Introduction
In 1984, painfully aware that the Veterinary and Remount Services had not received satisfactory approbation from military historians, the Directorate General commissioned a work that would ‘place on record the glories [of the corps] spread over two centuries’.Footnote 1 Faithful to this clear brief, Lieutenant Colonel J. S. Bhalla outlined the evolution of the corps, starting with its ‘inception’ in 1794, touching upon its magnificence during the two World Wars, and ending with a paean to its contemporary splendour.Footnote 2 Like all sagas of past glory, this narrative glossed over episodes of relative failure, mentioning them only as brief interludes in an inexorable journey towards modernization and efficiency. However, these episodes were so frequent and prolonged that it is quite possible to invert the prism and retell the story with a somewhat pessimistic tone, which is partly what this paper will attempt to do.
More importantly, it will situate the practice of horse-breeding within the institutional matrix of colonialism, highlighting its affinities with the economic impulses that animated the Raj during these initial years, when the question of land revenue settlement, property rights, trade, and markets were being extensively discussed. It is sadly forgotten nowadays, under the influence of the new linguistic turn in South Asian historiography, that colonial discourse was not comprised solely of the tropes of cultural difference, displacement, ‘Otherness’, and assimilation; it also consisted of several economic themes that have received relatively inadequate attention in recent years. This neglect or omission is not entirely involuntary and has been seen severally by critics and economic historians as the outcome of a ‘holy fear of economic reductionism’ or a ‘profound disinterest in economics’.Footnote 3 This paper challenges this partial occlusion of the economic, and argues that it was indeed the touchstone used by the colonial state to examine and implement policies around several subjects, like horse-breeding. It will also show that the semantics used for discussions around land settlement—undoubtedly the most important economic measure during early colonial rule—insinuated itself into debates on other subjects, shaping and forming them in various ways. There were parallels between land revenue measures and colonial breeding policies, indicating that there was a common framework within which such subjects were being approached. Finally, the tentativeness of colonial policies during this early phase has been captured through the indecisiveness on questions that were integral to horse-breeding, for instance on the question of autonomy or integration within the ‘native’ economy.Footnote 4 Integration could have the potential benefit of reducing expenses, but autonomy would mean less dependence on unreliable native agents and producers, and the relative merits of both these approaches were long discussed. It was partly the fear of the unknown Indian terrain during this early phase of colonialism that pushed the state towards a policy of greater autonomy, which ultimately went against the economic logic that was so central to its policies.
Before discussing these larger questions related to colonial policies, it might be useful to briefly sketch the immediate pre-colonial background. This will serve the purpose of elucidating both the continuities and breaks within the horse-breeding network under the East India Company's suzerainty.Footnote 5 Perhaps the stable hierarchy of horse-breeding regions represents the most striking continuity, so that the Punjab, Rajasthan, Kutch, and Kathiawar continued to dominate the horse-breeding scene even under colonial rule. Though many of these regions provided conditions that were far removed from the lush, humid, and flat landscape of the plains, they were apparently ideal for breeding horses for military purposes.Footnote 6 This is also reflected in the great popularity of horses imported from the somewhat inhospitable terrain of Central Asia, Iran, and the Arabian peninsula. Maritime trade in horses from these regions has been traced as far back as circa 1000 AD,Footnote 7 though imports only peaked in the early eighteenth century at a figure of nearly 5,000 horses annually.Footnote 8 This annual influx of quality horses was essential to satisfy the immediate military demand from regional potentates, but, equally important, this fresh stock was needed to reinvigorate flagging equine strains. The rather intangible and extremely fluid ‘character’ of horses was, after all, notoriously difficult to maintain.Footnote 9 However, although imports from external sources were essential for these reasons, the manner in which they occurred reflects a full and complete integration with internal economies and agricultural cycles in South Asia. This was true as far as overland trade in Central Asian horses was concerned, as they were brought in by Afghan merchants travelling with caravans of Powindah trading nomads. These merchants either travelled towards northern India via the Khyber Pass or went southwards towards Bikaner, Jaipur, and the Deccan region via the Bolan and other passes.Footnote 10 Paying several cesses and dues en route, they travelled extensively within British territories and attended important fairs such as the ones held in Haridwar or Pushkar, which acted as nodal points for the purchase of horses.
Company officials recognized the importance of these pre-existing fairs and local networks, but were unable to use them optimally to procure desired horses. In fact, the Company's presence or growth appeared to be detrimental to the regional trade in horses; for instance, as it made greater ingress into the northwestern frontier, the horse trade in these hitherto thriving regions diminished. Similarly, as the Company consolidated its rule in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the overall demand for horses declined from the peaks it had scaled in the earlier part of the century. Officials were also unable to fully exploit native markets due to the insufficient funds at their disposal: dealers received much higher prices for quality breeds from regional rulers and were reluctant to negotiate prices with the British.Footnote 11 For these reasons the Company was partly driven towards instituting autonomous breeding experiments, which will be discussed in detail below. It must be mentioned at the outset though that such experiments did not make full use of existing wisdom on horse-breeding, which is why studs were established in the humid plains of eastern India rather than in the traditional horse-breeding districts. Another decisive break from pre-colonial patterns occurred when the British began to import breeding stock from the homeland in large numbers, a policy that was both financially disastrous and biologically unsuccessful.Footnote 12 This paper will highlight these aspects while discussing their links with larger colonial ideologies and tenets.
