Cattle, markets, and the state in India, 1930s - 1960s

Abstract

The thesis is a history of cattle developmentalism in India from the 1930s to the 1960’s. It argues that this period saw the emergence of modern animal husbandry and product standardization on a national scale that culminated in the dairy revolution of the 1970’s, which made India the largest milk producer in the world. The developments in this colonial period were incorporated into new discourses of postcolonial statecraft after independence, cloaked in the vocabulary of science, modern governance, agrarian development and self- reliance.

The pre-1970’s history of national cattle developmentalism in India is approached here through the state’s effort to develop two aspects of dairy development, milch cattle and ghee (also known as clarified butter). The first chapter on milch cattle investigates colonial efforts to create superior cattle for dairy purposes to underscore how milch cow became the preferred dairy animal in colonial India. The next chapter investigates the development of product standardization through an examination of ghee. It examines the history of an India wide legislation called the Agricultural (Grading and Marking) Act enacted in 1937. According to this act, the agricultural produce that were graded and authenticated by the various grading stations established under it were supposed to be labeled with an ‘Agmark’ seal, a circular mark affixed at the outer packaging of the products. Together these two chapters demonstrate that the period under study witnessed the arrival of highly interventionist national-level projects in cattle improvement and product standardization in late colonial India which were later taken up by various post-colonial Indian governments.