My paper stems from recognising the value of posthumanism as a rubric that can challenge many assumptions that define us as human as well as the need to be particular about it so as to avoid a kind of homogeneity that could be equated with the values of liberal humanism. Instead of a bland homogeneity, my paper suggests two case-studies as starting points of an interrogation of the human in relation to the animal through a posthumanist lens.
Posthumanism in its anti-anthropocentrism examines the question of the animal by questioning the dominant modes of liberal humanism that limit the ethical concern towards animals to a discussion of rights. I use posthumanism as a term as used by theorists like Cary Wolfe who deploy it specifically to understand the limits of the human as constituted by the non-human. In this regard, this differs from more popular theorisations of posthumanism such as by Katherine Hayles who champions a kind of triumphant human disembodiment through technology as a way to move beyond the human.
But at the same time, there is a similar impulse that drives posthumanism that can be located in Wolfe’s formulation too, which is that of the human being ‘heterogeneous’ to the human inasmuch that the human is always radically other constituted by what is not human in the different biological, evolutionary and zoological aspects of what is given to us as human. So, for Wolfe, the set of questions that not only rejects humanism but also any of its ethical imperative such as relying on the rational human to discover the world is posthumanism. Thus, the ‘post’ in posthumanism should mean “after humanism” also signifying some continuity and exchange with the ideas of humanism instead of a technological rupture that heralds some kind of new being.
If we agree that posthumanism should not re-centre man at its centre with its fixed ontological set of attributes that are necessarily confined only to man and used to distinguish a lack in the animal, then the posthumanist challenge is to articulate a non-hierarchical respect for nonhumans through the specific realities that they take partake in. Cary Wolfe’s solution to this knot is to suggest a kind of ‘trans-species empathy’ which is to recognise man as not rational or superior but as one which shares characteristics with other species by being part of a “generalised animal sensorium” (2010: 134). Posthumanism is then not just anti-speciesism which works by pushing the limits of rights because that is trapped in a justice framework that grants rights based on arbitrarily defined and contested characteristics. Instead, the violence of humanism, as Wolfe has reiterated forcefully, ‘is species-specific in its logic (which rigorously separates human from nonhu- man) but not in its effects (it has historically been used to oppress both human and nonhuman others)’ (1998: 43). This is what posthumanism resists.
My case-studies or examples, if you may, revolve around a common figure in Indian society- the cow. I wanted to follow this ubiquitous presence of our cultural, social, political, everyday life for several reasons.
- The cow metonymically taken for ideology and the nation state is an animal into which politics is read. What I mean by this is that the cow’s body becomes a tabula rasa for the nation-state’s ideological politics of the far-right to be mapped. Here, there is a tight congruence between the body and discourse that is never allowed to slip. The cow, in the national imaginary, is never not a sacred symbol that upholds the hindu purity of the Indian society. This ideological sleight of hand deifies the cow even as it rummages through garbage dumps for food and roams through streets. This is interesting because no other urban animal has been invested with similar cultural meanings or consistently figured in national-level conversations. This is in contrast to most other urban animals like street dogs who are afflicted with a certain kind of ‘liminality’, where they are invisible till, they are mired in debates about their very presence in these what is appropriated as ‘human’ spaces.
- The cow is also a hybrid figure in the Indian society. Many states such as Punjab distinguish between Indian and foreign cows such as the Jersey and Holstein Friesian (HF) who are available in India. As part of the milk revolution cross breeding and introduction of these foreign breeds served to boost milk production in india. Once the cows stop producing milk, dairy farmers abandon these cows on the roads and the buffaloes are sent to slaughter as they become a financial burden. While many states have gaushalas or cow sanctuaries many organisations are arguing that it is not their responsibility to take care of the American cows. Moreover, they are often anthropormorphised negatively, with the Indian cow or the gaumata as clever and warm and the exotic jersey cow as lazy, idle and unhygienic.
