Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Visualizing Peasant and Bovine Self-Sustenance in the Famine Tracts of Colonial India

2023; College Art Association; Volume: 105; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00043079.2022.2109390

1559-6478

Liza Oliver,

South Asian Studies and Conflicts

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century, the British Raj sponsored cattle competitions across India to educate peasants in responsible bovine husbandry practices to mitigate famine. Photographs of these competitions, which demonstrate the fraught convergence of economic liberalism and colonial humanitarianism, aimed to constitute model peasants and cattle of measurable self-improvement. Simultaneously, the photographs reveal traces of bovine-peasant relationships that unsettle these newly conceived colonial subjects and that speak to the manner in which cattle’s bodies were sites of competing political and affective inscription. NotesI would like to thank Namita Dharia, Susan Ellison, Sarah Mallory, Maureen Warren, Akshaya Tankha, Benjamin Siegel, Robert Linrothe, Christopher Pinney, and the editor of The Art Bulletin and its anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback or support of this project at various stages.1 F. Fraser Darling, “Animal Husbandry in the British Empire,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 82, no. 4257 (June 22, 1934): 829.2 John Falconer, “Willoughby Wallace Hooper: ‘A Craze about Photography,’” Photographic Collector 4 (Winter 1983): 258–86.3 An 1870 dispatch by Lord Mayo, Viceroy of India, cited by Eugene C. Schrottky, The Principles of Rational Agriculture Applied to India and Its Staple Products (Bombay: Times of India Office, 1876), 8.4 These famines were the Upper Doab Famine of 1860–61, the Orissa Famine of 1865–66, the Rajputana Famine of 1868–69, the Bihar Famine (sometimes referred to as the Bengal Famine) of 1873–74, the Madras Famine (sometimes referred to as the Great Famine) of 1876–78, the Indian Famine of 1896–97, and the Indian Famine of 1899–1900. Their naming after singular regions often belies their expansive geographic reach. “Major famine” is defined here by Raj criteria, and the number of major famines during this time could actually be considered much higher depending on the criteria used to evaluate and define them.5 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).6 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 5.7 Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library, 2008); and Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).8 Darren Zook, “Famine in the Landscape: Imagining Hunger in South Asian History, 1860–1990,” in Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India, ed. Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 107–31.9 Confirming Zook’s argument, a recent New York Times article entitled “Why We Are Publishing Haunting Photos of Emaciated Yemeni Children” is one of the first to overtly speak to this genre of representation and to attempt to couch it within the specificities of the Saudi assault on Yemen. Placing these photographs within the context of journalists’ duty to bear witness, the article nonetheless tells us nothing about the children depicted except their names and whether or not they had yet died. Eric Nagourney and Michael Slackman, “Why We Are Publishing Haunting Photos of Emaciated Yemeni Children,” New York Times, October 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/reader-center/yemen-photos-starvation.html.10 Papers Connected with the Betwa Canal Project in the North-Western Provinces [1868–1885] (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1877) (India Office Records [henceforth IOR] V/23/51, no. 232), 73.11 Saurabh Mishra, “Cattle, Dearth, and the Colonial State: Famines and Livestock in Colonial India, 1896–1900,” Journal of Social History 46, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 992. See also Mishra’s Beastly Encounters of the Raj: Livelihoods, Livestock and Veterinary Health in North India, 1790–1920 (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 2015).12 Mishra, “Cattle, Dearth, and the Colonial State,” 989–90.13 J. C. Geddes, Administrative Experience Recorded in Former Famines: Extracts from Official Papers Containing Instructions for Dealing with Famine, Compiled under orders of the Government of Bengal (Calcutta, 1874), 230, quoted in Mishra, “Cattle, Dearth, and the Colonial State,” 992.14 Mishra, “Cattle, Dearth, and the Colonial State,” 994.15 The Madras, Bombay, and Bengal presidencies were the major geographic and administrative divisions of British governance in India.16 See Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).17 See, for example, the many maps of the most consequential government