was pushed by humane bodies like the CSPCA that campaigned for the suppression of private, unlicensed slaughterhouses to promote humane slaughtering practices. We have seen so far that regulating slaughterhouses was a part of the colonial project to discipline the natives. However, both the demands of the native subjects, and the nature of colonial control had shifted considerably by the beginning of the next century. Whereas in the mid-nineteenth century, private slaughterhouses represented an urban nuisance that had to be cleansed and a source of cruelty that needed to be repressed; by the early twentieth century the emergence of rinderpest as a zoonotic disease recast interest in slaughterhouses. Although their sanitary and humanitarian dimension remained important, debate increasingly focused on the relationship between slaughterhouses and meat inspection. A language of diseased meat control began to take over attempts to regulate local slaughterhouses, reflecting a shift in rhetoric in public health work away from a doctrine of nuisances.141 Scholars have examined how in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourse on food, the issue of vegetarianism versus non-vegetarianism became a cultural question, with much significance for nationalist thought---whether one ate animal flesh or not became a marker

139 Mukherji, 10. The author draws attention to this flaw in South Asian medical historiography that has equated ‘Western’ medicine as a metonym for colonial modernity has therefore remained largely a bad word, a factor mediating the capacity of the colonial power to ‘control’ its subjects. 140 Ishita Pande makes a similar argument in her book as she demonstrates that by the end of the nineteenthcentury, the Bengali bhadralok was no longer the passive object of a medical and ethnological gaze because “he refused to be pathologized as the other.” Pande, 16. 141 For a similar study in the context of nineteenthcentury Britain see, Keir Waddington, The Bovine Scourge: Meat, Tuberculosis and Public Health 1850-1914 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006).

148 of civilizational characteristics or distinctions. 142But the other factor that has been overlooked by historians is the outbreak of rinderpest and bhadralok fears of food poisoning stemming from that. The Bengali bhadralok’s anxiety concerned the extent to which the great livestock diseases- --rinderpest, foot-and-mouth, and pleuropneumonia---affected human health.143 By relying upon a variety of nongovernmental archives---Bengali medical periodicals, pamphlets----I have attempted to retrieve the actual idiom in which the bhadralok anxieties in Bengal were articulated. By the mid-1880s, the examination of meat had become a regular feature of local public health work. Sanitary inspectors were appointed to serve as meat inspectors in 1897; a Veterinary Inspector was appointed from February 1906. His duty was to inspect the meat slaughtered in District II slaughterhouses and the slaughterhouses at Tangra. The Veterinary Assistant was responsible for passing the animals prior to slaughter and the Superintendent for stamping the meat according to its quality. All the meat was to be stamped with a violet analine dye, which facilitated the discovery of illicit slaughter. Meat inspection remained chaotic. Attempts to reform the meat trade also came into conflict with trade interests, highlighting the tensions between the public and commercial spheres. Historians studying meat inspection have shown how commercial interests responded to and shaped food regulation, and how different pressure groups “used their own notions of the ‘public interest’ as convenient rhetoric in the debates about food regulation.”144 In the case of Bengal, the limited political power that the bhadralok enjoyed proved woefully inadequate in assuaging their concerns over food adulterations. The Bengal Municipal Act of 1894 and the later, more powerful Bengal Food Adulteration Act of 1919 both proved inadequate.145 The following table shows meat that was found “unwholesome” and destroyed by the Food Inspectors.

142 Jayanta Sengupta. 143 In Chapter Four, “Politics of Diagnosis,” I have examined how the Bengali veterinarians influenced by the anxieties about the role meat played in the transmission of disease, also began to voice unease about the zoonotic properties of cattle rinderpest and the implications for human health. 144 Michael French and Jim Philips, Cheated not Poisoned? Food Regulation in the , 1875-1983 (Manchester, 2000). 145 Kabita Ray, Food for Thought: Food Adulteration in Bengal 1836-1947 ( Calcutta: Papyrus, 2003). Ray who has closely examined food adulteration in Bengal mentions that the journal Gharer Kotha was in 1929 still writing about the inadequacy of municipal efforts. All citizens of Calcutta knew that whatever foodstuff they bought, they were never sure that it was not adulterated. The fear arose, in part, argues Ray, as a consequence of the pervasive impact of colonial modernity and its attendant lifestyle changes this specific concern about contamination/adulteration was directly related to a widespread consumption of commercially prepared food in the city.

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Table 5.1: Meat Confiscated

Year Food item Amount destroyed

1894 Meat 36

1896 Meat 1 , 13 seers

1905 Meat 58 maunds, 10.25 seers

1906 Meat 7 maunds, 25 ½ and 5 tins

1907 Meat 13 maunds, 37 ¾ seers

Source: Reports on the Municipal Administration of Calcutta. West Bengal State Archive, Kolkata

Conclusion

In the final analysis, the story of slaughterhouses and the animal slaughtered for food reveals the nature of British colonialism in several ways. First, the slaughterhouses become the perfect colonial irony----on one hand, throughout the nineteenth century, the demand for meat- eating increases and on the other hand, there is an increasing appeal for kindness/compassion towards those very animals slaughtered. At another level, the colonial project of protection towards animals---a largely unsuccessful one at that---mirrored an irony in that it exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent colonial state and a powerful, not-to- benign reality in which the colonial state constantly sought to control, subjugate and discipline its subjects—human and non-human. Thus slaughterhouses as the outcome of a colonial ambivalence became the typical colonial irony that embodied the twin appeal for compassion (halal vs. painless death) and yet selective legislation that would preserve the interests of a colonial government. In the entire discourse, the animal was no longer the focus, rather from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century onward the focus shifted to public health, hygiene, disease. In this new climate, the sentiments did not come from a welfare/protectionist discourse, but from a nationalist and scientific discourse. The discourse surrounding animal cruelty, diet, nutrition and the physical space of the city was ever-shifting and carried within it multiple strands as different parties with varied interests invested in the debate. The British, for instance, were not so much interested in the

150 debate as to whether Bengalis should eat meat or not. But their main concern is to ensure that adulterated meat did not flood the market because it might affect the army circles and white civilians too. The Bengali bhadralok played a crucial and singular role in the discourse. In many ways, Bengal presented an interesting contrast to other metropolitan cities like Bombay or Delhi. The imperial capital of Calcutta was itself a British creation. In the imperial capital, the depth of British influence was much pronounced. “Western” style education had been introduced in Bengal for the longest period and as the middle class Bengalis came to realize the importance of an “English education” as a source of employment, and ever-increasing numbers took to it. Hindu College, the nation’s first English-language educational institution was established in 1818; Calcutta Medical College was founded in 1835. As a result, by the 1890s the Calcutta elite were, relative to the other presidency towns, perhaps the most deeply indoctrinated in the “western” sciences. The situation in Calcutta, though not unique, thus clearly presented some specific dilemmas. Against this backdrop, the colonial Bengali middle-class, actively imbibing Western traditions in the nineteenth and twentieth century was not a mere local voice. In that sense, we notice an interesting hybridization among the Bengali bhadralok. On one hand, they cling on to the Hindu Vedas and Upanishads, and on the other hand, they draw from the London Vegetarian Society or Georges Cuvier as they give voice to the dichotomy. The bhadralok is a simultaneous figure of assimilation and discontent, of privilege and subordination. At the end however, as my study has shown, it is this scientific discourse that pervade Bengali minds. Perhaps it is here that the nature of colonialism prevails. The examples the bhadralok cite in the early twentieth century as expressed through their demands for slaughterhouse regulation or meat inspection are no longer borrowed from Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, but from Europe, empirical science and rationality. So discourses on health, which permeated ideologies and practices of colonialism and nationalism, were appropriated by middle class Indians to create and perpetuate social identities around class, caste, and religion as they try to fashion a medical modernity. Hence, the tool of colonialism in India, to subjugate the human subjects through science, succeeds through the colonial Bengali middle class reared in the British scientific sub- culture.

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CHAPTER SIX

LOCATING THE BURDENED BEAST: CARTERS, BULLOCKS AND HORSES

The drivers there were unused to the interference in their employment of draught animals, and the owners of which rebelled by a “strike” of four days’ duration against the rigour of the new law. Merchants and traders were naturally disgusted by the consequent deadlock occasioned to their .1

In May 1862, an unprecedented event brought the animated city of Calcutta to a complete halt. Reacting to a piece of new legislation that prevented cruelty to draft animals, the carters of Calcutta refused to ply their carts. The carters’ strike not only disrupted goods transportation, but also caused enormous financial losses to merchants and brought hardship to civilians. By focusing on the story of overburdened bullocks in Calcutta, this chapter demonstrates how debates concerning laboring animals betrayed less protectionism, but reflected in microcosm the existing class distinctions. I shall illustrate how a single decisive event---the carters’ strike---was made to confront two parallel and conflicting worlds, that of the poor, uneducated carters and the elitist Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The carters’ strike stands out as historically significant not only because it witnessed the meeting of these two worlds, but more because by making the animals a mere proxy protagonist, it revealed the complex fault-lines within a colonial society. The human and the nonhuman subalterns---carters and bullocks, found their fates intertwined as the disadvantaged actors in a powerful, but unsuccessful protectionist crusade.

A City Run on Bullocks and Horses

Prior to the advent of railways and mechanized technology, the bulk of inland travel in India was carried out by bullocks, along the road network. Camels were also used in sandy areas.

1 The Animal World ( London: Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, February 1, 1881).

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Bullocks were employed either as “pack bullocks,” which carried goods strapped to their backs and usually traveled directly over pasture land, or “cart bullocks,” which pulled a cart loaded with goods and traveled along improved roads.2 Buffaloes were used for similar purposes. On the best road surfaces and during optimal weather conditions, cart bullocks could cover 20-30 kilometers per day.3 However, premium roads were extremely sparse and the roads that did exist were virtually impassable in the season. Pack bullocks were more versatile than cart bullocks, but their freight rates were three times higher per unit distance and weight.4 The traders had their own oxen and farmer’s cattle, when not in use in farming operations, were used for carrying goods.5 Animals like bullocks and oxen were thus used both as means of transport, for carrying grains, foodstuffs and people from fields to towns and markets, and as agricultural laborers for ploughing fields.6 Horses were, however not used as agricultural labors, but they served a variety of utilitarian and symbolic purposes---from drawing private carts, to working as , or representing the status of a zamindar.7 While horse-carts were more common in the northern, western and central parts of India, they were not a popular form of transport in Bengal where bullock-carts were much in use. Bengali karigor (craftsmen) were skilled in constructing

2 S. Bhattacharya, “Regional Economy: Eastern India,” in Cambridge Economic History of India Vol 2, 1757-1970, ed. ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 272. 3 J. Deloche: Transport and Communications in India Prior to Steam Locomotion: Volume I: Land Transport (French Studies on South Asian Culture and Society, No VIII). (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 4 I. Derbyshire, I. “Opening Up the Interior: The Impact of Railways upon the North Indian Economy and Society, 1860-1914,” Ph.D. thesis, , Department of History, 1985. 5 S. Bhattacharya, 272. 6 The role of human agricultural laborers in pre-colonial India and under the British Raj has been much debated in South Asian agrarian history. Almost all such regional works examined the role of the peasants in colonial India. For a general historiographical discussion of the larger debates on the role of peasants and agrarian change under colonialism, see Sugata , Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (The New Cambridge History of India) (Cambridge University Press, 2007). While focusing on peasants as rural agricultural laborers, South Asian scholarship is however, reticent on the role of animals as agricultural laborers. An interesting analysis of the importance of animals as agricultural laborers in Ottoman Egypt that largely influenced by thinking about laboring animals is Alan Mikhail, “Animals as Property in Early Modern Ottoman Egypt,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53 (2010) 621-652. 7 Unlike in England or France where draft horses were introduced to work on farms as a replacement for oxen, in India horses were seldom used as agricultural labor, given their scarcity and high costs. Indian climate and pastures were ill-suited for horse breeding. The violent contrast between the hot season and the monsoon made the soil swampy in one season and hard and cracked in another. Even the grasses were spare and not good for fodder. Moreover, since the best soil was mostly reserved for the cultivation of grains and vegetables to feed a large and largely vegetarian population, there was relatively little room for horses even in those places where more nutritious fodder grasses were found. Due to lack of extensive pasturage, horses in India were unable to exercise or develop strength and fitness. See Wendy Doniger, 41. On a statistical study to assess the significance of the introduction of the work-horse to medieval English farming, see John Langdon, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066 to 1500 ( London: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