Markets as the measure of success
The question of horse-breeding in early colonial India was intimately linked to the military needs of the Company; the relentless march of the British Army was, after all, handicapped to a certain extent by the superiority of native cavalries. In his sketch of horse-breeding in India, Gommans notes that, ‘at the end of the eighteenth century, the Company's officials and the army officers became increasingly aware that, in the long run, they could not hold or expand their newly acquired territories without a substantial enlargement of their cavalry establishment’.Footnote 13 This was partly true, as the British found themselves at a slight disadvantage against excessively equinely inclined adversaries like Mysore,Footnote 14 which was apparent in Lord Cornwallis’ abortive advance on Seringapatam in 1791. In the months following this setback, there was an increasing consensus that the insubstantial British cavalry, which was totally dependent on allied states for replenishment during wars, needed to become self-reliant.Footnote 15 Two hurdles had stood in the way of achieving this: one was the expense involved in recruiting a massive cavalry, a problem that was partly resolved after a realization of its immense usefulness; the other problem was the far more persistent one of quality, an area where the administration was much less willing to compromise. Horses had to be of a ‘good character’, had to be ‘well formed, proportioned and limbed’, and had to be at least 14-and-a-half hands tall.Footnote 16 Government studs, using only the best stallions from India and abroad, were established in Poosa, Ganjam, and Hissar to address this question of quality. However, the animals performed abysmally and were written off as a bad investment, though the burden of keeping the studs going was shouldered for many years in the hope that they would, at some point, be able to perform the miraculous feats that were expected of them. The urgency and redoubled energy with which horses were sought did not fail to bear fruit though: the Bengal cavalry, which had no more than 500 horses in 1793, grew sevenfold to have nearly 3,500 horses only six years later.Footnote 17 Despite this, Company officials were guarded and often outrightly critical in their assessments of the progress made: these returns, they felt, did not match the level of expectations and financial investments. The supposed grimness of the situation forced a distressed Captain Wyatt, superintendent of the stud in Kathiawar, to go as far as to rue the decline of an alleged tribe of marauders called the Kattra who had been ‘distinguished for ages past by the superior breed of their horses’; that this sentiment was expressed in 1814 when the anti-thugee campaign had already begun, further highlights his desperation.Footnote 18
The only really effective way of ensuring a perpetual supply of exceptional horses in these circumstances was to establish a network of native breeders producing quality horses for colonial consumption. In other words, the Company wished to be at the centre of horse-breeders’ activities, thereby displacing native potentates from this enviable position. However, it failed spectacularly to achieve this due to the small matter of insufficient demand—at a time when native rulers bought the lion's share of the 600,000 horses traded in the mid-eighteenth century,Footnote 19 British purchases never exceeded a few thousand, even during years when this became a priority area. In view of this rather limited British demand, the native dealer, far from being the unenterprising, orthodox or ‘traditional’ being that colonial records alleged he was, appears instead to have been a very sanguine creature who was alive to the idea of profit-making. It is also worth remembering that although Mysore and the Marathas might have fallen, the incessant demand from regional satraps kept the market afloat—even the ruling chief of Bhartpur, for instance, had a cavalry regiment consisting of 1,647 horses,Footnote 20 while more substantial rulers like the Amir of Afghanistan had 19,500 or more horses.Footnote 21 This leads us, unavoidably, to a formulation that might appear somewhat odd at first sight: although there was a vibrant native market in horses, the new market in ‘quality produce’ that the colonial masters wished to conjure into existence never really took root, despite several incentives and gifts. The native market, it appears, was not only spatially separated from its British equivalent, it also followed different economic laws. As late as 1872, more than seven decades after the first efforts in this direction were inaugurated, the government was still hoping that ‘with proper assistance and encouragement, the breeding of horses for the market would probably again revive as a profitable enterprise’.Footnote 22 It appears that the British notion of quality—imported wholesale from the metropole and applied unreflexively in the colony—prohibited an unfettered interplay between the forces of demand and supply, thereby stunting the growth of the nascent market.
