Sarama and Her Children

by Bibek Debroy

  But if one is looking for stray dogs coming into their own, that happens in Lila Majumdar’s works, Lila Majumdar being Satyajit Ray’s sister. There is a dog named Bagai in her “Gupir Gupta Khata” and a pet mongrel named Bhulo has a key role to play in her award-winning “Haldey Pakhir Palak”. Bhulo was a clever dog and always ran away. When his collar was being fastened, he would stick out his ears and inflate the hair on his neck. Once the collar had been fastened, he would flatten his ears and narrow his neck, thereby slipping out of the collar. The story is largely about Bhulo’s running away and eventually returning. Lila Majumdar also has a collection known as Kheror Khata and one of these essays is about dogs, mostly stray dogs in Santiniketan. The essay is mostly about the civilized norms these dogs follow and about how they divide up the geographical area of Santiniketan among themselves. There was one particular dog that loved lectures. And another that loved to chew sandals and was therefore particularly liked by the cobbler. Lila Majumdar has a book named Taka Gach (Money-Tree). Kanu is a child in Kolkata who makes a living by polishing shoes and this stray boy has a companion in a stray dog named Bhulo. Kanu has seen dogs owned by rich people. They have leather collars and are taken for walks on leashes by servants. But Bhulo is a free stray and is Kanu’s companion in his footpath life. In other Lila Majumdar stories also, this theme of companionship occurs. For instance, in “Jal” (Water), Punnu’s life has been devastated by a flood in the Brahmaputra river and he shares the little bit of corn he has with stray dogs whose lives have also been similarly devastated. In “Manimala”, Manimala has a companion in her dog Bagha. In “Tongling”, a lonely child creates an imaginary friend who also has a dog, the point being that a dog as a pet adds to a child’s sense of security. In “Bhou-bhou Yap-yap”, the story opens with a touching description of a bitch dying on the streets and leaving two puppies behind. These puppies (Udo and Budo) are adopted into a household and hidden out of sight, because the grandfather prefers pedigreed dogs. One such pedigreed dog, Lord, is actually bought. However, when there is a plot to rob the house, Lord does not bark. Instead, Udo and Bhudo bark the house down and prove themselves to be good watchdogs.

  Successive generations of the Ray family have been involved in running and editing a children’s magazine known as Sandesh, started in 1913. If one goes through old issues of this magazine, one discovers several stories where dogs feature, sometimes in detective stories and novels heavily influenced by Enid Blyton. One of these stories is titled “Three Friends” and is authored by Shishirkumara Majumdar. Khyanda and Ali live in a slum and Khyanda’s friend is a mongrel dog named Bhulo. While foraging for food, late in the evening, Khyanda and Bhulo discover a small girl. From the jewellery she is wearing, it is obvious that the girl belongs to a rich family. Since she is lost, not knowing what to do, Khyanda and Bhulo bring her home to their slum. Night passes, the plan being to go to the police station in the morning. Next morning, Khyanda and Ali give the little girl some breakfast. Since the bread is stale, she throws it to Bhulo saying that ‘Tiger’ will eat it. From this, Khyanda and Ali deduce that there is a dog named Tiger in the girl’s home and they do know of a rich household, not far off, where there is a dog named Tiger. They take the girl there, hoping for a reward. The gate is open and the girl dashes in and Khyanda, Ali and Bhulo can hear the sounds of delight at the girl having returned. Khyanda and Ali hope for some reward. But in the excitement, Bhulo begins to bark and immediately, three foreign dogs dash out of the house and chase them away. The three friends go back to foraging in garbage bins. In one of Narendranath Mitra’s stories, the point is made that a household’s and the housewife’s culture becomes manifest through its servants, curtains, table-covers and its dogs and cats.

