Dogs were adored in medieval India. They saved cows from asuras, fought boars & tigers

The Print

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For tens of thousands of years, dogs have worked with or scavenged from our ancestors; they have fed us with wild game, protected us from raids, and been worshipped by us on memorial stones.
Just two weeks ago, Delhi High Court ordered the formulation of a policy for the rehabilitation of street dogs, with the goal of phasing them out entirely from public roads. While animal rights activists have raised justifiable concerns about the morality and practicality of this goal, there is no debating that our crowded cities have been unable to find a sustainable place for our canine companions.
The Indian dog & its global footprint
Scientists and historians universally agree that humans and dogs have an especially long shared history in the Indian subcontinent. A dog with a leash is visible in the rock paintings of Bhimbetka, conservatively dated to 5000 BCE, but likely much older. Indus Valley cities, at their peak in the third millennium BCE, had many breeds of domesticated dogs. Terracotta figurines of collared dogs have been found at multiple sites, and Harappans were even buried with dogs on occasion. German scholar Willem Bollée, in his monograph Gone to the Dogs in Ancient India, notes that a mastiff-like breed with floppy ears and a curled tail is visible in Harappan figurines. Even at this early date, there appears to have been some international trade in dogs, as a similar breed was also present in Mesopotamia.
A few centuries later, c. 1500 BCE, dogs were mentioned in the earliest portions of the Vedas: the storm-god Indra was believed to have a female canine, Sarama. Other deities, such as Yama, the god of death, and Rudra, the roaring one, are also described as being accompanied by dogs. Legends described Sarama as a loyal hound who helped sages retrieve cows stolen by asuras. So positive was Sarama's reputation that the term Sarameya, 'Sarama's Children', became one of the many Sanskrit terms used to refer to dogs. Economist and Indologist Bibek Debroy writes in Sarama and Her Children that the generally positive view of dogs continued into the last centuries BCE. In the later recensions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, dogs are spoken of as fierce hunters and loyal companions. At the same time, there was also a general trend toward linking dogs with 'lower', working-class people.
Indeed, through most of the history of the Indian dog, the humans who worked most closely with them seem to have been largely illiterate and working-class. This by no means reduced their expertise in dog-handling. Around the 400s BCE, as the earliest Gangetic states were developing, the Greek writers Herodotus and Xenophon mention fearsome imported Indian dogs who accompanied the emperors of Persia—at the time the most powerful men in the world—on the hunt. These Indian dogs were exported as far as Greece, and used to hunt boar and deer. When Greek warlord Alexander III of Macedon arrived in the Indus Valley in 326 BCE, the historian Ctesias reports, a local Indian tribe entertained him by setting their mastiffs loose on lions. The dogs would not release their grip even when dismembered. These fearsome animals, according to Aristotle, were the cross-breeds of tigers and dogs.
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The 'impurity' of the dog
By the early centuries CE, Bibek Debroy writes in Sarama and her Children, there was a marked change in literate Indian views of dogs, particularly in the Dharmasutras – Sanskrit moral and social codes authored by Brahmins. Working with animals came to be seen as ritually polluting. As the Manusmriti puts it (Book 3, verses 162–3): 'A trainer of elephants, oxen, horses and camels… a breeder of sporting-dogs, a falconer…. Should be avoided during oblations offered to the gods and ancestors.' As an extension of this logic, dogs, and the people who worked with them, were pushed to the margins of society.
In Book 10, verses 51–56, the Manusmriti declares that 'The dwellings of Chandalas [the 'lowest' caste] and the Shvapachas [literally 'Dog-Cookers', another 'low' caste] shall be outside the village… their wealth shall consist of dogs and asses. The clothes of dead bodies shall be their dress… They shall always execute criminals.' Dogs' breath and spittle—even their presence, and those of their 'Chandala' owners—came to be seen as polluting Brahminical rituals. Simultaneously, animals hunted by dogs (and Chandalas) were considered suitable to eat (Book 5, verses 130–131), and those who killed dogs were to be punished, as per the Gautama and Baudhayana Dharmasutras.
It is difficult to pinpoint the reason for the literary disdain of dogs. Broader social changes were afoot in the early centuries CE, as Sanskrit became the dominant language of learning, and Brahmins transitioned from priestly roles into a broader administrative, intellectual, and ritual class sought after by new states. As the naturalist, critic, and historian S Theodore Baskaran writes in The Book of Indian Dogs, this upper class 'shunned' dogs. At the same time, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the population of Indian dogs only continued to grow with states and cities, and it wasn't just the 'lower' castes that associated with them. In the Ajanta murals of the 5th century CE, a stocky little dog breed with small ears is shown as part of royal hunting processions. Dogs are also mentioned as eating up offerings placed in town squares, in Sanskrit dramas such as the Mricchakatikam.
