3 - Imperial Laboratories and Animal Experiments

Summary

Once bacteriological laboratories and Pasteur institutes began to be established, the ethics of laboratory research in India assumed critical proportions. The institutes required massive animal resources. To give one example, the production of a single (Semple antirabic) vaccine in one Pasteur institute required six thousand rabbits annually. The quaint, idyllic, and peaceful hills where the British established their bacteriological laboratories became the sites of extensive animal experimentation in India. The question is, how was this prodigious animal resource secured for scientific research in colonial India? In other words, how did bacteriology harness its beasts of burden in the empire? This chapter argues that animal experimentation in Indian laboratories has to be seen within a larger context in which Indian animals became subjects and resources of the colonial state. This was a complex process, because debates about animal experimentation in Indian laboratories were shaped both by late Victorian morality toward Indian animals and Indian, specifically Hindu, sensibilities that developed around the contemporary cow protection movement. British attitudes toward animals in India resembled their attitude toward lower-class Indians or “natives,” which was both romantic and authoritarian. British scientists and administrators legitimized and legalized animal experimentation in colonial India through two simultaneous processes. First, they assumed moral and political agency by representing Indians, especially of those castes and occupations who owned or worked with domestic animals, as cruel and childlike at the same time, a class of people who were unable by nature to care for their own animals.