Introduction: The milk revolution

In March 2021 India’s Ministry of Defence announced the closure of its 39 military dairy farms. This decision, taken on grounds of economy but also because clean, fresh milk was now available almost anywhere in the country, ended a history that dated back to the establishment of the first such farm at Allahabad in 1889. In ‘drawing the curtains’ on this bovine institution, after what the official press release called ‘132 years of glorious service to the nation’, the army ended a system of milk production that at its height, in the early post-independence years, encompassed 130 farms, 30,000 cattle, and 20,000 acres of land.Footnote ¹ It is remarkable that a colonial-era institution should have enjoyed such longevity and to have served India’s military across such a lengthy period of political, economic, and social change. But the demise of India’s dairy farms also raises questions as to why such institutions were established in the first place and why they were created and maintained as specifically military institutions.

The idea of a milk revolution in India is normally associated with ‘Operation Flood’ and the campaign to increase milk production and consumption in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ² This article argues, however, for an earlier, in some respects no less momentous, episode, beginning in the 1880s. The developments in dairying, in the quarter-century preceding the First World War, reinforce the idea of this as a period of significant technological progress in India, sandwiched between the monumental technologies of the mid-nineteenth century—railways, steamships, telegraphs, irrigation works—and the era of innovation and indigeneity associated, after 1905 and more especially 1918, with the swadeshi movement and the Gandhian reaction against modern machines and industrial technology. Aside from their direct contribution to milk and butter production in India, the cantonment dairy farms reflect issues of animal history, the development of Indian (and European) cattle breeds as milch animals, and the role of routine science (bacteriology, cattle-breeding, food hygiene, and dietetics) at the intersection of prevalent notions of race and purity. Although in its origin this dairying development relates to the health of British soldiers and their families, the impact of change was far more widely felt—in Indian as well as British animal husbandry, in Indian consumerism, and ultimately in both the bifurcation and mutual appropriation involved in the conjunction of Western and Indian ideas about the nature and function of cattle and the milk they produced. Focusing on milk as a discursive medium—for ideas of race, hygiene, and scientific modernity—creates wider interpretive possibilities than concentrating on cattle alone. Further, while much of the now-extensive scholarly literature on cows and ‘cow protection’ relates to issues of Hindu religious belief and communal conflict, this earlier history is predicated on a largely secular understanding of bovine animals, and yet it still contains within it a narrative of Hindu identity, resistance, and appropriation.Footnote ³

The military had a multifactorial relationship with India’s bovine population.Footnote ⁴ From the early colonial wars against the Marathas and Mysore, the armies of the East India Company and the British Crown, adopting indigenous practice, relied heavily on oxen to haul siege guns and for general transport purposes. As late as the First World War bullocks were employed to support military operations in Mesopotamia. To meet this need, the army had its own cattle-breeding stations and experimented with different breeds of Indian bullocks with a view to maintaining a dependable supply of working animals.Footnote ⁵ Indian breeds were seen to possess the strength and endurance required for military service in India and neighbouring territories (Afghanistan, Burma, Iraq), while European oxen, ill-suited to regional conditions, offered little or no additional benefit. A more controversial aspect of the army’s multiple bovine engagements was the consumption of beef, a mainstay of the British soldier’s diet in India. Partly for this reason many of India’s slaughterhouses were located in, or in close proximity to, cantonments. However, by the 1890s, with the rise of the Arya Samaj and the cow protection movement, this was becoming a source of increasing friction between Hindus and Sikhs, on the one hand, and the military (as well as civil) authorities, on the other.Footnote ⁶ But this discussion will concentrate on milk, milch cows, and the growth of cantonment dairies, a development broadly contemporaneous with the declining use of bullocks for military purposes.

Two points need to be made at the outset. First, milk and its production under army auspices makes a perhaps surprising entrance into British military history in India. There have been many scholarly accounts of British soldiers in nineteenth-century India as drunken and dissolute, consuming vast quantities of rum and beer, as well as arrack and other alcoholic beverages obtained from army canteens or, illicitly, from neighbouring bazaars. The consequence of this persistent heavy drinking was widely viewed as undisciplined and riotous behaviour and a slew of health problems—delirium tremens, sexually transmitted (‘venereal’) disease, and chronic hepatitis—that resulted in high levels of hospitalization and mortality among rank-and-file soldiers.Footnote ⁷ The milder milk-and-butter story of the military dairy farms offers both a sequel and a partial corrective to this drunken narrative.

The second point is that the many army cantonments that had grown up across British India since the late eighteenth century, especially in the wake of the 1857–1858 Uprising, were zones of exceptional governance. Often vast in extent, covering hundreds of acres, they provided more than just accommodation for British and Indian troops and their officers. They also contained stables and saddleries, bazaars, villages, places of worship, schools, bakeries, hospitals, cemeteries, racecourses, slaughterhouses, and dairies. They were spaces organized around animal as well as human lives. Within these capacious enclaves, special laws and regulations applied that made the cantonment administratively and judicially distinct from the surrounding province and even neighbouring municipalities.Footnote ⁸ And, while they could never be entirely isolated from what one medical officer called ‘the native environment beyond cantonment limits’, in matters affecting health, sanitation, and disease, from lock hospitals to compulsory vaccination, cantonments constituted zones of exceptional intervention, experimentation, and control.Footnote ⁹ Accounts of army health in India have frequently invoked the human spatiality of barrack and bazaar; but, as the story of military dairying demonstrates, the cantonment’s bovine denizens also constituted a primary zone of disease investigation and an interspecies site in the search for remedial measures.