This mixed attitude toward dogs—textual disdain from the ritual elite, paired with adoration from those who actually worked with the animals—would go on to become the new norm in the medieval period. Literature routinely looked down upon dogs, and to this day, 'dog' and 'bitch' are considered terms of abuse in many Indian languages. Yet, working dogs were everywhere in the subcontinent, and as literacy trickled into new groups, they recorded much more positive relationships with their canine companions. In Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, sculptures, both in temples and on memorial stones, depict powerful guard dogs and hunting-dogs. Dogs were gifted by kings to their loyal vassals, such as Kali, who belonged to the Ganga king Butuga II and was granted to his knight Manalera for his services in battle. Kali was later killed during a fight with a wild boar in 949 CE.
While Kali and Manalera belonged to the medieval elite, we also know of humbler pairings of master and companion. In Kolar district, a pair of dogs called Dhalaga and Loga killed over 100 boars over the course of their lives before dying in a hunt; they were commemorated by their master, son of a local chief called Parasandi.
Archaeologist AV Narasimha Murthy recorded other cases of dogs fighting off tigers and cattle-raiders in an archived piece in the Star of Mysore. By the 12th century, the Deccan emperor Someshvara III, in his Manasollasa court manual, wrote with admiration of dog breeds sourced from present-day Punjab, Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra. He described their colours – ranging from whitish to red and yellow – and how some of them bore stripes or spots. They could do everything, from chasing down hares to tearing apart boars.
Around a century later, the Jain writer Hamsadeva, in his Mriga-Pakshi-Shastra, seemed to be taking direct aim at earlier Brahminical writers when he declared, at the end of Book 1: 'Those who do not protect the animals in the world, will never get fame, virtue and pleasure… Though animals cannot talk as human beings, they are very useful to people.' In medieval India, as today, there seemed to be as many attitudes toward dogs as there were dogs.
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Indian 'street' dogs today
It would appear that India has always been home to a dizzying variety of dogs, some selected and bred for work, others evolving to live at the margins of settlements. According to Theodore Baskaran (Indian Dogs), there was no conception of 'purebred' dogs, or even of house dogs as pets. Rather, just as humans had a jati or caste linked to their occupation, so did their dogs. The Banjara tribe, for example, kept Banjara hounds. What made the dogs Banjara hounds was the fact that they lived with, hunted with, and travelled with Banjara caravans. Such working dogs were not allowed into living quarters, bathed, or groomed. They were fed and worked. Or they scavenged and begged in towns and villages, evolving to fill a specific niche in urban ecology.
This was in marked contrast to European attitudes to dogs, which from the 18th century onwards had a deep, often painful, impact on our relationship with our canine companions. The European traders and mercenaries who immigrated to India brought with them the concept of breed purity, and considered their dogs suitable house-pets who were superior to Indian 'mongrels' and 'pariah dogs'. Krithika Srinivasan, an expert on human-dog interactions and public health, writes that 'pariah dogs' were probably a type kept by the Paraiyar, now a Scheduled Caste in Tamil Nadu. As 'mongrels' they were sometimes hunted by Europeans for sport.
Art historian Dorota Kamińska-Jones, in 'Multiple Roles of Dogs in India: Culture, Art and the Colonial Context', writes that Indian artists often stereotyped Europeans by showing them accompanied by tiny 'purebred' dogs. Soon, though, European breeds were all the craze, and Maharajas who once took pride in their native hunting-dogs were importing foreign dogs ill-suited to the Indian environment. This fad was then picked up by Indian middle classes, who invited European dogs into their homes before our native breeds. This led to the dying out of many specialised Indian dog breeds, who were expelled to the streets and mingled back into the pool of urban, free roaming dogs.
But there is still hope. Rescued Indian dogs, now called 'Indies' and 'desi', are slowly but steadily finding welcoming homes in urban India. As for the less lucky ones, as Srinivasan puts it in her article for Aeon, though Indians frequently see 'stray' dogs as a 'problem', there is also a strong sense that they deserve to live on the streets where they have evolved for countless generations. In a survey she conducted in Chennai, 79.3 per cent of respondents agreed that dogs were paavam — a most endearing term, meaning 'innocent' or 'vulnerable'.
It often seems to be the case that elite Indians, who rarely interact with street dogs, are most insistent that they be removed for 'safety' or in order to conform to European notions of sterile urban spaces. Indians who actually occupy these spaces, however, tend to have more positive views of dogs. At the same time, rabies, dwindling populations of other Indian wildlife, and occasional conflict with humans are real challenges. Solving them will require serious state capacity, animal welfare laws, and consultations with urban ecologists and public health experts. An interspecies relationship of 10,000 years is not going to be fixed overnight.
All I can say is that any lasting and humane policy toward India's dogs must take into account our long, shared history, replete with warmth and affection, and sometimes fear and contempt. For thousands of years, dogs have shared our urban and work environments, sometimes independent from us, sometimes not.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of 'Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire' and the award-winning 'Lords of the Deccan'. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.
This article is a part of the 'Thinking Medieval' series that takes a deep dive into India's medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)