153 modest, inexpensive bullock-carts by attaching wooden wheels to bamboo platforms.8 Construction of horse carriages were not taken up on a large scale in Bengal, as the weak wooden or bamboo wheels of Bengal carts failed to keep up with the agility and speed of horses. Moreover, unlike bullocks or elephants, horses were not native to India, and had to be constantly imported from western and , which in itself was expensive.9 Wendy Doniger has argued that horses were a problem for the British in India. Some horses were well-bred in India; in 1860 a Captain Henry Shakespeare who had bred horses in the Deccan for several years insisted that “no foreign horse that is imported into India….can work in the sun, and in all weathers, like the horses bred in the Deccan.”10 According to Doniger, the native Indian forces that opposed the British kept most of the best horses for themselves, and only a small fraction of the worst horses reached the horse fairs in the east, where the British were in control. In addition, there was the usual problem of shipping horses as most were imported in from New South Wales. Horses were far too expensive to be used as farm animals or beasts of burden and in any case, the heat and the humidity made them useless for that kind of work, which was mostly done by oxen.11

The Socio-Economic Hierarchy of Draft Animals

The importance of the domesticated animals was implicated in their religious and social standing in Hindu Bengali society. Domestic animals were some of the most productive forms of agricultural capital, as the material culture of rural Bengal largely revolved around cattle-rearing. Animals were markers of status and wealth since they did work that could not otherwise be done in the agrarian and the urban worlds of colonial Bengal.

Cows and Bulls

At the top of the socio-economic and religious hierarchy of these quadrupeds was the cow, the symbol of good humane behavior---docile and maternal. Unlike bullocks, cows were never used as work animals, given the reverence towards Go Mata among Hindus.12 Though the

8 Jitendranath Ray, Banglar Kalkarkhana o Karigari Bidhyar Itihaash. ( Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2005), 30. 9 Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2010). 10 Doniger. 11 Doniger. 12 The cow and the bull are associated with the gods in one form or another and accorded divine status in . Also, because cow provides milk to nourish both humans and the gods, it came to be regarded as a surrogate mother ( Go Mata or Mother Cow). On the projection of cow as a nationalist animal in India and the

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Vedic people occasionally ate cows, cows soon became, for most Hindus, cultural symbols of nonviolence and generosity, through the natural metaphor of milking.13 The bull was a curious animal, which had rather an ambivalent status, linked as he was to Hindu god Shiva’s Nandi--- a generally docile and benign creature. Like the cow, the bull too stood privileged as it was never worked as a draught animal, given its strong religious symbolism.14

Bullocks

Placed on the opposite pole of hierarchic binary was the detested bullock. Bullocks were typically castrated oxen that were considered best worked as beasts of burden and agricultural labor. If horses symbolized elite status and imperial grandeur, bullocks signified flourishing agriculture of a peasant. Sam Higginbottom, the British Christian missionary who took a deep interest in farming techniques in Northern India recognized the economic potential of the Indian ox and its central role in Indian agriculture. He wrote, The ox is the source of India's power whether it be pulling the plow, drawing the water from the well, treading out the grain or taking the produce to market. He is well nigh indispensable, and has no substitute. The ox can work in an average mean temperature of eight to ten degrees hotter than the horse can stand. With the very small holdings which obtain in the densely populated parts of India, power machinery is beyond the reach of

growth of a distinctly “Hindu” identity that manifested itself through the Hindi-Urdu controversy and the Cow- Protection riots see Peter van der Veer, : Hindus and Muslims in India (University of California Press, 1994), John McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Sandria Freitag, “Sacred Symbol as Mobilizing Ideology: The North Indian Search for a ‘Hindu’ Community,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 4 ( October 1980): 597-625 and her Religious Rites and Riots: From Community Identity to Communalism in North India 1870-1940 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980); Gyan Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region 1880-1917” in Ranajit Guha ed. Subaltern Studies 2 (Delhi, 1983): 60-129. 13 Doniger, 43. Annemarie Schimmel argues that it was wrong to use cows as beasts of burden, even in Sufi tradition. See Annemarie Schimmel, Islam and the Wonders of Creation: The Animal Kingdom (Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2003), 48, as cited in Alan Mikhail. Mikhail points out that cows were not used as draught animals in Egypt because they could produce milk that that Egyptian peasants considered them of value and generally more expensive than male camels and donkeys, both of which were available in great numbers throughout Egypt and were, thus, very easy to acquire and cheaper than cows. Mikhail, “Animals as Property.” 14 A common Bengali phrase that defines the status of a bull is “dharmer shranr,” or the bull of religion. The bull, it is often believed, it not only never to be worked as a beast of burden or in farm, but it is should also never be tied or chained, thus reinforcing the image of Shiva’s bull as a perpetually unchained, free creature that is never subjugated to human dominance.

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the farmer and if he could afford it, his holding is too small to make its use profitable. Therefore the ox seems destined to remain the source of India's power.15 If the oxen were physically better-suited than horses to work as agricultural laborers, they were also sturdy enough to be beasts of burden. The wide range of contemporary Bengali novels and poems all attest to the prevalence of the bullock or ox-carts as a common mode of transport that was used extensively in nineteenth and twentieth century-Calcutta.16 However, with all their economic value, bullocks along with the male buffalo came to symbolize evil in , as well as being often associated with Pariahs.17

The Work-Horse and the Symbolic Horse

The horse occupied a significant status and performed multiple functions in the rural and urban spaces. It was part of the very structure of history that India has always had to import horses, which became prized animals, used only in elite royal or military circles.18 Horses were often exchanged as gifts among the royal circles in as numerous biographies and accounts testify.19 The Muslim horse, though a foreigner in India, was equally prized by the ancient Hindus since the Vedic times.20 The Vedic horse stood as a symbol of power and aristocracy of the , the royal warrior class, and such powerful symbolism found echoes

15 Sam Higginbottom, The Gospel and the Plow or The Old Gospel and Modern Farming in Ancient India. (London: Central Board of Missions and Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1921. Republished in 2006), 70. 16 To take one example, the illustriousBengali poet ’s rhyme, composed largely for children reads, “kumor parar gorur gari, bojhai kolshi hari.” Goru which is Bengali for cow, does not however in this poem, denote a cow, but an ox or bullock. Interestingly, in the Bengali parlance bullock carts are commonly referred to not as bolodh gari (bolodh being the Bengali for bullock) but as “gorur gari,” which again signifies not a cow- cart, but a bullock-cart. 17 Doniger, 41. Kancha Illiah by equating the marginalized -Bahujans of India with the plight of the buffalo, argues that the fascist Hindu project has all along been to “de-legitimize the Dravidian black beauty”, and subsequently the Dalit-Bahujan culture. He discusses the reasons why the cow was projected as a spiritual animal while the buffalo never figured in the discourse on animal protection. See Kancha Illiah, Buffalo Nationalism :A Critique of Spiritual ( 1984). 18 Wendy Doniger argues that the horse is always the foreigner in India, the invader and conqueror, and the history of the horse in India is the history of those who came to India and took power. 19 To give one example, Gul-Badan , the daughter of Babur Padshah writes, “From Khalifa I accepted 6,000 shahrukhis and five horses, and Sultanam gave me 3,000 and three horses.” See Gul-Badan Begam, The History of Humayun: Humayun-Nama. Translated with introduction and notes by Annette S. Beveridge. (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1902). Reprinted 1989. 20 Wendy Doniger argues that the Vedic horse remained a Kshatriya animal with all the negative connotations of that class---power, domination, extortion (tax-collectors who rode into villages on horse-back) and death. The Vedic stallion of the ancient Hindus was white, in contrast to Dasas. British racist ideas, supported by a complex pseudoscientific ideology, rode piggyback on the already existing Hindu ideas about dark and light skin without the support of the racist theory like that of the British. Doniger, Hindus.

156 even in nineteenth and twentieth century .21 In any case, horses were quite rare in rural Bengal and were most usually possessed by the rich Zamindars or propertied tax- collectors. The horse in the city served the needs of different social groups----as a metaphor of prestige for tax-collectors, as leisure for both spectators and owners through amateur and professional racing, as ticca gharries to the Bengali babus, and as the cavalry to the British Indian military.22 The demands of the urban market in the nineteenth century produced a unique context for the urban horse.23 From birth to death, horses were, as Susan Jones points out, “living commodities with cultural values.”24 Subsequently, with new and lucrative urban freight and street railway markets, both of which demanded larger horses, breeding practices also underwent significant changes.25 In India however, the situation was largely different. The best and most expensive Central Asian horses made their way to the British Indian cavalry, while the poorer breed came to be used for private purposes as carts in eastern India. As early as in 1775, a horse carriage workshop was set up by William Johnson in Panditiya Street in Calcutta.26 Most of the horse carts of eighteenth century Calcutta were used for personal purposes, and ticca gharries or hired horse carts had not yet struck roots. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a highly sophisticated velvet-cushioned horse cart cost 300 guineas, whereas an ordinary one cost 55 guineas. From the 1820s onwards, Bengalis largely took up the business of trading in horse carts.

21 nineteenthcentury Bengali novelist Tarashankar Bandhopadhyay’s (1878-1971) powerful story Jolshaghor brings out the symbolism of the horse through the fortunes of a failing zamindar. In a poignant and yet artistically profound narrative, the old and impoverished zamindar goes riding his frail horse in an attempt to his former prestige and socio-economic status among the villagers who now doubt his glory. 22 The horse has been studied by several scholars who historicize the complex multiple roles of the animal in the city. Clay McShane and Joel Tarr have shown in the context of America that the urban horse of the nineteenthcentury was viewed as an animal who was regarded and utilized by a wide variety of urbanities--- teamsters, merchants, factory and workshop owners and managers, streetcar drivers and company officials, and even veterinarians---as a living machine. They argue that the animal attributes of horse were evaluated primarily in terms of his ability to contribute constructive work in a variety of contexts. On the role of the work-horse in nineteenthcentury see Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America ( Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008). On the social status attached to horses in medieval Europe, see Salisbury, The Beast Within 28-31 and 35. 23 Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 9. 24 Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America, annotated edition. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 25 McShane and Tarr, 9. 26 Ray, 30.

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27 Following the success of Brownlow horse-cart, Calcutta soon witnessed a plethora of European and indigenous hired horse-carts---Greenfield, Fiton, Bruham, Lando, Victoria, Bayrush, Gig, Keranchi, Chenkra, Chariot, Juri, TomTom, Ikka, Tanga---all flooded the streets of Calcutta. Bengali Muslims in Calcutta like Shaikh Maqsud Ali Mohammad Manruddin of the Lower Circular Road were especially enthusiastic in horse-cart business.28 Among the Hindus, the most influential were U N Banerjee and Co. of Taaltola, the famous couch-builders from Akhrur Dutta Lane named G.C Dey and Co., and Lower Circular Road’s Harishchandra Bose.29

Unpacking the Ticcas and Ox-Carts: Indices of European and bhadralok Respectability?