The enteric army

The milk trail begins, as with so much else in British India, with disease—in this case with typhoid, or enteric fever as it was more commonly referred to at the time. First identified in India in 1853, the disease was barely considered a health issue among British troops stationed in the subcontinent before the 1870s.Footnote ¹⁰ In colonial documentation it was largely subsumed under the amorphous heading of ‘fevers’, much of which related to malaria; only in 1871 did enteric fever become a separate entry in army statistical returns. In 1859–1863 enteric fever officially accounted for only 0.2 per cent of hospital admissions among British troops in India and 0.1 per cent of deaths; but by 1877–1894 the figures had shot up to 16.4 and 4.7 respectively, far outstripping malaria, cholera, dysentery, and hepatitis, and making typhoid by far the largest single cause of white morbidity and mortality in the army. ‘Enteric fever’, according to India’s sanitary commissioner in 1887, was ‘the most fatal of all diseases to which the European soldier in India is liable’.Footnote ¹¹ Mortality peaked in 1897–1898, with 1,305 deaths in those two years alone. In 1899, 1,392 soldiers were hospitalized with enteric fever and a further 348 died. In 1900, the figures were slightly lower at 970 and 289 respectively, but in that year enteric fever still accounted for a third of all fatalities among British soldiers in India.Footnote ¹² As well as the actual loss of life, the army authorities were alarmed by the cumulative loss of soldier man-days. In 1898 an estimated 117,023 days of military service were lost through typhoid.Footnote ¹³ Although the incidence of the disease and its fatality began to decline early in the new century, there were still 4,791 hospital admissions and 932 deaths recorded between 1905 and 1909 out of an average strength of 72,000 soldiers, with a partial recrudescence during the First World War.

The reason for this deadly upsurge was unclear to contemporaries. Enteric fever was a ‘mystery’, its aetiology ‘obscure’.Footnote ¹⁴ One factor in greater awareness of the disease was undoubtedly improved diagnosis, especially after the microbial cause of typhoid was identified by Karl Joseph Eberth in 1880, which enabled enteric fever to be more effectively distinguished from other ‘fevers’. Increasingly expert use of microscopy was a further significant element, as were detailed analyses of the disease made by medical authorities in India as well as in Europe and North America. By the late 1890s and early 1900s, India’s sanitary commissioner could cite dozens of scientific papers and reports as evidence of a rapidly increasing knowledge of the disease and its possible modes of transmission: no other disease commanded such lengthy and detailed analysis.Footnote ¹⁵ It was not, however, until Robert Koch’s researches in 1902–1903 that it was definitively established that humans were the natural ‘storehouse’ for the disease and that the causative bacillus had only a short life outside the human body.Footnote ¹⁶ A second, and from the military perspective, particularly compelling factor in drawing attention to the disease, was the very high incidence of typhoid among young British soldiers, particularly those under 25, who had only recently (within the previous two or three years) been stationed in India and so had not become ‘acclimatized’ to Indian conditions. European officers, whether in the British Army or its Indian counterpart, were also, relative to their strength, statistically significant casualties. Conversely, among long-serving soldiers, especially those over 30, the percentage of cases and deaths was far lower, while in the Indian Army the incidence of enteric fever was either very low or seriously underreported.Footnote ¹⁷ So racially specific did morbidity and mortality appear to be that many observers believed that Indians must have an inherent immunity to the disease or acquired it through childhood infection.Footnote ¹⁸ Until the 1900s typhoid in India was apt to be classed as a ‘race’ disease.

To add to the perplexity, some military stations suffered more from typhoid than others. Although the disease seemed particularly to affect soldiers in April, May, and June as the weather grew hotter, it could be found in cooler hill locations as well as in the plains. One station that was severely and repeatedly afflicted was Quetta in Baluchistan, which by the late 1890s had acquired ‘an unenviable notoriety for enteric’.Footnote ¹⁹ Between 1890 and 1897, out of an average strength of around 2,200, 408 British soldiers in Quetta were hospitalized with typhoid and 64 died from the disease. Some years proved exceptionally deadly. In 1896 alone there were 140 hospital admissions and 22 deaths, and here, too, the disease reached beyond rank-and-file soldiers to officers and soldiers’ wives. Between the start of January and 14 November 1898, nine officers, 220 soldiers, and 18 women were struck by typhoid; one officer, three army wives, and 69 soldiers died. Such was the level of concern among the cantonment authorities that a special enteric fever committee was formed at Quetta in 1898 to propose measures to combat the disease.Footnote ²⁰

Explanations for the cause of such violent, deadly, and apparently racially discriminatory outbreaks varied widely. Between the 1860s and 1900s the general understanding shifted from miasmatic factors and non-specific sanitary conditions to a focus on how exactly the bacillus might be transmitted. At Quetta a correlation was mooted between outbreaks of typhoid and local climatic conditions, especially the direction of the prevailing wind, and dust-borne transmission of the typhoid ‘germ’. Flies, poor sanitation, and human and animal ‘filth’ were further implicated as likely vectors or causative factors. But attention was also directed at soldiers’ food and drink, including milk and water. It seemed self-evident to some at Quetta that ‘the water and milk-supply must be looked into’.Footnote ²¹

That milk might be a cause of typhoid or a medium for its transmission had long been mooted. Much of the evidence for the milk connection came from reports in Britain, continental Europe, and North America, but in 1880 Joseph Ewart of the Bengal Medical Service, a pioneer of typhoid investigation in India, cited a case in which milk adulterated with pond water had been identified as a possible medium for the disease among prisoners in Ajmer jail, though he otherwise gave milk no particular prominence.Footnote ²² In 1892 another physician in the Bengal service, Charles Bedford, accepted that typhoid in India must be the same disease with the same aetiology as observed in Europe, but emphasized what he saw as ‘the totally different conditions of Indian life’.Footnote ²³ Among these ‘local’ factors was the way in which milk in India was liable to contamination, whether by aerial exposure to ‘germs’ from cesspits and latrines, through to adulteration with dirty water, its handling by unhygienic cooks and milkmen, or even cows ‘fed on garbage or contaminated grass’. It followed that the milk-supply in military stations ‘should receive constant attention’; milking should be closely supervised to prevent adulteration of the milk and the cows themselves should be ‘well selected’ and ‘carefully fed and housed’.Footnote ²⁴ The story of enteric fever was becoming a tale of cows and milk.

