Exactly at noon, on April Fools’ Day in 1928, the carters of Calcutta unhitched their draught buffaloes to rest the animals in the cruel heat, just as the colonial legislature of Bengal had ordered. Left in the middle of the roads in Burra Bazaar, the carts blocked tram lines and traffic, cutting off the routes between the city’s jute mills and the river jetties. As police fought to clear the roads, historian Tanika Sarkar records, the people hit back, launching fusillades of bricks, soda water bottles, iron bars and sharp, iron wheel discs from their carts.
“This was later acclaimed by the official Communist press as the first barricade street fight with the police in India,” an Intelligence Bureau report later recorded, “which indeed it was.” Seven carters were shot dead by the police.
Last week, police in Assam filed First Information Reports against the organisers of buffalo and red-vented bulbul fights. The government stopped short of using force to prevent gatherings, likely understanding the potential risks of taking on cheering crowds. In 2017, mobs set light to police stations in Tamil Nadu, as authorities sought to stamp out jallikattu bullfights. Animal sacrifices at temples have persisted in several states despite laws prohibiting the practice, sometimes leading to criminal prosecutions
The ongoing debate on animal cruelty in India—which includes a legislative push to increase punishments—is most often represented as a simple moral issue. Tens of thousands of cases involving gratuitous cruelty to animals, ranging from sexual assault to sadistic torture—are registered each year, independent studies show.
Yet, the more-than-century-old story of policing how humans treat animals—sometimes bizarre, sometimes tragic—shows complex questions of class and culture are involved, too. Through the colonial period, the ethical norms of urban industrial societies and traditional cultures raised uncomfortable questions about power asymmetries centred around class, caste and faith. The questions remain unresolved to this day.
The barbarism of Asiatics
Florence Stanley had emerged as a kind of Florence Nightingale of the animal kingdom in early 20th-century Bengal, relentlessly campaigning against cruelty. She was among the very few women to serve in the Calcutta Metropolitan Police, her deceased husband a Brigadier in the colonial Indian Army. Leading the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Stanley saw the campaign against the mistreatment of animals as part of a broader effort to uphold the moral order by eradicating sex work and commercialised vice.
Stanley won the support of moral crusaders for her campaign to give buffaloes a summer-season rest break, but the ironies were evident. Police officer Douglas Gordon noted that, “others held that it was no more cruel than for any other beast, even humans, who had to work and sweat at heavy tasks in the heat”.
Everyone wasn’t persuaded that the Bengal legislature had acted in good faith, either. Gordon, who fought the carters in 1928, noted that European members of the legislature supported Stanley “not so much on grounds of cruelty but that such a measure might lead to the substitution of motor lorries for the antiquated and slow carts”.
For Stanley and her peers, historian Neel Ahuja records, the practice of phooka emerged as a critical concern. Forms of phooka— the inflation of the womb with air, often through a bamboo pipe inserted in the milch animal’s vagina—were widely supposed to improve the production of milk, from Ireland to Ethiopia.
Like the American missionary Katherine Mayo, author of an infamous polemic against Indian self-rule, Stanley saw the treatment of “children, women, and animals as interlinked signs of the barbarity and inhumanity of Asiatic racial types.”
Looking into a cowshed, Stanley watched as a milkman “seized the animal by the hairy end of the tail and with the greatest possible violence thrust this together with his hand and arms up to the shoulder inside the vagina of the animal. By the movements of the man’s arm, one could see that he was inserting the hairy end of the tail right inside the uterus”. Then, after “very casually dipping his hand in a tub of water, he started milking the buffalo”.
The practice had repulsed many Indians, too. MK Gandhi came to be repulsed by milk after learning of its existence. For colonial authorities, though, the war on phooka was also a rhetorical weapon, which legitimised efforts to regulate and control the practices of rural Indians.
Legislation introduced in 1899, specifically outlawing phooka, did little to end the practice. In 1948, the Calcutta High Court reduced a three-month sentence handed to milkman Subol Koley to a Rs 100 fine, noting that the offence here was comparatively mild. “The cow was subsequently milked and continued to produce milk indicating that the process of phuka committed on it had not been of a very serious character,” the judges noted.
The campaign did give momentum to various political groups, including White rulers seeking moral legitimacy for their rule, and native nationalists concerned with the protection of Gau Mata. The peasant got moral sermons, not empowerment.
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An inhumane ideology
Founded in 1861, the Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA) had begun fighting carters long before the 1928 strike. Following the introduction of the first animal cruelty laws that year, posters were put up, warning the drivers and owners of mistreated hack-horses and draught buffaloes that they could face prosecution. The number of wounded animals, the organisation noted in an 1862 report, far exceeded healthy ones. Large numbers of prosecutions followed, the burden falling mainly on carters, rather than the elites who owned the animals, or the middlemen who loaded the carts.
Living in a society where malnutrition and disease claimed enormous numbers of lives, the carters were less than impressed by the language of animal rights. The law did not criminalise the passion of colonial administrators or native rulers for the wholesale slaughter of tigers, or the practice of Bengal elites keeping caged birds for their amusement.
The carters responded by going on strike, which led to widespread losses for Bengal’s colonial-era merchants and traders. Efforts were made to lay down mandatory weight restrictions for cart loads but with little on-ground effect.
Historian Samiparna Samanta’s excellent work on animal-oriented humanitarianism in colonial India shows that the conflict with the carters was part of a series of skirmishes around hygiene, butchering practices and slaughterhouses. “The slaughterhouses,” she notes, “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.”
Echoes of these battles still play out today, in the conflicts over the sacrifice of animals in temples and public venues on occasions like Shivratri and Eid.
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An inconsistent humanitarianism
Few reading through recent newspaper headlines would fail to be repulsed, though. Killing puppies, our moral intuition shouts out, ought to merit more punishment than a fine of ₹50, as should gang-raping goats, or forcing birds to fight each other to death. The issue is too complex, though, to be left to moral intuition alone. Large numbers of cases of animal cruelty involve psychiatric illnesses India’s criminal justice system is ill-equipped to investigate and address. And that isn’t the only problem.
Even as vigilante killings to protect cows continue, the scholar Yamini Narayanan shows in her path-breaking work, there is a sphere of permissible violence against animals. Less-well-performing stud bulls, for example, are subjected to electro-ejaculation, the administration of electric shocks of up to 24 volts through the rectum. The painful practice of palpating the uteruses of cows before artificially inseminating them is commonplace.
The killing of an elephant with a firecracker-filled pineapple causes widespread outrage; the killing of wild boar with the same kind of explosive device, or the setting up of electric fences to keep out wildlife even as their habitat is encroached on, is conducted with widespread social and political approval, researcher Vaidyanath Nishant writes.
Letting loose the criminal justice system to defend the rights of animals has already victimised the most vulnerable in our society. These include Adivasis, dependent on ever-diminishing forests; the urban and rural poor who consume beef, and entire communities whose traditional practices have been deemed criminal by the moral values on which modern society and its laws rest.
Treating animals humanely needs more than tougher laws or aggressive policing. Like its colonial predecessor, modern India needs to take a long, hard look at its civilising mission.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)