My Family and Other Globalizers | Converting to the camel in Rajasthan

Camel polo at the 44th edition of the Jaisalmer Annual Desert Festival, from February 3-5, 2023.

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.

On a trip to Rajasthan about a year ago, my family converted to the camel.  As we travelled west, deep into India’s Thar desert, our car increasingly had to share the road with this awkwardly shaped ungulate, all humps and joints and teeth.

In Bikaner, we visited the National Camel Research Centre. The boys tried flavoured camel milk and we learned that camel bone made a good replacement for ivory. Rajasthan is synonymous with the camel. It is a region of camel polo and camel fairs. The Bikaner area even boasts a camel cavalry, one with a storied history.

Under the British Raj, the city’s Camel Corps had helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. And in 1915, during World War 1, the corps routed enemy Turkish forces at the Suez Canal in a dramatic camel cavalry charge. Today, the Indian military’s camels are mostly ceremonial, but soldiers from India’s border security forces still use them to patrol the more arid parts of the India-Pakistan border.

And yet, the camel demographics in Rajasthan are worrying. Data from the latest livestock census shows that by 2019 the state only had about 213,000 dromedaries, down from 325,000 in 2012. There are multiple reasons for this drop. These include the declining utility of camels for transportation, as road infrastructure has improved. A 2015 prohibition on camel slaughter for meat has further dissuaded some camel herders from continuing in the profession.

The upshot is that it’s more urgent than ever to find alternative ways of utilizing camels, if the economics is to support their continued existence. This really shouldn’t be that difficult given what a miraculous creature the dromedary is.

We learned, for example, that camel milk is the new superfood-in-waiting. It is high in unsaturated fatty acids and vitamin C. It is better for diabetics than cow milk, given its lower glycemic index. And it is real milk, unlike nut and oat alternatives. It tastes good: rich and flavourful.

In Jaisalmer, the boys bought three bars of camel milk chocolate to give to friends in Spain as exotic presents but ended up eating them long before returning to Madrid - they were that yummy.

Camel milk ice cream, camel hair blankets, camel bone artifacts: there was a whole world of camel commerce out there. My oldest, Ishaan, had a business idea. “You know how everyone loves camembert cheese?” he said, “How about we promote camelbert, instead?”

Fantasizing about revolutionizing the world’s food industry jolted my memory about the most interesting, and frankly bizarre, factoid I’d ever been told about camels. About 5 years ago at a literary festival in Indonesia, a young Australian writer told me about the million feral (!) camels that apparently roamed the Australian outback.

Australia is certainly synonymous with fascinating fauna: kangaroos, echidnas and wombats. But camels? These are about as Australian as polar bears, and yet in the outback, a 6 million square kilometer swathe of territory so vast that it is almost twice the size of India, there are so many wild camels wandering about that they need to be culled.

The first camel to arrive in Australia was imported in 1840 from Tenerife. George Gawler, the then governor of South Australia, thought the ungulates could be useful in the dry climatic conditions north of Adelaide. Half a dozen dromedaries were loaded onto a steamship of the Appoline line in Tenerife, although only one survived the journey, arriving at Adelaide harbour on October 12, 1840. The survivor was christened Harry.

Harry made a moderately successful go of it in his new home, but his career ended in ignominy when in 1846 he was involved in the accidental shooting and death of his owner, one Mr John Horrocks.

A two-decade camel-hiatus followed the unfortunate Harry’s Australian debut. But by the 1860s, the decks of Down Under-bound ships sailing off the coast of northwestern India – which at the time included modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan - were heavy with the dromedaries that went on to play a crucial role in outback exploration and settlement.

Between 1870 and 1920 as many as 20,000 camels were imported into Australia along with at least 2,000 handlers, who were called “Ghans” after the Afghans, they often, but not always, were. The “Ghans” were mainly Pushtuns, Punjabis, Balochis and Sindhis.

They operated camel trains across South and Western Australia as well as the Northern Territory. These accompanied exploratory expeditions and carted wool to ports, barrels of water to drought-hit regions, construction materials, telegraph poles, tea, tobacco and much else, creating crucial lines of supply between isolated settlements.

By the 1930s, once the railways were firmly established, camels lost their importance as pack carriers. Thousands of them were released into the wild. Over the years they have multiplied unfettered. And inevitably, they have also come to clash with human outback settlements, destroying water storage tanks and pipelines. The result is that the government-funded Australian Camel Management periodically culls thousands of animals by shooting at them from helicopters. Between 2009 and 2013 some 160,000 animals were killed in this gruesome manner.

Back in Rajasthan, the boys bought hand painted T-shirts featuring camels, which they became so fond of, that it was a fight to get them to part with the clothing long enough to have them washed. Ishaan even shot a David Attenborough-style video as we rode camels over the sand dunes, under a setting sun.

As a family, we are now all camelites. Dear reader, it is a way of being that I would recommend to you all.