By the 1890s milk—still more, its production and delivery—had become a cause for intense military medical concern. In discussing possible causes of cantonment outbreaks in 1892, India’s sanitary commissioner cited the medical officer in Bangalore. ‘The food which the European obtains in this country is not always of the purest description’, warned Brigadier-Surgeon Bennett Kelly, pairing the impurity of milk with the vulnerability of Europeans:

In the same report, Quetta’s medical officer was quoted as saying that at least one case of enteric fever had been directly linked to the adulteration of milk supplied to the cantonment hospital. ‘The contractor was caught mixing dirty water with the milk, and severely punished.’Footnote ²⁶ Eight years later, in 1900, as the crisis deepened, other incidents of a similar nature were reported. At Dagshai in the Punjab hills, milk obtained from a ‘filthy hawker’ was blamed for an outbreak of enteric fever, while nearby Kasauli dairy ‘was reported to possess every possible defect from a sanitary point of view’.Footnote ²⁷ At Quetta, too, the problem was seen, in part, to lie with the contaminated milk-supply. Milk and butter for British troops and the station hospital came from so-called regimental dairies but in practice from cows and buffaloes owned by Indian contractors and milked by Indian milkmen (goalas). The animals were kept in fly-infested, insanitary outhouses, with mud floors and inadequate drainage to remove the dung and urine. It was widely suspected that goalas adulterated the milk with impure water to increase the quantity for sale and were generally unhygienic in their methods. Additional milk was obtained from surrounding villages, over which there was no supervision at all.Footnote ²⁸

Although there was no consensus, even among medical officers at Quetta, as to how exactly typhoid was transmitted, and seldom any firm evidence that the culprit was milk (or the milkman), tackling insanitary milk production and the unsatisfactory state of cantonment dairies appeared to offer one practical solution. In other words, the founding of cantonment dairies in the late nineteenth century was not, as the official communique cited at the start of this article suggested, to serve ‘the nation’, but to save the lives of young British soldiers. The army authorities believed that they had made substantial progress in protecting the health of British troops since the publication of the Royal Commission report on the sanitary state of the army in India in 1863.Footnote ²⁹ Morbidity and mortality from most diseases had fallen and standards of sanitation in military stations were generally higher than in society at large. It was, therefore, all the more galling—and alarming—that enteric fever had somehow breached the sanitary cordon of the cantonment and so placed European lives at risk.

In fact, the creation of the cantonment dairies, to which we will turn shortly, did not primarily resolve the issue of typhoid among British troops in India, nor does enteric fever alone explain the financial and administrative investment made in military dairying from the 1880s onwards. Although milk was often mentioned in the sanitary commissioner’s reports and in other studies published in India between the 1870s and 1900s, it was seldom presented as the sole cause: contaminated water, the inefficient disposal of human waste, possible transmission by flies and dust were given equal, if not greater, prominence.Footnote ³⁰ There was even some scepticism that milk, or milk products, could explain the erratic occurrence of the outbreaks. In 1891 Sir William Moore doubted that typhoid could be related to milk ‘for the women and children who consume most milk [in the barracks] do not suffer so much from this disease as the men’.Footnote ³¹ Bangalore’s medical officer likewise commented: ‘Milk-drinkers and non-milk-drinkers, teetotallers and moderate drinkers, haunters of the bazaar and men who said they never went near the bazaar at all, suffered alike.’Footnote ³² ‘Most, if not all, soldiers use butter,’ reported another medical officer in 1901, ‘but a considerable number use no milk, not even in their tea, and a large number use it only in tea’.Footnote ³³

The point is not, then, that enteric fever could be conclusively and exclusively linked to milk, but that milk served as a discursive medium, indicative of the perceived threat to the health of vulnerable white soldiers and their families. Much could be done to mitigate the effects of enteric fever in India, J. Butler Hamilton argued in the late 1880s: ‘In the matter of milk-supply alone, an enormous improvement might easily be effected at comparatively little trouble and expense.’Footnote ³⁴ Others concurred. Surgeon-Major A. M. Davies, commenting on a paper on enteric fever at the Indian Medical Congress in 1894, warned

In practice, medical attention focused on two other measures to combat typhoid. One was the recognition, following Koch, of the role of human ‘carriers’ and the need to identify and isolate them as quickly as possible. The enquiry by D. Semple and E. D. W. Greig in 1906–1908 revealed that British soldiers, not Indian milkmen or cooks, were the main source of infection in the army in India.Footnote ³⁶ In order to prevent convalescent cases from spreading the disease, two segregation hospitals were established in 1908, one at Nainital for north India, the other, for the south, at Wellington in the Nilgiris. This policy of strict isolation was thought to have a significant impact on the chain of transmission.Footnote ³⁷ The second ameliorative measure was inoculation. Following the development of an anti-typhoid prophylactic by Almroth Wright and David Semple at the Army Medical School at Netley between 1892 and 1902, the British Army in India rapidly adopted its use, the need having been further demonstrated by heavy troop losses to enteric fever during the South African War of 1899–1902. By 1915 more than 90 per cent of British troops in India had been inoculated.Footnote ³⁸ These initiatives primarily explain the decline of typhoid morbidity and mortality in the army after 1906. Measures to improve the supply of ‘pure’ milk were a secondary but still symbolically and practically significant factor.

Tainted milk and ignoble cows

This was substantially more than a story of the triumph of microbial specificity and disease prophylaxis over hazy miasmatics. While enteric fever could not be blamed exclusively on milk, the alarm over the loss of soldiers’ lives generated unprecedented scrutiny of milk and the manner of its production and supply in India. For years the army’s bovine preoccupation had been bullocks; now, in the 1880s and 1890s, attention shifted dramatically to cows and their milk, and this newly critical scrutiny extended far beyond the cantonment. Contrary to what Hindu reverence for the cow might suggest, Indian cows were now widely seen by the British as ignoble, unclean animals. Surgeon Kelly’s prejudicial view cited earlier, that cows were ‘fed by natives on forage of the most filthy description’, was widely shared. Speaking in 1891, the residency surgeon in Jaipur, Thomas Holbein Hendley, described the cows that foraged on the streets of Rajasthani cities as scavenging animals, hardly to be distinguished in their eating habits from dogs, pigs, and vultures. ‘Milch kine,’ he declared, ‘pick up a living in the streets, and their appetites are so depraved that they act as scavengers.’ In cities like Bikaner, ‘nearly all the milk comes from foul-feeding cattle’.Footnote ³⁹ A few years earlier Butler Hamilton had observed:

According to Hamilton, it was ‘well known’ that in the dry season when fodder was scarce goalas ‘fed their cows on ‘the filthiest of food’, including stable litter and ‘even fouler garbage’.Footnote ⁴¹ At the 1894 Indian Medical Congress, P. W. O’Gorman listed a dozen diseases, led by tuberculosis, cholera, and enteric fever, attributed to cows or disseminated through their milk. He quoted a report in the Indian Daily News on milch cows and milkmen in Calcutta: ‘In our midst we have perhaps the foulest dairies or byres in the world, regulated by no rules of cleanliness, care, or humanity. They are nurseries prepared and ready for the germ which is to spread an epidemic of disease and death amongst us.’Footnote ⁴²

