Synopses & Reviews
This book explores both the social history of livestock and veterinary history in South Asia, and integrates both of them seamlessly within its narrative. Historians of medicine have often focused exclusively on medical developments and ignored larger social realities. This book challenges such partial approaches and seeks to integrate medical issues within a larger narrative of social change. Keeping the question of livestock at the centre of its discussions, it explores a range of themes such as famines, epizootics, medical innovations, agrarian relations, urbanisation, caste formations, etc. Such a wide-ranging approach allows it to highlight a number of new areas of inquiry that have remained unexplored till now.
Synopsis
This is the first full-length monograph to examine the history of colonial medicine in India from the perspective of veterinary health. The history of human health in the subcontinent has received a fair amount of attention in the last few decades, but nearly all existing texts have completely ignored the question of animal health. This book will not only fill this gap, but also provide fresh perspectives and insights that will challenge existing arguments regarding the nature of colonial medicine and public health in India.
At the same time, the book aims to provide a social history of cattle in India. Keeping the question of livestock at the centre, it explores a range of themes such as famines, agrarian relations, urbanisation, middle class attitudes, and caste formations. Such a wide-ranging approach allows it to highlight a number of issues that have remained unaddressed till now. The most striking aspect of the volume is the manner in which it connects veterinary health with the lives of the peasant household, and extends it to delineate fascinating aspects of Indian social history.
Beastly encounters of the Raj will be of interest to experts and students in the history of medicine, science and technology, imperial history, and South Asian history.
Synopsis
This book explores both the social history of livestock and veterinary history in South Asia, and integrates both of them seamlessly within its narrative.
About the Author
Saurabh Mishra is Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I
Veterinary Health and the Colonial State
1. Horse Breeding and the Ideologies of the Early Colonial State
2. Beasts, Murrains and Veterinary Health
3. Ticks, Germs and Bacteriological Research
Part II
Caste, Class and Cattle
4. Cattle, Famines and the Colonial State
5. Food Adulteration, Public Health and Middle Class Anxieties
6. Cattle-Poisoning and the Chamar Identity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index