This failure to institute a Company-centric market was seen as the foremost symptom of the general malaise afflicting horse-breeding operations in India. The strength of this notion of the market as the cure for all ills is not very surprising, considering that this was the age of the ascendancy of utilitarian free-market doctrines and physiocratic principles.Footnote 23 Also related to this was the introduction of land settlements, which were expected to inject the notions of private property and the market into a supposedly inert and supine Indian countryside,Footnote 24 and which would in turn pave the way for the evolution of a society based on status/custom to one based on contract, from closed village communities to larger integrated economies, and from the Asiatic mode of production to the capitalist one.Footnote 25 Even during later periods, buoyed by their centrality within the theory of laissez-faire, the concepts of free market and free enterprise continued to be perceived as a talisman for growth and development. In fact, as late as the 1860s, when the heyday of utilitarian and physiocratic theories was over, senior colonial administrators like Baird SmithFootnote 26 still saw markets and freely transferable property rights in land as not merely the most effective means of attracting capital into agriculture but as the best form of insurance against famine.Footnote 27
Consequently, just as in the case of agricultural tracts, measures were taken to create the much-desired market in horses, and assistance and encouragement began to be offered to potential breeders. Both the cultivation of land and the cultivation of horse-breeds, it was hoped, would reach optimal levels as Zemindars or ‘improving landlords’ gradually took up the idea of profits and markets. An official noted in the context of horse-breeding that: ‘I know of no expedient so effectual as that of offering a premium for the greatest quantity [of horses] delivered by the landlords.’Footnote 28 Interestingly, this analogy between farming and breeding does not end here; in fact, the two overlapped closely enough to even share a similar nomenclature: both the permanent settlement of land revenue and the new scheme for encouraging horse-breeding were known as the ‘Zemindary’ system. This was quite appropriate, as both schemes rested on the bedrock of substantial landlords who were considered sedentary and trustworthy. It could be argued, in fact, that the Zemindary system of horse-breeding reflected colonial faith in the ideas of progressive landlords and markets to a much greater extent as breeding for commercial purposes had, after all, hitherto been almost completely shunned by Zemindars. What was attempted, therefore, was a complete overhaul of the existing system and the creation of an entirely new kind of breeder. The idea of a permanent, stable, market-driven system, free of any interference from middlemen or dealers, drove the Company towards this ambitious scheme, and in this sense both the Zemindary scheme for breeding and land settlement had common ideological origins.
The Zemindary scheme for horse-breeding was first formulated in the 1790s by Major Frazer, the pioneer of studs in Bengal, to cope with the surge in demand from the newly formed cavalry corps.Footnote 29 Launched on a small scale in 1798, the scheme initially relied on the expertise of native horse-breeders (called Naulbunds). Stallions with a supposedly excellent character and pedigree were distributed gratis among Naulbunds, with the sole condition that the Company would have the right to be the first buyer of any subsequent progeny. They were each assigned a certain village or a certain number of mares and were also paid for the upkeep of the stallions; a ‘Daroga’ was also appointed to superintend their work and to maintain records. However, since Naulbunds, unlike Zemindars, were men of small means, their own promissory statements had little value and the weight of added testimony from fellow-breeders or ‘respectable’ villagers was required to lend them stability and credence.Footnote 30 Despite a strong emphasis on using local expertise, this initial experiment failed to show any appreciable outcome and was quickly forgotten within a climate of growing expectations of the studs. However, the scheme had the twin merits of being relatively inexpensive and supervision-free, and consequently made a reappearance in 1816, by which time the failure of the stud experiment had become self-evident. It was clear that two decades after the inception of the first institution at Poosa, studs had failed to show any signs of becoming financially stable. In the year 1814/15, for instance, the net expenditure on studs amounted to Rupees 406,427 whereas the value of the stock at these studs only rose by Rupees 262,966.Footnote 31 William Moorcroft, who had the great misfortune of replacing the illustrious Major Frazer in 1808, consequently had to face acerbic attacks from all directions, not least from colleagues and seniors whom he had successfully antagonized. There was little else to do in such a situation other than to repackage the Major's popular Zemindary scheme and, with just a slight nod of acknowledgement in the Major's direction, present it as primarily his own brainchild.Footnote 32 This he did rather successfully, with the one major alteration of including Zemindars within the scheme, thus making it more worthy of its name.
