Meat, Mercy, Morality

About the Speaker

Samiparna Samanta is Associate Professor at Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University, India. As part of her own research, Samiparna focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia, predominantly in areas of history of science and medicine, colonialism, human-animal relations. Prior to JGU, Samiparna was an Associate Professor of History at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, USA. Samiparna received her Bachelor’s degree from Presidency College, Kolkata and a Master’s degree in History from the University of Calcutta. She received her Ph.D. from Florida State University (FSU) in 2012, and an MA in History of Science and Medicine from FSU in 2008. She is currently working on her book manuscript that uses the lens of human-animal relationships to understand the nature of British imperialism in India.

Abstract

"Cattle have become rare, the butchers are buying up all the cattle of the country!"*

This talk examines the relationship between animals, diet, and disease in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India to analyze its impact on the history of Calcutta’s urban spaces. More specifically, it explores how slaughterhouse emerged as a major site of tension among British public health officers, humane societies, and the bhadralok (Bengali middle class) as they came to be enmeshed in an interlocking relationship and debated the regulation of Calcutta’s urban space. Concern for slaughterhouses surfaced fast with the expansion of the city. In the twentieth century, with emergence of new notions of social hygiene, contests over appropriate measures for controlling animals became part of wider debates surrounding environmental ethics, vegetarianism, and a politics of race/class that reconfigured boundaries between the colonized and colonizer, humans and nonhuman animals. At a theoretical level, through this story of animal-human interface, I illustrate how the Bengali bhadralok in their understanding of diet and germs, often mediated the language of modern ‘science’ and imagined it in their own cultural contexts. More importantly, I demonstrate how humans and nonhumans often mimicked the boundaries between the colonized and the colonizer.

(*Report of the Commissioners appointed to enquire into the Origin, Nature etc, of Indian Cattle Plague, 1871. West Bengal State Archive, Kolkata, India)

Report

This talk focused on the slaughterhouses of Calcutta and the constant tension that arose between British public health officers, humane societies, and the Bhadralok, regarding these in the urban spaces of Calcutta. The speaker used this work as a window into colonial history and colonial culture and also a means to engage with Environment history and history of animals.

Dr Samanta first introduced us to a few questions essential to understanding why the work is important. The first was that the notion of eating versus the notion of worshipping. In contemporary India, there is an extensive debate about the cow and whether cow slaughter should be a crime or not, as the cow is also considered a holy animal in the Hindu tradition. Dr Samanta would show us through her work that similar debates were present in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century Calcutta. Should one consume what one has come to love? She does this by introducing us to the major trends of animal writings from that period. They usually focused on a rural ecology and cattle, and an over-romanticisation of the pre-colonial past. This would come as a reaction to the changing dietary habits that would come with the advent of colonisation and the building of Calcutta as an imperial city. The other major trends that she spoke about were of animals in wilderness and hunting traditions, which again ties back to the idea of what animal to hunt and eat, and the changing notions of masculinity with colonisation.

The next segment was focused on the attitude about meat of the general population. There are two aspects to this, one is the British perspective and the other is the Bhadrolok one. Dr Samanta showed us that with the advent of Calcutta as the imperial capital, the Bhadrolok (in addition to the British) diet became increasingly muddled with meat. This meat consumption was supplemented by a large number of cattle slaughtered in the neighbouring agricultural areas. Cattle for agricultural purposes became very rare. But the sanitary condition of these meats was extremely unhygienic.

This brings us to the third aspect of the response, that of the laws. Due to the heavily unhygienic conditions of the Calcutta Slaughterhouse, there was a demand for better slaughterhouses. This was spearheaded by the Calcutta Society for the prevention of cruelty against animals. The two important rhetorics surrounding that were that the methods of slaughter were against Christian methods of slaughter and the English way of justice. This was often a direct backlash against halal, the Muslim way of slaughter, as many butchers around Calcutta followed this method.

Thus there was a constant struggle around the same question which ultimately resulted in meat laws being introduced. Therefore the study of meat consumption gives us an interesting socio-political insight into Imperial Calcutta and organisation of Imperial cities.

By Pratiti, Undergraduate Batch of 2020