publication produced on Indian famines in Report of the Indian Famine Commission (London: Printed by George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, Printers to the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1800).18 David Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 6–11. For more on the structures of famines, see Amartya Sen’s classic work, Poverty and Famine: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).19 Laxman D. Satya, Ecology, Colonialism, and Cattle: Central India in the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 70. For an in-depth understanding of the British land-tenancy system in India, see B. H. Baden-Powell, The Land Systems of British India: Being a Manual of the Land-Tenures and the Systems of Land-Revenue Administration Prevalent in Several Provinces (London: Clarendon Press, 1891); and Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).20 Satya, Ecology, Colonialism, and Cattle, 68–69.21 The Madras Presidency experimented with a different land-tenure system that cut out the zamindar (land leaser or owner) and allowed ryots to rent directly from the government. In theory, by cutting out the zamindar, this “ryotwari” system allowed ryots to be taxed at a slightly lower (though still excessive) rate without affecting government profits.22 A “Question and Answer” interview with a Lieutenant Pogson mentions interest rates of ryots at 37.5 percent. “Indian Agriculture,” Agricultural Gazette of India 5 (June 30, 1874): 289. See also S. Ambirajan’s chapter on the end of usury regulation under the British in the 1850s: “Economic Ideas and Economic Relations,” in Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 101–43. The Raj recognized this problem early on, particularly with its removal of usury regulations, and sought to rectify it in several ways, including with Act X passed in Bengal in 1859, which ostensibly protected ryots from landlord exploitation, but the law was toothless and easy to bypass. See also Ambirajan, “Economic Ideas and Economic Relations,” 115–29. On landowner-ryot rent exploitation in nineteenth-century India broadly, see also Eric Stokes, “The land-revenue systems of the North-Western Provinces and Bombay Deccan 1830–80: ideology and the official mind,” in The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 90–119; Sugata Bose, “Appropriation and Exploitation,” in Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 112–39; and Michelle Burge McAlpin, “The Agrarian System and the Impact of British rule,” in Subject to Famine: Food Crisis and Economic Change in Western India, 1860–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 84–143.23 Satya, Ecology, Colonialism, and Cattle, 76–77.24 William Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India (Madras and Bombay Presidencies and Province of Mysore), 1876-1878 (London: Longmans, Green, 1878), 1:8.25 Ibid., 27–33.26 The Ceded Districts, in what is today southern Andhra Pradesh and part of Karnataka, obtained their name after being ceded by the Nizam of Hyderabad to the East India Company in 1800 in exchange for military aid against the Marathas. They encompassed the areas of Bellary, Cuddapah, Anantapur, Kurnool, and parts of Tumkur.27 J. Frederick Price, “Notes on the Construction of Protective Railways in Ceded Districts,” in “Miscellaneous: folder containing minutes by Grant Duff and others on protective railways and famine in the Ceded Districts, reviews of the Madras administration for the years 1882, 1883 and 1881–85, police, competitive examinations, municipal matters, Syrian Christians in Travancore, the Ecclesiastical establishment, ryotwari system, work of the Settlement Department, and other administrative matters,” 1881–1886 (IOR Mss Eur F234/97).28 As J. Frederick Price noted of this situation, “Attention has also been called to the facts that the increase in the death-rate was, in a marked degree, synchronous with that in prices and that high prices and a high death-rate, generally speaking, accompanies distance from the railway.” Ibid., 7.29 Charles Benson, A Statistical Atlas of the Madras Presidency (Madras: Printed by the Superintendent, Government Press, 1895).30 See Ambirajan, “Economic Ideas and Famine Policy,” in Classical political economy, 59–100.31 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (London, 1951 [1913]), 370, 371, quoted in Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2017), 11.32 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Farrar & Reinhart, 1944), 160, quoted in Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 10.33 Schrottky, The Principles of Rational Agriculture, 1, 17.34 Ibid., 1, 12.35 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 4–5.36 Ibid., 8.37 See U. Kalpagam, “Colonial Governmentality and the ‘Economy,’” Economy and Society 29, no. 3 (2000): 418–38.38 Photographs of the British Burma exposition at the agricultural fair in Alipur are in the British Library, India Office Records (Photo 1000/50). For the art exhibitions that sometimes accompanied the agricultural fairs, see Madras Exhibition of Raw Products, Arts, and Manufactures of Southern India, 1855: Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into Which the Exhibition Was Divided (Madras: Pharaoh and Co. Athenæum Press, 1856); and “North Western Provinces and Oudh, Papers and proceedings of the Talukdars’ Agricultural Meeting and Exhibition held at Lucknow, Lucknow, 8–10 March 1881” (IOR/V/27/500/60).39 Based on numbers provided in “Cattle Fairs in the Punjab,” Agricultural Gazette of India 2 (June 15, 1871): 283.40 “The Cattle Show at Nundipett,” Agricultural Gazette of India 2 (April 15, 1871): 227.41 For excellent, detailed textual descriptions of the fairs, which I do not have space to discuss in this article, see the following sources from the IOR: “2024: Special Narrative No.5 of the Proceedings of the Government of Bengal, dated 27th October 1865, regarding the agricultural exhibitions held in Bengal during the last cold season [December 1864–February 1865]” (IOR/L/PJ/3/1095 No.11); “North Western Provinces and Oudh, Papers and proceedings of the Talukdars’ Agricultural Meeting and Exhibition held at Lucknow”; and “Madras. Board of Revenue, Report on the Madras Agricultural Exhibition, 1883” (IOR/V/27/500/54).42 Agricultural Gazette of India 6 (November 29, 1872): 106.43 “Proceedings of the Madras Government, Revenue Department, 10 March 1865,” in “Forwarding Report on the Cattle Show held at Addanky, in the District of Nellore, on the 25th and 26th January Last. Fort. St. George, Revenue Department,” 2 (IOR/L/E/3/748, no. 28).44 Gyan Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India,” Representations 40 (Autumn 1992): 153–78.45 Ibid., 154, 157.46 Ibid., 161.47 “Amritsar Cattle Fair,” Agricultural Gazette of India 2 (June 15, 1871): 282.48 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) for a critique of the intertwined nature of colonial rationalization and moral sentimentality.49 107.50 Ibid., 106.51 “Cattle Fairs in the Punjab,” Agricultural Gazette of India, 2 (June 15, 1871): 283–84.52 Robert Wallace, India in 1887 as Seen by Robert Wallace, Professor of Agriculture and Rural Economy in the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1888), 73.53 Darling, “Animal Husbandry,” 829.54 For more on the British criminalization of India’s many Indigenous tribes broadly referred to as Adivasi, see Meena Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History: “Criminal Tribes” and British Colonial Policy (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001).55 “Amritsar Cattle Fair,” 283–84.56 Ibid.57 Ibid.58 Ibid., 282.59 Ibid.60 Darling, “Animal Husbandry,” 817, 818.61 “Professor Wallace on Indian Agriculture,” Indian Agricultural Gazette: A Monthly Journal of Agriculture Arts, and Commerce 3, nos. 28–33 (July–December 1887): 692.62 “Cattle Fairs in the Punjab,” 284.63 Ibid.64 Greco-Roman bias inflected the views of many antiquarians about Indian art and architecture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These figures include Guillaume Le Gentil de la Galasière (1725–1792) and Pierre Sonnerat (1748–1814). Simultaneously, antiquarians like Edward Moor (1771–1848) sought to draw comparisons between Greek and Indian art to elevate the latter’s status in the minds of Europeans. For a detailed study of this subject, see Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).65 See, in particular, David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); and Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).66 See Anne McCauley, “Beauty or Beast? Manet’s Olympia in the Age of Comparative Anatomy,” Art History 43, no. 4 (September 2020): 742–73.67 Ibid., 752.68 Wallace, India in 1887, 52 (emphasis in original).69 Darling, “Animal Husbandry,” 818.70 Anwesha Borthakur and Pardeep Singh note that experimental farms, such as the Government Farm in Madras, were established beginning in 1884, unless this farm is the Agricultural School at Saidapet, which was established in 1868. See also Anwesha Borthakur and Pardeep Singh, “History of Agricultural Research in India,” Current Science 105, no. 5 (September 10, 2013): 587–93.71 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 46.72 Thomas Bewick, A Memoir of Thomas Bewick Written by Himself, ed. Ian Bain (1862; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 140, 141, quoted in Ritvo, Animal Estate, 59, 60.73 Ritvo, Animal Estate, 54.74 Ibid., 55.75 See an untitled blurb in the journal Indian Agriculturist: A Monthly Journal of Indian Agriculture, Mineralogy, and