Meat, Mercy, Morality : Animals and Humanitarianism in Colonial Bengal, 1850-1920

This book analyzes how discourses of cruelty against animals - in veterinary, dietary, and transport registers - inform the colonial imagination of humanitarianism. It argues that debates concerning animals invoked less protectionism, and reflected in microcosm the nature of British Empire and Bengali anxieties over dietetics and identity. Imagining animals as diseased, eaten and overworked, the study reveals that animal cruelty was often enacted in a space where control and submission were the dominant form of governance.

This book disentangles complex discourses around humanitarianism to understand the nature of British colonialism in India. It contends that the colonial project of animal protection in late nineteenth-century Bengal mirrored an irony. Emerging notions of public health and debates on cruelty against animals exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent Empire and a powerful imperial reality where the state constantly sought to discipline its subjects-both human and nonhuman. Centered around stories of animals as diseased, eaten, and overworked, thebook shows how such contests over appropriate measures for controlling animals became part of wider discussions surrounding environmental ethics, diet, sanitation, and the politics of race and class. The authorcombines history with archive, arguing that colonial humanitarianism was not only an idiom of rule, but was also translated into Bengali dietetics, anxieties, vegetarianism, and vigilantism, the effect of which can be seen incontemporary politics of animal slaughter in India.