Theme issue introduction: The species turn in Indian identity politics

Abstract

Animals are instrumentalised as symbols, objects, and commodities in the construction of diverse subaltern and elite human identities and identity politics in India, through their imposed identification with various human groups, with enduring implications for animal and human (in)justice and wellbeing. Species, as itself as an axis of social difference, and therefore of identity, however, has hitherto rarely been considered as a core facet of identity politics in Indian political life, despite its central role in shaping the inclusions and exclusions that characterise society. This Theme Issue aims to open the space for animal identities to become political, allowing for a critical multispecies politics of identity. To this end, it asks: In what ways can animals be centred as a core part of democratic political life? What are the consequences of doing so? In other words, what opportunities or concerns emerge with the institutionalization of species difference as an identity category? And last, in what ways does a multispecies approach to identity politics impact the analysis of (in)justice in its varied forms in contemporary India and beyond?

Highlights

1. Animals are exploited in Indian political and social life to form and entrench a spectrum of humanist hierarchies and marginalisations.

2. Species identity, specifically that pertaining to the human-nonhuman animal binary, have rarely been a focus of political advocacy, or multispecies scholarship.

3. This Theme Issue focusses on species as a core differentiator of identity to explore the implications for multispecies (in)justices.

4. It proposes a critical multispecies politics of identity where species difference and sameness allow multispecies flourishing, justice and liberatory praxis.

Introduction

In this Theme Issue (TI), we gather a range of analyses that examine the ways in which nonhuman animals in India are entangled in social formations (farming, organised religion, wildlife conservation, sex) that intersect with politicised aspects of human identity (caste, religion, sexuality, class, rurality, gender). There is a vast critical scholarship on how animals are used to perpetuate and reinforce identity-based social hierarchies and marginalisation in India and beyond. This TI widens such scholarship by centering species difference as a core aspect of identity to explore the material implications of such political (and other types of) instrumentalisation for animals themselves. While species identity encompasses earthly beings other than animals, in this TI, we concentrate on understanding how species-based politics unfolds at the interface between Homo Sapiens and other animal species. The overarching goal is to ask whether this multispecies expansion of critical analysis can sharpen and deepen understandings of how identity-based injustices unfold.

The TI is in some ways motivated by a sense of frustration with the character of scholarship on these matters. There has been no scarcity of historical and current work, predominantly articulated by both Indian and western elites, that dissects the political valorisation of some animals over some human communities in India, and that condemns the attendant social injustices. J.N. Jha's (2002) Myth of the Holy Cow uses archaeological evidence to dispute cow protectors’ claims that Hinduism is embedded in a vegetarian ethos; indeed, as Jha reveals, even ‘upper caste’ Brahmins ritually sacrificed cows and consumed beef. In Buffalo Nationalism, Dalit political activist Kancha Iliah (2004) notes how the political attention to cows served to invisibilise buffaloes, associated with the Dalits thus erasing Dalit voices from the construction and even the ‘voice-consciousness’ of the Indian nation (cf. Spivak 1988: 27).

In contrast, frustrated with the overemphasis in his view on the cultural dimensions of India's cow-oriented identity politics, Harris (1966: 261) notes that ‘the irrational, non-economic, and exotic aspects of the Indian cattle complex are greatly overemphasized at the expense of rational, economic, and mundane interpretations’. Harris urges instead that Hindu principles and rituals be reimagined and applied towards ‘the management of Indian cattle’ for dairy production, and economic development of the nation. The father of Indian dairy development, Verghese Kurien similarly expresses his frustrations with the Hindu religious demand for a national ban on cow slaughter in the mid-1960s. He writes (Kurien 2005: 183), ‘It was important for us in the dairy business to keep weeding out the unhealthy cows so that available resources could be utilised for healthy and productive cows.’

In contemporary scholarship, there continues to be an overwhelming focus on matters relating to cows and/or vegetarianism, and the ways in which they intersect with caste and religion-based oppression (see Staples 2020), or impact gross national earnings or the country's poverty alleviation agenda (Schloten 2010). Cows, revered as sacred as by Hindus, represent the feminised body politic of the aspirational Hindu state itself (Gupta 2001). Many states in India have instituted varied bans on cow slaughter, and beef production and consumption, activities that have been made associated with Muslim and Dalit communities. These populist narratives celebrate the vegetarian ethos of ‘upper-caste’ Hindu communities as humane, obscuring that production of dairy products, central to ritual Hinduism, also involves bovine slaughter.

