Friday, July 19, 2019

Of goat sacrifice, cow love, and monkey hooliganism

The stories of goat sacrifice, cow love, monkey hooliganism, and bear sex are grounded in the recognition that each needs the other to survive and even thrive.

It is quite unlikely if anybody would value pigeon as a pet, since the ubiquitous bird has already attained the undisputed title of a despised pest. This widespread notion can easily change if one gets to hear about the experiments which are now engaging pigeons to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public - a despised pest being transformed into a veritable messenger. Gathering new data to imagine fresh engagement with the feathered critters may eventually help afresh strained relationship to address complexities of life. Such possibilities are worth exploring for building new sensitivities with fellow species as a means of fostering enhanced response-ability.

Based on extensive ethnographic research in the mountain villages, Radhika Govindrajan explores multiple aspects of interspecies co-existence for assigning new meanings to intimacies with domestic and wild animals. Animal Intimacies captures the recursive play between life and death of six species – goat, dog, cow, pig and bear – which has violence at the heart of inevitable relatedness with the mountain households. The stories of goat sacrifice, cow love, monkey hooliganism, and bear sex are grounded in the recognition that each needs the other to survive and even thrive. Even in the otherness of the species there is a moral and ethical underpinning that defines interspecies care and reciprocity, which extends the narrow domain of such interactions beyond the conventional man-animal conflict.  

Relatedness is the key that holds stories in Animal Intimacies from the perspective of sustaining kinship. Drawing heavily from Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, Govindrajan frames interspecies relations as kin‐like, which provides distinctive ways of defining intensity of such relationships in the mountains. Even the queer narrative of bear engaging women in sex is not without a sense of kinship, where they relate to one another by their shared desire of pleasure. Bear becomes the metaphor to critique the denial of legitimacy to female sexuality, as also highlights their social subjectivity and marginality. 

Animal Intimacies provides lively reportage on the everydayness of existence in the mountain villages, where interaction with domesticated cattle and encounters with wild animals constitute a better part of daily existence. Within the knotty nature of multispecies relatedness Govindrajan discovers the common experience of inequality and exploitation that has contributed to a distinct fellowship between humans and animals. Is the shared history of neglect and exclusion the cause for of goat sacrifice, cow love kinship in the mountains? Each story provides insights on how people perceive and relate to different animals, building a unique interspecies social equilibrium. 

However, in recent years two notable externalities - the right-wing political project on cow protection and translocation of monkeys from the plains to the mountains – have disrupted interspecies equilibrium which the local population finds hard to negotiate. The consequent flux of stray cattle and the growing monkey hooliganism have made the potential of participation in the life of the other impermeable. As hordes of people abandon land and migrate in search of better pastures, the everyday form of relatedness has taken a serious beating. It is an incredible loss, both to humans as a body and animals as an agency.

Through stories of interspecies interconnections, based on empathy and love, Govindrajan constructs the fleeting possibility of another world.  She doesn’t render animals as a symbolic foil but as subjects whose agency, intention, and capacity for emotion is critical in shaping the relationships that has the potential to dilute the impact of humans as a geological force. In this period of the Anthropocene, when places for people and other critters are being destroyed, the urgency of making kin with other species was never more compelling. 

The stories in Animal Intimacies lend credence to the notion that despite both animals and humans representing the world differently; it is in creative imagination of their relatedness lies the possibility of creating refuges for the humans and the non humans. Written with style and scholarship, Animal Intricacies provides fresh insights on the variety of human‐non human interactions that has the potential to take the urgency of making kin, with other critters, to an imaginative high. 

An assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, Radhika Govindrajan has put together her research into an interesting and immensely readable book. 

Animal Intimacies
by Radhika Govindrajan 
Penguin, New Delhi
Extent: 327, Price: Rs 599.

