Indo-German exchanges in education: Rabindranath Tagore meets Paul and Edith Geheeb

Abstract

protectionism in contemporary India, suggesting a through-line between historical discourses and present-day conflicts. However, the spread of these discourses outside Bengal, and the popularization of animal protectionism beyond the middle class are largely absent from the text. Given that West Bengal today is one of the only eight Indian states without a full or partial beef ban, the shifting geographies and social spaces of the contestation of human–animal relations – and especially human–cow relations – merit attention. The degree to which present-day class contours of animal protection, whether cow-focused or otherwise, parallel or diverge from their colonial-era antecedents also requires further attention. I raise these questions of contemporary parallels and divergences not because I think that Samanta’s book needed to answer them, but rather because she evokes them in her introduction, and because they are suggestive of potential future areas of study. But Meat, Mercy, Morality itself tells a remarkably complete and compelling story of the varied contestations of human-animal relations in colonial Bengal. The book is particularly commendable for, as Samanta puts it, ‘taking the South Asian context as the norm’, as a way to challenge ‘hegemonic’ practices in the writing of global history. The book is a useful model for other scholars because it avoids the assumption that European narratives of animal protectionism were universal, or that South Asia deviated from some expected ‘Western’ process. At the same time, its writing style and narrative remain accessible, even for readers without a significant background in the history of Bengal. Likewise, the book will be useful for a wide range of historians because it provides a model for the close analysis of multiple distinct colonial-era archives. Samanta weaves together a cohesive narrative by drawing on sources ranging from Bengali-fiction to official records and colonial memoirs. Through this diverse array of materials, she effectively demonstrates that although animal protection and cruelty discourses claimed to centre the suffering of non-human animals, they were ultimately used to legitimize colonial racial, class, and social hierarchies, and indeed, the colonial state itself.