Draft animals played important roles in colonial Bengal both as actual living creatures and as the key to important shifts in attitudes to social classes—horse-carts represented prestige, while bullock-carts were the poor native man’s conveyance. Several nineteenth and twentieth century texts reveal the ways British and Bengali culture and identity commingled and clashed through the historical understandings and meanings of draft animals. If horse-carts were flaunted as markers of power by a rich zamindar, a pretentious babu and a status-conscious British servant, they could also be despised by a white woman as being beneath her status. Draught animals and carts thus often functioned as parables of class and racial tensions in colonial Bengal. For example, in the nineteenth century Canadian journalist Sara Jeanette Duncan’s (1861–1922) fictional novel, The Simple Memoirs of a Memsahib, the aversion for horse-carts (ticca gharries), drivers and Calcutta babus comes out strong.30 In the fictional tale, drawn

27 According to Ray, the shift from the human power of palki bearers to the dependence on the work-horse has to be studied against the backdrop of persistent strikes among palki-bearers. Strikes among palanquin bearers had become a frequent occurrence in early nineteenthcentury Bengal as they often unanimously ceased work when the passengers refused to comply with their demand for higher rates. Against the backdrop of indefinite strikes among palki bearers, in 1827 a British palki-maker and merchant, Brownlow devised a horse-cart by erecting a wooden platform over four wheels and attaching a cabin on to it that would be drawn by a horse, and named it Brownberry. However, riding a Brownberry was not as comfortable as one would imagine. Often the iron rods that clung on to the wooden platform would pose much inconvenience to the passengers as the horses sped on rough roads. Brownberry was still preferred over the whimsical palkis because it was both affordable and faster moving. The transition from palki to ticca gharry is historically important as it reveals how attitudes towards animals were mediated by material foundations of a society. If palki carriers could successfully go on strike to demand higher wages, horses could not. 28 Ray, 30. 29 Ray, 30. 30 Sara Jeanette Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1893). The daughter of a Scottish father and an Ulster Protestant mother, Sara Jeanette Duncan was born and raised in

158 largely from Duncan’s own impressions of nineteenth century Anglo-Indian community, the chief protagonist Helen expresses her unyielding hatred for hired horse-carts or the ticcas. Helen describes the ticca as “an uncompromising shuttered wooden box with a door in each side and a seat across each end.”31 She equally despises the ticca drivers and comments, “When the ticca is in action, the driver sits on the top, loosely connected with a bundle of hay which forms the casual, infrequent dejeuner of the horses. The syce stands behind, and of the back shutters are open he is frequently malodorous. There may be some worldly distinction between the syce and the driver, but it is imperceptible to the foreign eye. I have never been able to decide which is the more completely more disreputable of the two.”32 But her most fierce contempt is manifested towards the most frequent riders of the ticca---the baboos. According to her, The baboo loves the ticca gharry because the baboo knows not mercy and gets a long ride, yea and seven of his kind with him, for three pence. Calcutta people hate it for reasons which are perhaps obvious. And for another. The ticca gharry directly aids and abets the Govt in its admirable system for the valuation of society, represented, as it has been seen by the Accountant-General. A person who habitually drives in a ticca gharry is not likely on the face of it to be in receipt of more than a very limited income, and is thus twice gazetted as not being a particularly desirable person to know. It is evident therefore that when the Brownes decided to go to the Viceregal Drawing Room in a ticca they bowed to circumstances.33

Helen’s objection to riding a ticca stems more from her concern for her status, than feelings of genuine compassion for the animal. She objects to the “disreputable” driver and the syce, as they both are seemingly below her elite colonial status in Calcutta, as also the “nasty” horses. If Duncan’s novel betrayed a deep abhorrence for the babus who happily rode the ticcas with no compassion for the starved, overworked horses, a satirical and ostentatious display of horse-carriages by the babus is well brought out in the nineteenth century journalist and writer,

Brantford, Canada. In September 1888 she set off with a fellow journalist, Lily Lewis, on an ambitious round-the- world tour. 31 Duncan, 119. 32 Duncan, 120. 33 Duncan, 120.

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Kali Prasanna Singh’s (1840-1870) Hutum Penchar Naksha (Sketches by a Barn Owl).34 Singh writes in a tone of mockery and satirical humor, “Calcutta’s Keranchi horse-carts’ are immensely palliative for arthritic patients, as it acts as a galvanic shock on them!”35 Comfort was thus, as Singh notes, not a priority to the baboos; rather ticca gharries served as markers of prestige as the baboos flaunted riding it with the memsahibs. Deconstructing the two texts---one, imperialist and another deeply satirical, can reveal how the shifting tracks of these animals formed a trail of continuity and change in colonial Calcutta.

The Carters’ World: Gharrywans, Merchants and Chowdrees - Agents of Overloading?

It is estimated that there were broadly two classes of cartsmen or gharrywans in 19th- century Calcutta---those who drove their own bullock carts; and those who employed drivers for the purpose. 36 While the former was a limited class, the number of hired drivers continued to rise in Calcutta. Peary Chand Mittra, who took deep interest in the question of overloading bullock-carts states, “During the last 20 years, the traffic in Calcutta had so much increased, and the demand for carts was so great, that the paid men were tempted to demand a higher rate of hire for their own benefit, and thus overloading went on, and the carters escaped punishment.”37 With increasing demand for carts, the paid drivers or gharrywans thus often took up excess load apart from their assigned load, in order to earn more than their regular pay. Added to the greed of the drivers, were the middle class or the Chowdrees and Godown Sircars who were the most common agents of overloading. The mercantile community of Calcutta seems to have escaped much of the blame for overloading, because they paid for carriage of their goods, “generally two price per maund,” not to the cartsmen, but to the “middle man”--- the Chowdry or the Godown Sircar who was responsible for hiring the carts. 38 The middle men thus ensured they bargained for the best deal by loading the animals with “the heaviest possible burthen at the least possible

34 Kali Prasanna Singh, Hutum Penchar Naksha (Sketches by a Barn Owl), 1885. Prose manuals in conversational Bangla inspired Kali Prasanna Sinha to write his satirized version of nineteenthcentury Calcutta city-life in Hutum Penchar Naksha which created a furor in contemporary Bengali society with its sharp satire and caricature of nineteenthcentury Bengali social life. 35 Kali Prasanna Singh, 103. 36 Baboo Peary Chand Mittra, Life of Colesworthy Grant (Calcutta: I.C Bose and Co. Stanhope Press, 1881), 40. 37 Mittra, 40. 38 Mittra,40.

160 cost.”39 In order to optimize his profit, often the Chowdry would overload the cart at the lowest cost and accomplish maximum trips within an unreasonable time, which would bring him best gains from the merchant. Such an intricate network of renting, hiring carts and carrying goods ensured that the drivers and chowdrees continued the offence of serious overloading, without any penalties. To the colonial government, ox-carts and horse-drawn carts formed a steady source of income which is evident in the persistent attempts to impose taxes and fees on cart registration from as early as the 1840s.40 Sufficient vigilance was imposed to ensure that there were no objections to taxes. However, often the cart-owners found ways to evade taxes by tweaking and twisting the meaning of the Act. For instance, in January 1896, an alarming decrease in tax payments by cart-owners was reported from Satkhira Municipality.41 Taking advantage of the obscure phrase “habitually used” in section 142 of the Act, a tax-defaulter and convicted cart- owner defended himself, arguing that he lived and kept his cart outside the Municipality, and used it inside the Municipality twice a week throughout the year. The Deputy Magistrate who tried the case had to contend that the cart had not been “habitually used” in Chanduria within the meaning of section 142, and therefore had to acquit the accused. The introduction of taxes on carts did not go uncontested. The carters soon became makers of their own politics, demanding revocation of the taxes.42 Early in June 1849, owing to a

39 Annual Report of the CSPCA for the Years 1865-68. Uttarpara Jaykrishna Public Library, Uttarpara. 40 Municipal Department, Municipal Branch, File No. M2T/22, Proceeding No.,B 200 and 201, January 1905; Municipal Department, Municipal Branch, Proceeding No., B 127 to129, File M 12/A19, Oct 1905. West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata. The vast number of Municipal reports testifies to the continuous colonial effort to levy taxes on carriages, horses and other animals in different Municipalities of Bengal. 41 Municipal Department, Municipal Branch, January 1896. West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata [ Hereafter WBSA] 42 The carters in nineteenthand twentieth century Calcutta were a volatile group that often rebelled against colonial authorities. While South Asian historiography is rich on studies of working class politics, there is a dearth of scholarship on the historical roles and importance of carters as a significant non-industrial labor force. Isolated works deal with the carters while discussing the larger question of working class strikes and riots. Subho Basu has shown how the carters along with large numbers of workers took to the streets to oppose the plague inoculation drive in Calcutta on 3rd May, 1898. On that particular event, the hackney carriage drivers and carters went on a strike fearing they would be forcefully inoculated. Subho Basu, “Strikes and 'Communal' Riots in Calcutta in the 1890s: Industrial Workers, Bhadralok Nationalist Leadership and the Colonial State,” Modern Asian Studies, 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1998): 949-983. One of the rare works that actually investigate the relationship between carters, animals and the colonial state is Janet Davis, “Propagating the Gospel of Animal Kindness: Sacred Cows, Christians and American Welfare Activism with Reference to India at the Turn of the twentieth Century,” in Speaking Truth to Power: Religion, Caste, and the Subaltern Question in India. Edited by Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), where focusing on animal welfare in twentieth century India she demonstrates how carters can be a rich source of looking at animals.

161 tax levied on Calcutta’s ticca gharries and bullock carts, the bullock cart drivers unanimously refused to drive their carts.43 The editor of Sangbaad Bhaskar expressed his concern, Last Thursday we had sent our people to fetch Sundari wood from Narkeldanga godowns. However, our men could not bring the wood due to paucity of bullock carts in the streets of Calcutta.44 About 5,000 porters and bullock carters appealed to the Deputy Governor to exempt them from paying the taxes on bullock carts. The appeal went unheeded. However, more intriguing than the appeal of the carters was the argument of Sangbaad Bhaskar. In fact, the increasing assertion of the carters shocked a significant section of propertied, educated Bengali elites whose lament now poured out in the newspapers. Sangbaad Bhaskar’s editor opined that the carters’ strike had brought to surface the disunity and factionalism among the gentlemanly, urban, upper-class, educated community of Calcutta. The editor commented, While even the “common people”---the porters and the carters have demonstrated an unprecedented solidarity in the wake of the newly levied tax on bullock carts, it is surprising that the respectable people of Calcutta are unembarrassed by it. Can we not get together and unanimously abandon ticca gharries and bullock carts? How did the respectable middle class Calcuttans carry out their businesses even when there were no ticca gharries and bullock carts in the city? 45 Sangbaad Bhaskar proposed, “When the respectable people of Calcutta had failed to withdraw the tax levied on ticca gharries, they should at least bless the carters for launching such a powerful protest against taxes on bullock carts!” 46 Sangbaad Bhaskar’s report is intriguing because it divulged the ambivalent stand of the editor in his interpretation of the carters’ strike and the role of the bhadralok community of Calcutta. On one hand, Sangbaad Bhaskar sided with the marginalized carters, lauding their success in revolting against the tax; on the other hand it nearly alienated them by recommending the shunning of ticca gharries and ox-carts, the very livelihood of the carters. Oscillating between condemning the disunity among Bengali and yet not supporting the carters’ protest, Sangbaad Bhaskar epitomized shifting loyalties. Even the solution it suggested—shunning ticcas and ox-carts---was curious because it

43 Sangbaad Bhaskar, June 26, 1849, No. 33, Calcutta edition. 44 Sangbaad Bhaskar, June 26, 1849, No. 33, Calcutta edition. 45 Sangbaad Bhaskar, June 26, 1849, No. 33, Calcutta edition. 46 Sangbaad Bhaskar, June 26, 1849, No. 33, Calcutta edition.

162 dared not offend the colonial government and prefered a safer way out of the predicament, that of discharging the carters. The sarcastic tone of Sangbaad Bhaskar only served to reinforce the existing class distinctions in nineteenth century Calcutta---if the affluent bhadralok relying on ticca gharries were constantly chastised for its factionalism, the marginalized carters’ living off bullock-carts were praised but never backed.

