Abstract
Anthropologist Radhika Govindarajan’s monograph Animal Intimacies is a field-based account of the human–animal relations that shape the everyday lives of contemporary Kumaonis. Her focus on the contemporary cultural and material entanglements between humans and non-humans attends innovatively to historical and emergent relationships with animals. She began working in this region in 2010, spending time in villages in the vicinity of Mukteshwar, in the state of Uttarakhand. Methodologically, she immersed herself in the lives of animals as much as she immersed herself into the lives of people (p. 21). Elements of Kumaoni subjectivity is revealed to Govindarajan through her close observation of animals in the contemporary, while also contemporary animal life in specific political histories of the region. The specific findings in this engaging book ‘emerge through both tangible and intangible, material and immaterial, proximate and distant encounters’ (p. 22) with animals. Most of the narratives that shape this book emerge from women interlocutors, as women were largely responsible for the ‘care of domestic animals and for a variety of agrarian tasks that brought them into contact with wild animals’ (p. 28). The framework for this book draws from a variety of theories, most notably feminist science studies, affect theory and existing historical and contemporary work on human–non-human relations from a variety of academic fields, thus distinguishing her approach from elements in South Asian folkloric traditions where animals have a more symbolic presence.
One of the key interventions in this book is revisiting kinship by exploring in detail the everyday emotional entanglements with animals, both domesticated and wild. This is what Govindarajan calls ‘relatedness’—the central conceptual knot that holds together many aspects and forays of this ethnography of interspecies affect and practice. In her framework, animals are not merely symbols, but they impact on the materiality of existence in concrete ways. She points out that her approach is about how individual animals, as characters, insert themselves into Pahari subjectivities and belonging, and not just as a species. She carefully distinguishes her approach and findings from other multispecies ethnographies by asserting a non-depoliticized perspective where animals ‘condition political and cultural possibilities not just as immaterial metaphors but as particular actors with complex lives, histories and characters’ (p. 89). Her engagement with animals aims to offer a path to researching the post-human in a way that ‘must engage the lessons of postcolonialism and vice versa’ (p. 179).
What drives relatedness between humans and non-humans is not some essential one-ness, but recognition of a connection, working through ontological differences. Govindarajan clarifies that ‘relatedness … gestures to one’s existence in a world where the overlapping of different lives and fates means that difference had to be constantly and imperfectly negotiated through shifting turns to love, care, neglect, avoidance and violence’ (p. 25). Relatedness has three essential elements: difference and connection, connection despite difference and connection through difference. What emerges from this nuanced look at human–animal relatedness are ways in which Kumaoni villagers distinctly position themselves as Paharis (vis-à-vis outsiders).
The cultural politics of Pahari identity, seeking to maintain a distinct presence from plains populations, is a common practice among inhabitants of the Eastern Himalayas as well (Sen, 2017). So, what does a focus on human animal relatedness tell us about Pahari identity and disposition in the Central Himalayas? Govindarajan’s study complicates the simplistic theories/logics, as found in previous academic engagements or in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) propaganda, which tend to homogenize the multiple entanglements with cows. The narratives around the difference in shakti (power/strength) between the jersey and pahari cows or dogalla (hybrid) brings out how upper caste and lower caste/Dalit Kumaonis maintain caste boundaries within this region, and also the new possibilities engendered by the availability of Jersey cows due to dairy development initiatives. At present, Dalit Kumaonis are able to drink milk with their tea or expect to be served milk-tea (mark of wealth and status) when they visit upper-caste homes. Govindarajan cautions against simplistic celebration and denouncement of existing binaries that exist in Kumaoni relatedness to animals. Her interlocutors clarify that Jersey cows (introduced by development interventions), though less pure in Pahari cosmology, may over time become like Pahari cows (p. 83). Furthermore, these distinctions also enabled cow slaughter to continue in clandestine ways, since sacrifice and care of domesticated animals was coterminous in Kumaoni life. In this context, it is important to note that at the time of Govindarajan’s fieldwork the state legislature of Uttarakhand was dominated by the Hindu nationalist BJP and there was a specific Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in 2011 which prohibited animal sacrifice.
