During a recent trip to Jaipur, Rajasthan, I was often drawn away from my studies by the bandar (monkeys) that wandered around the city, marvelling at their seemingly effortless ability to climb between buildings, dangle from trees, and plead with phalwallahs (fruit sellers) for bananas. The most commonly sighted were the rhesus macaques, one of many varieties of macaque found across many Asia, Africa and Southern Europe. On rarer occasions I spotted the langur variety, monkeys unique to the Indian subcontinent. The city seemed to be their playground, a space to roam, eat, and live at ease alongside its human inhabitants. On the same street in Jawahar Nagar I encountered langur and macaque monkeys (below).
(Photos by Lloyd Price, 2015)
Life seemed even more relaxing for those living in Galtaji, a monkey temple tucked away in the hills surrounding Jaipur. For many Hindus, the langurs and macaques are living incarnations of Hanuman, a deity that appears many times in the sacred and popular text the Ramayana, the tales which have similar significance to the Bible in western countries. Described as brave and loyal with godly powers, Hanuman finds Lord Rama during his fourteen-year exile in the forest. After hearing his plight, Hanuman vows to help, rallying an army to overthrow the demon King Ravana and rescue Rama’s wife Sita. According to scholars, ‘the black facial skin of the langurs strongly associates them with stories of Hanuman being burned in an act of heroism. For some people, therefore, feeding the langurs is a devotional act’.[1]
Macaque monkeys relaxing by the water at the Galtaji temple, Jaipur (Photos by Lloyd Price, 2015)
Kutta (dogs) were also a regular feature of my walks around the city. Some were domesticated, notably in wealthier districts where labradors and spaniels lived in homes and walked on leads. More often, street dogs roamed freely in packs, weaving in and out of beeping traffic, sleeping along the roadside and at times snarling at passers by. They are known as pariah or “pi” dogs, words commonly used to refer to outcasts, outlaws and vagabonds. They are generally of medium build with short, faded brown coats and curved tales. For some, caring for dogs is a spiritual activity, their companionship a quality celebrated in tales of Hindu deities Yudhishthira and Bhairava. During my stay their presence in the city was contentious issue, with fears of government culls proposed in Kerala driving many activists to demonstrate in Jaipur’s Pink City bazaars.[2]
Artistic rendition of Hindu deity Bhairava, Jaipur, circa 1880. (For more see http://www.indianminiaturepaintings.co.uk/Jaipur_Bhairava_MK.html)
Returning to the UK, I began to wonder how these animals might have featured in the history of urban India. As scholars have shown, the presence of animals in the city spaces remains highly precarious. Numerous government campaigns have sought to control and manage what ethologists define as “commensal” species, populations that have co-evolved alongside humans, sharing the resources we gather and discard, whether by our consent or otherwise. Like the struggling homeless that cling precariously to the capricious charity and tolerance of urban society, many animals teeter on the fringes conflict and consent. The British Raj saw both wandering cows and mendicants as prime manifestations of India’s degenerative culture, celebrations of the very problems that prevented progress in the East.[3] How did monkeys and dogs fair as north India’s metropolises expanded around them in the nineteenth century? In what ways have their lives been shaped by changing discourses of urban spatiality, the interconnected life-support system that exists primarily to service the human collectives need for food, shelter and security? How might their story further elaborate upon David Arnold’s assertion that ‘animal geography helped give fine-grain definitions to urban spatiality and to refine practices of urban inclusion and exclusion’?[4]
While looking for newspaper articles about urban cattle, I came across a number of reports discussing monkeys and dogs in north Indian cities. Generally, the reports were not positive. Despite their religious significance, monkeys were commonly considered to be a nuisance. In 1880 the Nairang Mazámin in Mathura stated that monkeys ‘frequently assault the people and carry away everything that falls into their hands’. These concerns were echoed in Lucknow, where the Mashir-i-Qaisar complained that monkeys ‘tear up clothes, and frequently attack women and children’.[5] The Shola-Túr described them as ‘very mischievous’ creatures;
(Source: IOR/L/R/5/56, Shola-Túr, (Lucknow), 20th May 1879, p 409)