The Burdened Bullock and a Humane Society

The practice of eight or ten people drawn by two undersized, underfed ponies or bullocks was a common sight in nineteenth-century Calcutta. In addition to frightful wounds inflicted on the necks of laboring, overloaded bullocks, the cumbrous yoke imposed upon the diminutive cattle of Bengal often worked to seriously injure the animal. The “guillotine-like action of the objectionable yoke” was never an even or steady pressure against a muscular surface, but a continuous sawing between and rolling over the animal’s vertebrae. 47 Contemporary Bengali novels like Hutum Penchar Naksha by Kaliprasanna Singh provide vivid documentation of overloaded, tortured bullocks as a common scene in the streets of nineteenth century Calcutta. Singh describes the plight of the bullocks in the following passage: The bullocks carrying overloaded goods on their carts began to puke from excess fatigue, as the garewans twisted their tails and thrashed them, crying, “shalar goru cholena.”48 But the exhausted bullocks still wouldn’t move, and the cart wheels made screeching sounds from the excess load.49 Furthermore, the size and character of the wounds inflicted upon the necks and backs of the bullocks required several months of rest and care to heal. To the poorer owners however, those months were times of loss and privation----a privation, which they could not afford to succumb to. Hence, when only half healed, the draft animals were put to work again, and with the customary yoke. Daniel Johnson, wrote in his Sketches of Indian Field Sports that, The natives of India have a very strange method of breaking in their bullocks for ploughing. The cattle with which they plough the ground are in general small, yet they are strong enough for the purpose ; the earth being only turned up a few inches deep. The larger cattle are selected for carriage, or for drawing hackeries (carts).They are first

47 First Annual Report of the CSPCA, 1862-63. Uttarpara Jaykrishna Mukherjee Public Library, Uttarpara. 48 “Shalar goru cholena” can be translated as “the damn horses won’t move!’ 49 Kaliprasanna Singh, Hutum Penchar Naksha, 103.

163

yoked, to an experienced bullock; and as most of them are of an obstinate, restive disposition, they soon lie down. To make them rise, the men twist their tails, and if that does not succeed, a man throws a tiger's or leopard's skin over his head, and runs towards the bullock, which never fails of making him get up immediately. After three or four repetitions of this, they seldom attempt to lie down again. It has the same effect on bullocks which have never been in a country inhabited by tigers or leopards, and therefore they could-never have seen a skin of the kind before.50

In order to effectively execute state protection of animals through prosecutions, it was however, first necessary to prove that animals had “rights.” , in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789 believed that just as slavery was beginning to be recognized as an infringement of human rights, “The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.”51 Animals’ capacity for suffering alone, according to Bentham, was a sufficient claim to rights. According to in his Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses, first published in 1796-98, the virtues and “intelligence” even more than the “feeling” of these “four-legged, and mute citizens…necessarily imply rights.” At a time when reformers in all spheres felt themselves embattled against the forces of reaction and self-interest, Lawrence looked to an “increase of light and the progressive improvement of the human mind” to purge the nation of its cruel proclivities, “those relics of ancient barbarity.”52 A succession of parliamentary bills for the protection of animals from cruelty began shortly afterwards in England. The abuses of horses and cattle, especially in the streets in the cities, became the

50 Daniel Johnson, Sketches of Indian Field Sports: With Observations on the Animals: Also an Account of Some of the Customs of the Inhabitants; With a Description of the Art of Catching Serpents, as Practiced by the Conjoors, and their method of curing themselves when bitten : With Remarks on Hydrophobia and Rabid Animals. (Robert Jennings, 1827), 142. 51 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789, chapter XVII, part i.4, footnote; ed. J H Burns and H.L.A Hart, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham ( London: Athlone Press, , 1970), 282-3. Cited in Diana Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain, 1750-1850 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). 52 Lawrence, Philosophical and Practical Treatise, Vol I, p.117f, 123-4, 135; Vol II, p.512, 522; as quoted in Diana Donald.

164 subject of the first law offering limited protection to domestic animals through the Martin’s Act of 1822.53 In India, governmental attitude towards animal protectionism at this stage remained half- hearted, perfunctory and at times ambivalent. In 1861, an enquiry was made into the question of overburdening cattle, and it was found that overloading and the cumbrous yoke on the necks of laboring cattle were the prolific causes of suffering to the cattle. Subsequently, Acts V and XV of 1861 for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals came into force which provided for punishments for inflicting cruelty on draft animals, mainly horses and bullocks. While Act XLVIII of 1861 for the towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, invested the magistrates with the power of punishing those who both directly and indirectly inflicted cruelty upon animals, other incipient animal protectionist legislations conferred no power to control the owners of the cattle which plied in the city.54 Since a majority of the owners lived in the suburbs, they were beyond the reach of the law. Overburdening thus continued, unabated.

Compassion Institutionalized: The Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

British understanding of animal protectionism and cruelty has significant implications for analyzing the colonial situation in Bengal. If England’s early animal protection laws were in effect a response to the repulsion for lower-class violence, did British attitudes towards animals in Bengal imply a similar attempt to discipline the colonized Bengalis? Interestingly, the earliest humane society to be established by the British in India was one that dealt with rights of animals- ---the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA) in 4th October, 1861. Lord Elgin, the then Viceroy of India, lent his powerful support by consenting to become its first patron, along with Archdeacon Pratt who became its first President. The Society was a conglomeration of several influential Hindu landlords, well-to-do Muslims and Christians. In lines with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Calcutta Society for

53 The Parliamentary Debates, new series, vol.VII for 24 April-6 August 1822, London: T. C. Hansard, 1823, columns 758f, 873f, “Ill-Treatment of Cattle” Act. Martin had already introduced an unsuccessful “Ill-Treatment of Horses Bill” in 1821; Parliamentary Debates, new series, Vol V, London: T.C. Hansard, 1822, columns 1098f. Martin’s Act of 1822 imposed fines or imprisonment on those guilty of abusing sheep, cattle, horses or donkeys. It was the first measure to punish cruelty to animals per se, not just as a malicious injury to another’s property. See Chapter 2 “Perceiving Animals, Historicizing Cruelty” for a detailed discussion on the growth of animal protectionist sentiments and subsequent legislations in nineteenth century England. 54 First Annual Report of the Calcutta SPCA, 1862-63. Uttarpara Jaykrishna Public Library, Uttarpara, Hooghly.

165 the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, at the very outset, concerned itself with such gross cruelty inflicted upon draught bullocks and hack horses, whose sufferings had according to the CSPCA, “shocked the public sight and formed a standing reproach to the city of Calcutta.”55 As early as in 1862, the CSPCA promised that a prize of one hundred would be offered at the Agricultural Exhibition for the “best Collar or Harness for Draught Bullocks,” as an improvement on the existing “barbarous Yoke.”56 Essays were submitted to the Society’s prize competition of 1862, and in order to foster feelings of kindness towards animals, nearly a thousand copies of pamphlets were distributed among the drivers and owners of bullocks and carriage horses. The onus of a lofty “civilizing mission” seemed to lurk behind British attempts to protect domestic animals in India. The founder and Honorary Secretary of the CSPCA, Colesworthy Grant who arrived in Calcutta at the young age of nineteen, argued that “the mission of the Europeans to India was not to fund a highly principled, educated and enlightened people, but to aid in making them so.”57 In publications sponsored by the Calcutta SPCA itself, the ability of religion and education to work as a fundamental change in attitudes to working animals was repeatedly questioned. There was a strong religious element in the zeal for animal welfare.58 To many a Christian member of the CSPCA, protecting animals resonated with the missionary goal of living “to extend the kingdom of God.”59 The Honorary Secretary and Treasurer of the CSPCA, Colesworthy Grant believed, “I consider every Christian man ought to be doing something for his Master, and my work in connection with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is my work for Him---I feel called by God to do it, it is my religious duty, and I should be guilty before Him if I neglected it.”60 Grant believed that “he will acquire and

55 First Annual Report of the Calcutta SPCA, 1862-63. Uttarpara Jaykrishna Public Library, Uttarpara, Hooghly. 56 Ibid. 57 Colesworthy Grant, quoted in Peary Chand Mittra, Life of Colesworthy Grant ( Calcutta: I C. Bose and co. Stanhope Press, 1881), 18. 58 The evangelical fervor of animal welfare has been emphasized by Janet Davis who has studied the close relationship between nineteenthcentury American animal welfare activists and missionaries in India. Examining the Massachusetts SPCA’s magazine, Our Dumb Animals, Davis argues that the MSPCA activists worked hand-in-hand with missionaries in India to propagate the twin gospels of animal kindness and . See Janet M. Davis, “Propagating the Gospel of Animal Kindness: Sacred Cows, Christians and American Welfare Activism with Reference to India at the Turn of the twentieth Century,” in Speaking Truth to Power: Religion, Caste, and the Subaltern Question in India. Edited by Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 59 Peary Chand Mittra, Life of Colesworthy Grant (Calcutta: I C Bose and Co. Stanhope Press, 1881) 91. 60 Revd. Alfred J. Bamford, as cited in Peary Chand Mittra, Life of Colesworthy Grant (Calcutta: I C Bose and Co. Stanhope Press, 1881) 89.

166 exercise that influence over the minds of the thousands around him, which…at least discourages the abuse of it.”61 Grant nurtured the belief that very few Bengalis were capable of protecting their animals because lack of a proper education and the prevalence of social evils had stunted their moral development. The British, by contrast, by their “superior intelligence” and “consistent example of honorable and generous conduct” could prevail upon the lower class Bengalis to stop animal abuse.62 Hence, Grant sympathizing with the condition of the lower classes, trained their children to shun early marriages and remedy other social evils detrimental to their improvement. 63 If animal protectionist sentiments within the Calcutta SPCA bore powerful missionary undertones, the Bengali members of the CSPCA on their part, glorified the Vedic compassion for animals to argue for an innate “kindness towards animals” inherent in ancient Indian culture. Baboo Peary Chand Mittra, the Honorary Magistrate and a member of the CSPCA, for example, while commending the activities of the CSPCA, emphasized especially that “if in any country such a Society can meet with success, it is in India.”64 While lauding CSPCA’s activities, Mittra at the same time attempted to trace the roots of “humanity towards animals” in the ancient Indian ---the Sama Veda, Rig Veda, Chandogya Upanishads and the Swetaswara Upanishad.65 But while tracing the roots of kindness to Vedic traditions, Peary Chand Mittra, also linked animal kindness to Christian missionary work within the CSPCA. In expressing the “native opinion” on C. Grant in the wake of the death of the latter’s death, Mittra argued that Grant worshipped God not in word, but in truth and spirit for the brute creation, identifying himself with their comfort and happiness.66 Thus, is it intriguing that animal protectionist sentiments within the Calcutta SPCA bore both powerful missionary undertones, yet paradoxically, the elite Bengali members of the CSPCA also glorified the Vedic compassion for animals. 67 It was this constant attempt to grapple with two worlds---imbibing “western” ideas

61 Colesworthy Grant, quoted in Mittra, 18. 62 Mittra, 18. 63 Mittra, 18. 64 Mittra, 93. 65 Mittra, 94. 66 Mittra, 91. 67The evangelical fervor of animal welfare has been emphasized by Janet Davis who has studied the close relationship between nineteenth century American animal welfare activists and missionaries in India. Examining the Massachusetts SPCA’s magazine, Our Dumb Animals, Davis argues that the MSPCA activists worked hand-in-hand with missionaries in India to propagate the twin gospels of animal kindness and Christianity. Davis argues that by denouncing the British Empire, idealizing Brahminical-Hinduism’s advocacy of vegetarianism, and supporting

167 and yet going back to indigenous values derived from their own society---that made the Bengali members of the CSPCA a dynamic “hybrid” group. The elite Bengali members of the CSPCA, in their advocacy of a “Victorian kindness to animals” and a “Vedic, humanism” thus found themselves in interesting dilemmas and tensions about how to reconcile indigenous traditions with metropolitan ideas.68

The Carters’ Strikes: Barometer of Tensions

Cruelty versus Livelihood

Acting under the pressure of the Calcutta SPCA, the Government of Bengal enacted rudimentary legislations to prevent cruelty against draft animals. The earliest laws to have taken shape were Act XLVIII of 1860 and Acts V and XV of 1861 that made it a punishable offense to “cruelly beat, ill-treat, abuse or torture any animals.”69 It was stated that “for every such offense, one would be liable, on a summary conviction before the Magistrate, to a fine not exceeding one hundred rupees, and in default thereof, to imprisonment, with or without hard labor, for any term not exceeding three months.”70 The Acts covered numerous cases of urging on bullocks by twisting their tails; yoking them to hackeries with heavy loads while their necks are in a raw and wounded state; driving galled hacks; striking horses and other animals over the head or in any other inhuman manner; loading conveyances which any animals has to draw with a weight beyond its power. Two European Agents, Pensioners from the Queen’s Army were employed by the Calcutta SPCA to explain the law, warn the drivers and the owners of bullocks and carriage horses against its violation, and furnish simple instructions for the treatment of wounds. In addition to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1861, the government of Bengal also initiated the Stage Carriages Act of 1861 ( Act XVI of 1861) for “licensing and regulating Stage- Carriages.” The Act defined stage-carriage as “every carriage drawn by one or more horses which shall ordinarily be used for the purpose of conveying passengers for hire to or from any

Indian nationalism, the MSPCA in India “participated in the discursive formation of an increasingly homogenized, modern Hindu subject.” See Janet M. Davis, “Propagating the Gospel of Animal Kindness: Sacred Cows, Christians and American Welfare Activism with Reference to India at the Turn of the twentieth Century,” in Speaking Truth to Power: Religion, Caste, and the Subaltern Question in India. Edited by Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 68 Mittra, 95. 69 First Annual Report of the SPCA, 1862-63. UJKPL, Uttarpara, Hooghly. 70 First Annual Report of CSPCA, 35.

