Meat, Mercy, Morality

This book uses the lens of humanitarian debates to understand the nature of British colonialism in India. It demonstrates that with emergence of new notions of public health in late 19th-century Bengal, contests over appropriate measures for controlling animals became part of wider debates surrounding environmental ethics, diet, sanitation, and a politics of race/class that reconfigured boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized. Centered around three major stories – animals as diseased, eaten, and overworked – it explores how the colonial project of animal protection mirrored an irony in that it exposed the disjunction between the claims of a benevolent colonial state and a powerful, not-too-benign reality where the state constantly sought to discipline its subjects – both human and nonhuman. It refreshes our understanding of environment, colonial science and British imperialism by arguing that colonial humanitarianism was not only an idiom of rule, but was also translated into Bengali dietetics, anxieties, vegetarianism and vigilantism which can be seen in India even today.