Published : Jan 04, 2025 12:40 IST – 9 MINS READ
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Rock art of Bhimbetka in the foothills of the Vindhya mountain range in Madhya Pradesh. The depiction of animals in the rock shelters of Bhimbetka were a vital clue to early human migration in the Indian subcontinent. | Photo Credit: LALIT SHASTRI
Conversations with the Animate ‘Other’ seeks to examine a long history of negotiations between the human and the nonhuman in a wide range of Indian literary, art historical, anthropological and archaeological texts. These texts have not only dislodged anthropocentricity but also draw attention to the embedded relationships between humans and nonhumans and their natural landscape—a necessary intervention in an era of widespread environmental degradation.
As the editor of the volume Aloka Parasher-Sen observes, it is necessary to pay greater attention to the lives of nonhuman species and the varied impact that the human destruction of the environment has had on nonhuman as well as human lives in various local and supra-local contexts. The conflict is not just between humans and nonhumans but also among humans over other living beings and the natural landscape. If one has to give equal importance to the human and the nonhuman, it is necessary to critique Enlightenment notions of the human as someone who possesses language, rationality and moral capabilities. Like the concept of nature itself, the terms “human” and “nonhuman” have to be seen as cultural constructs that privilege the human over the nonhuman. The nature/culture binary is blurred when we consider the nonhuman and (“other”) humans as subjects who possess their own embodied forms of agency.
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The book is divided into three parts. The first two parts historicise nonhuman forms of personhood and agency through various textual and art-based representations, while the third part focuses on historical investigations of the nonhuman.
In her essay “Imagination and Presence: Human-Animal Relations and the Arts of Pre-colonial Deccan”, Sudeshna Guha analyses a range of texts from rock art to tribal paintings and terracotta figurines that illustrate human perceptions of animals and the distinction they made between tame and wild animals. Although she rightly argues that it is important to blur the hierarchy between thinking humans and acting animals to imagine the possibility of an embodied form of subjectivity (where thought is not an essential aspect) that both humans and animals share, she does not illustrate her claim.
The focus of Guha’s textual analyses is largely centred on human perceptions of animals, categorisations of tame and domestic animals, human acts of sacrifice and kindness towards animals and the use of animal metaphors to describe human virtues. However, there is no discussion or imagination of how the animal might have perceived humans. In her discussion of the rock art of Bhimbetka, for example, it is not clear how the image illustrates the animals’ ability “to predict the hunters’ predictions and exercise autonomous powers of intentional action”. It does not help matters that most of the images in the book, including the ones in Guha’s essay, are not very clear; this impedes the possibility of visualising the animal’s embodied agency.
Reiko Ohnuma’s essay, “Animal Doubles of the Buddha”, which upholds the objectives of the volume by drawing attention to embodied forms of nonhuman agency, is perhaps the finest essay in this volume. Ohnuma argues that the animal characters in the Jatakas function as the Buddha’s alter egos, which both blur and preserve the moral hierarchy between humans and nonhumans. The horse, Kanthaka, who accompanies the Buddha when he renounces worldly life, serves as a scapegoat who partially absolves the Buddha of censure for abandoning his family by embodying the Buddha’s regret through his silent presence (for which he is rewarded in the next life).
The elephant Nalagiri, who is sent to kill the Buddha, publicises the Buddha’s greatness and ideal masculinity to the world when he is instantly subdued by the Buddha’s touch. While Kanthaka remains a proxy for the Buddha, Nalagiri is reduced to an allegory for base human desires that have to be domesticated if humans are to attain spiritual liberation. Like some of the other essays on Jainism in the volume, Ohnuma’s essay reinforces the fact that nonhuman living beings are worthy of compassion and respect even if they are considered lower than humans.
Andrea Gutierrez’s essay, “Gajasiksa as Interspecies Communication in Elephant Manuals of Early India”, explores the verbal and non-verbal codes of communication that were used to train royal elephants in the 12th century elephant manual Manasollasa and the undated manual Matangalila. Gutierrez argues that the haptic and seismic modes of communication that mahouts employed were forms of manipulation that were more violent than they appear. Although Gutierrez argues that mahouts communicated with elephants in Sanskrit and other local languages, many of the words that she lists sound more like sounds that may accompany touch and gestures.
As Gutierrez rightly argues, these manuals may privilege the verbal over the non-verbal, but the most significant part of the communication between mahout and elephant is a gestural and haptic repertoire that is a product of the interactions between them. Do we have a sense of how these texts were read and received? Are there any descriptive/visual accounts of how elephants respond to touch and gestures? How does their familiarity with various Indian languages including Sanskrit give us access to their cognitive and affective abilities or even their willingness or unwillingness to obey their mahouts?