168 place in the Stats.”71 Apart from penalties against unlicensed carriages, the Act imposed penalties for allowing carriages to be drawn by fewer animals or more passengers than provided by license, and for ill-treating animals.72 However, while the Act penalized “any proprietor, or agent of a proprietor, or any driver of a licensed stage-carriage, who, knowingly permits such carriage to be drawn by a less number of horses or who knowingly permits a larger number of passengers, or a greater weight of luggage, to be carried by such stage-carriage than shall be provided by the license,” to a fine of one hundred rupees, it did not specify how much weight the license allowed to be carried on the carriages, thus leaving the question of permissible load open- ended. After the two pieces of legislation against cruelty towards draft animals were passed by the government in July 1861, the next seven weeks were devoted to the process of warning, with thousand pamphlets distributed among the drivers and owners of bullocks and carriage horses. Large Bengali posters were put up in crowded parts of the city to attract the attention of the native community. Prosecutions commenced about the 8th week after the warning. Care was taken to bring before the Magistrates only cases of a serious nature. The number of convictions obtained through the Society’ agents till May 10, 1863 were huge--- around 506, besides 29 cases instituted by the Police officers.73 Of the total 506 convictions, about 400 cases referred to injured cattle that had been dislocated and deformed due to the wanton use of barbarous yoke.74 As regards the horses, they were overworked with wounds, and the hack ponies suffered from the wretched harness in which they were worked. Interestingly, the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 1861 meant to prosecute not the middle men ( Chowdrees, Godown Sircars), who were considered by the CSPCA to be the “real agents of overloading,” or even the merchants, but only the drivers and owners of the carts. In fact for a considerable time the punishment and prosecutions for cruelly working wounded cattle fell exclusively upon the drivers who were employed by the Hackney carriage

71 The Act was modified in 1898 to include all animals used for drawing carriages. It was also provided that the Act shall not apply to carriages not ordinarily used for journey of a greater distance than twenty miles. 72 Penalty for ill-treating animals: Any person who shall cruelly beat, illtreat, over-drive, abuse, torture or cause or procure to be cruelly beaten, illtreated, overdrive, abused or tortured any horse employed in drawing or harnessed to any stage- carriage, or who shall harness to or drive in any stage-carriage any horse which from sickness, age, wounds or other cause is unfit to be driven in such stage-carriage, shall for every such offence be liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred rupees. Stage Carriages Act, 1861 ( Act XVI of 1861), 7th July 1861. In the Stage Carriages Act of 1898, a clause was further added to inspect the manner in which the animals were to be harnessed and yoked. 73 First Annual Report of CSPCA, 23. 74 First Annual Report of CSPCA, 23.

169 owners. As gradually heavier penalties came to be inflicted on the carriage owners, “irritated by these determined and persistent measures, and vainly hoping to resist the tide of civilization and humanity,” a large number of Hackney owners in 1862, suddenly and simultaneously went on a strike.75 Contemporary records corroborate the enormous loss of trade and inconvenience suffered by the mercantile community of Calcutta during the four-day strike. Nearly the entire commerce of Calcutta suffered a temporary suspension; but neither any compromise was made, nor any concession conceded for several days. Eventually, the merchants by purchasing the numerous carts and cattle to themselves succeeded in bringing the Gareewans (cart-drivers) back to their work again. The CSPCA’s comment in the wake of the carters’ strike is noteworthy: “Besides the excitement of tenfold sympathy in the cause everywhere created, it stimulated and encouraged a spirit of enterprise and improvement which will gradually release our merchandize from almost Abyssinian barbarity of conveyance, and our merchants from humiliating dependence on the whims or schemes of ignorance and folly.”76 The literature of the SPCA continued to present harrowing accounts of the cruelties to horses and cattle, even as these legislations failed to protect them.

Unburdening the Beast: Cruelty versus Control

Determining the “Load”

It was understood by common consensus that “Abyssinian barbarity of conveyance” was to be remedied by unburdening the overloaded beast, mobilizing public opinion in favor of animal kindness, and inventing newer that would lessen the pain on the draft animals. Thus began a phase of frantic animal legislations and call for inventions that could effectively address the cause of the burdened bullock and horse. Existing legislations had to be revised in light of the recurrent strikes among carters, and newer legislations passed to convict the real offenders. With the strike of 1862, burdened animals reentered the official discourse. Colonial understanding of animal protection during this phase was largely influenced by metropolitan discourse on the same, though there was considerable disparity even within official circles in Calcutta. Often different parties used the British model of protective legislation on animal cruelty

75 First Annual Report of the SPCA. 76 First Annual Report of the CSPCA, 1862-63.

170 to both buttress and dismiss the case for draft animals in Calcutta. For instance, in the CSPCA annual meeting of 1868 that the British Parliament had from time to time enacted both “general legislations” and “special legislations” to deal with specific cases of animal cruelty.77 Hence, in keeping with the British model, legislation in India should also address both general and special cases of animal cruelty. It was argued that the existing law on animal cruelty in India was too general and did not deal with specific case of overloading. The Stage Coach Act of 1866 for regulating Hackney Carriages, to take one example, left much to be desired. Peary Chand Mittra, member of the Calcutta CSPCA brought to attention that while the Stage Coach Act specified that licenses should state the amount of luggage put on every carriage, there were no attempts to define “luggage” or “overloading.”78 The British laws hence served as the exemplar--- legislations in India were to follow suit and insert specific clauses dealing with “overloading.” If the English Act was used as a referent to frame new laws in India, the British case was also employed to disregard animal protection. The Advocate-General of Calcutta, Hogg, for instance, argued that it was almost impossible to define “overloading,” and would not be wise to leave it to the discretion of individual Magistrates. Any case of overloading amounting to “positive cruelty” or “ill treatment,” would fall under Section 67 of the Police Act which entailed a fine of Rs. 100 for such offense. Hogg believed that, “when the advancing civilization of England had not attempted to define overloading, this Council should not attempt to do so.”79 Hence, following the British model, he took serious objection to adding a clause on “overloading” in the cruelty Acts in Calcutta. Animal cruelty did play out well in issues of human control. The carters’ strike of 1862 introduced a new dimension to the discourse of animal protection and abuse as the events repeatedly generated intense, heated debates in the officialdom. Responding to the increase in number of overworked draft animals, the CSPCA on May 2, 1868 ventured to introduce a special legislation that would deal with overloading. In 1868 Baboo Peary Chand Mittra was appointed member of the Bengal where he strongly supported the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The primary mover of the bill, Mittra, submitted it to the Legislative Council on the ground that the previous Act of 1861 provided for animals “tortured”

77 It was argued that improvements to the Martin’s Act of 1822 came in 1839 when a new clause was inserted as to the prohibition of carts and vehicles being drawn by dogs. The Act was further modified in 1859 to prohibit the use of dogs as beasts of burden throughout England. 78 Mittra, 42. 79 Mr. Hogg, quoted in Mittra, 44.

171 in a general way, but not in a specific sense. Mittra argued that, “overloading” was not “torturing,” and there had to be a distinct clause to deal with “overloading.”80 Moreover, admitting that the Police often tilted prosecutions by accepting bribes, he contended that “that evil was small in comparison to the evil which this Bill was intended to prevent.”81 The solution lay in punishing the Police, which would serve as a deterrent to abuse of power and force people to abide by the new law. Two distinct additions were proposed to the new Bill of 1868. The word “overdrive” was borrowed from the Stage Coaches Act of 1866, on the ground that “whatever held good in the case of horses, ought to hold good in the case of bullocks.”82 More importantly, the third section of the Bill attempted to provide a penalty for overloading as it was argued that the previous Acts had not defined the term, and Magistrates might differ on its interpretation. The insertion of the word “overloading” however caused much debate among different members. The Advocate- General argued that “overloading” should be specifically defined, and not included under broad offenses like “ill-treat, abuse or torture.” He further argued that certain descriptions of animals, drawing certain vehicles or carrying certain loads were not to be burdened beyond a certain weight, and that should be specifically defined. He added that defining the weight would be difficult because a person might overload accidentally, without any cruel motive towards the animal.83 Hence, it was necessary to decide how much overloading amounted to cruelty within the purview of the Act. 84 The Stage Carriage Act of 1861 was also sought to be amended in 1900 to take into account cruelty concerns. It was now stated that the licensing authorities may refuse to grant a license for a stage carriage if “the maximum number of passengers or weight of the luggage which it was proposed to carry in on the carriage was excessive.”85 No limits were however set as to what defined an “excessive” load. This semantic exercise in juridical propriety received a fresh lease of life when the Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta, T. A. Pearson corresponded about the issue of overloading bullock carts to the Secretary of the Calcutta SPCA.86 Pearson argued that it was quite

80 Mittra, 36. 81 Mittra, 37. 82 Mittra, 39. 83 Emphasis mine. 84 Mittra, 52. 85 Notification, dated 2nd Nov, 1900. WBSA. Judicial Department (Judicial Branch), F.N., J 1-A/16 7, No. 12, Nov 1900. 86 Chief Presidency’s Magistrate’s Court, No. 603, dated Calcutta, the 11th July 1902.

172 impracticable to fix upon any given load as excessive. He opined, “As to whether a load is excessive: or not, depends on the size and strength of the bullocks used to pull it and on the state of the roads at the same time”.87 Pearson argued that it would be necessary before such cases were brought to Council, to unload and weigh the cargo on any suspected cart, which again he apprehended might cause friction among the mercantile community and the hirers and owners of the carts. Pearson's letter attracted considerable response from the Secretary to the Calcutta SPCA, G. W. Lees.88 Lees contended that the majority of the carts plying for hire were served by practically the same kind of bullocks, of the same size, in the same condition, and were treated equally badly. Hence, there would be no difficulty in fixing a maximum load. Lees further suggested that that those who had better bullocks might seek special licenses for increased loads, and that would in a way encourage the employment of a better class of animals. Lees had his own reasons for pleading for a “fixed load.” He believed that it was impossible for anybody professional or unprofessional to judge from the appearance of a pair of bullock what load they could draw without strain or suffering. Lees asserted, “a pair of tired bullocks would cruelly suffer: drawing a load they might easily do when fresh.”89 The difference in condition of the load and the animals would make “cruelty at one time and not cruelty at another”.90 It thus seemed impossible to Lees for any magistrate to judge or use discretion except in the most arbitrary way unless he had witnessed the hearing of the animals at the time of the arrest. Added to the official dilemma of determining a “fixed load” weighed other considerations that left the issue of fixing maximum load an open question. The people who hired carts often forced the drivers to overload because payment was made by the journey, and not the weight carried.91 If in the dry seasons, ordinary carts carried 300 bricks weighing 26 maunds, during the with softer, wet roads and greater strains they were still forced to carry 300, regardless of the increase of 30% weight on the bricks by absorption of moisture. 92 Lees suggested a simple and effective remedy--- prescribing a “maximum load” to overloading in all seasons. 93 Lees demanded the Principal of the Veterinary College, Belgachia, the Commissioner of Police and the President of the SPCA to reach a unanimous decision

87 Ibid. 88 Report of the Calcutta SPCA for the Year 1904, dated Calcutta 12th July, 1902. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid 93 Ibid.

