History

WATCH: How Riots Were Once Fought Over Street Dogs

There was a time when bounty hunters were paid handsomely to kill street dogs.
Dhvani Solani
Mumbai, IN
street stray dogs india
Photo: Getty Images

Rest is History is a show about all the weird stuff from the past they never taught you in school.


They say Mumbai is a city that never sleeps. But when it does fitfully slumber in the golden glow of its street lights, its four-legged citizens take over. 

Stray dogs – as omnipresent in metropolitan India as roadside temples and killer potholes – are not just bum-wagging, motorbike-chasing animals. While they routinely make the papers as those that saved the lives of babies or adults, they also are in stories where they’ve been mercilessly beaten to death, deliberately run over, and even buried alive.

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They’re both loved and despised, even feared. But while the canines have been polarising the country for decades now, it turns out, they also unwittingly led to the first ever riots in Bombay – what metropolitan Mumbai was called until 1995.

In 19th century Britain, human and animal “vagabondage” was much frowned upon, and “unowned” dogs were increasingly treated as symbols of uncivilised urban cultures and blamed for spreading rabies. This attitude crossed the seas and landed in colonial India, too. 

In 1813, a regulation was put in place to allow for the culling of ownerless dogs. In 1832, however, the British-administered magistrate of police decided to adopt new measures to control the city's stray dog population. 

One of these included paying a handsome bounty of 8 annas or half a rupee for each dog killed. That might convert to a mere $0.0068 today but back then, it was enough for dog catchers to not just go after street dogs but also break into people’s homes, club poor Tommy/Moti/Fudo on its head, and take away its corpse to collect the bounty.

Obviously, people were pissed.

And none more so than the Parsis. 

The Parsis – who had come to India from Persia in the seventh century A.D. fleeing religious persecution – had grown to become a tiny but super powerful community in Bombay. They had flourished under the British Raj, which gave the enterprising community not just a chance to run thriving businesses but also freedom to practise their religion. The Parsis, in return, adopted the manners, dress, and aspirations of their British colonisers, picking up their love for tea, Oxford grads and cricket, too.

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But the Parsis also loved their dogs – not just because they are so damn cute but also because their religion states that dogs are the faithful companion of the righteous across the bridge to paradise.

So, when a day that Parsis consider holy coincided with a widespread plan to cull the dogs in June 1832, tempers rose to degrees as high as the notorious Indian summer. 

Know more about what happened next in the first-ever episode of Rest is History.

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