Animating caste: visceral geographies of pigs, caste, and violent nationalisms in Chennai city

Abstract

The paper introduces porcine bodies as landscapes upon which caste as wildness, primitive, or savage are inscribed and asserted in India, by the Hindu Right and the Dalit Right, to respectively advance parochial nationalisms. The general obscuration of the pig in violent nationalist discourses, is itself due to her inherent caste status as impure/polluting. Hindu Vedic scriptures endorse a civilizational rhetoric of the cows as Brahminical and divine, and the pigs as associated with filth and ferality. Caste advances or obstructs political and economic power, and is interlocked with market capitalism, which relies on nature -and casteised subhuman/nonhuman bodies -as both profitable (and venerable), and expendable (and despicable). The visceral socio-political contempt the pig evokes is intertwined with their use in performing economic labor as waste scavenger, and political labor as superfluous to a nation in which pigs, and people associated with pigs do not belong. Via empirical work in Chennai city, this paper focusses the pig, ecologically and sociologically wild, feral and promiscuous, as enmeshed in a long-enduring, constructed caste conflict around Brahmin/Dravida; Hindu/Tamil; civilized/primitive; and even, human/animal binaries. Finally, it specifies species as also core to identity politics, as part of a transformative praxis to a post-casteist society.

Debating animal agriculture in contemporary India: Ethics, politics, ecologies

“…The first is cultural vegetarianism and cow protectionism which have been deployed by right-wing religious (Hindu) forces to enact oppression and violence on religious and caste minorities. In this strand, cows are simultaneously sacralized and exploited directly (for dairy and labour), and the symbolic value attributed to them (and other farmed animals) is weaponised -they are used as pawns to uphold as well as resist social hierarchies (Narayanan, 2018b(Narayanan, , 2021. The second is the steady expansion of high-productivity commercial animal farming, which even if not always displaying the large-scale forms seen in other parts of the world, is increasingly characterized by other features of intensification, including corporate logics, techno-scientific husbandry aimed at ever-rising productivity, and geared towards high-value markets.…”

“…This is not to say that these issues have gone completely unnoticed (Ganesan, 2020; Hari, 2020; Kumar, 2019; Narayanan, 2021). However, these remain isolated strands of debate.…”

Theme issue introduction: The species turn in Indian identity politics

“…‘ Debovinization can be understood as a stripping, or a de-recognition of inherent bovine vulnerabilities, which denies cows and buffaloes their species truth’ (Narayanan 2023: 84). So too de-porcinisation or the framing of pigs as despicable as an exclusionary tactic marginalises the Dalit community associated with pigs in the Hindu state, while simultaneously erasing and deeming irrelevant the essential nature of being a pig and her associated vulnerabilities, needs and experiences (Narayanan 2021a). Caste itself is thus sustained by conjoining human-animal identities; animals too are regarded as being born into caste, and caste is embodied by ‘simultaneously dehumanizing, sub-humanizing, and animalizing humans , and humanizing , sub-humanizing, de -animalizing other animals ’ (Narayanan 2023: 83).…”

Living waste, living on waste: A bioeconomy of urban cows in Delhi

“…The colonial construction of the category of surplus cattle, the concomitant enclosure of grazing grounds and urban commons in postcolonial India, and the vilification of urban dairying and an anxiety surrounding slums (Sundaram, 2010) all contribute to the so‐called ‘cattle problem’ in Indian cities. Not only is there a strong casteised dimension to this issue, but the mediation of urban ecologies through caste contributes to framing particular sets of urban practices as being a ‘problem’ (Narayanan, 2021; Reddy, 2021). We sketch out such casteised ecologies in relation to urban bovines, but the topic deserves further and fuller empirical attention in future work.…”