173 concerning the “maximum load” which could then be placed before the Lieutenant-Governor for legislation. After much deliberation, the matter was taken up by the Commissioner of Police, R. A Bignell who suggested to the Secretary that it had been reported to the government that a maximum load of 25 maunds for bullocks and 30 for buffaloes should be fixed, and that below it the Court should decide when the case came up.94 Eventually, on January 6, 1905, by-laws were passed under Section 559(51) prescribing the conditions under which persons should be permitted to drive registered carts.95 The Hackney Carriage Act for ticca gharries stated that every proprietor or driver of a cart should comply with the following provisions for regulating the maximum weight to be carried by the carts:

Table 6.1: Maximum Weights for Carters specified under the Hackney Carriage Act, 1905

Types of Carts Maximum Weights

For lorries or 4-wheeled wagons drawn by 2 buffaloes or horses 80 Maunds

For 2-wheeled carts drawn by 2 buffaloes 60 Maunds

For 2-wheeled carts drawn by 1 buffalo 30 Maunds

For 2-wheeled carts drawn by 2 bulls/bullocks 20 Maunds

For 2-wheeled carts drawn by 1 bull/bullock 10 maunds

Source: Report of the CSPCA for the year 1905. National Library, Kolkata

The Bill of 1868 drew fierce opposition from different elite members of the CSPCA that unveil the middle-class anxiety to monitor social discipline and throw light on the fragile nature of animal protectionism at this stage. Care was taken to ensure that the law would not affect the elite British members of the CSPCA and the Bengali middle-class that fancied caging birds as pets. For instance, Baboo Ramnath Tagore, a wealthy member of the CSPCA and the younger

94 Report of the Calcutta SPCA for the Year 1902, no. 8578 dated 11th July, 1902. National Library, Kolkata. 95 Sanctioned by the Local Government, Vide Notification No, 85-M dated Jan 6, 1905 published in the Calcutta Gazette 11th Jan 1905, Part I. B., pages 5 and 6.

174 brother of Bengali entrepreneur argued at the annual meeting in 1868 that the Bill required amendments as to the definition of “animal.” He argued that if the term “animal” in the Act was taken to mean any domestic or tamed quadruped or bird, “no one would be able to catch and purchase a bird, and imprison it for the purpose of domestication, for the Magistrate might consider it to be ‘wanton’ and fine the man who contravened the law.”96 The element of self-interest that ran through selective animal legislation reveals that while the humanitarian crusade initiated legislative changes in the society in favor of the tortured beast, animal protectionism betrayed a strong class bias. The broad equation between animal cruelty and lower-class brutality, versus kindness and middle-class social discipline was repeatedly emphasized in the CSPCA annual proceedings. The CSPCA was likewise concerned with the plight of draught horses, and with the prosecution of offending drivers under the Acts for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. However, fines imposed on carters, wagon-drivers and hackney coachmen soon brought down accusations of social bias on the Society. In context of nineteenth century Britain, recent historians of the anti- cruelty movement in Britain have magnified the charges against the Royal SPCA. 97 They have argued that the SPCA became an organ of the urban middle-class, hostile to, and defining itself against, the values of the laboring classes---even as a quasi-governmental instrument of control of the rebellious lower orders. I argue that while we notice a similar class bias in animal protectionism in India, however, an analysis of the literature published by the Calcutta SPCA produces a more complex and ambivalent impression that the class thesis suggests. The picture in nineteenth and twentieth century India was all the more complicated by the exigencies of colonialism. Laws were to be made operative on the lower-classes that depended on animals for livelihood---carters, cart-owners, butchers, pet-dealers, and rarely on the middle-class that fancied caging birds as pets.

96 Mittra, 48-49. 97 See Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, Brian Harrison, Peaceable Modern Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 82-156; Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (London: Penguin, 1990), 129-56. This prevailing view is partly contested by Kean in Animal Rights, 31-2, 36.

175

Improving the Yoke

The case of the burdened animal demonstrates the multiple and varying ways in which a plethora of involved parties understood the value and use of draft animals and the meanings associated with cruelty. Often the nature and extent of cruelty inflicted and the subsequent protectionist attempts on them varied from one type of animal to another. The deferential attitude towards horses and bullocks was evident not only in the greater amount of cruelty inflicted on bullocks, but also in the technology and mechanisms to protect both. If the CSPCA invented sun protector for horses, for bullocks the protectionism was geared towards guaranteeing a painless life. For the bullocks, protectionism was more urgent; for horses it was less immediate. In tandem with legislations, attempts were made by the Society to devise better harness for the draught animals. The following images testify:

Source: Annual Report of the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Uttarpara Jaykrishna Library.

Figure 1: Common Bengali Yoke

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Figure 1 represents the common Bengali yoke which was an immovable fixture to the cart, thus causing a constant pain on the neck of the bullocks. Moreover, the several wooden pins were passed through the yoke, on the outer side of the bullocks’ necks, to prevent the yoke from slipping.

Figure 2 represents the American yoke designed in the manner of a horse-collar. The object of the large iron ring, suspended from the iron strap in the center, was by allowing the pole of the cart to rest loosely within it, to prevent the jarring of the yoke complained of in the Bengali implement. The advantage of such a yoke was that the cart could even be overturned, without the yoke harming the neck of the bullocks.

Figure 2: American Yoke designed like a horse collar

Figure 3 represented a major improvement on the Bengali yoke, invented by Mess. Monteith and Company Half Collars. The inner sides of the Collar were stuffed and covered with leather to prevent causing any pain to the neck of the bullocks.

177

Figure 3: Improved yoke invented by Mess. Monteith and Company Half Collars

178

The CSPCA also introduced a new invention, “Sun Protector,” by Mr. Mead of Calcutta for the benefit of horses forced to work under the sun. 98 The sale of the Sun Protector was entrusted to veterinary surgeons of Calcutta, Messrs. Hunter and Co. It was however, argued that the Sun Protector needed adequate technical improvements. While it covered the head and the upper portion of the neck, it did not cover the whole spine. Though sunstroke primarily affected the area covered by the Protector, it was argued that the cause was not always localized. An extension of Mr. Mead’s plan was thus suggested by the CSPCA. It was necessary to devise a neck protector, and a loin protector, both of which could be easily fitted and worn by the horses. It was believed that the lightness of the material (Sola) and the simplicity of its construction would favor its adoption. It was also believed that water troughs were much needed for the overworked draft animals—bullocks and horses, and the CSPCA built a Drinking Fountain at Tank Square as a memorial to its first and dedicated patron, Colesworthy Grant.

Figure 4: Sun Protector for Horses

98 Mittra, 22.

179

Cruelty versus Control: The Belgachia Veterinary Infirmary

Animal protection soon received a crucial boost as it gradually became intertwined with the colonial interest in creating a well-structured system of veterinary health. From the mid- nineteenth century onwards, increasing outbreak of cattle plagues in different districts of Bengal sent shock waves through the empire.99 Not only was the decimation of cattle wealth alarming, but the lack of a “western” style veterinary health care in India called for immediate attention. In 1889, the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Arrest) Act I (BC) of 1869 was sought to be amended “with a view to make the Bengal Veterinary Institution at Belgachia an infirmary for the treatment of animals in respect of which offences under the Act have been committed in Calcutta, , Sealdah, Chitpur, Cossipore, and Dumdum.”100 Accordingly, in 1900 the Bengal Veterinary College at Belgachia was registered as an Infirmary under the Cruelty to Animals Act, 1869.101 It was now held under the amended Act of 1900, that every tortured animal should be sent to the Infirmary and treated until cured. Once the animal had been cured, a notice was to be sent to the owner of the animal, warning that “the animal would be sold to defraying expenses, if not removed within fourteen days.”102 Furthermore, a distinction was made between the class of animals to be admitted on grounds of whether it was “wild” or “tame,” thus giving Magistrates the right to destroy wild animals at once if it became “dangerous” or “unmanageable.”103 Curiously, an Infirmary designed to cure abused animals could simultaneously destroy those same animals at its will. There was to be a strict categorization of animals to be brought into the Infirmary, including the charges for each.

99 See Chapter Three, “The Diseased and the Dead,” and Chapter Four, “The Politics of Diagnosis” for a detailed discussion on cattle plague, governmental intervention and the multi-layered nature of conflict between colonial and indigenous medical practices directed at tackling cattle murrains. 100 Municipal Department, Medical Branch, April 1889, F.N 1A/5, No. 5-13. WBSA. 101 Letter from P C Lyon, Director of the Department of Land Records and Agriculture, Bengal to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Revenue Department, dated 24th July 1900. WBSA. Judicial (Judicial), Nov 1900, F.N.239A, No.1-2. 102 Ibid. Section 3 of the “Instructions to the Magistrates under Act I (BC) of 1868 as amended by Act III ( BC) of 1900 stated that cured but unclaimed animals were to be sold by the Police under Magistrate’s orders. 103 Ibid.

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Table 6.2: Scale of Charges for Animals to be brought into Belgachia Infirmary

Class Animals Charge/diem Minimum Charge

I Horses, ponies and 6 annas Rs 6 buffaloes

II Cattle, deer, small wild 4 annas Rs 2 herbivore, digs and cats

III Sheep and goats 2 annas 8 annas

IV Poultry and small birds 1 anna 8 annas

V Camels Re 1 Rs 12

Elephants Rs 5 Rs 60

Ostriches Re 1 Rs 12

Source: Registration of the Veterinary Hospital attached to the Bengal Veterinary College at Belgachia as an Infirmary under the Cruelty to Animals Act, 1900. WBSA, Calcutta.

While the Act was meant to bestow powers on the Magistrate to destroy “dangerous” animals, not much is known about the owner’s interest in bringing in the animals. Did the owners intend to rework the animals once cured? Was the Infirmary a way for the owners to get away from keeping the diseased animals? Were the animals brought in left unclaimed? These are some of the questions to which we do not find answers. Sympathy for the abused animals poured in from different quarters---notably from the agriculturists and veterinarians. A cursory look into the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century British agricultural manuals and veterinarian texts reveals how the fate of the bullied bullocks and horses often drew attention of these authors. For instance, Dr. Sam Higginbottom (1874-1958), a British Christian who came to India in 1903 and founded the Allahabad Agriculture Institute (now Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences)

181 in 1910, was deeply disturbed at the way many an Indian farmer worked his bullocks. 104 Volumes were published on domestic animals that emphasized the need to take adequate care, feed and nurture horses, bullocks and cows. Some were meant to instruct cattle breeders and farmers on improving the health of cows and bullocks in India, while others provided detailed guidelines on nurturing the race horse.105 For instance, British veterinarian and Captain of Bengal Staff Corps, M. Horace Hayes in his A Guide to Training and Horse Management in India devoted an entire chapter to “Saddling Horses,” where he discussed the ways of restraining a horse without causing him any pain.106 The veterinarians’ and agriculturists’ interest however seemed to reinforce less of the genuine protectionist sentiment and stemmed more from an economic urgency. Colonial concern for animals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century thus emerged from multiple quarters, as various parties with diverse interests in animals perceived the beasts differently. Not only were the fault-lines not drawn along ethnic lines, but even the divisions within the different classes were complex. Different parties had divergent agendas---the missionaries wanted to evangelize India by basing their work on the “cattle problem of India;” horse-racers and veterinarians were eager to maintain a steady supply of healthy horses; and the CSPCA used the trope of uneducated “cruel masses” to nurture a “superior” British sense of kindness and facilitate animal welfare by disciplining the economically marginalized.