In his essay “Of a Porcine Mother and her Tamil Children”, Nachiket Chanchani examines the ambivalent relationship between humans and feral and domesticated pigs and wild boars primarily through his study of a 10th-century sculpture of Varahi. He further tracks literary perceptions of pigs in Tamil Sangam poetry where they are described as animals that “dig up mud, eat bulbs and millet, uproot reeds, make nests” and in Sanskrit poetry where the boar is an avatar of Vishnu. Boars, like the other plants and animals that feature in Sangam poetry, are conventional symbols for human emotions and moods rather than being animals in their own right—an aspect that Chanchani leaves unexplored. What are the theological and aesthetic implications of having a theriocephalic representation of Varahi rather than a theriomorphic one? What does the literary have to do with the sculptural and what is the specificity of the sculptural as a medium of representation? Is the pig in any of its representations visualised as an animal that has its own subjectivity rather than merely being a symbol of human (political) virtue?
Bhutanese painted thanka of the Jataka Tales, circa 18th-19th century. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
I have the same question for Viraj Shah’s essay “Nagas or Serpents in Jain Visual Imagery”, where snakes are imagined as morally ambivalent creatures that blur the human-nonhuman boundary by assuming anthropomorphic, therianthropomorphic, and zoomorphic forms. Again, Shah does not explore the aesthetic implications of these various forms in terms of imagining the snake’s subjectivity and agency.
In her essay, “From Earth to Form: The Terracotta World of the Non-Human”, Aloka Parasher-Sen argues that the human and the nonhuman shared the same ritual, social and religious space in Harappan terracotta art. Animals did not just inhabit the religious domains of people but were also depicted as material possessions and toys and decorative objects. In her discussion of animal sarcophagi that were discovered in Megalithic society in the Deccan, Parasher-Sen does not explore the implications of having animal shaped sarcophagi to bury people who believed in life after death. Parasher-Sen also does not give us the historical and cultural context in which terracota figurines were produced. What are the implications of the distinction between historically and culturally sensitive terracotta art and that which is “ageless” and traditional? In her discussion of Andrea Gutierrez’s work, I am not sure how animals constituted early Brahminical ritual and were an intimate part of the human world.
Anchit Jain’s essay, “Situating Camels and Other Animals in their early Medieval Efflorescence of the Thar”, cursorily looks at the representation of the camel in medieval Jain literary texts and economic histories of the Thar region but fails to capture the subjectivity of the camel. The camel that seems to be no different from the other animals is just a passive object or an instrument of human trade and commerce. I am not sure what the camel’s commercial role has to do with the Jain literary perception of the camel as a playful animal or as an object of ridicule. If the camel was playful, it suggests some form of embodied agency that must have shaped its relationship with humans and history.
Vijaya Ramadas Mandala’s essay, “The ‘Wild Ecology’ of Hunting and Forest Beasts in Colonial India” contrasts colonial and tribal (Gond and Baiga) attitudes towards the tiger. While the colonial state viewed the tiger as an animal that had to be tamed for its own governmental purposes, for the indigenous tribes, the tiger was a fellow forest being that had to be respected and feared. Mandala deploys the term “wild ecology” to describe the relationship between the tiger and its natural environment in its “primeval state”. What is not clear is how this pristine state of nature can be assumed without being imagined as a (colonial) projection onto the past.
Mandala believes that the Gond and Baiga have had a “biocentric” relationship with nature unlike the utilitarian and anthropocentric relationship that the colonial state had with nature. As Mandala herself argues, the conflict between Baigas, Gonds and the tiger is a man-made dichotomy that reinforces the fact that even the tribes have an anthropocentric perception of the tiger that they hunted for food. The difference, if any, between the Gonds and the Baigas and their relationship to nature and the tiger has not been spelt out in the essay. I also believe that the colonial perceptions of these tribes need to be challenged.
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Finally, let me end by raising a few questions for Parvathy V.’s essay, “Human-Serpent Entanglement in Kerala”. In response to some of the claims Parvathy makes about myths and literary texts, cannot myths be read as literature? Do literary texts and art not evoke emotions? How does the author define myth, fantasy and what is their relationship to daily life?
While the objectives Parasher-Sen discusses in the introduction promise to be a crucial intervention in contemporary debates on the environment and the fraught relationship between human and nonhuman actors, they are not entirely upheld in the rest of the book. In fact, some of the essays end up reinforcing the hierarchy between nature and culture; human and nonhuman without sufficiently capturing/imagining the sensory modes of communication and agency that are specific to nonhuman subjects (and that they share with their human counterparts) that are often reduced to symbols and metaphors for human values. Nonetheless, the volume is a fair attempt to imagine and understand the fraught negotiations between human and nonhuman subjects across various media and human history that have largely reinstated the moral and political hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman.
Kiran Keshavamurthy is Assistant Professor of English at IIT Guwahati and a scholar of modern Tamil literature.
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