The scheme, in fact, became so dependent on Zemindars that not a single Naulbunds’ name can be found in the lists of beneficiaries which are replete with Deshmukhs, Deshpandeys, Kulkarnys, and Patils.Footnote 33 It appears that the Company, riding high on the success of its military campaigns and the quieter but more insidious revenue campaigns, had decided that the formerly rebellious local potentates and landlords had been finally vanquished and tamed. In his nuanced and detailed sketch of the western Indian countryside, Kumar notes that:
The office of the Mamlatdar was completely transformed. . . The Mamlatdar was formerly an officer who exercised considerable initiative. He now became a supine instrument of the collector's will, and his actions were controlled by a narrow and precise set of regulations. The Deshmukh. . . suffered a similar eclipse, the collectors were inclined to look upon him as a parasite and they were reluctant to utilise his services in negotiating the land-tax with the Patils and the Kunbis.Footnote 34
Also, the Zemindars were considered more trustworthy than the impecunious Naulbunds despite their recent recalcitrance due to their status as propertied men. The Zemindars continued to harbour misgivings about colonial motives and were inclined to question the Company's philanthropic intentions.Footnote 35 Such doubts were partly justified, for though beneficiaries were repeatedly assured that they could ‘do as they wished’ with their windfall, an official eye was firmly fixed on their activities. In fact, though it ran completely contrary to all notions of a free market, the Company's right to be the first buyer quickly dovetailed with the right to levy fines—a ‘book of fines and rewards’ was maintained and the stud superintendents doubled as ad hoc magistrates.Footnote 36 The undertakings and testimonials produced on the Naulbunds’ behalf were also strictly enforced, and in the lean years when breeders moved in search of greener pastures, their guarantors were rounded up and reminded of their obligations. This quasi-feudal, retributive system did not sit easily with the avowed objective of creating a free market in quality produce that was so desired by officials.Footnote 37 These inherently antagonistic tendencies ensured that colonial efforts to establish a market did not bear fruit until the end of our period of study.
Far from the native market: horse-breeding at colonial studs
The native market was, then, too fickle and unresponsive to be relied upon, though it was the easiest and cheapest route to achieving plenitude. Also, markets could not be simply wished into existence, and although local breeders were encouraged with an eye to the long term, it was also essential to think of a quick, short-term remedy. In the 1790s, when the urgent need for a strong cavalry was fully appreciated, there appeared but one way of achieving the target quickly: by circumventing the ‘unreliable and profiteering’ Indian horse dealer and creating a parallel breeding network.
Native horse dealers attracted great scorn and ridicule from British purchasers, their dishonesty acquiring an almost legendary status. Considered to be rogues and swindlers, they were thought to possess several cunning tricks to cheat potential buyers. In fact, buyers were especially warned to be suspicious of excessively healthy-looking animals, as they could be suffering from what was popularly known as the ‘dealer's condition’, implying that they could have been temporarily polished and fattened, thereby conveying an erroneous impression of health.Footnote 38 Horses, complained officials, were invariably of indifferent quality, and on the rare occasion when they were tolerable, the price quoted was exorbitant. Dealers were also susceptible to acts of sabotage by rival European and native powers who ‘being jealous of [British] interests. . . diverted expected supplies into different channels’ at the most critical periods.Footnote 39 The situation became even more difficult and aggravating when an individual dealer became powerful enough to form a large conglomerate that monopolized the regional horse trade.Footnote 40 Not surprisingly, this stranglehold of middlemen was believed to be stifling British interests, especially in a situation where it was not an option to discipline or reprimand wayward dealers for fear of antagonizing them and reducing future supplies. This fear of antagonizing dealers also existed in the context of itinerant trade in other commodities. Writing about colonial treatment of banjara traders, Siddiqui notes that:
There had been instances, it was said, where large bodies of banjaras passing near army camps, and refusing to offer the grain they carried, had been allowed to move on to the enemy, the dread of alarming them, and thus banishing them for ever, being sufficient to protect them from interruption.Footnote 41
This fear of the itinerant trader arose not just out of a pragmatic evaluation of their extreme usefulness but also out of several deep-seated prejudices, chief among which was a distrust of peripatetic and non-sedentary groups.Footnote 42 These groups were, by their very nature, difficult to control or observe, and though the authorities sought to integrate them within the colonial knowledge system, they were considered to be ‘slippery commodities’ who were constantly seen as potential conspirators and rumour-mongers. While their extensive travels made them extremely useful as sources of information, this same incessant movement also rendered them dangerous and untrustworthy. In a way, this dual perception of itinerant traders reflected the double-edged nature of the ‘information order’ as a whole, which, although useful and effective, could also on occasion turn against the colonial masters.Footnote 43
This fear and distrust of the middleman was not limited to the horse trade. It became the central notion around which the colonial approach to many subjects was formulated. The Ryotwari land settlement was, after all, first and foremost an attempt to eliminate middlemen and deal directly with the cultivators;Footnote 44 similarly, within the textile trade monetary advances were made directly to weavers, thus circumventing the powerful middle interests.Footnote 45 However, although quickly ridiculed, middlemen were a huge blessing for the British, especially when they had no direct links with producers. This link with producers was especially fragile during the initial years, when the white man was yet to physically stamp his presence on the Indian countryside. The rumour of the arrival of the white man had, of course, travelled to the remotest regions, but when they appeared in person at a native gathering—as they did, for example, at a cattle fair in Dinapore—they inadvertently caused great alarm and fear.Footnote 46
Until such time as direct and reliable links were established, it was essential to rely on the services of the rogue middleman. An incident that occurred in wartime Deccan in 1802 captures both the extreme usefulness and the British mistrust of agents: an entire regiment was left stranded without any draught animals to carry provisions, an agent called Vencatarungapilly came to the rescue and almost magically mobilized 30,000 bullocks within a day or two.Footnote 47 However, true to form, officials alleged he had artificially engineered this shortage or disarray with the sole purpose of ingratiating himself with the highest authorities by promptly meeting the demand for animals when panic set in.Footnote 48 When he later demanded payment, a debate ensued about his character, (dis)honesty, and his alleged services, and Vencatarungapilly ended up being viewed by officials as a suspicious character. Within this climate of suspicion, it is easy to lose sight of the pivotal role played by agents like him, but they helped steady the Company's ship during its turbulent foundational years.Footnote 49 Also, although these agents were perceived as profiteering swine, they had the great virtue of forestalling huge potential expenses on creating a parallel breeding establishment.
