[INDOLOGY] May 27th GCSAS Lecture Series: Tails from Colonial North India: The Lives and Companions of Show and Street Dogs

[Akshara Ravishankar]

Dear colleagues,

We are excited to announce the next talk in the series We are delighted to
announce the next talk in the series “More-than-Human South Asia:
Ecologies, Knowledge, Bodies, and Senses,” organized by the Ghent Centre
for South Asian Studies, on *May 27th, 4 pm CET. *This will be a hybrid
lecture by Andrew Halladay, titled "Tails from Colonial North India: The
Lives and Companions of Show and Street Dogs."

More information can be found below. You can also register for online
attendance here
<https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/7be68288-e15c-4fbb-bd51-207fdb0d2e4b@d7811cde-ecef-496c-8f91-a1786241b99c>
or
via the QR code in the attached poster.

Hope to see many of you there!

Title: Tails from Colonial North India: The Lives and Companions of Show
and Street Dogs

Speaker: Andrew Halladay, London School of Economics

Abstract: The first decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of a
distinct dog-show culture in colonial India. Strongly influenced by trends
in the metropole, this phenomenon was largely limited to elite classes and
developed alongside other forms of animal-based entertainment. But even as
dog shows reflected a trend in Britain, they also intersected with
longstanding human-canine interactions in India. Notable in this regard are
Indian street dogs, who had long been woven into the fabric of human
society and have recently been the topic of some exciting scholarship.
Indian street dogs naturally existed in a very different domain than did
their show dog counterparts, but this paper contends that these worlds were
nevertheless intertwined. First, the rising popularity of dog shows in
Britain correlated with a professed concern for street dogs outside
Britain, expressed most vociferously in the British public’s aversion to
the culling of Constantinople street dogs in 1910. Indian kennel clubs
echoed this ethos by including ‘native’ Indian breeds within their
contests. Second, the human labour necessary to train and care for the dogs
of the human elite appears to have relied on Indian communities familiar
with non-elite dogs. By considering these divergent spaces together, this
paper argues that dog and human societies were inexorably linked; it
proposes, further, that dogs in early twentieth-century India emerged as a
commodity through which humans – whether British or Indian, elite or
subaltern – often defined their social status.
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