Much of the hostility generated over tainted milk and enteric fever was directed at low-caste goalas and their methods. In the racial rhetoric of the time, they were represented as not only filthy, unhygienic, and deceitful but as purveyors of the adulterated and contaminated milk that poisoned and killed innocent Europeans, including the soldiery on whom imperial power ultimately depended. Milk signalled a general distrust of Indian agency, especially that of servants and subordinates: in this regard it corresponded to, and further fuelled, the poison fears prevalent among Europeans in India at the time.Footnote ⁴³ Much discursive space was devoted to the methods by which the milkmen diluted their milk with impure water, extracted from the nearest pool or well, or forced cows to yield their milk by blowing into their vaginas, before, barren and mistreated, they were despatched to the slaughterhouse. ‘The milch cow’s lot in the hands of the Calcutta wholesale milk supplier,’ concluded the Daily News in 1894, ‘is not a happy one.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Even when Semple and Greig showed that enteric fever mainly circulated among British soldiers and that in most cases ‘the Native element could be completely eliminated’, the intensity of the hostility to the milkman and his methods remained and gained traction not just among Europeans but among middle-class Indians as well.Footnote ⁴⁵

Other considerations, too, lay behind the army’s investment in military dairies. One was the increased concern for the health of British soldiers in India in general and the loss of young lives in particular. Given the long history of heavy drinking and its impact on soldiers’ health and discipline, by the 1890s the military authorities were keen to promote regimental libraries, indoor recreations, and outdoor sports—a cult of self-improvement and physical fitness to supplant the old culture of drunkenness and debauchery. As a result of ‘strenuous efforts’ by medical officers and cantonment magistrates even the sexually transmitted diseases which had been so large a cause of army ill-health in the nineteenth century began to decline. Temperance societies were encouraged; tea-drinking (with milk) became widespread.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is hard to imagine the British Army in India in the 1890s and 1900s quaffing large quantities of milk, but, as well as milk, soldiers and their families regularly consumed butter, cream, and dahi (curd) supplied by regimental dairies, or made sweets, cakes, and ice-cream using what often proved to be contaminated milk. In 1892–1893 the Allahabad cantonment dairy not only sold copious quantities of milk and butter to the barracks and military hospital but also 32,319 pints of buttermilk.Footnote ⁴⁷

The production and consumption of clean (increasingly pasteurized) milk, and its by-products, were part of an enhanced concern for the colonial self, extending even to working-class soldiers, a strategy directed at saving European, rather than Indian, lives. Moreover, the racialized equation of ‘pure’ milk and butter with European health extended well beyond the barracks. In the 1890s even schools for European children in the hills boasted of having their own dairy to supply fresh and unadulterated milk and butter to their pupils.Footnote ⁴⁸ The dairy fetish extended all the way up the colonial food-chain. At the Delhi durbar of 1911, held to commemorate the accession of George V, 4,500 cows were assembled to provision troops with a reliable source of milk; when the royal party toured India by train, hundreds of milch cows were driven up to the side of the railway tracks to provide the daily milk ration.Footnote ⁴⁹

A further factor in the widening concern over milk and its connection with military hygiene and public health was the rise of bacteriology.Footnote ⁵⁰ Milk constitutes a primary example of how the routine science of bacteriology transformed health ideas and practices in India. As in Europe and North America, there was increasing alarm at the way in which everyday items of food and drink—not least, as Steere-Williams has shown, milk and its products—could become a medium for the transmission of cholera, enteric fever, and other deadly or debilitating diseases.Footnote ⁵¹ At one extreme of the colonial health spectrum stood the goala with his cow and milk-pail, at the other the bacteriologist with his microscope and slides. Analysts in government and municipal laboratories across India scrutinized the chemical composition, bacterial load, and levels of impurity in water, milk, and various foodstuffs. E. H. Hankin, from 1892 chemical examiner for the North-Western Provinces, was one of the first of the new breed of bacteriologists in India to conduct intensive investigations of this kind, and he was repeatedly called upon by the army to analyse samples of milk and butter. One of his first commissions was to examine the cause of typhoid outbreaks among British troops in Lucknow and Agra and possible links with regimental dairies. His painstaking investigations, involving the inspection of wells, kitchens, dairies, and messes, were seldom entirely conclusive as to the source and means of transmission, but repeatedly led him to suspect ‘the dairyman and his milk’ as likely agents in the spread of typhoid and cholera.Footnote ⁵² In Bombay in 1916 alone the municipal analyst L. L. Joshi examined 6,137 items, mostly of food and drink, 1,909 chemically, 4,228 bacteriologically. Of these, 818 were samples of milk. Butter and ghee also came under close scrutiny.Footnote ⁵³

Bacteriology could be employed not just to condemn Indian milk; it could also function as a technology of affirmation to demonstrate the purity and authenticate the British-level quality of milk produced in military dairies or on government farms like that at Pusa in Bihar.Footnote ⁵⁴ Notions of ‘purity’—with all their racial overtones and analogies—pervaded the colonial discourse of cows, milk, and dairying. Here, speaking with the authority of Western science, of the bacteriologist, the laboratory, and the microscope, was a seemingly objective idea of purity, health, and cleanliness, that to many European minds contrasted with Hindu notions of the purity or purifying power of the five products of the cow (milk, butter, curd, urine, and dung). The concern over adulterated milk became extremely widespread by the 1920s and was the subject of numerous reports highly critical of the current state of supply to the public as well as the army. But, significantly, the ‘milk problem’, as it was described, was an issue that captured Indian, as well as European, attention, the racial rhetoric of the latter proving broadly congruent with the caste, class, and nation-building concerns of the former.Footnote ⁵⁵

Moreover, and most influentially, it was increasingly argued, in India as in the West, that impure, unsterilized milk was a major factor in infant mortality.Footnote ⁵⁶ As R. J. Blackham noted in 1920, the level of infant deaths in India, and in Indian cities in particular, was extremely high—445 per thousand live births in Bombay, 381 in Delhi, and 297 in Madras in the decade preceding the First World War. A fifth of all Indian infants died within a year of their birth.Footnote ⁵⁷ An increased supply of clean, fresh, affordable milk, it was argued, would help reduce such appalling mortality.Footnote ⁵⁸ This made milk a moral and political as well as a medical issue, and one that transcended the colonial divide. In 1918 Chunilal Bose, formerly Bengal’s chemical examiner, described milk as ‘an indispensable item of food for children’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1935 Godbole and Sadgopal went further, arguing: ‘In India, we require a country-wide campaign of “Drink More Milk” in order to build up [the] bonny babies and healthy adults who form the real backbone of the nation.’Footnote ⁶⁰ By the 1920s supporters of the cow protection movement, adopting and adapting the logic of the colonial sanitarian and combining it with an enhanced sense of the place of milk in Hindu ritual and dietetics, argued that the killing or export of milch cows was highly detrimental to the already insufficient milk supply and impacted adversely on the health of the Indian nation, above all its infant population.Footnote ⁶¹