However, distrust of the native dealers and the disappointment in the native market had become so strong that the Company was virtually forced into making this financial blunder. Portents of disaster were evident from the start. Poosa, for example, of which great things were expected, produced a paltry dozen or so horses rather than the hundreds that would have justified the scale of investment. Good stallions of breeding age seemed impossible to find and ‘ignorant natives’, who appeared otherwise quite innocent of any notion of property, suddenly became excessively proprietorial about their mares.Footnote 50 This produced a crisis of authority within stud administration, and even animal fodder became difficult to obtain.Footnote 51 During the initial years it was easier to represent these as minor irritants, but when they failed to disappear well into the next century, stud administrators struggled to find a reasonable and convincing explanation.Footnote 52 Poosa faced the auditor's axe less than a decade after its celebrated inauguration and barely managed to survive; its equivalent at Ganjam in the Madras presidency was less fortunate and was summarily abolished without much prior warning.Footnote 53 The committee that presided over its liquidation noted, after burrowing into its finances and weighing expenses against the value of stock, that ‘the expense of the stud has not hitherto been balanced by any proportionate benefit derived from the institution’.Footnote 54 In those times of extreme fiscal economy, unprofitability equalled failure and studs struggled vainly to win the battle with the account books.Footnote 55 A decade after the abolition of Ganjam, a memorandum circulated by the Bengal government noted rather conclusively that, ‘the breeding establishment in Bengal has been found, after a trial of twenty years, to be utterly inadequate to the object of introducing into the Bengal province an improved breed of horse’.Footnote 56 That Poosa continued to exist despite this damning verdict can be attributed more to chance than circumstance; a similar verdict led to a complete abolition of studs in the Bombay and Madras presidencies.Footnote 57
However, although the stud administrators were heavily censured, their alleged ineptitude—financial or otherwise—was not the sole trigger for escalating costs. If these were indeed times when thrift in public life was considered a great virtue, these were also times when office holders were infamous for their susceptibility to corruption, and this added substantially to the cost of running the studs and similar institutions.Footnote 58 The race to earn the rather oddly termed ‘competencies’Footnote 59 and a peaceful retirement in ‘old Blighty’ contributed in no small measure to what Dirks calls the ‘scandal of empire’, and it led senior officers to trifle with public finances and policies.Footnote 60 It is no surprise then that the heavily endowed stud plan was closely pursued by the twin shadows of fraudulence and nepotism. When Major Frazer initially demanded 300 quality mares for the experiment at Poosa, the contract was immediately awarded—without so much as a token debate—to the brother of Sir John Murray, member of the recently constituted Board for the Superintendence of Horse Breeding Operations. A report later noted that out of all the mares bought as a result, ‘One half. . . prove[d] barren and the rest bad mares or otherwise objectionable.’Footnote 61 The report made much of this initial lapse, though it talked of Sir Murray's indiscretion in euphemistic terms, calling it his ‘impatience of losing time’.Footnote 62 Apart from such instances of blatant corruption, the stud's autonomy and efficiency was compromised by interference from senior military officers working part time and gratuitously on the Board of Superintendence, leading to multiple layers of authority and a confusion regarding the lines of supervision.Footnote 63
However, the chief cause for the failure of the stud experiment was, in a way, embedded within the seeds of its birth. Poosa was envisaged as a tranquil island for exceptional horses situated far from the influence of native markets; its climate was likened to that of Britain, and its horses were to match English horses in ability and character.Footnote 64 Anglo-Indian breeders were, it appears, gripped by nostalgia for the motherland: it is quite ironic, of course, that within Britain itself the exotic Arabian breed, relatively easily available within the Indian subcontinent, was more highly prized than the home-grown animals.Footnote 65 This nostalgia, which formed the basis of stud policies, perverted normal operations and introduced certain financially ruinous practices, chief among which was the importation of English stallions and mares for breeding purposes. In fact, an elaborate and complex establishment took shape in the metropole to support the Indian studs, which included acquiring a 130-acre farm in Essex, the appointment of a permanent veterinary surgeon and various assistants at the farm, the formation of a board to oversee the purchase of horses, and regular maintenance of all records relating to the shipment and purchase of horses.Footnote 66 These were very expensive measures, which could have been easily avoided had the native market been regarded with a little more sympathy.Footnote 67