Another significant thread that runs through Animal Intimacies is a critique of the Western liberal view of love where this emotion always leads to positive ties in attachments in human relationships. Govindarajan considers this approach artificial; in her thinking, love always holds a capacity for violence. She demonstrates this through her examples of goat sacrifice (Chapter 2) and sending certain cows to the slaughterhouse (Chapter 3), and also through the discussion of violence towards Kukur (dog) or Bagh (tiger) in the epilogue. Everyday material realities and gendered labouring engendered these situated ties to particular animals. where men and women repeatedly equated sacrificing the animals they loved and cared for as completing a necessary cycle, a ‘transactional relationship wherein a lifetime of care and nourishment creates a karz (debt) that the sacrificial animal pays with his blood’ (p. 49) for the benefit of families. There is a lot of remorse and thought that accompanies and animates the ethics of these everyday sacrifices.
In taking this stance, Govindarajan underscores the limitations in both right-wing Hindu notions of sacrifice and those of animal rights activists. In right-wing discourse, animal sacrifice was something that only lower castes or Dalits engaged in. For animal rights activists, care and love for animals was the purview of cosmopolitan elites who would veer ordinary villagers away from sacrifice which they read is pure violence. In trying to avoid an orientalist explanation, Govindarajan urges us to think through animal sacrifice in Uttarakhand through the framework of ‘reciprocal indebtedness’. Care, remorse, absolution and love (p. 60) marked the cycle of kinship with animals, and sacrifice did not mean that love had ended, as noted by Bimala chachi (one of the Govindarajan’s main interlocutors in Chapter 4). Govindarajan concludes that ‘Kumaonis tried to atone for their actions in multiple ways: by providing gentle and loving care; by remembering that their continued presence in the world owed itself to the death of others; by acknowledging the guilt and remorse for their actions’ (p. 178).
Related to issues of love and sacrifice, Animal Intimacies offers a glimpse into the complex and queer desires of Kumaoni women concerning sexual intimacy and how they situate themselves as sexual subjects in a cultural context where women’s display of sexual prowess is frowned upon. In analysing the tales around the wild bear (bhalu ki baat), Govindarajan embraces baat as a genre to trace critiques of dominant or official social norms. Women narrate incidents and cherished affective ties to bears (bhalus), enabling them to voice and validate unrequited desire and love. In engaging such tales, Govindarajan distinguishes herself from folkloric analysis to underscore the contemporary materiality and everyday-ness of women’s queer desire. Women’s stories engaged bestiality that transcended boundaries between human and animal sexual love. Repeated stories of women’s sexual encounters with bears had a common thread. Bears with whom women had sex ‘did not turn into men’, but substantiated their distinct presence as sexual partners who, despite ‘taking women’, could be loving premis (lovers). Bhalu ki baat also enabled women to articulate a critique of domestic violence and the shaming of women, holding them to savarna (upper caste) notions of purity (quite common in this area). Ultimately through these lived tales women positioned themselves as desiring subjects, not just as resisting subjects (p. 162).
Finally, Animal Intimacies offers situated histories and practices of world-making. In her narration of the ‘other wild’ (Chapter 5), Govindarajan illuminates engagements with contemporary and colonial state interventions. The everyday talk about insider (Pahari) and outsider monkeys (Chapter 4) enables Govindarajan to express the fears and marginalization that Pahari village dwellers face to maintain their distinctiveness and survive the onslaught of successive modernizations like the real-estate developers who engaged in clandestine land and property deals in the Almora region. Some villagers thought that the aggressive breed of outside monkeys was affecting traditional ones because they were gluttonous (khadu). Pahari residents compared these outside monkeys with tourists from the plains, alluding to the problematic incursions of outside forces. Govindarajan states that some villagers ‘compared the looming ruin of Pahari monkeys to the ways in which Pahari youth had been spoiled by learning city ways through television…’ (p. 117).
With its many interesting findings, Govindarajan’s thought-provoking ethnography will remain important in South Asian studies, specifically Himalaya studies, as an engagement with Anthropocene that remains a ‘gift armed with teeth’ (Howe & Pandian, 2016, quoted in Govindarajan, p. 182).