Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking Religion, Law and Ethics

Adcock, C.S.; Govindrajan, Radhika

doi:10.1080/00856401.2019.1681726

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…Scholars have argued that academic debate regarding cattle in India has proceeded through a problematic opposition between ‘religion’ and ‘economy’. In practice, though, religion is entangled with and inseparable from the biopolitics and bioeconomies of Indian bovines (Adcock & Govindrajan, 2019), including those emerging from practices of slaughter (Narayanan, 2019).…”

Section: Conclusion: Provincialising Lively Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In India, cows 'inhabit several worlds simultaneously': domesticated, wild, human, divine, transcendental (Robbins, 1998, p. 237). Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism and, since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power in 2014, they have been mobilised as political symbols for the Hindutva movement and become conduits for the expression of majoritarian forms of right-wing Hindu nationalism (Adcock & Govindrajan, 2019). Gau seva and cow protectionism are now political priorities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Turnbull

Barua

2022

Trans Inst British Geog

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The economic implications of biopolitics – or the administration, regulation, and control of life – have received significant attention in recent geographical and cognate scholarship. An emerging theme of inquiry, largely focused on the Global North, makes contributions to specifying ‘lively capital’, defined here as bodily value in motion – predicated on accumulation from other‐than‐human life. In this paper, we argue that the biopolitical process of bringing life into the ambit of capital works in cultural, political, and economic registers and not just through singular logics of the economic, as extant accounts have implied. The rendition of life into capital through modes of biopower is not a universal process. It has diverging trajectories that, in postcolonial contexts, involve hybrids between biopolitical and vernacular practices. This argument is made through an account of bovine biopolitics in urban Delhi with specific reference to the city's ‘cattle problem’ involving ‘surplus’ animals. It unfolds in four distinct parts. First, drawing on archival work, we trace colonial histories of cattle improvement to reveal how the category of ‘surplus’ was invented. Second, we deploy more‐than‐human ethnographies of free‐ranging animals in Delhi to foreground how ‘surplus’ cattle – which we conceptualise as ‘living waste’ – are driven to feed on waste as a result of gentrification and the enclosure of erstwhile grazing grounds. Third, we turn to gaushalas (cow shelters) in Delhi to show how ‘surplus’ cattle from the city's streets are rehomed and managed. Fourth, we examine the uneven practices of care afforded to different bovines based on logics associated with right‐wing Hindutva nationalism. Our account provincialises lively capital by opening up more nuanced and situated understandings of the relations between biopolitics and capitalism, attentive to divergences from models situated in Western modernity.

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Section: Conclusion: Provincialising Lively Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Turnbull

Barua

2022

Trans Inst British Geog

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“…As Govidrajan (2008, p. 20) put it in her masterful ethnography of animal life in the Himalayas, we need ‘to treat animals, human and nonhuman, as coparticipants in meaningful worldling’. Such worldling practices and meaningful social relations encompass both cultural representations and economic practices, as is the case with the ‘sacred cow’, a central figure in anthropological debates around symbolic and material explanations (e.g., Adcock and Govindrajan, 2019; Korom, 2000). In this paper, the cow will also figure prominently, although her divine authority will be matched by a more ‘profane’ existence: the subject of biopolitical interventions of governmentality, and a scavenger inhabiting India's proliferating urban dumpsites.…”

Section: Studying the More‐than‐humanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stench and sensibilities: On living with waste, animals and microbes in India

Doron

2020

Australian J of Anthropology

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“…In India, relationships between the state, people, and cattle transcend the binary of religion and economy that has fundamentally driven bovine politics in India, as well as set the intellectual terms on which these binaries have been reproduced (Adcock and Govindrajan 2019, 1099). The scholarship on cattle symbolism, privileging histories of the sacred, has largely failed to account for people's distinct temporal sensibilities and relationships to bulls, cows, and buffaloes as commodities on the Indian subcontinent.…”

Section: Cattle Rustling and Border‐makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

Sur

2020

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. Borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. Dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence and torture. I show how India’s prohibitions on live cattle exports and Bangladesh’s demand for beef compel acts that effectively legalize animal smuggling, which, nonetheless, remains a risky business. Across the riverine islands of the India-Bangladesh borderlands, small-scale traders and transporters operate according to the distinct logics of militarized infrastructures and legal regimes that generate moments of “signal clear,” marking the temporary opening of border passages and opportunities for sustenance, as well as “armed” times, more sustained periods of heightened national security, and imminent violence. By subjecting the border’s productive and coercive temporal energies to close ethnographic scrutiny, I suggest that cattle’s sacrality reinforces the material world of capital and strife, ruptures kinship ties, and subjects Muslim cattle workers and their families to prolonged periods of scarcity and hunger. This article shows how people’s experiences of the borderland as a space are vitally shaped by fractured, shifting, and contingent rhythms of time.

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Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking Religion, Law and Ethics

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Stench and sensibilities: On living with waste, animals and microbes in India

Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

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