However, although it was the underlying rationale for the whole experiment, the utopia of studs as unspoiled European stations in a sea of native markets was quite impossible to implement. Poosa's climate might, in wistful British eyes, have been similar to their homeland; however, the chances of success for this bold experiment relied substantially on the native presence being tolerated within this tranquil island. After all, Naulbunds had to be recruited in their dozens to care for the horses, despite the allegedly suspect nature of their breeding practices, while native book-keepers and babus, despite having a reputation for being sly and guileful, had to be appointed to ensure that routine duties were performed faultlessly. An incident that flared up at the Hapur stud in 1833 reveals indirectly the power and authority of the babu. A major feud broke out in this year between European officers at the station, and a commission was instituted to inquire into the incident. Instances of insubordination were taken very seriously at this time, and an immediate order was issued to check the veracity of the numerous complaints made by the veterinary surgeon Hodgson and his colleagues against the stud superintendent Captain McKenzie.Footnote 68 The future of the establishment hung in the balance and native employees were forced to choose allegiances in this open conflict, which most of them did by bolstering the McKenzie camp. As the enquiries took a decided turn against Hodgson, he was gripped with paranoia and in this frenzied state imagined all babus at the stud, and especially Ramruttun Sain, to be conspiring against him. Ramruttun, he alleged, had torn up vital evidence, threatened his subordinates with dire consequences if they dared to reveal the truth, and was perverting the course of the inquiry in every conceivable way.Footnote 69 Both the commission and the Military Board dismissed his pleas and complaints as the ravings of a lunatic—which, incidentally, worked in his favour as he was spared a court martial due to his supposed insanityFootnote 70—but his tirades reveal to an extent the financial clout and elevated position of the babu, which was substantiated by testimony from other officers too.Footnote 71
However, the history of colonialism has proved conclusively that employing natives does not necessarily translate into integration with the native society or economy. Poosa, geographically distant from any major settlement, was both literally and metaphorically detached from the countryside—so detached, in fact, that basic necessities like animal fodder became difficult to obtain. Natives appeared excessively uncooperative and were so unwilling to part with their straw that physical or legislative force had sometimes to be used to ‘convince’ them.Footnote 72 It is possible that a different outcome could have been obtained had the countryside and local cultivators been carefully assimilated within the stud plans. This could have had other potential benefits too, for greater integration would have meant greater utilization of the local ecology and natural resources which, apart from several other advantages, would have made great financial sense. Studs were, however, so hermetically sealed that even commonplace information—like the location of local grazing fields or foraging areas—was out of reach. Interaction with the locals was so minimal that when two charwahas (cow herders) ‘strayed’ into the Poosa stud in 1800 they succeeded in causing a minor sensation.Footnote 73 They were plied with gifts and Major Frazer showered them with queries about local rearing practices, making a careful note of their responses and acting promptly upon them soon afterwards.Footnote 74 On his return trip from the areas mentioned by the charwahas, Frazer seemed completely convinced of the benefits of greater integration, recommending:
The adoption of that measure [by which] the gualas [cow herders] will become our ryots and neighbours. By assisting each other and introducing population we shall obtain the object desired without any increase of expense and these lands may probably be brought to yield great assistance of the stud.Footnote 75
However, this laudable objective of ‘introducing population’ was never fully realized; isolationism and import remained the two dominant pillars of official stud policy. The same logic of separation from natives and native produce which first pushed the Company into creating a parallel infrastructure now effectively choked its fledgling stud enterprise. The success of the colonial project itself owed much to a spirit of isolationism as well as to an incomplete, lopsided and unequal integration with the native economy—a ‘healthy distrust’ of the natives was combined with partial engagement with local entrepreneurs and producers. Already facing extreme pressure to conform to the high standards of financial viability, the stud was further crippled by this disengagement from the local setting. Several measures were employed to stem this rot, one of which was the appointment of veterinary surgeons to studs. However, in such a scenario even the veterinarian's role came under attack and was significantly reformulated and redefined, as will be seen in the next section.