Statistics (January 1, 1876): 2.76 File R 665/1881: Correspondence and related minute papers regarding the collection and exhibition of models and drawings to scale of agricultural implements and appliances, and requests for the Government of India (IOR/L/E/6/30, File 665).77 Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native.’”78 “Memorandum on Allahabad and Benares Division Agricultural Exhibitions,” 106 (emphasis added).79 For an in-depth analysis of the role of Smithian sympathy and affect in representations of famine camps, see Zahid Chaudhary, “Famine and the Reproduction of Affect: Pleas for Sympathy,” in Afterimage of Empire, 153–87.80 “Cattle Fairs in the Punjab,” 284.81 Wallace, India in 1887, 47.82 Ibid., 76.83 Elizabeth Edwards, “Anthropology and Photography: A Long History of Knowledge and Affect,” Photographies 8, no. 3 (2015): 241.84 Pinney, Coming of Photography, 4.85 As Wallace stated about them: “There is a home for cows, buffaloes, bullocks, and horses. Some of them are maimed, diseased, and some are healthy. They are sent to the hospital, either because their masters wish them to pass a pleasant old age, or because they have become useless to them.” Wallace, India in 1887, 77.86 Ibid., 76–77.87 Mishra, “Cattle, Dearth, and the Colonial State,” 998.88 See, for example, cattle descriptions in George Coates, The General Short-Horned Herd-Book: Containing the Pedigrees of Short-Horned Bulls, Cows, &c.; of the Improved Durham Breed, from the Earliest Account, to the Year 1822 (Otley, UK: W. Walker, 1822).89 This is the subject of William Gould’s Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).90 Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 3rd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 157–58.91 Ibid., 158–60.92 See Ram B. Bhagat, “Census and Caste Enumeration: British Legacy and Contemporary Practice in India,” Genus 62, no. 2 (2006): 119–34; and Padmanabh Samarendra, “Census in Colonial India and the Birth of Caste,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 33 (2011): 51–58.93 See Sandria B. Freitag, “The Cow Protection Riots of 1893: Community in Public Arenas and Political Movements,” in Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148–74.94 “Government of India. Home Department. To the Right Honourable the Earl of Kimberley, K.G., Her Majesty’s Secretary of the State of India, Calcutta, the 27th of December 1893,” in “Report on Cow-Killing Riots in British India,” December 27, 1893 (IOR/L/PJ/6/365, File 84), 6.95 Ibid.96 Christopher Pinney, “The Nation (Un)Pictured? Chromolithography and ‘Popular’ Politics in India, 1878–1995,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 841.97 Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Jagat Mata Go-Laxmi (World Mother Cow of Good Fortune),” https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/838322.98 I am thankful to Akshaya Tankha for originally bringing to my attention the compositional similarities between Jagat Mata imagery and the photographs from cattle competitions while he moderated my talk on this topic at the Yale South Asia Studies Colloquium on February 10, 2022.99 Pinney, “The Nation (Un)Pictured?,” 843.100 “Dated Bankipore, the 27th October 1893. From—A. Forbes, Esq., Commissioner of the Patna Division, To—The Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal,” in “Report on Cow-Killing Riots.” Several other instances of imagery being used to inflame sentiments are also discussed in this memo.101 “Reports on Riots in Rangoon, Bombay and Different Parts of the North West [sic] Provinces,” December 20, 1893 (IOR/L/PJ/6/365, file 55).102 Rohit De, “Cows and Constitutionalism,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (2019): 248–49.103 “Agricultural Stock (from the Indian Daily News),” Agricultural Gazette of India 4, no. 21 (May 1873): 264.104 Ibid.105 Ibid.106 “Model Farms (to the Editor of the Indian Daily News),” Agricultural Gazette of India 2 (June 15, 1871): 293.107 “Professor Wallace on Indian Agriculture,” 696.108 The letter “(d)” is a typo. There are only two photographs on plate V, (a) and (b), and only (a) coincides with the cattle breed and general description of an Inga dulsis background.109 Wallace, India in 1887, 32.Additional informationNotes on contributorsLiza OliverLiza Oliver is associate professor of art history and affiliate faculty of South Asia studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Art, Trade, and Imperialism in Early Modern French India (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and is currently writing her second book, “Empire of Hunger: Representing Famine, Land, and Labor in Colonial India” [Art Department, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Jewett Arts Center, Wellesley, MA 02482, liza.oliver@wellesley.edu].