  While Sandesh is a children’s magazine, Desh is a magazine for adults and in 1955, Shibram Chakrabarty wrote a short story in Desh titled “You don’t know what you are losing”. A pretty young lady goes to a lawyer, seeking legal help against the neighbour. The neighbour jumped across the balcony and invaded her flat, when she was in a state of undress. When her friend came and knocked on the door, the neighbour ran away, across the balcony again. The laywer is looking forward to the salacious details. And the pretty young lady wants compensation in the form of this neighbour being shot. We then realize that the complaint is about the neighbour’s dog rather than the neighbour himself, the offence having been committed by the dog. Mrinal Sen’s film Calcutta 71 is an assimilation of three stories by Manik Bandopadhyay, Probodh Sanyal and Samaresh Basu. In the first of the three stories that make up the film, a middle class family is ousted from its home because it is raining and their house hardly has a roof. They finally seek refuge in a richer neighbour’s house. Not only do they find several other lower middle class families crowded there, they also find the street mongrel Bhulu there. One of Shailajananda Mukhopadhyay’s stories is named after a dog, “Sadananda”. Bacchu is a child in a rich household and wants a dog. The maid who works in their household has a son named Labu. Labu has found a stray puppy and adopts it as a pet. Because it is white, Labu names it Sada (white). But Bacchu wants this puppy and Labu’s mother sells it to Bacchu for one rupee. The puppy is renamed Sadananda (always happy). Labu’s puppy becomes Bacchu’s puppy and begins to grow up. However, Labu is miserable at having lost his dog and his mother resolves to get the dog back. Meanwhile, a circus has come to town and having seen the circus, both Bacchu and Labu have dreams of teaching the dog tricks. Bacchu is training Sadananda in the kitchen, refusing to let the dog have any food until it has learnt some tricks. A pot of milk is boiling at the side. Since Sadananda refuses to learn, Bacchu begins to whip him. Sadananda bites Bacchu’s hand and in the general confusion, Sadananda leaps onto the fire and dies in the pot of milk. The milk and the pot have to be thrown away. ‘Can I have the pot please?’ says Labu’s mother. ‘Don’t throw that away.’ ‘Why only the pot?’ asks the cook. ‘Take Sadananda also and give him to Labu.’

  In contemporary Bengali literature, reference to dogs has become almost routine. And this includes stray dogs. Examples are Sanjib Chattopadhyay, Satinath Bhaduri, Kamalakumar Majumdar, Hemendrakumar Ray, Ashapurna Devi and Jibanananda Das (who wrote short stories in addition to poetry). Satinath Bhaduri’s novel titled Jagari has a British superintendent of jails who owns a bull terrier, and the Indian subordinates show as much respect to the bull terrier as to the superintendent. In Sukanta Bhattacharya’s poetry, there are references to stray dogs that attack their own race, in imitation of humans. One of Rajanikanta Sen’s poems is about a painter who draws the picture of a cremation ground. A skull and bones can be seen and the king asks, ‘Whose is the skull and whose are the bones?’ ‘The bones are my dog’s and the skull is your father’s,’ replies the painter. Buddhadev Basu wrote a poem titled “To some dog” and this anonymous dog is a pet, because there is a reference to it belonging to a household, being fed meat and rice and being fondled by the ladies. One of Buddhadev Basu’s relatively minor works is a play titled Calcutta’s Electra and in this, a gentleman is killed by unleashing a dog on him. But by the time this play was written, owning dogs had become commonplace. Hemendrakumar Ray has two detectives named Bimal and Kumar and they have a dog named Bagha. Ashapurna Devi’s short story “Baje Kharach” (Useless Expenditure) mentions a household dog named Lily who is bathed with soap and water. There is a servant boy named Govinda, in the category of what can be called useless expenditure, who is a bit of a stray himself. When his master Jaminikumar dies, Jaminikumar’s sons and daughters decided not to incur useless expenditure on funeral rites and it is Govinda who sells his wife’s jewellery to do the needful. Govinda used to take care of the dog Lily, and bathed it, even when he did not have soap for himself.