Between the Treasury and the military: the veterinarian in a colony
A quick survey of the initial years of veterinary medicine in India will elucidate many of the points made in the last two sections. The question of economic utility was, after all, of the greatest importance when recruiting veterinarians: it was only in 1796, when a sizeable cavalry had been acquired and losses through disease became a very real possibility, that a regulation was passed proposing the appointment of a veterinary surgeon to cavalry regiments.Footnote 76 Another question that was central to the practice of veterinary medicine during these initial years was the use of native resources and expertise; these were not fully trusted but were readily available at negligible cost when compared to the expenses involved in importing medicines from Britain. This led to a dilemma for the colonial state that was highlighted earlier. The veterinarian also faced the question of economic utility when performing his duties as a horse-breeder, and faced heavy censure from the authorities for showing inadequate results.Footnote 77 Finally, a study of early veterinary developments reaffirms the strong military connection with horse-breeding that has been shown throughout this paper. Perhaps the efficiency of the veterinarians and horse-breeders was, to an extent, compromised due to this strong link with the military.Footnote 78
Colonial officials had little doubt about the superiority of British veterinary expertise despite the raging debate over the relative advantages of integration and autonomy; the relative merits of native and British practitioners were not even perfunctorily discussed, as veterinarians barely trained in the rudiments of the art were imported from the metropole.Footnote 79 Medicine for regiments was also purchased in and despatched from Britain through the offices of the ever-helpful Mr Coleman, though bazaar medicine was resorted to quite frequently in practice.Footnote 80 It was soon realized, however, that the demand for veterinarians far outstripped the supply, primarily due to the great reluctance shown by British practitioners to undertake a stint in India—perhaps the poor pay conditions had a substantial role to play in curbing their adventurous instincts.Footnote 81 The only potential method for addressing this recruitment gap was by training local farriers, an experiment that was started on a small scale at Arcot in 1811 when ‘half-caste boys’ were instructed for short periods and later attached to regiments.Footnote 82 However, the experiment was not a roaring success, as the rather short training period succeeded in merely equipping beneficiaries with a ‘superficial knowledge of diseases’.Footnote 83 A similar initiative was launched in 1822 at Ballygunge in Calcutta under the superintendence of Veterinary Surgeon Hodgson who at the time had not yet acquired the unflattering reputation for which he ultimately became known.Footnote 84 Working on the theory that a ‘hint of whiteness’ was immensely preferable to unrelieved ‘negritude’, ‘half-caste boys’ were recruited, though even they were found wanting in several attributes. At the end of the training Hodgson reported that only two out of his eight wards, Mr Hughes and Mr Molineux, were tolerably well informed.Footnote 85 These failed experiments, combined with the elevated position of British practitioners, reflect both the growing demand for veterinarians during these times of rapid growth in cavalry, as well as a strong distrust of native aptitude and ability to cure animal disease. When juxtaposed with the negative perception of native breeders highlighted earlier, this underscores the extremely suspicious official stance against indigenous practices when it came to prized British horses. An official noted rather emphatically in this connection that:
It must be obvious to any one who has paid the smallest attention to the subject that Europeans. . . who have obtained a very moderate share of veterinary knowledge must be far more useful in a cavalry corps than the first native solotree [sic] in the country whose medical acquirement, if they can be so called, are far below the most ignorant European cow leach in Europe.Footnote 86
Though such statements reflect the dismissive colonial attitude towards indigenous expertise, it must be reiterated that in terms of practical measures there was some degree of grudging dependence, reflected in the use of dealers, Naulbunds, and Zemindars in horse-breeding experiments, highlighted earlier. Within veterinary medicine too, native expertise and bazaar medicine were constantly used and applied. Mistrust also coexisted with partial dependence—and even a measure of respect—when it came to other aspects of indigenous knowledge, for instance in the case of astronomy or human medicine.Footnote 87 Such grudging admissions notwithstanding, colonial suspicion, mistrust, and disparagement of indigenous knowledge systems prohibited a greater integration with them.
Where indigenous resources and expertise could not be trusted, autonomous arrangements were necessary, as in case of studs; Arcot and Ballygunge were a step in this direction. Contrary to the logic of the stud enterprise, however, the question of quality did not determine the nature of veterinary training in the colony, where maximum returns with minimum investment appears to have been the Company's motto. When Hodgson berated the government for its inadequate devotion to the advancement of science, the reply was clear and categorical: all that was expected of him was to train his wards in ‘practical matters’, not in the ‘scientific knowledge of the [veterinary] art’.Footnote 88 As the proportion of livestock in the Company's regiments rose, so did the losses suffered through epizootics and other disease,Footnote 89 but there existed a strong belief that basic precautions like proper shoeing of horses and knowledge of certain stock remedies would significantly reduce the losses. This, of course, had the added advantage of justifying the rather elementary but cost-effective training provided at Arcot and Ballygunge while also setting the tone for contemporary and future Anglo-Indian veterinary practice. Consequently, when William Moorcroft wrote his first and only monograph targeted at veterinarians in India, he chose deliberately to ignore the abstract anatomical and physiological experiments being carried out at the famed French institutes, writing more prosaically about the ‘contents of a portable horse medicine chest adapted for India’.Footnote 90
