Our cities, our dogs

The dog has aged well. Out for a walk with a beloved human, that classic c-curved Desi Kutta tail raised jauntily, their happiness has radiated off the walls of Bhimbetka's caves for at least 12,000 years.

- Nilanjana S. Roy

Among the prehistoric and ancient cave paintings of these rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh, there are four featuring dogs—one on a leash, most free-roaming, another Canis familiaris caught in mid-stride, graceful, joyous.

It's hard to remember, in the middle of a moral panic, that the bond between humans and dogs is an old one, stretching all the way down the centuries to the 2nd or 3rd century BC. But perhaps it's worth it to go back that far, to the vivid figurines of fighting dogs or collared dogs from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, just to acknowledge that dogs have been around in human settlements right from the start of our recorded history.

In a 2008 book, Sarama and Her Children, Bibek Debroy, the economist, translator and expert on Indian mythology, made an impassioned plea for giving our homegrown desi kuttas the love and respect they deserved. "Imagine my surprise when I re-read the Rg Veda and discovered that dogs were used as herd dogs, hunting dogs and watchdogs, not to forget their being used as beasts of burden," he wrote. "As I re-read Hindu texts with this canine perspective in mind, I continually stumbled upon facts that I had not known. The more I read, the more I marvelled."

Sarama's story appears in the Rig Vedas. She is the mother of all dogs, helping Lord Indra track down the kidnapped cattle of the Angirases, in legend the ancestors of man. Devdutt Pattnaik writes that her children, the Sarameyas, "are considered the guardians of the dead," companions to Lord Yama. At a sacrifice held by King Janmajaya, a puppy is accused of licking the milk offered to the gods and stoned by the king's brothers; the small creature runs back to Sarama, whimpering from its wounds. Sarama bursts in, disrupting the yajna, and demands justice for her daughter. In one version that I heard in Kolkata, she says to the king, "To hurt the innocent, to harm the smallest and most helpless of your visitors is