Animals are quite often finding themselves in the courts of law. Specifically, bovines involved in Kambala (Karnataka), Bailgada Sharyat (Maharastra), Jallikattu (Tamil Nadu) and Bhohgali Bihu (Assam) are contemporary subjects of legal wrangling in India’s Supreme Court. Indian animal welfare laws, in past, largely dealt with prevention of cruelty to animals in their working environments. But in recent decades the law courts are dealing mostly with the animals in public performances, specifically related to harvest festivals in rural India. Whether it is racing or taming, jousting or fighting, the performance of the animal performer becomes a new face of animal welfare. Invariably and inevitably, the fundamental issue at stake in these cases are negotiations in the borderlines of animal pain and welfare. Of these legal cases dealing with animal welfare, the iconic one is about the sport named Jallikattu, which involves bulls, played in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. On 14 May 2014, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment on this case which banned the sport of Jallikattu on the grounds that it is an act of cruelty to bulls. The mass protest in favour of this sport in 2017 made the Indian government to amend the law pertaining to the case towards convincing the Supreme Court in revoking the ban on this sport. As the matter pertains to the question of fundamental right to life and cultural freedom, Supreme Court of India has transferred this case to constitutional bench. As of now the case is still pending before the constitutional bench. Having said that, it is certain that the decision of the constitutional bench of the highest court of India would have a serious repercussion to the lives of animals, in general, and livestock in particular, and the vast rural population living in close contact with them.
While the notion of divergence between legal and social ways of understanding the animals are often highlighted, the operating dynamics of the law and the social in approaching animal pain and thus the way in which legality / illegality and social / anti-social are getting materially formulated is hardly studied. Instead of taking for granted the divergence between legal and social ways of making meaning of the animal pain, this presentation intends to explore the operating dynamics of the law and social in enacting the animal pain in the court of law and the sporting arena, and thus speculate the possibilities of approaching more-than-human pain. In pursuance of this aim, I invoke the 14, May 2014, supreme court judgement which banned the sport of Jallikattu and read the judgement as closely as possible towards understanding the juridical phenomenon of narrating the pain of bulls. In parallel, I describe the social ways of engaging with bulls practiced by Jallikattu’s sporting connoisseurs, from my personal and ethnographic experiences. Basically this presentation is about the performative dynamics of how legal and social subject-hood of the bull in this sport is getting performed, in the context of pain.
According to the Supreme Court judgment, “bulls are basically Draught and Pack Animals [….] Bullocks have a large abdomen and thorax and the entire body has a resemblance to a barrel shape, which limits ability to run. Bulls have also limitations on flexing joins and the rigid heavily built body and limited flexion of joints do not favour running faster [….] Bulls, it may be noted, are cloven footed (two digits) animals and two digits in each leg can comfortably bear weight only when they are walking, not running. Horse, on the other hand, is a solid hoofed plant-eating quadruped with a flowing mane and tail, domesticated for riding and as a draught animal. Horse power, we call it as an imperial unit of power, equal to 550 foot-pounds per second. Horse’s anatomy enables it to make use of speed and can be usefully used for horse racing etc., unlike Bulls. Bulls, therefore, in our view, [are] anatomically not designed for that, but are forced to perform, inflicting pain and suffering, in total violation of PCA [Prevention of cruelty to Animals] Act”.
Animal welfare rules in PCA Act extensively codify the size of the cages for different animals, feeding intervals, methods in capturing animals, list of tools which a farrier can posses, among many, with scientific precision. For example, Draught and Pack Animal Rules prescribe a framework on the following lines: a bullock weighing more than 350Kgs must pull a weight of less than 900 kgs in a two wheeled vehicle without any pneumatic tyres, for less than five hours only, in the temperatures not exceeding 37 degree Celsius. Any working condition which is more than this prescribed criteria, in terms of weight, time period and temperature, is understood as inflicting pain on the bull. The axis of this mode of approaching pain is a bio mechanical calibration of animal’s capacity, and based on which pain and welfare are measured and demarcated. This framework disregards the multifarious affects and intends towards a norm / deviant structure within which the meaning of pain is deciphered.
Pain is a quintessential renaissance thought on which the discourse of secular body was negotiated. Descartes ‘Treatise on Man’ figuratively portrayed a human body, inside which a long lobe of fibre runs from the skin to the brain. This model pioneered a fundamental claim that pain is caused by an external stimulus on the skin of our body transferred to the brain by the lobe. Antithetical to the religious notion of pain and suffering as an effect of sin committed by the person, this model claimed that body is a finite and autonomous entity connected to its milieu; thus pain became a sensory phenomenon, rather than a cosmic expression of deviation from religious virtues prescribed by the god. The legal apparatus, in the context of elevating the welfare of animals to the rights of animal subjects, brings in the same bio-mechanical logic of cartesian pain, and thus the legal question on animal welfare becomes a constitutional issue of bringing animals in the scope of fundamental right to life and natural freedom.