This body of work on cow politics, however, appears to have reached a point of theoretical and empirical stagnation, even while the actual atrocities continue. Furthermore, this work, much like public debate around these matters, is often characterised by two problematic, contradictory features (Adcock and Govindrajan 2019). On the one hand, there is implicit, or perhaps unwitting, attribution of subjectivity and agency to the animals who are instrumentalised (by some humans) in identity-based conflict and violence. On the other hand, there is the simultaneous neglect or even negation of the experiences of the animals who are caught up or used in these conflicts. As a result, these works stop short of fully politicising the animals, i.e., by taking their experiences, and their emotions as also fully relevant to critical politics. In other words, species identity matters, but largely only in so far as it tells us something about the human condition, and so long as human privilege and supremacy remain unshaken.

By contrast, politicising animals would show that the centrality of cows to caste and religious violence in India is linked to the idea that farmed cows need to be protected (from slaughter) by some people (caste Hindus) from other people (marginalised caste and religious communities) by enacting violence against the latter. Yet, cows are simultaneously seen as ‘things’ that don’t have the capacity to experience and be materially impacted by their place in farming and these conflicts, and that therefore ought to be subjects of (in)justice. It is thus that cow protectionists are able to see cows as needing protection only from slaughter and not from the far worse violences enacted for dairy production, which is central to the symbolism of cows in Hinduism (Narayanan 2023).

Equally, this is how eating cows in ‘beef festivals’ becomes an act of defiance and political progressiveness, instead of an act that involves one kind of violence (against nonhuman animals) to protest a different violence (against caste-oppressed groups). This doublethink can be seen in a recent campaign in which people wore cow masks to protest sexual violence against women in India, as shown by Dave and Gupta in this TI. The premise of this campaign is that cows, being ‘holy’ in the Hindu religion, are safer than women in India. This narrative is made possible only by the deliberate or negligent dismissal of the realities of dairy production which is founded on regular sexualised, bodily violences perpetrated on cows and their male counterparts (Gillespie 2014, Narayanan 2018a, 2023). This produces a campaign that perhaps unwittingly but most perversely argues that women ought to be treated like those nonhuman animals (cows) that are among the most exploited and abused in India.

These contradictions are not unique to scholarship on identity-based politics and violence. Social science scholarship in, on, and from India has till very recently been marked by similar problems. An otherwise vibrant field with close connections to social movements and progressive politics has remained very circumspect when it comes to nonhuman animals and nonhuman life more broadly (Srinivasan 2010). Nonhuman animals have been positioned as cultural symbols and as resources to be equitably managed but have very rarely been addressed as beings with their own interests and experiences. Some exceptions include Narayanan's (2023, 2021a) centering of buffaloes and cows as political subjects in India's cow protectionism, or probing the implications for pigs weaponised to craft polarised ideas of Dravida and Tamil nationalisms in Tamil Nadu (also, see Srinivasan 2013, 2014, 2019; Turnbull & Barua 2022; Barua & Sinha 2019; Parikh & Miller 2019; Deckha 2020.) Similarly, in her work on animal activist politics in India, Naisargi Dave's (2014) argues that witnessing animal suffering, against the landscape of Hindu nationalism, divisive cultural politics, and infrastructural development, serves to meld humanity and animality together but also reinforces human exceptionalism in authorising the human to ‘speak for’ the animal. Seeking a way of undoing human supremacy, Dave asks (2014: 448), ‘can we become animal, become other, in a way that is disruptive rather than productive of anthropocentric humanism?’

In the main, however, the overarching tendency has been to delegitimise any wider/public concern for non-human animals, including wildlife, as ‘western, elitist, casteist, non-secular, emotional, moralistic’ (Srinivasan 2010, 33). Ambivalence around human violence to animals through sacrifice, slaughter and entertainment – and reluctance to characterise and challenge such acts as cruel or violent – predominates much South Asian animal studies work on politics, culture and socialities (cf Asif and Taneja 2015). Animals themselves thus, have rarely featured as subjects, or actors, or an identity group in themselves, in Indian political discourses. In Mother Cow, Mother India, Narayanan (2023) quotes Pradeep an animal activist, who tells her about the difficulty in extricating the cow and highlighting her lived realities in cow protection politics. Pradeep tells her, ‘The cow has become so political that the animal has been lost. The animal is lost even though it is in full focus.’

What does it mean then, for the animals and indeed, humans, to attempt to bring animals into ‘full focus’ in Indian politics, amid and against a spectrum of competing political representational claims and narratives, as Pradeep suggests? What might happen, when species or animality is understood as the basis of not only human oppression, but also animal oppression? How do animals fare when objectified as nation-building symbols, or when they are displaced, weaponised or militarized, or commodified to sustain various forms of sovereignties? How do existing or dominant narratives around identity politics in India, define or limit the ways in which animals are seen, and what implications therein for the wellbeing of even those animals who are celebrated as national capital? What hitherto partial understanding of Indian politics would the fuller illuminating of Indian politics via animals unveil?