The rise of army dairies in India thus reflected and reinforced increased appreciation of the nutritional value of milk. Before the 1890s, colonial studies of Indian diets and the diets of Europeans in the army or among Indian prisoners rarely mentioned the health benefits of dairy products. In his 1864 report, W. R. Cornish, the Madras sanitary commissioner, noted that caste Hindus abjured all meat but used buttermilk and curds ‘very liberally’. Milk, he observed, was ‘the perfect food’ since it contained ‘in due proportions every principle necessary to the growth and development of the human body’.Footnote ⁶² But, like most of his medical contemporaries, Cornish concentrated on the food-grains, pulses, and the vegetable products that were deemed to be the main items of Indian consumption; milk, ghee, and buttermilk gleaned only passing notice.Footnote ⁶³ Later writers were, however, more aware of the importance of milk and its products to Indian food culture, especially in the north. In 1912 the physiologist D. McCay noted how two of India’s leading ‘martial races’, the Sikhs and Jats, consumed large quantities of milk and curd at home and continued this practice of high dairy consumption on entering army service. It was, he believed, a factor in their ‘superior’ physique and in rendering them ‘good fighting material’.Footnote ⁶⁴ McCay’s research initiated a long series of nutritional studies in which Sikh diets, or Punjabi diets in general, were lauded for their exemplary use of milk, lassi, and ghee, just as ‘bad’ south Indian diets were castigated for low levels of milk consumption and general lack of animal protein.Footnote ⁶⁵

It would be tempting to speculate that increased consumption not just of milk and butter but of buttermilk and curd in the British Army in India was influenced by north Indian tradition. But it is far more likely that the growing appetite for milk arose from increased tea-drinking among soldiers and the perceived threat from enteric fever, coupled with changing medical ideas and tastes emanating from Britain. And yet there was arguably some degree of cultural convergence here. It is surely significant that by the 1890s the bulk of the British Army in India was stationed, not in the milk-poor south, but in the bovine-rich regions of northern India, in Punjab and the United Provinces, with their long cow-keeping traditions; they lived in close proximity to the cows and buffaloes that provisioned their cantonments with milk. Where earlier dairies had been organized on a regimental basis and came and went with individual detachments of the British Army, the new dairies were cantonment dairies, supplying all resident troops, including Indians. At about the same time, colonial knowledge of indigenous milch cows, especially those of the north and northwest, was enhanced by a series of monographs on Indian cattle breeds written by British veterinary officers but drawing on the bovine expertise of Indian subordinates and other ‘native informants’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Borrowing from India’s cattle-keeping culture was an ongoing process. During the First World War, needing fresh milk for troops fighting in Mesopotamia, the military adopted Tharparkars from the desert margins of Sind as a breed tolerant of Iraq’s aridity. Unrecognized as a major breed before the war, thereafter, thanks to the army but also to the nomadic pastoralists who had long nurtured the breed, Tharparkars became one of India’s most sought-after dairy cattle.Footnote ⁶⁷

Enter Keventer

British regiments in India had long claimed to have their own dairies. But these were often rudimentary in nature—a crude cowshed, with an earthen floor and thatched roof where the goalas kept the cows and buffaloes from which they supplied milk to the regimental mess. ‘The so-called dairy,’ it was reported from Murree in 1901, ‘was a servant’s house, dark and ill-ventilated, close to a native latrine.’Footnote ⁶⁸ The perceived problem with these so-called dairies was twofold: first, that they were grossly unhygienic and a likely source, via infected milk, of cholera, typhoid, and dysentery; and, second, that they were demonstrably unmodern at a time when dairying in the West was being revolutionized through the sterilization and pasteurization of milk and by newly mechanized means of producing not just milk, but also butter and cheese.

One of the innovative features of the first dairying revolution in India was the prominence given to butter and cream. In part this reflected European tastes and expertise; but, like Operation Flood in the 1970s and 1980s, it signalled a partial turning away from traditional Indian dairy products, notably ghee.Footnote ⁶⁹ In many parts of rural India ghee was a major outlet for surplus milk and a vital source of income for small farmers and peasant cultivators. It had, however, little part in the ‘modern’ dairying pioneered in late nineteenth-century India. A review by Henry Howman, a British dairy expert invited to India by the Bombay government in 1889, highlighted the inadequacies of the current milk and butter supply.Footnote ⁷⁰ ‘The butter made by Natives,’ he reported, ‘was very inferior, preserving neither the flavour nor the keeping properties that we look for in England.’ In consequence there was little demand for it. Howman took with him to India an Alfa Laval hand-operated cream-separator, and to operate it, a young Swedish assistant, Edward Keventer, to conduct trials on Indian buffalo and cows’ milk. Howman even concluded, in implicit recognition of Indian traditions and preferences, that the buffalo (no part of Europe’s dairying tradition) was, ‘from a butter making point of view, an animal of exceptional merit’.Footnote ⁷¹

Following Howman’s report, India’s military authorities decided to act, and in 1889 they authorized the establishment of dairy farms in cantonments across northern India.Footnote ⁷² The first such diary was at Allahabad, where a grand new building was erected—a three-storey temple to the science of modern dairying—crowned with a depiction of an English-looking dairymaid beside an English-looking cow.Footnote ⁷³ The city’s vast cantonment contained a grass farm that could be diverted to cattle use, and a modest herd of 15 cows, one buffalo, and ten calves was assembled. By 1892 the herd had grown to 35 cows, 16 buffaloes, and 54 calves.Footnote ⁷⁴ The commissariat officer in charge of the farm was convinced that it could meet the dairy needs of the entire garrison at Allahabad but was doubtful that it would ever, from a financial viewpoint, be a complete success. Lieutenant D. J. Meagher was appointed to oversee the dairy, his knowledge of ‘cattle of all kinds’ being ‘unrivalled’. He gave all his leisure time to the dairy where, it was reported, ‘he practically lives’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1897 Meagher was sent to Britain to study modern dairying; he also took the opportunity to visit Denmark and Sweden and toured the Alfa Laval plant in Stockholm where cream-separators were made.Footnote ⁷⁶ The recourse to ‘foreign’ expertise (from outside British and imperial circles) and the value attached to imported dairying equipment were other characteristics this first dairying revolution shared with its post-colonial counterpart.Footnote ⁷⁷

