Sharing a room with sparrows: Maulana Azad and Muslim ecological thought1

Taneja, Anand Vivek

doi:10.4324/9781003036272-11

Cited by 2 publications

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“…For Waigeo men working as guides for international birdwatchers in Indonesia (Tsing, 2022, 16–18), and for Aboriginal Australians interpreting the upside‐down hanging of flying foxes as “calling for” rain (Rose, 2012, 131–34), it is a story of birds’ affective and intimate coexistence with the flora that hosts them than an expression of hostility. In the context of South Asia, Taneja (2021, 238) finds the ethics of hospitality to sparrows in the writings of Indian political thinker Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as mutual “experiments in cross‐species intimacy.” Veena Das (2013) further untangles the significance of interspecies intimacy through her explanation of the ethics of noncruelty in the Vedic‐Hindu formulation. She interprets a Vedic story of the parrot who willingly dies by staying alongside the withering tree that once hosted it and suggests we “accept the power of intimacy” while interpreting multiple meanings of co‐living with animal Others (27).…”

Section: Hospitality Hostility Hostpitalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Welcoming the foreigner: Notes on the possibility of multispecies hospitality

Kavesh

2023

American Anthropologist

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What do the welcome and the refusal mean when the one who arrives is not human? By examining the moral attitude created through the acceptance of European racing pigeons in Pakistan and the capture of Pakistani “spy pigeons” at the India‐Pakistan border, this article unknots multiple meanings of arrival and explores how shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a more‐than‐human Other arrives in a foreign land as an invited guest or an uninvited intruder. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's (2000) construction of hostpitality and Punjabi Sufi poet‐philosopher Waris Shah's discussion of badal (reciprocity), this article contends that in South Asia, reciprocal exchanges produce and sustain cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic bonds and propound an analytical avenue to critically rethink deconstruction of the home as a sovereign space.

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Section: Hospitality Hostility Hostpitalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Welcoming the foreigner: Notes on the possibility of multispecies hospitality

Kavesh

2023

American Anthropologist

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Nonhuman Governance

Mehtta¹

2022

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

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The current ecological crisis and its accompanying environmental consciousness has prodded many to reject Western dualism and instead embrace animism. Taking the Sundarbans forests of India as a starting point, the author shows how several animated, nonhuman agents of the region guide both resource use and social relationships through a set of rules known as the “rules of the jungle.” The source of these rules are deities, demons, and spirits—that is, “cosmic polities”—that undeniably govern life in the Sundarbans and across the landscape of South Asia. Mehtta shows how such nonhuman forms of governance and animistic ontologies can act as a source not only of care and an ecological consciousness but also are capable of exclusion and discrimination. Consequently, the South Asian context provides an important cautionary tale about the blind embrace of animism as the sole savior of our ecological crisis by revealing a spectrum of violence within certain strands of animistic ontologies. Simultaneously the author shows how Western repertoires of thought reveal framing devices that transcend dualism and may be read as the precursors of contemporary environmental consciousness. This article ultimately proposes the importance of acknowledging a bricolage of ontologies and realities without entrenching them in a particular identity of caste, tribe, or “indigeneity” or in being of “the West” or of “the rest of the world.”

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Sharing a room with sparrows: Maulana Azad and Muslim ecological thought1

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Welcoming the foreigner: Notes on the possibility of multispecies hospitality

Welcoming the foreigner: Notes on the possibility of multispecies hospitality

Nonhuman Governance

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