- While many states have legislation that bans cow slaughter, India is also one of the leading producers and exporters of beef. Article 48 of the constitution of India recommends that scientific breeding programs be conducted to advance animal husband and to prevent the slaughter of cows and other cattle. This contradiction takes into account the nation’s needs to treat cow as resource at the same time it tries to uphold the beliefs of Hindutva nationalists.
The cow thus presents a challenge to posthumanist renderings of its being because she circulates in the Indian psyche as sign and signifier; property and meat; technology and indigeneity. Here, any universalising claims of a posthumanist vein that could glorify modern technoscientific breeds is not tenable because here the nature of the human is not an ontological given as the cow is worshipped and denigrated, and secondly because the human in this specific national context is not an autonomous being, distinct from nature and animality. Here the human being is steeped in metaphor as well as cultural practices.
As Juanita Sundberg points out, posthumanism is silent about its “loci of enunciation” thereby eliding the “geo-historical and the biographic” location of the authors and schools of thought (2013: 36). She adds that this silence about location “enacts Eurocentric theory as universal, the only body of knowledge that matters” (36). In addition, the silence only makes indirect and occasional references to indigenous knowledges which articulate non-dualist frameworks that go beyond man/animal, colonized/colonizer etc. The question is how posthumanism as understood in western philosophical thought which is underpinned by “dualist, colonial imaginaries is going to constitute different political imaginings- and for who” (37).
Thus, keeping in mind Cary Wolfe’s theorisation of posthumanism which is theoretically appealing to me, I want to decolonise that reading through my examples. While this may be difficult, my aim is to produce as a result of my analysis not a reproduction of the Eurocentric humanist modern, rational male as also the Indian subject, but something else altogether. Here I follow Dipesh Chakrabarty who Juanita Sundberg cites to demonstrate the need to decolonize posthumanism. Charkrabarty points out that western scholarship tends to treat philosophers who have been dead for a long time such as Locke, Marx, Weber as intellectual contemporaries without attributing to them their intellectual history which would situate them in very contextual and historical frameworks. This is in stark contrast to eastern intellectual traditions such as Sanskrit which are treated as archaic and dead and as material for archival research. What I am offering through these two divergent human-animal interactive examples is to inflect the western school of posthumanism with Indian cultural thought. While there are limitations to using case studies or examples to rupture a dominant school of thought, and while what would be superior would be to use Indian philosophy to challenge the conceptual system directly, I hope that since these are ‘living’ examples, they can modify our understanding of these concepts without discarding them altogether.
The more-than-human assemblage of the farmer protests are striking to see (https://twitter.com/GulbargaTemper1/status/1337826168645423104). On October 2, 2020, more than 30000 farmers, allied with Bharatiya Kisan Union started a non-violent rally from Haridwar to Delhi. They had two demands: one, an unconditional loan waiver as many of them were in heavy debt and implementation of the 2004-06 Swaminathan recommendation of the minimum prices for the crops. Not all of these marches which mostly were stopped at the borders of Delhi had cows but many of them from Rajasthan did. I am not sure if it is a spectacle or because the videos are able to convey the energy and tension in the air. The semblance human-nonhuman solidarity against draconian laws gives the impression of communication and vulnerability between the two species. The human-animal divide seems to be overcome, if only temporarily, in the mobility of action and protest. It’s poignant because in standing side by side, the question of the livelihood that the farmers’ protests have attempted to foreground becomes centerstage.
In media stories that reported this story, the cow is never referred to as the cow- instead the collective is referred to as cattle, signifying their role in the agricultural market helmed by the farmers. At the same time, as Radhika Govindarajan’s Animal Intimacies that chronicled human-animal relationships in central Himalayas showed us, even when animals are ostensibly used or sacrificed, they also live in complex and intimate terms with humans that are complicated by spiritual and religious beliefs held by the local people (2018). Indeed, the farmers’ protests have also been marked by a high presence of markers from their day-to-day life such as tents for sleeping and even make-shift gyms. This is because the farmers were determined to not be discouraged by lack of amenities as they were aware that they would need to be prepared for the long haul with the government negotiations. Therefore, it is not surprising that they would get their cattle also as the degree of familiarity that they have with the animal also symbolises their identity as a farmer which is a joint identity of human and nonhuman.