In the quest for clean milk, the dairyman was supplanting the sanitarian. In 1890 the government of the North-Western Provinces (NWP) appointed Keventer, initially on a one-year contract, to create a modern dairy farm near Aligarh, to supply the army and other such institutions (orphanages, hospitals, asylums, jails) as might benefit from its produce. There, and then at the Lucknow cantonment, Keventer ably demonstrated that milk, butter, and cream could be produced on modern lines, to European standards, and by methods superior to those currently used in India. Rather than import expensive European cattle for this purpose, Keventer scoured the countryside for cows and buffaloes; he was also able to persuade European customers, long suspicious of the ‘smoky’ taste of buffalo milk, to consume this, and the cream and butter made from it, as happily as cows’ milk. Keventer proved that butter could be made year-round in India, not just in the cooler months, and trained Indians to learn and apply his modern methods. In addition to proving the viability of mechanized dairying in India, Keventer also sold the equipment, becoming sole agent in India for Alfa Laval milking-machines and cream-separators.Footnote ⁷⁸ Asked in 1893 to assess the quality of Keventer’s butter, India’s agricultural chemist responded: ‘There can be no question that the separator system worked by Mr Keventer … gives results beyond all comparison superior to the native system ordinarily followed.’Footnote ⁷⁹

As well as introducing the latest techniques and equipment, Keventer experimented with new forms of packaging—from tins packed in ice to earthenware jars lined with muslin—by means of which butter could be sent long distances by road and rail to Simla, Ajmer, and Calcutta—without losing its freshness and taste. By 1893 butter from Aligarh was being supplied to messes and clubs across Punjab, the NWP, and the Central Provinces.Footnote ⁸⁰ Seizing the marketing opportunity presented to him, Keventer pioneered a butter revolution as much as a milk one, feeding a demand for fresh butter among Europeans in India that hardly existed previously. These innovations in the manufacture, packaging, and marketing of butter were soon adopted by other dairy farms in India, both private and state-owned, though some baulked at the considerable expense of buying cream-separators from Europe.

The NWP government was delighted with Keventer’s success, and, with the typhoid crisis still unabated, the health benefits it assumed would follow. By early 1899, in addition to Aligarh, he had established cantonment or government dairies at Lucknow, Bareilly, Meerut, and Muttra.Footnote ⁸¹ The Keventer model spread rapidly and by 1900 there were 14 military dairies across the Indian empire (including Aden and Burma). As well as Allahabad, Lucknow, and Cawnpore (Kanpur), they included Rawalpindi, Jubbulpore, Agra, Ambala, Belgaum, and Quetta. In 1904 the authorities decided to go further and create military dairies in 30 cantonments, using methods Keventer had pioneered at Aligarh. By then the Government of India was budgeting Rs 35,000 a year to support new or existing dairy farms.Footnote ⁸² Cantonments offered space, finance, and a captive market. Most had their own grass farms, European dairy managers, purpose-built cattle sheds, creameries, and extensive specialist equipment. Some, like Allahabad’s dairy farm, were involved in buying, fattening, and slaughtering cattle, as well as producing milk, cream, butter, and cheese.Footnote ⁸³ More were planned, often entailing costly land purchases to provide adequate grazing and fodder. When the military station or cantonment lay within a princely state like Mysore or Hyderabad, tricky negotiations ensued over land rights and the culling of surplus cattle.Footnote ⁸⁴

Having initially employed him for only a year, the NWP government was uncommonly keen to extend Keventer’s contract and even offered to increase his salary. The Madras government, too, made a bid for his services; the Bengal administration asked him to establish a dairy farm in Darjeeling, where the milk-supply was ‘notoriously bad’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Citing the need to ‘give Europeans in this country a proper supply of good milk and butter’, untouched by ‘filthy native gwalas’, Bombay appointed Keventer as its dairy expert. Suddenly, if the English-language press is to be believed, the clamour for fresh milk, and for butter and cream made by ‘European methods’, was everywhere.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1890 Bombay’s Times of India enthused over the opening of a new dairy in Tamarind Lane. Sponsored by the provincial agricultural department, with machinery from London and the indispensable Keventer’s assistance, the dairy was intended to show the Bombay public that butter and cheese could be produced in India to a high standard ‘and that it is profitable to produce both commodities by a cleanly and scientific method’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Since cream-separators were a novelty in India, the correspondent explained at length the process by which milk was converted into butter and cheese. ‘At present,’ the article concluded, ‘the new enterprise is in its infancy in this city, but there is every likelihood of it soon attaining to a vigorous manhood.’Footnote ⁸⁸

Within 18 months the Bombay Dairy Supply Company had provided modern equipment to more than 50 dairies across India, including in several princely states.Footnote ⁸⁹ Another new firm, the Western Dairy Company, imported not just cream-separators but also churns that could be sealed on leaving the depot, ‘so that it will be impossible for the delivery milkmen to tamper with the contents’. Customers were further assured that the enterprise was ‘carried on entirely under European supervision’.Footnote ⁹⁰ An article in the Bombay Times in 1894 hailed the transformation that had occurred over the five years since the city’s first modern dairy opened, noting that ‘the dairy industry in this Presidency, largely through the help of the Agricultural Department, has been developed of late years on scientific principles’. The number of private dairies had also increased, it was reported, and the government dairy at Poona, ‘far from acting as a hindrance to private enterprise’, had helped create ‘a new industry’. ‘Evidently,’ the article concluded, ‘we have got far beyond the time when bad butter need be one of the discomforts of exile in India.’Footnote ⁹¹

