Visualizing Peasant and Bovine Self-Sustenance in the Famine Tracts of Colonial India

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the British Raj sponsored cattle competitions across India to educate peasants in responsible bovine husbandry practices to mitigate famine. Photographs of these competitions, which demonstrate the fraught convergence of economic liberalism and colonial humanitarianism, aimed to constitute model peasants and cattle of measurable self-improvement. Simultaneously, the photographs reveal traces of bovine-peasant relationships that unsettle these newly conceived colonial subjects and that speak to the manner in which cattle’s bodies were sites of competing political and affective inscription.