Protection, Prosecutions and Colonial Law

“Illiteracy Breeds Cruelty:” The Humane Society

Increasing prosecutions targeted at overloading might have worked to some extent to lower the burden on the animals. However, it is difficult to say how far the prosecutions actually

104 Sam Higginbottom, The Gospel and the Plow or The Old Gospel and Modern Farming in Ancient India. (London: Central Board of Missions and Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1921. Republished in 2006). 105 Colonial interest in improving cattle health of India led to the growth of a huge body literature that outlined ways to ameliorate agriculture by advancing cattle health. Among them are Isa Tweed, Cow-keeping in India, A Simple and Practical Book on their Care and Treatment, their Various Breeds, and the Means of Rendering them Profitable (Calcutta,Thacker, Spink,1900), R Wallace, Indian Agriculture ( Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co, 1892). There was also a substantial body of works on how to treat the race horse, as jockeying as a sport had by nineteenthcentury become hugely popular among elite circles in Calcutta. McShane and Tarr have shown how the nineteenthcentury urban horse had a liberating influence, opening a of leisure for the nineteenthcentury urbanites of all classes, most obviously by allowing access to either the real countryside or the large parks and that pretended to imitate nature. 106 M. Horace Hayes, A Guide to Training and Horse Management in India; with a Hindustanee Stable and Veterinary Vocabulary and the Calcutta Turf Club Tables for Weight for Age and Class ( Calcutta: Thacker, Spinx and Co., 1878).

182 implied an increase in kindness towards animals. Justice Stanley, the President of the Calcutta SPCA, believed that the unduly lenient sentences passed on the offenders by the magistrates were responsible for repeated offences and consequent prosecutions.107 According to him, it was necessary to inflict exemplary punishment, as merely nominal fines had little effect in checking a repetition of cruelty. For instance, he argued, the owner of a cart and worn-out horse or bullock might prefer to pay a as a fine rather than give up the services of the animals which brought him a monetary profit. After having made a thorough enquiry into the punishments inflicted by the magistrates in Calcutta for offences of cruelty to animals, Justice Stanley concluded that prior to 1889 only two or three cases had been sentenced to imprisonment. This he believed was indeed a significant discovery as the offenders were all old offenders. Prosecutions continued to rise and in 1900, the number reached the highest in the history of the Society. The following table exemplifies the scale of operations:

Table 6.3: Statistics of Animal Cruelty Prosecutions, 1900

Calcutta 11, 011 England and Wales 7,900 Madras 54,011 Naples 4,967 Bombay 3,321 Source: Report of the Calcutta SPCA for the Year 1900. National Library, Kolkata

Increasing convictions formed a matter of intense discussion among animal protectionists of Calcutta. Questions were raised as to whether the rising prosecutions were a boon or bane to the society. It was reasoned that Calcutta ranked highest in prosecutions because not only were the number of bullocks to be found in Calcutta greater than in Bombay or Madras, but the bullocks were also worked throughout the year.108 In Bombay, during the monsoons, the bullocks were entirely sent away. Bullocks in Bombay, it was argued, were made to work eight months in the year, the other four months being periods of complete rest. But in Calcutta a bullock had no rest. In addition to blaming long periods of work, the Society was keen to point its accusing fingers at the illiterate cart-drivers of Calcutta in causing atrocious animal suffering. The most common inference concerning high rates of animal cruelty in Calcutta as compared to the Upper

107 Report of the Calcutta SPCA for the Year 1888-89. National Library, Kolkata. 108 Ibid.

183

Provinces was that “most of the drivers of the hackney carriages in Calcutta were men who came down from the uncivilized parts of Bengal. They had no other profession to take but this, and they belonged to the lowest strata of society.” 109 Accusing the unlettered cart drivers, butchers and carters was a recurrent theme that ran steady through the discourse of animal protectionism in colonial Calcutta, reinforcing the colonial presumption that illiteracy and cruelty worked in tandem and that education inculcated compassion. Certainly, the cruelties committed by working men were both more obtrusive and easier to punish than those of the powerful; and as governance of the Calcutta SPCA was increasingly infiltrated by aristocratic patrons, this discriminatory tendency was confirmed. However, members of the Calcutta SPCA were in fact preoccupied by an attempt to understand the origins of cruelty in the human psyche and in society as a whole, and to find a means of eradicating it. Was it, as they suggested, a residue of innate “Indianness” which British tutelage would eliminate? 110

The Anomaly of “Animal”: Colonial Ambivalence

While legislations and newer inventions all worked to unburden the overloaded animal, however, in a perfect colonial irony, the meaning of “animal” itself was left vague and amorphous in the British imagination. A study of the court cases brought to the in the nineteenth century shows how the Cruelty Acts and their ambiguous clauses meant that there was perpetual confusion between status of “domestic” and “captured” animals. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1890 stated that it would protect “animals” which were either “domestic in themselves by breed or otherwise” or “which though captured in a wild state had become domestic or rather domesticated after being captured.”111 The Act when applied to the cases of animal cruelty created utter confusion. For example, on twentieth July 1897, a case was brought before Justice Wilkins and Justice Ghosh in the Calcutta High Court where the petitioner Soshi Bewah was charged with having in her possession for sale certain crabs that

109 “The Chairman’s Speech.” Report of the Calcutta SPCA for the Year 1900. National Library, Kolkata. 110 In facing such problems, the Calcutta SPCA aligned itself with the larger forces of moral and social reform then active in Britain. Indeed, many of the same individuals, notably Wilferforce and Fowell Buxton, actively supported both the abolition of slavery and campaigns to protect animals from cruelty. The commodification of rational and sentient beings; their public exposure in sales which separated them from their former companion; their undeserved punishments: all offered parallels between horses in Britain and slaves on the West Indian and American plantations. It is not fortuitous that Anna Sewell’s horse was black, nor than an American edition of her novel was subtitled “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Horse.” See Chitty, Women Who Wrote Black Beauty, 224-5; Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen 1780-1900 ( Ann Arbor: Press, 1998), 76-77. 111 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1890. National Library, Kolkata.

184 suffered pain because they had been mutilated in April 1897 at the New Market. 112 Evidence indicated that she had 200 live crabs for sale with all their legs pulled off and with their shells broken.113 When the case was first brought to the High Court, Soshi Bewah was convicted under the Prevention of Cruelty Act, 1890. However, confusion soon arose when her lawyer argued that the conviction had been unwarranted because crab was not an “animal” within the meaning of the Act, as they had been captured a few days before and were still “wild” and had not been domesticated. Neither of the judges would however accept this line of argument, and asserted that Soshi Bewah’s lawyer had bent the meaning of the Act in his client’s favor. They argued that so long as an animal was wild, i. e, it has not been brought under the subjugation and control of man, the law could not protect the concerned animal. But if a living organism having sensation and power of voluntary motion had been captured and domesticated, it qualified to be an “animal” within the purview of the Prevention of Cruelty Act. Thus the common crime of torturing crabs by breaking shells and thus selling them had almost succeeded in overriding the Cruelty Act. As these man-made categories like “domestic,” “captured,” “tame,” “wild,” were constantly defined and redefined by subsequent Cruelty Acts, and as ambiguous colonial legislations guaranteed life and promised death to animals in Bengal, the boundaries between pain/mercy, cruelty/compassion kept oscillating and were crossed many a times by different parties----pet dealers, carters, merchants, the Calcutta SPCA and the British government in their attempts to manipulate the fuzzy categories. The colonial classification of animals into the various categories---“wild,” “captured” and “domestic” is historically significant because it not only revealed that “animals,” were still objects of human manipulation and control, but it spoke much about the relationship between animals and a colonial government. Soshi Bewah was not convicted for selling live crabs, but for perpetrating cruelty on them. The colonial discourse on cruelty not only defined what an “animal” in colonial imagination was, but it actually favored animals which were under human control. The colonial classification system offered an increasingly powerful explanation to manipulate the material they structured. They embodied a sweeping human claim to intellectual mastery of the natural world.

112 Law Intelligence, High Court, July 20, 1897. Criminal Appcllate Side before Mr. Justice Ghosh and Mr. Justice Wilkins. Empress vs. Toolsi Bewah or Soshi Bewah. National Library, Kolkata. 113 Ibid.

185

Conclusion

Tensions within animal protectionism and abuse continued to persist as Calcutta witnessed repeated confrontations between the carters on the one hand, and police, CSPCA and other administrative authorities on the other hand.114 Overloading, strikes and legislations went hand in hand in a colonial society heavily dependent on non-human animals that sought to initiate animal welfare through disciplining its human subjects. The question of determining the fate of overburdened draught animals took a new lease of life in the early twentieth century with debates among the Calcutta , Police Department and the CSPCA concerning the need for erecting weigh bridges for bullock carts. In 1916, an Estates and General Purposes Special Committee was appointed to discuss questions relating to prevention of cruelty to animals in Calcutta, and to enquire whether the Calcutta Corporation was willing to erect weigh-bridges at certain thanas in the city and suburbs where cart traffic was heavy.115 It was argued that the Calcutta SPCA with its limited funds, had already constructed five weigh-bridges, but was unable to build more owing to a lack of funds. It was ascertained by the Police Department that the cost of an Avery’s bullock wagon weigh- bridge with complete outfit and cost of erection amounted to about Rs. 1550, which was beyond the budget of the CSPCA.116 The Special Committee recommended that “instead of prescribing, as in the Corporation by-laws, a scale of maximum load for carts, which tend to become the minimum, a scale of loads based in the average capacity of each class of animals should be prescribed and that to facilitate the use of this scale, a number of depots, which might conveniently be coincident with thanas, should be established at various points in the city and suburbs and that at each of these depots there should be a weigh-bridge.”117 In response to the enquires by the Police Department, the Chairman of the Calcutta Corporation replied that “under

114 Between 8th and 11th June 1901, a number of carts men and carriage drivers in Calcutta again successfully went on a strike that completely paralyzed the life of Calcutta for four days. Report of the CSPCA, 1902. National Library, Kolkata. The carter strike of 1901 is also analyzed by Tanika Sarkar, Bengal, 1928-1934: The Politics of Protest (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 115 Local Self-Government Department, Municipal Branch, dated December 1916. Provision of weigh-bridges in Calcutta for enforcing Corporation by-law regarding the maximum load for carts. FN., M 1B/36. No., B 280-83. WBSA. 116 Letter from L.S.S O’Malley, Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Chairman of the Corporation of Calcutta, dated nineteenthJuly 1916. Dacca. F.N, No. 374 T/M. WBSA. 117 Ibid.

186 the existing law the municipal funds cannot be spent for this purpose.”118 The Chairman assumed that the issue of prevention of cruelty to animals---the purpose for which weigh-bridges were required---was a subject to be dealt with in the Acts for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and not the Calcutta Municipal Act.119 Hence, the Municipal Act had no power to frame laws on the subject of animal cruelty. The matter was however not allowed to rest, as the Advocate- General and Legislative Council (L.R) soon retorted that the Chairman’s false assumption would call into question the legality of the by-law made under section 559(51) of the Calcutta Municipal Act for regulating the maximum load for carts. They argued that while the Calcutta Municipal Act did not give direct power to the Corporation to frame such a by-law, the defect was proposed to be removed by inserting in the Calcutta Municipal Bill a new provision that conferred power to the Corporation to make such by-laws ( clause 481 (3) of the Bill).120 Hence, “there is therefore no legal objection to the Corporation fund being spent on the provision of weighing bridges.”121 By-laws were thus framed under S. 559 (51) that would regulate the maximum weight to be carried by registered carts. However, the debate continued.122 Next, the Calcutta Corporation proposed that “the object for which “weigh bridges” are required, was essentially the prevention of cruelty to animals, and not the avoidance of obstruction, and this outside the scope, spirit, and intention of the Act, and from this point of view, it may well be contended that municipal funds cannot be spent for the purpose.”123 Amidst the heated debates on the necessity of erecting weigh-bridges, it is intriguing that the central discourse on erecting weight bridges shifted. A discourse that involved a plethora of rival parties was now no longer concerned with the plight of the overburdened animals, but more with the legality of an intervention and the power of the Corporation to frame laws. In a final analysis, the carters’ strikes betrayed a perfect colonial irony in several ways. On one hand, throughout the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century there had been an increasing demand for kindness towards animals and on the other hand, the colonial law on the

118 Letter from Mr. C F Payne, Chairman of the Corporation of Calcutta to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Municipal Department, Letter No. S 1742, dated Calcutta, the 28th . WBSA. 119 Letter to the Chairman of the Corporation of Calcutta from L.R. WBSA. Italics mine. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 There were repeated attempts to revise the Cruelty Acts and tweak the provisions of the Calcutta Hackney Carriage Acts, 1919 to regulate the maximum permission load; but no unanimous conclusions were ever reached. Municipal Dept, Municpal Branch. Proposed amendment of rules under the Bengal Cruelty to Animals Act, 1920 to reduce the minimum weight of loads drawn by draught animals. 123 Hand-written notes from the Municipal Department. Italics mine.