How are the cows and bulls stakeholders in this process? Does their agency derive from this human-non-human apparatus and the resistance-as-power that they hold or does the cow synergise agency as a stakeholder in its bodily participation? The cow certainly was not present in the marches led by people in Bangalore with the support of farmers and Dalit groups in protest of the anti-slaughter cow bill that was passed in Karnataka assembly because that would have been cruel and inhuman but also meaningless. Especially, when we consider animals in India’s postcolonial context, where they are victims and resource simultaneously, it is hard not to consider them through humanism’s vocabulary such as through autonomy, agency, agency, intention and rationality.
To look for alternatives however, what means did the presence of the cow infuse the marches with? What difference does the presence of the cow make to the nature of the protest and the form of the struggle? As Ian Wedde points out in his social history of dog walking, even if the dog is on a leash to be led by the human, the human is also led by the dog as the dog cooperates with the human while on a walk (2007). In the same way, a humanist perspective can see the ‘cattle’ being marched as mere props in the farmer’s struggle, whereas a posthumanist perspective may not render a collective identity that is based on common livelihood and a shared history improbable.
However, such a neat reading without any loose ends is not possible. Many of the farmers are sugarcane cultivators from uppercase Hindu communities so it is not like the posthuman reading of this situation would be to equate them with the subaltern. Moreover, as images from the protests show, the women are prominently missing from the protests though as sociologists have shown us, in their incessant participation in formal and informal ways, they contribute to their farm and farmland as much or more as their male counterpart. They are at the same time also subaltern in the sense that they are farmers protesting a powerful state in unusual, democratic, non-violent ways. Here Cary Wolfe’s articulation of ‘trans-species empathy’ works in the farmer-cow vulnerability against the state though their mode of collective being is that of protest. In protesting the corporatisation of agriculture, they along with the cows are demanding a return to a completely different scale of agriculture and ways of living.
These messy histories indicate how the human-nonhuman relations in India at this specific moment, in this specific context, are always already fractured and ridden with multiple meanings. As Juanita Sundberg cautions us of the tendency to reduce radical alterity to sameness and offers, she offers the strategy of the ‘pluriverse’ as a way to keep together the different strands of the “multiple, distinct ontologies or worlds, which ‘bring themselves into being and sustain themselves even as they interact, interfere, and mingle with each other’ under asymmetrical circumstances” (52). In accepting the posthumanist credo of an ontological sameness between the human and nonhuman through our common suffering, vulnerability and passivity in the face of our shared ‘flesh and finitude’, what do we define that against in the Indian context? Taking into account our history of colonisation, we still need to account for a definition against not a ‘Eurocentric, white male’ but perhaps a being not fully human (but not subhuman) who is mediated by socio-cultural histories of caste, livelihood and capital. Further, as Donna Haraway and other theorists of the anthropocene have shown, our lives are irrevocably also circumscribed by the Capitalocene and in the concomitant vulnerability that is shared between species as a whole, what does posthumanism mean in a Neo-liberal schema (2015)? It is certainly plural, but I suggest that it is also not just human.
Works Cited
Govindrajan, Radhika. Animal intimacies: interspecies relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. University of Chicago press, 2018.
Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin.” Environmental humanities 6.1 (2015): 159-165.
Sundberg, Juanita. “Decolonizing posthumanist geographies.” Cultural geographies 21.1 (2014): 33-47.
Wedde, Ian. “Walking The Dog.” Knowing Animals. Brill, 2007. 266-288.
Wolfe, Cary. What is posthumanism?. Vol. 8. U of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Animal rites. University of chicago Press, 2008.