But the rise of cantonment or government-funded dairies, as in Poona, did not please everyone. Indeed, they re-created a problem that Indian administrations had already encountered over jail industries. Since the 1860s prisoners in larger Indian jails had been employed in making boots, blankets, carpets, and other goods, or in printing, papermaking, and bookbinding. These enterprises were, in effect, subsidized by the state since prisoners were not paid for their labour and the premises where the industries were conducted lay within the prison domain. Private businesses, especially European ones, protested at what they saw as unfair, state-subsidized, competition and an obstacle to their own legitimate development. Jail industries were accordingly scaled back.Footnote ⁹² The Government of India then questioned whether it was also contrary to its free-trade principles to bankroll cantonment dairying, especially when military dairies increasingly found a market for their produce among the civilian population. In 1893 it could still be argued that government dairies ‘occupied a field that was practically untouched by private enterprise’, but within a few years this was evidently no longer the case.Footnote ⁹³ ‘It is desirable,’ wrote one official in 1899, ‘to attract private capital into this class of industry, and the claims of private persons to have reasonable protection against Government competition in this matter are just as clear as they are in the matter of the competition of jail industries.’Footnote ⁹⁴ The government received a stinging complaint from Mr W. Milner in Allahabad who wanted to establish his own dairying business but felt he faced unreasonable competition from the military dairy. He claimed that the government profited from this state-run enterprise to the tune of Rs 10,000 a year, mainly by supplying non-military customers. Milner wanted his share of the market for ‘untainted milk’. The government replied that the dairy’s first duty was to supply the army but could not deny that the Allahabad dairy was now being run on commercial lines.Footnote ⁹⁵

It had long been acknowledged that India’s milk problem was economic as well as technological. Goalas adulterated their milk with water because they could not otherwise make a living from the low price their milk commanded. If 6 to 8 seers of milk sold for one rupee, Hamilton argued in 1888, instead of 12 to 16, the quality of milk would greatly improve and production ‘would no doubt be undertaken by respectable European or Eurasian residents’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Keventer and the military dairies demonstrated that a section of the public, both Indian and European, was prepared to pay more for milk and butter, if they could be sure of its freshness and purity. But because modern dairying had suddenly become such a profitable venture, cantonment dairies attracted much attention in the European press, not all of it favourable. Lahore’s Civil and Military Gazette, for example, expressed enthusiasm for the new dairies on several occasions in the 1890s and 1900s. British troops and British civilians deserved better than to be exposed to typhoid and cholera from milk and butter supplied by ‘filthy native gwalas’, an editorial observed in 1891. It was all in favour of dairies run according to ‘European methods’ and equipped with cream-separators and pasteurizing units.Footnote ⁹⁷ But the paper also carried complaints from European businessmen who keenly resented the unfair competition, as they saw it, from army dairies. George O’Gorman, proprietor of the Rawalpindi Dairy, sent a long letter protesting at the way the army was running a local dairy in competition with his own business, even supplying hospitals with milk and butter. ‘If this is not in direct opposition to the orders of Government in regard to interference with private enterprise,’ he stormed, ‘I do not know what is.’Footnote ⁹⁸

Such complaints were not without effect. In an act of what we would now call privatization, in 1900 the army sold the Aligarh farm to Keventer for Rs 10,000, transforming him from a state employee into an independent entrepreneur. The Swede seized the opportunity. He established outlets and subsidiary farms across northern India; he, and, after his death in 1937, his son, were the official suppliers of milk, butter, and cream to the viceregal household. By 1939 Keventer’s had dairying establishments in Bombay, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Karachi, Lahore, Naini Tal, Simla, Delhi, and Ranchi.Footnote ⁹⁹ After independence, the Aligarh farm was taken over by the Uttar Pradesh government. For decades it remained a state-run dairy, a ‘colonial-era legacy lost in time’, as one journalist put it.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Described as ‘a true pioneer’, Keventer himself was remembered for having almost singlehandedly revolutionized dairying in India.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Milch cows and model dairies

Despite their veneer of techno-modernity, many of the new dairies at first departed but little from earlier practices. Some continued to employ goalas to attend and milk their cows, albeit under greater European supervision. A suggestion that the wives and daughters of British soldiers should act as milkmaids, and so acquire a ‘useful’ occupation, gained no traction.Footnote ¹⁰² Labour at Keventer’s Lucknow dairy came initially from the local jail, with the cattle stalled in disused prison outhouses.Footnote ¹⁰³ Some military dairies found imported cream-separators prohibitively expensive and relied instead on what was termed the ‘improved native system’, such as the introduction of ‘scotch hands’ (grooved wooden paddles used to remove excess moisture) as an aid to better butter-making.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Just as Keventer in 1892–1893 had been eclectic in his choice of milch animals in order to make the Aligarh farm operative as quickly as possible, many dairies continued to rely on whatever bovines proved locally available, buffaloes included.

However, a substantial shift was occurring. Outbreaks of enteric fever had directed attention to the quality of milk in India—to its contamination and adulteration. But, as the health benefits of clean, fresh milk were extolled and as the market, both military and civilian, for milk and butter grew, so quantity, too, became an issue. In order to maximize milk yields, cantonment dairy managers experimented with introducing European milch breeds and crossbreeding them with indigenous cattle. The military farms were only viable because of their careful selection of breeding animals. Surplus or unproductive cattle were disposed of by ‘ruthless culling of the poor yielder’, by their transfer to the ordnance department if they were bull calves or slaughtering them for soldiers’ meat.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In this military model of bovine husbandry, milk and beef, dairies and slaughterhouses, went hand-in-hand. This, it was acknowledged, was not a dairying model that was ever likely to be emulated by, or acceptable to, cattle-keepers outside the cantonment enclave.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ But then the view of government dairy experts was that most of India’s 100 million or more cattle were, by European standards of animal husbandry, ‘only fit to be destroyed’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

By the mid-1920s India’s state-owned farms collectively owned the largest dairy herd in India, numbering close to 10,000 animals.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Where once the army’s preoccupation had been with the ordnance ox and transport bullock, now, with the coming of the military dairy farm, the overriding concern was with breeding cows specifically for milk.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ To further effect their ‘white revolution’, the farms imported, at considerable expense, pedigree bulls from Europe—Ayrshires, Jerseys, Brown Swiss, Friesian-Holsteins—so as to raise and maintain high-yielding herds or to cross with (and so ‘grade up’) animals from the most promising Indian milch breeds.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Here was an issue that was also to haunt Operation Flood decades later: was it better, in seeking to optimize milk production, to use imported breeds, with an established record of high yielding, or to favour crossbred or indigenous animals which might be better suited to Indian conditions?Footnote ¹¹¹ There had been many attempts over the course of the nineteenth century to establish European cows in India, but seldom with lasting success, whether from the animals’ inability to acclimatize and subsist on poor grazing or from want of consistency in breeding practices.Footnote ¹¹²