British officials were also concerned about monkeys. When designing and installing the first telegraph poles, William Brooke O’Shaughnessy had to make sure that they could withstand their climbing.[6] Consistently, concerns about monkeys were most vocally expressed by newspapers in Mathura, a holy Hindu city in Uttar Pradesh. During the 1880s, the people of Mathura persistently appealed to the government for monkeys to be banished from the city limits. They submitted several petitions to the ‘Lieutenant Governor of the North-Western Provinces praying that monkeys be removed from the city’ to the forest or jungle. Some went further, arguing that ‘all the apes should be…killed, while the Arya Mitra in Benares suggested that ‘people should poison them by giving them bread mixed with Nux vomica’. According to the Nairang Mazámin, ‘no Hindu of Muttra [Mathura] is so stupid as to look upon their banishment as an interference on the part of the Magistrate with his religious affairs’.[7]
Streets dogs scavenging on the weak. From John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India (1891)
Stray dogs were also persecuted in many instances. In 1832 they became a source of a riot in Bombay when the community of Parsis, followers of the Zoroastrian religion, protested against the British governments indiscriminate killing of dogs during the summer months.[8] Generally, newspaper reports from the late nineteenth century are mixed in their response to dogs. On the 17th of May 1879, the Rohilkhand Akhbar complained that in Moradabad ‘a mad pariah dog lately bit seven or eight men’. They were accused of snarling, growling and terrorizing residents, and were also associated with disease and poor sanitation. In 1884 the city of Lucknow made plans to allow street sweepers to shoot dogs that they encountered. However, not all people supported their destruction. The Bharat Bandhu condemned those that killed them and cut off the ‘dog’s tongue… for medicinal purposes’, or as a reaction to their barking and potential to bite. It stated, ‘What hard-hearted men are those who kills animals with their own hands!’[9]
From these initial findings, it is clear that many people were unhappy that they had to live alongside monkeys and dogs. Regardless of their religious significance, their potential to cause violent harm and spread disease left them with little sympathy from the vocal and literate members of the community. Despite such protests, both species remain a common feature of north Indian society to this day, celebrated by temples and sustained with hand outs. Understanding how urbanisation influenced these human-animal interactions is a core aim of my ongoing research.
[1] Work on relations between humans and monkeys: Terry O’Connor, Animals as Neighbours: The Past and Present of Commensal Animals, (East Lansing, 2014), p 76; Desmond Morris, Monkey, (London, 2013); and Radhakrishna, Huffman and Sinha (eds.), The Macaque Connection: Cooperation and Conflict between Humans and Macaques (New York, 2013).
[2] http://www.internationalanimalrescue.org/news/planned-mass-killing-stray-dogs-kerala-india-prompts-widespread-protests-around-world
[3] For a general discussion of criminality, vagrancy and colonial discourse see: Anand A. Yang, Crime and Criminality in British India (Arizona, 1985).
[4] Discussions of urban spatial discourse, humans and animals see: Matthew Gandy, ‘Cyborg Urbanisation: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 1 (2005), p 28; and David Arnold, ‘Pollution, Toxicity and public health in metropolitan India 1850 – 1939’, Journal of Historical Geography, 42 (October 2013), pp. 125; also consult Gillespie and Collard, Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections, and hierarchies in a multispecies world, (Oxon, 2015).
[5] IOR/L/R/5/56, Mashir-i-Qaisar, (Lucknow) 11th May 1879, p 391.
[6] Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, ‘‘Beyond the reach of monkeys and men’? O’Shaughnessy and the telegraph in India c. 1836 – 56’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 37, 3 (2000), p. 357.
[7] For articles discussing monkeys from 1879 see: IOR/L/R/5/56, Nairang Mazámin, (Mathura), 15th June 1879, p 484 and the Shola-Túr, (Lucknow), 20th May 1879, p 409. For articles from 1880 see IOR/L/R/5/57, Arya Mitra, (Benares), 30th Jan. 1880, p 94 and the Nairang Mazámin, (Mathura), 31st Oct. 1880, p. 757.
[8] Jesse S. Palsetia, ‘Mad Dogs and Parsis: The Bombay Dog Riots of 1832’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, 11, 1 (2001), p. 14.
[9] For examples of articles discussing dogs see: IOR/L/R/5/56, Rohilkhand Akhbar, (Moradabad), 17th May 1879, p 409 and IOR/L/R/5/57, Bharat Bandhu, (Aligarh), 12th Mar. 1880, p 204.
Beastly Histories 