In this context, I would like to speculate on the Jallikattu sporting connoisseurs way of approaching the pain of the bull. I have noticed, during my field work, that some of the Jallikattu bull’s ears are cut in its periphery for enhancing their peripheral vision in the sport. This act of ear cutting is one of the main reasons in banning the sport, as Supreme Court affirmed that is it an act inflicting pain on bulls. On questioned about the cruelty element in this act, sporting connoisseurs often strike a parallel between this act and head tonsuring and ear / nose piercing of children. They do not deny the existence of pain but argue that it is through this pain that there is an exchange of commitment between the two participants of the act. It should be emphasised that while piercing the ear of a child, the child is made to sit on his or her maternal uncle’s lap. The position of the uncle signifies a life-long commitment and bonding to the child. Similarly no Jallikattu bull groomer would allow anyone to cut the bull’s ears in an arbitrary way. This needs to be done at a specific age by a specialist who is trained in bull grooming or by a country side veterinary doctor who has knowledge of the bull’s movement. In this process, the bull’s groomer holds the bull’s head and supports it in the moment of pain. This also applies to the act of piercing the nose rope in the bull’s nostrils. A particular human who is associated in these moments of pain, is the one bull identifies or it is the one identifiable by the bovine who takes part in the moments of pain. The performative quotient of pain bestows a radical agency in the bull to manoeuvre the pain to form new relationships, which can include or exclude some of the bull’s closest human relative. The pain, in this context, is more a vehicle of socialising, constitutive act of forming relationalities, which opens new landscape of possibilities to the participants.
Existing literature on Bhakti and folk performances, argue that pain is an act of transcending from ‘polluted’ to become ‘sacred’, medium of bonding and embodied memory, a clock in body which regiments seasonal pilgrimage or worship. Further more, the performance of trance is also speculated as embodiment of pain and performance of grace. Similarly the sporting connoisseurs claim that pain of the bull as well as the pain of the players is a medium of transcending the givenness of beings and arriving at the moment of grace. The players of this sport often express that their would be a pain, along the shoulders and even the whole body, as like a current shock, when they embrace the hump of bull in this sport. More than winning the sport, it is the pain and its grace which drives the human players to participate in this sport. The abstraction of bull’s and human’s pain in the key moments of play is a grace for sporting connoisseurs.
Grace is a state of elegance and spectacular body in a zone beyond script and skill; dancer’s movement or a singer’s voice, which can not be reduced to a learned skill or a systemic logic, but certainly a feat of transcending the available body to a virtual body of infinite possibilities, is generally considered as a moment of grace. Theologically, grace is not just pain endured but also pain mastered, so instead of pain leading to a form of suffering, emanates as grace. The moment when pain is completely endured and surpassed, the body becomes graceful. Sporting bulls are masters of their pain, not just enduring it. So any behaviour of expression of pain / pleasure, virility / castration, aggression / docile, is a disgrace, and thus play bull can not exist as set of behavioural norm / deviant; rather they are faced as an affective mass of behaviours.
The interaction between grace and pain is significant in exploring the animal pain, beyond the Cartesian logic. Having said that, it needs to be questioned, if pain is an entity of value, according to the sporting connoisseurs, when does a pain become suffering and thus an act of cruelty? Even though connoisseurs do not articulate the idea of ‘cruelty’ as such, the notion of ‘unskilled’ is at par with cruelty in local parlance. While an act can be painful to the animal, it might enhance the relationship of commitment, leading to transcending pain towards an immanent grace, suffering is an act which is an end in itself. Suffering pushes us into our mundane bodies thwarting the possibilities of virtuous play. A person who knows the difference between pain and suffering possesses a skill in dealing with the subject matter, in this case bulls. The opposite of ‘skilled person’, in this context, is not merely an ‘unskilled person’, but a person who does not know how to respect the bull, a person who is a disgrace for the sport, and thus that person becomes a perpetrator of cruelty. Suffering, is not a deviation from calibrated norm of bull’s capacity, rather it is an act of disrespecting the potential grace of the bull. This sport is a skilful manifestation of transcending pain and immanence of grace, by both the human and the bull.
While it is feasible to codify an animal welfare law based on Cartesian logic of pain and to face the animals as legal rights holding subjects, the scope of legally and ethically approaching the notion of endurance of pain and transcending to the moment of grace is certainly a challenge. The ethics of pain and aesthetics of law need to face each other in performing the subject hood of animals and their right to life and freedom. Are we going to calibrate or transcend the pain is a matter of being human and becoming animal.
Reference
Animal Welfare Board of India vs. A. Nagaraja & Ors. Case. New Delhi: Supreme Court of India. Accessed from supremecourtofindia.nic.in/outtoday/sc1168607.pdf
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1967. Accessed from awbi.org/awbi-pdf/ Act%20&%20Rules%20-%20English.pdf
Sethi, Aarti (2019) Mahadev’s Gift: Men, Bullocks and the Community of Cultivation in Central India, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, No.6, pp. 1173-1191
Chhabra, Heeral (2019) Animal Labourers and the Law in Colonial India, South Asia Research Vol. 39, No.2, pp.166–183
Asad, Talal (2003) Formulations of the Secular – Christianity Islam, Modernity, California: Stanford University Press.
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