187 overburdened draft animal was never operative on the merchants or the middle men, but only on the uneducated cart-drivers. At another level, the colonial project of protection towards draught animals---a largely unsuccessful one at that---demonstrated how the colonial state, predicated on benevolence, constantly sought to control, subjugate and discipline its subjects—human and non- human. Thus carters strike as the outcome of a colonial ambivalence became the typical colonial irony that embodied the twin appeal for compassion and yet selective legislation that would preserve the interests of a colonial government. In the entire discourse, the animals involved became powerful signifiers as they exhibited class distinctions, race/gender relations, and status hierarchy in a colonial society. Yet, they were marginal to the larger project of colonial control. To conclude, this chapter explicates how specific practices in transport influenced upon the cultural construal of animals and related to issues of control and submission in a colonial context. By focusing on the burdened animal, it demonstrates the ways in which animal cruelty is constructed in a space where human cruelty, submission, and control were a dominant form of governance. The tragic saga of cruelty or compassion to animal is thus enmeshed in an interlocking relationship between animal on one hand and the human sensibilities and colonial governance on the other. Animal eventually turned out to be a contested site in which human sensibilities to animal and colonial governance conflicted with the rhetoric of compassion on one hand and power/hegemony on the other. In this contested terrain, the animal was compelled to be an unequal contender, destined to share what the stronger contending parties could afford to partake. Colonial imperatives, class distinctions and Bengali cultural sensibilities became the most mediating factor in weighing upon the amount of cruelty and compassion permissible to the silent protagonist. Finally, the trajectory of the burdened beasts, involving the carters, bullocks and horses, is sought to be observed at varying contours and locations in time, and in doing so the study is not reduced to a single colonial/anti-colonial frame. The study shows how it remains vital to explore the multitude of interrelations and crosscurrents, which were camouflaged by the anodyne rhetoric of ‘overloading’, ‘torture’, ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’.

188

CHAPTER SEVEN

CONCLUSION: LIMINAL BOUNDARIES, SHIFTING IDENTITIES

In this study, I have engaged the theme of animal cruelty to rewrite a social history of colonial Bengal as expressed through some key moments of human-animal encounters. The material culture of nineteenth and twentieth-century Bengal revolved around domestic animals--- agricultural cultivation depended on cattle; the urban city life relied on draft animals; and animals featured in food and rituals of the native Bengali subjects. Yet, in spite of the socio- economic importance of animals to Indian culture, contemporary South Asian scholarship is surprisingly silent on the importance of studying animals as historical actors. This study is a modest intervention that might arguably fill in this gap in South Asian historiography by co- opting animals into the study of empire building. More specifically, it has demonstrated how indigenous and colonial discourses on cruelty to animals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century not only revealed a very ambivalent attitude towards animals, but brought out the tensions among different human groups inhabiting an internally complex colonial society. My research has sought to break new ground by making the underexplored category of nonhuman animals, more central to the history of science and colonialism, and by forging the connection between race, class, and species in the history of colonial India. Throughout the study, I have demonstrated how nonhuman animals became powerful signifiers and markers of identities, and yet remained marginal to the larger project of colonial control, which was bent on dominating human subjects more than nonhumans. Each of the case studies---politics of rinderpest control, slaughterhouse inspection, and carters strikes are the outcome of the colonial ambivalence. They serve as the typical colonial irony where we witness the twin appeal for compassion and yet selective legislation that would preserve the interests of a colonial government at the expense of both human and nonhuman subjects. This study has also attempted to delve into the different layers of “othering” and studied the divisions existing even within each group---whites, colored, and the colonized animals. Furthermore, we have seen that any study of colonial knowledge formation has to analyze such

189 nuances within the colonial discourse, which would help to locate the different motives of the different parties that challenged and appropriated the overall systems of knowledge creation. Using the discourse on animal cruelty in colonial Calcutta as a useful instrument for studying human-animal relationships, it has arguably opened up a new area of historical enquiry: the contextual history of animals in urban spaces in colonial India. To deepen our understanding of human’s relationships with animals, this project has historicized the contested meanings, knowledge systems and sites of human-animal interaction in colonial India by demonstrating the implications that it conveyed for science, culture and race. The three major case studies have also revealed that animal cruelty was often constructed in a space where human cruelty, control and submission were the dominant form of governance. Linking the subject of animal protectionism to veterinary medicine, colonialism and knowledge-formation, my research has brought together environmental history, colonial history and history of science. In terms of broader impact, this study has promised to extend recent South Asian research at the intersection of environmental history, science and society, and colonial history by coopting animals into the study of imperialism. It has also helped us to rethink contemporary debates over animal-human relations in science, nature, and agriculture. As has been analyzed in Chapter Two, animal-human relationship has been approached from multiple angles in modern South Asian historiography. Two trends have been especially dominant---namely, studies focusing on the holy cow and subsequent religious mobilization among Hindus, and works on colonial hunting and wildlife that have investigated? the colonial fascination with the tiger. That animal sports were a common amusement in pre-colonial and colonial India is evident from the memoirs of British officers, travelogues, and the numerous Mughal and Rajput paintings. If cock fighting was a popular game sport in Southern India, the very aristocratic tradition of pigeon-flying dominated the ‘native’ courts of Baroda and .1 In terms of big game shot, the Mughals indulged largely in elephant hunting. Direct and indirect references to animal cruelty involving sports begin to surface from 18th century onwards, when Lady Dufferin laments about cock fighting that “I feel almost sorry I had been present, for it does seem rather barbarous.”2 In fact, Indian and British shikar flourished alongside each other in the eighteenth and nineteenth

1 William Crooke, “Amusements,” Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on various subjects connected with India. (London: John Murray, 1906). 2 Crooke, 11.

190 centuries.3 From the late nineteenth century onwards, Forest Rules began to lay down “bag limits” for sport hunters, as the latter debated what was better as a sport---snares for deer or trapping tigers.4 The wild carnivores thus entered official thinking and system of classification. In colonial shikar literature, there was a marked contrast with the previous period. Rival Indian hunters who did not belong to a privileged elite circle were branded as butchers who killed for gain and not for glory.5 Colonial legislations thus began to define the class of animals that could be hunted as sport versus animals that could be kept.6 In this context, contrasting the Cruelty to Animals Acts in Britain and Calcutta, and related social, scientific, and political movements, for example, has proved to be a rich source for understanding the flow of knowledge from the colony to the metropole and vice-versa. This study has thus dismantled the binary opposition between home and colony, Britain and India, by attempting to integrate them. However, sacred cows and wild tigers do not tell the whole story of nonhuman animals in India. By contrast, this study has consciously attempted to move away from both the cow and the tiger. Rather, it has aspired to investigate the larger colonial paradox: Why did the British, so bent on hunting, concern themselves with animal protection at all? Some historians like Deepak Kumar have hinted at the importance of animals and the study of zoology to the empire.7 However, such studies, though otherwise extremely useful, have remained sketchy and they do not adequately explore the connection between nonhuman animals and empire building. While colonial historians do acknowledge the value of appraising animals, it is however, largely under theorized in South Asian scholarship. In this study, I sought to reframe the history of these domestic animals---the horses, bullocks, dogs--- that inhabited both urban and rural spaces to understand what their stories revealed about a colonial government. In fact, it was this larger question that determined the character of this project: Why were the British responsive towards certain animals? What was their prerogative in privileging some animals over others? Which animals did they protect? In researching and finally answering these questions, I came across

3 Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 47. 4 Rangarajan, 52. 5 Rangarajan, 48. 6 It is evident that shikar in general was one of the sites on which the colonial project sought to construct the difference between its “superior” self and the “inferiorized” native other. See Ranjan Chakrabarti, “Tiger and the Raj: Ordering the Maneater of the Sunderbans 1880-1947,” in Space and Power in History: Images, Ideologies, Myths, and Moralities (Kolkata, India: Penman, 2001). 7 Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj: A Study of British India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

191 some of my strongest findings. I realized that I did not end up merely telling a bunch of stories about particular animals—dogs, tigers, fowls etc. Rather, I have been able to show that there a crucial connection between them. Colesworthy Grant, the founder of the humane society, CSPCA, was so visibly moved by the death of his pet Persian cat that he mourned for weeks and immediately took to the task of protecting domestic animals in Calcutta. However, in spite of Grant’s empathy for the exploited animals in Calcutta, the CSPCA did not protect stray dogs or cats in the streets of Calcutta. The animals that the CSPCA, a humane society that grew in a colonial milieu, did protect were draft animals and large meat-producing cattle. In other words, there was an implicit logic behind including and excluding certain animals that the British in Bengal wanted to protect. Indeed, the animals that eventually made their way into the colonial archive were not so much stray dogs or cats ( some colonial efforts were directed towards “destruction of stray dogs”), but only those animals that served the needs of the empire. This study has demonstrated that colonial animal protectionism was a selective, piecemeal, and myopic project that preferred and safeguarded animals mostly for imperial interests. If cruelty was an innate Indian vice rampant among the unlettered Indians, one of the best ways to force Indians accept British tutelage was to build up the image of a benign Empire by seeking to protect India’s numerous animals. As the case studies reveal, from controlling animal diseases like glanders in workhorses or rinderpest in cattle, to inspecting diseased animals meant for food consumption, protectionism was geared towards preserving the interests of the British civilians and troops. In addition, by favoring British and elite Indian planters, cattle owners and by constantly controlling the native farmers, British animal protectionism was also as much about reordering the indigenous population as combating animal diseases. It attempted to protect certain specific nonhuman animals by disciplining and monitoring certain indigenous human communities. It is thus a story of perpetually “othering” both humans and nonhumans. My study thus has opened up a new vista of colonial Calcutta through a comparative and overlapping study of the historical use, construction, and meaning of domestic animals from the mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. It has added to existing histories of colonial India by making human-animal relationships the pivotal point, and examining the construction of fractured identities in terms of diverse relationships with animals.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Samiparna grew up in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India where she received her Bachelor’s degree from Presidency College and Master’s degree in History from the . Samiparna worked as a Junior Research Fellow in Calcutta under the University Grants Commission (New Delhi) for a year before she moved to the United States to pursue her doctoral studies. At FSU, she received her Master’s degree in History of Science, Medicine, and Environment in December 2008. Joining the doctoral program at FSU in August 2007, Samiparna worked closely with Dr. Frederick Davis and Dr. Claudia Liesbeskind, who greatly helped her to develop, refine, and finally compose her dissertation on the history of animal protectionism in colonial Bengal. Her project appeals to a large range of audience and will be of interest to historians of science, medicine, environment, animal studies scholars, and South Asianists across disciplines. Samiparna lives with her husband, a computer scientist in Tallahassee, Florida and plans to move to Milledgeville, Georgia to join her new job as an Assistant Professor at Georgia College and State University from Fall 2012. Samiparna thoroughly enjoys lecturing and is especially passionate about teaching South Asia, as also history of Science, Disease, and Environment. Samiparna and her husband spend their leisure time traveling, watching world cinema, and trying out diverse cuisines.

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