Dogs in colonial Delhi

 

I’ve put myself up to this so I will indeed be writing about dogs and policing in Delhi, as I mentioned last week. In the absence of a historic picture of either dogs, or Mohalla (neighbourhood) gates in Delhi, I’ve put up an unrelated but well-known picture of a Delhi ‘street-scene’, common in postcards, pictures and advertisements from the 1880s (note, the Clock Tower in the picture was destroyed in the 1960s). 

 

So, back to dogs in Delhi. I came across colonial debates on the destruction of street dogs from the 1860s and was intrigued by the resistance this prompted. The killings were justified by the authorities on the grounds that the dogs could potentially spread rabies. However, this is where it gets interesting. I have an abstract from a Delhi newspaper called the Nur-ul-Akhbar. This was a vernacular newspaper which was monitored by the authorities after the Rebellion of 1857 for seditious news. In the 1873 its editor demanded the killings stop because the dogs were a necessity for policing. It says that unlike Europeans who kept dogs in houses, in Delhi, dogs (one to two) were kept out of houses in the streets of the Mohallas. Religious reasons meant that bringing a dog inside was impure but outside, the dogs had a purpose as the ‘watchmen’ of the Mohalla. All the inhabitants of the Mohalla were aware of this and supported the practice contributing to the welfare of the dogs. 

 

This form of security then formed was part of a multi-layered system of urban policing which also included the locking up of kuchas (lanes) at night (kuchabandi). The latter ended with the Rebellion  and once the human-animal nexus was broken through the killing of ‘stray’ dogs, it marked a change in the way a) safety was perceived and b) how security was maintained in cities like Delhi. 

 

More on related topics next Friday. See you later.