Preventing excessive mortality was, however, only a part of the veterinarian's duty—there was a significant expansion in his remit and responsibilities in the colonies, transforming him severally into a conservationist, an agrarian reformer, a researcher, and even a revenue collector.Footnote 91 In the Indian context, veterinarians acquired the dual responsibility of being healers as well as breeders, not only buying and rearing suitable horses for regiments but also overseeing stud operations. It was in this role that they directly faced the book-keeper's wrath, especially as the stud experiment failed to show any financial gains. Severely reprimanded for the studs’ meagre performance, veterinary surgeons and superintendents colluded and devised underhand methods of improving returns. Quantity not quality became the new watchword, as the fundamental rationale for studs was challenged in a race to increase the number of stud horses passing into the cavalry. Small wonder then that the number of such horses rose manifold from a mere dozen or two in the 1790s to as many as 496 in 1823, though any potential gain in the studs’ reputation was offset by the visibly poor quality of the horses.Footnote 92 Talking of the methods used to achieve higher targets, an official noted that:
The object of the superintendent and his veterinary surgeon [is] to get as many of their colts passed as possible. They [are] brought up in quick succession [before the Remount Committee] and subjected to a very cursory scrutiny. I have known colts rejected in the first two [or] three sittings of the committee presented on a future day when the members were less keen to their work and passed.Footnote 93
The economic argument, applied rigorously and carried to its extreme, perverted the very basis of the rather utopian stud experiment. Another crisis was generated due to the fundamentally military nature of the enterprise, which led to a deep-seated clash of interests after the appointment of veterinary surgeons to studs. Hodgson faced military opposition throughout his career, starting with the Ballygunge experiment and leading eventually to his dismissal from Hissar. An equally prolonged battle took place between Moorcroft and the Board of Superintendence appointed by the Military Board, with accusations flying thick and fast in both directions. Though Moorcroft's life was perhaps a great example of peaceful coexistence with the military,Footnote 94 he repeatedly made the point that his differences with the military breeders emerged out of an underlying conflict of perspectives.Footnote 95 His grand tours to North India and Central Asia, which so riled his military superiors,Footnote 96 might have been partly occasioned by a desire to flee from the dictates of his superiors, though his ostensible motive was to study and obtain a better breed of cattle. Such dissidence, coupled with the fact the late 1820s saw an enthusiastic return to the old policy of recruiting British practitioners, led to a partial strengthening of the veterinarian's autonomy,Footnote 97 a development that would have been quite inconceivable during the earliest phase when there had been a complete co-option by the military.Footnote 98 However, caught as he still was between military fiats and the Treasury's ledgers, it would take him many more decades to achieve any substantial measure of independence.Footnote 99
Conclusion
As discussed in earlier sections, veterinary developments both substantiate and resonate with a number of trends, including a distrust of native practices, the military origins of horse-breeding and its lasting influence, the financial underpinnings of the entire enterprise, and its dependence on metropolitan expertise. These trends have been highlighted against the background of several noteworthy processes occurring during this formative phase of colonial rule. The question of horse-breeding and a strong cavalry was, after all, of supreme importance during these times of great military campaigns and annexations, and it was closely linked to larger debates about property rights, land settlements, and financial administration. Major Frazer, though only an insignificant military underling, was in this regard a close ally of great and almost mythical personages like Cornwallis, Philip Francis, and Thomas More. All of them worked within a climate that was shaped by the larger utilitarian and physiocratic doctrines and tempered by a healthy financial austerity.
Though the colonial horse-breeding policy had its original impulse both in the concern with quality and in the distrust of native networks, policies and correspondences on the subject were couched in economic language right from the start: private property, the creation of a market, and the financial worthiness of studs were all discussed extensively in connection with breeding practices. Also, the argument of financial worth was the final basis on which the usefulness of any new policy was judged: the Zemindary system appeared alluring due to the promise it held of cutting down stud expenses; a quality-conscious native cattle market was promoted as the most cost-efficient method for acquiring horses; studs fell out of favour because of their inefficiency and unsatisfactory financial returns; and even the fate of the emerging veterinary establishment was decided on the basis of a carefully drawn balance-sheet. This financial emphasis was, in fact, carried to such an extreme that it undercut its own basic purpose, leading to half-baked measures and halfway-abandoned plans that made a significant demand on the Treasury. Though this is purely historical conjecture, perhaps the studs would have succeeded had their operations not been reined in and perverted by this economic logic.
Finally, this paper has mapped the trajectory of a policy that did not have much impact and never took off. The colonial cavalry never matched—purely in terms of quantity—those owned by native states like Mysore or the Marathas during these early years of colonial rule. Yet, a study of these failed measures not only reveals the larger ideological parameters within which the colonial government functioned, but also sheds light on several areas that have been interpreted differently by historians. For instance, although during this early phase of colonialism Company sahibs have been seen as having relatively greater interactions with the natives, this paper highlights a fundamental distrust of natives when it came to concrete measures. The British might have dressed up as nawabs and appreciated Urdu couplets, but this did not translate into an approval of all native agents. This distrust might have been partly responsible for an insufficient colonial penetration into the remotest territories, which could have led to the failure of many of the measures outlined above, even though the process of gaining collaborators had already started with the implementation of land settlements and similar measures.
