Beastly Raj: Humans, Animals and Animal-Knowledges in the British Empire

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

As pets, pests, technologies and food, animals formed a major part of the British Empire in Asia. Yet, historians of empire have seldom taken note of their role in all their rich complexity. The few existing studies of animal history focus too narrowly on individual animal species and frequently fail to sufficiently historicize the complex ecology of human knowledges through which these animals were recognized and utilized.
This panel brings together four papers where the emphasis is on the complexity of human-animal interactions and the multi-layered construction of knowledge about animals. Each paper teases out a tension between ‘imperial’ and ‘local’ knowledges about animals. Besides the human-animal interaction, each paper also maps the interaction between different types of animal-knowledge. Pushkar Sohoni shows how particular human groups and their knowledge of particular animals became so indispensable to the imperial order that they were treated as a single technological unit. James Hevia’s paper shows how the imperial veterinary establishment gradually displaced indigenous knowledge of pack animals through the introduction of laboratory science and a war on microbes. Saurabh Mishra’s paper compliments Hevia’s by showing how the imperial order continued to rely upon local knowledges for cattle. Finally, Projit Mukharji shows how a range of ‘indigenous’ and settler-knowledges about the cat were mobilized in seeking to refashion it as an anti-plague technology. While all the papers are focussed on British India, they all look outward and trace lines of movement throughout the empire. Mrinalini Sinha will serve as Chair and Discussant.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Projit Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Mrinalini Sinha, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Humans and Beasts: A Collaborative Technological Unit - Pushkar Sohoni, University of Pennsylvania

• Surra and the Transformation of Veterinary Medicine in Colonial India - James Hevia, University of Chicago

• Animal Diseases and Popular Healing Practices in Colonial North India - Saurabh Mishra, University of Sheffield

• Cat and Mouse: Plague and the Contested Construction of a Medical Technology, c. 1907-20 - Projit Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania