Swapping elephants for kangaroos. The exchanges between the Zoological Gardens of Calcutta and Melbourne around 1900

Abstract

Historians of the zoo are well aware of the colonial dimension of this peculiar institution. Nevertheless, they have focused nearly exclusively on the history of zoos in Western Europe and the United States. This paper proposes to invert the perspective and to look at two ¿Southern¿ zoos in British-India and Australia. Instead of asking for networks between the ¿West and the Rest¿ it will reconstruct the ¿South-South¿ connection between the Zoological Gardens of Calcutta and Melbourne. In the last decades of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries these two zoos were in frequent contact, exchanging and dealing with exotic animals as well as paying personal visits. This paper will focus on the two most relevant actors in this ¿South-South¿-connection: Ram Brahma Sanyal (1858-1908), superintendent of the Calcutta Zoo since 1878, and Dudley Le Souef (1856-1923), first assistant since the late 1870s and from 1902, director of the Melbourne Zoo. Their daily work as zoo managers but also their scholarly contributions were still shaped to a considerable degree by the colonial context. Nevertheless, Sanyal and Le Souef were able to carve out niches for themselves. Sanyal wrote the first handbook on zoo biology, Le Souef made a name for himself as the authority on Australian fauna. We will ask how their contributions were received in metropolitan circles. By focusing on the agency of non-European actors, this paper attempts to complicate the history of zoological gardens. Only by applying a global perspective the dynamic of the zoo networks with its multidirectional exchanges will come into view.