First published in the Hindustan Times, dated July 20, 2019

Friday, July 12, 2019

A Bullet with Manasa's Name

Ghosh deploys myth and history to focus on the scary maw of a violated nature and the digitally-aided transfer of people. And we carry on, in denial.

Amitav Ghosh’s anxiety on the subject of climate change had come out clearly in The Great Derangement (2016), wherein his conjecture on our collective inability to fathom lurking dangers of climate change was united with an absence of serious literature on the subject. The world has changed too much, too fast and so profoundly that not much sense can be made of it in non-fiction. Therefore, the conventional cause-effect narrative on the emerging environmental catastrophe rarely engages a large section of the affected and elicits a collective response.

It is only through stories that the universe can speak to us, contends Ghosh, and our failure to listen may invite punishment. It makes sense as we are the only species gifted with the faculty of storytelling that helps us capture the inward mysteries of our existence. Gun Island provides the mythical backdrop that connects the past with the present in Dinanath or Deen’s journey in tracing the footsteps of the gun merchant who had supposedly traversed the world in search of a safe haven to evade the wrath of the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. Deen’s travels from the marshes of the Sundar­bans to the gradually sinking Venice via fire-ravaged California is intermeshed with flights of imagination over dots of reality in building a compulsive story of contemporary relevance.

Plotted over a span of three centuries, from the little ice age to the current phase of global warming, the story remains alive to the unfolding ecological crises. The alarming decline of Irrawa­ddy dolphins in the Sundarbans and the invasion of venomous brown recluse spider in Venice provide evidence of shocking things happening around us. Ghosh brings to life non-human, silent, characters in the story—essentially a heady cocktail of myths, folklore and legends. “The primary literary challenge of our time is to give voice to the non-human”. Gun Island succeeds in integrating the non-human into an abs­orbing, partly thrilling, novel that blurs the lines between the real and the imaginary. Kneading past with present, connecting the human with the non-­human, and coupling myth with rea­lity emerge as its most striking feature, an essential prelude to looking beyond the obvious in making a sense of the pervasive crisis looming over us all.

Resting on the undercurrents of migration, a theme that has engaged the aut­hor since the Ibis trilogy, Gun Island provides astute observations on migration—posited here as function of pove­rty as well as a quest for connectedness. One of the most urgent and fraught themes that our political structures have sought to evade has fueled tales of escape from destitution and persecution. But Ghosh’s essential point is that the theory of deprivation is insufficient to explain the advent of the ‘people-moving industry’—one the world’s biggest and still growing enterprises. More than freak cyclones, smartphones and computers are stoking the desire for connecting with a perceived world of opportunities elsewhere. Does this notion of interconnection, while exp­anding small worlds, not play back on the abandoned rivers and fields?

The exceptionally gifted Ghosh crea­tes an imagery we may not have sensed bef­ore. Rising temperatures and shifting habitats are inextricably linked to our past, things humans have lost control over. It follows that we do not recognise the problems created by our way of life. As every individual is ince­ntivised to imp­rove his/her sta­ndard of living, with states driven by the capitalist model of growth, what will drive us to exit the comfort zone of this ‘new normal’ remains a vexed question.

Gun Island has all that which draws attention to the symptoms of demo­nic possession that the world of today presents. Towards the end of the novel, the glamorous Italian historian lets Deen get a sense of her predicament: “everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a livable place…and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit, as though we are in the grip of forces that have overwhelmed our will; we see shocking and monstrous things happening around us and we avert our eyes; we surrender ourselves willingly to whatever it is that has us in power.”

As public response to climate change is caught between the polarities of widespread denial and overt activism—which is also under surveillance by the military-industrial complex—fiction has the power to knock society free of the shackles of cultural cognition and motivated reasoning. Ghosh argues that there can be no compelling period in human history to recognise the urg­ency for such an engagement.

Gun Island
by Amitav Ghosh 
Penguin RandomHouse, New Delhi
Extent: 286, Price: Rs. 699.

First published in Outlook, issue dated July 10, 2019.