  Taslima Nasrin’s autobiography Amar Meyebela has several references to dogs. There are stray dogs, there is a dog named Bagha that bites her so that she has to be injected, there is an Alsatian named Rocket that they inherited from a missionary priest, despite Tasleem
a’s mother’s protestations that dogs are unclean creatures and there is an indigenous dog named Poppy who succeeds Rocket, when Rocket dies. Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s story “Pariksha” (Examination) mentions her daughter, busy not with preparing for examinations, but with taking care of stray dogs. One of the most powerful stories about a dog is one by Syed Mujtaba Ali and concerns a teacher (Panditmashai) who taught him Bengali (and Sanskrit) in school. On one occasion, the chief commissioner of Assam, N.D. Beatson Bell, decides to inspect the school. The inspection passed off well enough. After three days of holidays, school resumes and Panditmashai tells the students that while going home, he happened to meet one of the chief commissioner’s servants. ‘Did you notice the dog that came with the chief commisioner?’ Panditmashai asks his students. They had. The dog was lame and had three legs. ‘I talked to the servant,’ continued Panditmashai. ‘The dog’s leg was cut off in a train accident. How good is your mathematics? The servant told me that every month, seventy-five rupees is spent on the dog. For three legs. So how much is one of the dog’s legs worth?’ Twenty-five rupees. The students came up with the answer. Panditmashai continued, ‘In my brahmana family, there are eight people—I, my wife, my old mother, my three daughters, a widowed aunt and a servant. My salary is twenty-five rupees. So tell me, how many legs of the chief commissioner’s dog are equal to one brahmana family?’

  The brahmana, indigenous dogs and pedigreed western dogs—that just about sums up the evolution of Indian attitudes towards dogs—transformed depictions in Bengali literature offering a case study. This is a story of development and transition, India still not having accomplished the transition to a developed state where stray dogs disappear from the streets and all dogs are privately, rather than collectively, owned. It is also a story of transition from a rural to an urban society. In the former, stray dogs in the proper sense are unknown. Dogs are never anonymous, and at best, they are semi-strays and semi-pets, with some form of collective ownership. It is in urban society, no matter how primitive, that the tension between humans and stray dogs becomes palpable. Interpreted in its historical context, the brahmana influence coincided with urbanization, after a fashion. And religion, outside mainstream brahmana Hinduism, was not quite urban. In brahmana Hinduism, indigenous dogs progressively came to be looked down upon. And exposure to pedigreed western dogs and western influence led to tensions, because those attitudes reflected those of societies that were far more urbanized and developed. Consequently, what is left is not an attitude that has coherence. It is an attitude that is full of inconsistencies and contradictions. That is understandable, since simple explanations rarely provide the complete answer.

  In Lieu of a Conclusion

  This has been a long chronological journey, beginning with the pre-Vedic Indus Valley civilisation. The attempt was to test the hypothesis that dogs were looked down upon in Hindu texts and religious tradition. And we discovered that the truth was much more complicated.

  Forget the rest of the world. In India, the Bhimbhetka rock paintings that go back to around 5000 BCE, show a man tugging a dog on a fairly modern-looking leash. Alexander the Great may have crossed short-haired Indian dogs with Macedonian and Epirian war dogs to create the feared Mollosian fighting dogs. India exported (or gifted) dogs to Alexander the Great and the Persian kings. Dog figurines of short-haired and small-bodied dogs have been found in the Indus Valley civilisation, a begging dog with a beaded collar from Harappa and a fighting dog with a projecting collar from Mohenjodaro being two prominent examples. Examples of dogs being buried with humans have been found in excavations in Rupar and Burzahom. Maria’s song in Sound of Music has whiskers on kittens in her list of favourite things, the dog biting and the bee stinging making her feel sad. However, the dog barking, if not biting, has also made people happy the world over. It was no different in India, with a caveat. India is rich in flora, with relatively exotic species proliferating. In lands where the wolf is the only major carnivore, the wolf and its kin, the dog, will have a premium that it is unlikely to obtain in a land where elephants and tigers and lions thrive. Bharatvarsha obtains its name from king Bharata, the son of Dushyanta and Shakuntala. Bharata’s original name was Sarvadamana and accounts tell us about his exploits when he was just six years old. Sarvadamana captured and played with tigers, lions and boars. No one would have thought of mentioning a wolf. Nevertheless, in the vedas, there are references to dogs as watchdogs, hunting aids and even beasts of burden, also reflected in some of the names used for dogs. World over, the dog’s companion role is of much later origin. But the utilitarian role of the dog was known in Vedic and pre-Vedic India and one does not detect any negative connotations associated with dogs. Not only were dogs linked to Rudra (and Indra and Yama), the Yajur Veda even has a shloka where one is bowing in obeisance to dogs.