Now, with the new interest in dairying and the captive cantonment market, dairy managers had the freedom and the resources to make more sustained and overtly scientific experiments. One enduring outcome of the military farms’ experiments, extending into the 1920s and 1930s, was the creation of a high-yielding hybrid—‘Frieswals’—that combined indigenous Sahiwal stock with a partial Friesian-Holstein genetic inheritance.Footnote ¹¹³ At the same time, while some European milch breeds continued to be valued in their own right, attention shifted to half-a-dozen Indian dairy breeds, namely Sahiwals, Harianas, Girs, Ongoles, and Sindhis to produce as much milk as possible and over a prolonged lactation period. In a further shift to indigeneity, it was often confidently stated, as by Colonel Walker of the Punjab Veterinary College in 1924, that it was ‘unlikely that any Western breed could permanently take the place of the excellent indigenous cattle of the country’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Conversely, she-buffaloes, despite their prominence in the Indian milk and ghee trade and Keventer’s early enthusiasm for buffalo milk, were little favoured by the later military dairies and received far less scientific attention than milch cows.

This intensive bovine development strategy required a heavy outlay in terms of the dairies themselves, with their modern (generally imported) equipment, extensive buildings, trained Indian staff, and salaried European managers. There were further costs in raising and feeding pedigree breeding stock, in improving the production and supply of fodder crops, and in meticulously measuring and recording the productivity of entire herds. The initial outlay for a model dairy farm, whether under military or civilian management, might amount, according to one estimate in 1908, to Rs 28,750, even without the expense of cattle-feed and human labour.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Only a few privileged and largely state-funded institutions—cantonment dairies, government farms, agricultural colleges—were able to afford such a substantial and sustained investment, especially when the benefits of improved breeding and better feeding might not be evident for several bovine generations.

Thus, while enteric fever and the drive for ‘pure’ milk for the army provided the initial impetus for the creation of military dairies, they rapidly acquired both a financial and a scientific rationale of their own. As well as the generally profitable sale of milk, cream, and butter, the dairies were significant sites of bovine investigation, experimentation, and documentation. In this new version of bovine governmentality, cows, their ancestry, and progeny, were carefully recorded in herd books; white-coated assistants assiduously recorded the volume of milk produced, its fat content, the length of the cow’s lactation cycle, and logged the effects of dietary or environmental changes. Indian as well as European researchers published detailed accounts of their findings in dairying and animal husbandry journals. Veterinarians checked for disease and probed for parasites, and, in this Mendelian world, assessed the extent to which one cohort of cattle passed on their most favourable ‘characters’ to subsequent bovine generations.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Cows and their milk became highly statistical commodities. Apart from animals raised at the Imperial Institute of Agricultural Research at Pusa in Bihar, which was under civilian control, the Lucknow and Ferozepur cantonments reputedly kept the finest Sahiwal herds in India. The records of milk production at these three sites, covering nearly 800 animals in all, provided the basis for detailed statistical studies of the milk-producing capacities of both ‘pure’ and hybrid cows. The data confirmed that indigenous cows, if sufficiently well bred, well fed, and cared for, were capable of producing as much milk as any pedigree herd in Europe and of equal quality.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Looking back on India’s dairy industry in 1925, the Imperial dairy expert, William Smith, noted the seminal contribution made by military dairies. They were, he wrote, necessary once it became clear that the health of British soldiers and their families ‘depended largely on a pure and safe milk supply’ and that ‘the spread of epidemic diseases could not be prevented unless the supply of dairy produce was under such control as to render it safe’. By 1910 about 30 military dairies had been established, Smith continued, and they had ‘demonstrated to the community at large the possibilities of commercial dairying on modern lines’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ By the mid-1920s cantonment farms were well-established enterprises, efficiently run, highly productive, and financially self-sustaining. While their example could certainly not be emulated across the whole of India, they helped to revolutionize milk and butter production and exemplified the ways in which relatively modest technological innovations could have far-reaching effects. Even the Amul cooperative dairy that provided the institutional model for Operation Flood in the 1970s had its remoter origins in a government factory that had provided butter and cheese for the army in Mesopotamia (Iraq) during the First World War.Footnote ¹¹⁹ When in 1919 the central government proposed an India-wide scheme for ‘the development of cattle-breeding and dairying’, a ‘subject’, it said, of great magnitude and economic importance’, the military dairies at Lahore, Ferozepur, Lucknow, Poona, and Belgaum were singled out as providing the technical expertise and the pedigree animals required to make such a scheme work.Footnote ¹²⁰ Even the breeds and crossbreeds that cantonment farms championed and developed—Sahiwals and Friesian-Holsteins among them—became the very milch animals that helped fuel the later expansion of Indian dairying.Footnote ¹²¹

Certainly, the impact of India’s first dairying revolution should not be overstated. A dairying model designed in the first instance to meet the needs of British troops in cantonments could not easily be expanded to serve the entire country.Footnote ¹²² Per capita milk consumption (Punjab aside) remained extraordinarily low in India by international standards.Footnote ¹²³ It was estimated in 1914 that clean, unadulterated milk was unavailable to 90 per cent of the Indian population, and was scarce even in large towns.Footnote ¹²⁴ The military dairy farm at Kirkee produced excellent pasteurized milk, some of which was sent to Bombay for sale, but nearby Poona remained reliant on goalas and the ‘shameless’ adulteration of their milk.Footnote ¹²⁵ In the late 1930s, New Zealand had 50,000 cream separators; India only 4,000.Footnote ¹²⁶ The rise of model dairy farms barely compensated for the loss of open pasture as irrigation and cash-crop agriculture expanded and forest grazing was restricted or banned.Footnote ¹²⁷ If the British looked to cantonment farms as a model for how Indian dairying might progress, many Indians regarded cantonments as places where cattle were taken or kept only to be slaughtered to satisfy the irreligious craving of British soldiers for red meat. So often seen as an anti-Muslim agitation, the drive for ‘cow protection’ was also a movement directed at the British and their slaughterhouse cantonments, a hostility exemplified by the ultimately successful campaign against the expansion of the military abattoir in Lahore in 1937.Footnote ¹²⁸