Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 331

In the summer of 1822, an Act of Parliament came into force in the United Kingdom to prevent the ‘cruel and improper Treatment of Cattle’. It made it an offence to beat, abuse or ill-treat ‘any Horse, Mare, Gelding, Mule, Ass, Ox, Cow, Heifer, Steer, Sheep, or other Cattle’. Martin’s Act – named after Richard Martin, the Irish MP who drafted it – was the world’s first national animal welfare law.

A couple of years later, in 1824, at a meeting held in the unlikely location of Slaughters’ Coffee House, London, Martin and others formed the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later given ‘Royal’ status and known today as the RSPCA) to ensure implementation of the Act. They blazed a nineteenth-century institutional and legislative trail that was to be followed, at least to some degree, in several parts of Europe, as well as in Canada, the US and Russia. Colonial Bengal was no exception. In 1861, a British artist named Colesworthy Grant, who had long been resident in India, founded the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA); Lord Elgin, Viceroy of India, became its patron and laws were introduced to punish the ill-treatment of animals.

However, this book says that there were added dimensions to the movement in Bengal that went beyond a simple desire to prevent suffering – and that the wielding of sanctions there was frequently motivated as much by politics as protection. It makes the case, in short, that in India: ‘Animal cruelty and protection was… more about legitimizing colonialism than about addressing the suffering of non-humans in the colony’ (p. 5) and uses contemporary debates on humanitarianism as a lens to understand the nature of British colonialism in Bengal.

Samiparna Samanta begins by outlining the tensions that have been provoked in today’s India by the Hindu nationalist government’s clampdown on beef eating and cattle slaughter, and reminding us that, paradoxically, ‘the country where almost 80 per cent of the population revere cows and refrain from eating beef, is also the world’s second-largest beef exporter’ (p. 3). The origins of this paradox and these often-violent clashes can, she suggests, be traced back to the colonial era – a time when British concerns about animal welfare, as well as notions of health and hygiene, coincided with rapid urbanization and an increase in the number of Calcutta’s slaughterhouses, as well as religious and class-based Bengali deliberations about vegetarianism. Sitting, as Samanta says, at the ‘intersection of three sets of scholarships: history of science/medicine, environmental history, and urban history’ (p. 11) it is less a book about the animal welfare movement, and more one about the animal as an agent for the complexities and legacies of Empire.

Samanta structures the book around three main stories, looking at animals as diseased, eaten and over-worked. Chapter 1, which provides an historical context to the humanitarian movement in colonial India, outlines the complexities of attitudes to animals in pre-colonial times and into the nineteenth century, and then discusses the formation of the CSPCA, which was ‘a conglomeration of several influential Hindu landlords, well-to-do Muslims and Christians’ (p. 44) divided in their attitudes to animals: some were ‘more concerned with disciplining the lower orders‘ whilst others ‘were vocal about caring for the animals’ (p.47). Although the Society might have seemed to be an extension of the RSPCA, Samanta argues that closer scrutiny reveals colonial humanitarianism with an ‘Orientalist tinge’.

Chapter 2 is likely to be of most interest to agricultural historians as it discusses colonial responses to outbreaks of rinderpest (often known as cattle plaque) in Bengal. The disease, which caused much consternation to the colonial government, did not only devastate cattle populations but also created (or exacerbated) complex fractures in society; there were differences of veterinary opinion for instance, not only amongst British vets but also between British and Bengali vets. Although local knowledge of cattle diseases was sought, it was also often downplayed and native remedies treated with suspicion in favour of a modern, ‘scientific’ understanding. The chapter also examines further dimensions to the politics of care, discussing growing unease amongst Bengali elites about the ways local go-dagas or cow doctors treated animals. The politics of diagnosis, Samanta argues, was ‘often more about controlling human populations than animals’ (p. 131).

The rinderpest epidemic had consequences that were far-reaching, not least in the way it created new anxieties about diseased animals entering the human food chain and about meat-eating itself. Chapter 3 looks at this issue in detail, revealing how slaughterhouses became foci of attention and tensions for competing groups in debates encompassing issues ranging from cruelty to public health and vegetarianism.

The last story, that of the burdened or over-worked animal, is the subject of chapter four. It discusses the introduction of legislation to protect draft animals from practices such as twisting exhausted bullocks’ tails to urge them on, or yoking animals to heavy loads even if their necks were sore and wounded, and examines the ways that prosecutions tended to focus on the economically disadvantaged carters, rather than the middlemen or merchants who encouraged overloading.

The editing of this book has been careless, and there are frequent typographical slips (‘This feat is prompted not much by profit motive than his love for animal’ (p.58) for instance, as well as at least two factual errors: it refers (p. 34) to a British Cruelty Act of 1867 (it was 1876) and states that it ‘categorically forbade experiments on dogs and cats’ (it didn’t). However, by focusing on discourses around animals in imperial India, this book exposes some of the complex and multi-layered tensions that existed within the societies of both the colonizer and the colonized. It also adds to our understanding of the intricate politics that can surround outbreaks of disease in livestock.