  From the vedas, one moves to the Ramayana and there are no negative associations there either, though the dog was clearly not common in the terrain that the Ramayana described. However, when Bharata and Shatrughna visited their maternal uncle and grandfather in Kekaya (the northwest, around Punjab today), we learn of dogs that were specifically bred inside the palace and were sent as gifts to Ayodhya. Although the Uttara Kanda is a later interpolation, there is a reference there to a most wise and clever dog. The only negative reference to dogs in the Valmiki Ramayana is a prohibition on eating dog meat. But that is understandable, because there was a general prohibition on eating the meat of carnivores, as opposed to that of herbivores. References to dogs are much more abundant in the Mahabharata and more complicated, because negative references begin to creep in. But the references are not only negative. For instance, Arjuna prays to the goddess Durga and the goddess has the face of a dog. The sage Vishvamitra’s name may have had something to do with a dog. The Mahabharata was certainly not composed at one point in time and one should not expect logical consistency. In subsequent interpolations, the lowly positions of dogs and chandalas probably crept in. There are also places, not part of the core story, where references to chandalas and dogs together can be found, including in a shloka in the Gita. With the dharmashastras (such as the Manu Samhita) and the puranas, the negative association with dogs becomes stronger, notwithstanding a reference in the Vamana Purana to a dog having actually gone to heaven and the use of dogs in divination. How did this negative association come about?

  The argument that this is because of the dog’s association with cremation grounds and death, or because of its indiscriminate habit of copulating in public, or because of the special characteristics of a bitch’s vagina so that the penis gets temporarily stuck, does not quite wash. That did not prevent the dog from being accepted elsewhere in the world or even in pre-purana and pre-dharmashastra India. There must have been something more to it. As a religion, Hinduism has evolved. And part of the answer seems to have been related to the relative decline of gods like Indra, Rudra and Yama, with each of whom the dog was associated. As these traditional Vedic gods declined in importance, Vishnu went into an ascendance. There was never much of an association between dogs and Vishnu. Hence, a downgrading of dogs accompanied Vishnu’s elevation and this was also associated with an increase in the brahmana influence, typified in the nasty things said about dogs (and women and shudras) in the dharmashastra texts. However, Hinduism was not about Vishnu alone. In the trinity of Hinduism, Brahma was never important. But there was Shiva, who assimilated many of Rudra’s traits. If the Vishnu hypothesis is correct, one would expect the dog’s treatment to be different in strands connected with Shiva. And indeed, that is what one finds. Dattatreya may have been one of Vishnu’s avatara’s in the 24-avatara version, but as an outcast, he exhibited many of the Shiva-type characteristics. There was also Bhairava, specifically Vatukabhairava or Kala Bhairava, with Khandoba and Gorakhanath as local variations. Not only was Bhairava connected with dogs, the dog was his vahana. Dogs also figure in the Shakti and tantra traditions. The brahmana and Vishnu tradition codified India into a hierarchical and verti
cal society and the dog’s position was low. But the non-brahmana and Shiva tradition was relatively equal and the dog suffered no such reduction in status. If this hypothesis about hierarchy and inequality is correct, one should find dogs treated relatively well in Buddhist stories, with the negation of caste hierarchy, such as in the Jatakas. Not only does one find that, one also finds that nitishastra texts like the Panchatantra, the Hitopadesha and the Kathasaritsagara which were influenced by the Jataka stories, treat dogs relatively better. As a counterfactual question, one wonders what Indian attitudes towards dogs would have been had Buddhism not gone into a decline or if Islam had not arrived on the scale that it did. However, caste Hinduism did not overwhelm Indian society. And thus the dog retained its own in popular stories and popular culture, not to speak of its association with various holy men.