The Inculpable Ignorance of Europeans and the Culpable Ignorance of Natives: Anthropomorphism, Elephant Diseases, and a Pack Animal Revolution in the Raj

This article reconstructs the transition from elephants (and camels) to mules in British India’s military transport system in the nineteenth century. It reads veterinary manuals, expedition records, and colonial correspondence to trace therapeutic debates over elephant disease (including the decline of bloodletting and contested reliance on Indian practitioners), the institutional launch and rapid expansion of state mule-breeding (notably in northwestern India), and the operational consequences of these policies on frontier campaigns. It argues that colonial veterinary “science” did not replace indigenous knowledge through linear progress. Rather, persistent uncertainty about elephants enabled a moralized discourse that portrayed Indian expertise as cruel or irrational while excusing European ignorance. It further contends that the turn to mules reflected a technocratic desire for “certainty”, “manageability”, and “efficiency”. Yet, this project repeatedly broke down because the colonial authorities kept ignoring the locally embedded human–animal–ecological relations that sustained pack animals.