The palpable presence of animals in contemporary Indian political life is occurring against a growing conservatism in global and Indian politics that intersects with both religion and ecology. At times of ‘rapid change and uncertain futures’, when people are most likely to feel an acute sense of existential crisis, nationalism and religion emerge, writes Kinnvall (2004: 741), as ‘“identity-signifiers” that are more likely than other identity constructions to provide answers to those in need’. Animals are at the heart of India's ecological crisis, and their instrumentalisation scaffold specific frameworks and practices of nation-building to compose a visceral facet of Indian politics. Together, these two trends point to a critical gap in braiding Indian identity politics, with animal political theory.

In bringing together theoretical and empirical orientations around animals and identity politics, several critical questions, respectively with regards to nonhuman and human beings arise. In the first instance, what are the stakes in in initiating a ‘parochial shift away from human uniqueness’ (Calarco 2015: 12) in identity politics, and frontstaging species identity in politics – and what are the risks, for animals and humans? How can we theorize the relationship between animals’ experiences of the human-animal hierarchy, and the symbolic identities imposed on them in human identity politics? What can we learn about how varied social structures work to constrain, or enable animal agency? How can we explain human-animal differences and similarities meaningfully and materially, rather than ideologically? Can an animal-oriented politics offer a pathway out of the entrenched traditions and histories of oppressive human identification with other species?

This TI, thus, advances scholarly conversations on the place of animals in identity politics in India to propose a critical multispecies politics of identity, wherein the subjectivities of animals, or their capacity to ‘stake claims and be recognized’, is recognised as political (Krause and Schramm 2011: 1). We do this by directing empirical attention to axes of identity other than caste and religion, and to animals other than cows. Our aims are two-fold: a) to develop a clearer understanding of the ways in which animals themselves are affected and impacted by varied social formations and associated politics; b) to investigate how taking the subjectivities and experiences of animals seriously can generate fresh perspectives on long-standing justice concerns, and potentially better ways of addressing them. Our task then, is to probe and unravel how the politics of species identity, identification and de-identification animate political life, in India and elsewhere.

Species identity, and identification as species

The politics, practice and advocacy for an identity politics, even within the humanist landscape, is far from straightforward. Identity is purposively invoked political capital for activists, social justice movements, and scholars, as identities might reveal ‘knowledge especially relevant for social change’, and are a particularly critical way through which marginalized or oppressed people can mobilise (Alcoff and Mohanty 2006: 2). To this end, identity politics is ‘a claim that identities are politically relevant, an irrefutable fact,’ and it is around identities that ‘political structures are played out, mobilized, reinforced, and sometimes challenged’ (Alcoff and Mohanty 2006: 7). Identity helps to politicise myriad areas of marginalised life, such as everyday relations between diverse religious communities (Narayanan 2016), gender (Butcher 2022), sexuality (Krishnan 2017, Dave 2012), and disability (Darling 2013), among others. To this end then, Kauffman (1990: 67) argues that identity's ‘elaboration, expression, or affirmation—is and should be a fundamental focus of political work’.

Elite representations, whether colonial or native Indian elite, have dominated the articulation or representation of the Indian nation, eliding in the process, the identity of subaltern others who constitute ‘the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’ (Spivak 1988: 26). In her famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak (1988: 25) urges us therefore ‘to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat’. At the margins – and indeed, one can say at the centre – of Indian nationalist politics, lie a spectrum of animal others, including the bovine, marked also by the total Indian population, and those we describe as human. The articulation of the cow as a contested representational body politic itself of the Indian state is framed by competing discourses between elite colonial and neo-colonial representations that are invested in her economic and material potential, and elite Indian, particularly Hindu religious-nationalist narratives that instrumentalise her religious and cultural significance. In both cases, anthropocentric violence, serves in effect, to erase cows – and indeed, buffalo, camel, goats, and a wide spectrum of wild and domesticated species.

Animals compose a central facet of humanist identity politics, albeit, through their imposed identification with various human groups, as commodities, objects and cultural and political symbols associated with those communities. Recognising the central symbolism of animals in shaping human identity, recent anthropological and geographical works have deployed more openminded approaches that do not a priori dismiss nonhuman animals (Govindarajan 2018, Parikh and Miller 2019). There has nonetheless remained a hesitation to foreground, or even seriously consider, questions of multispecies justice, when it comes to matters of identity-based politics.

For instance, in her analysis of bull-racing in agricultural festivals in Maharashtra, Aarti Sethi (2019) analyses the Supreme Court ban of such events, based on its view that animals are legal persons, and bear rights based on their capacity to suffer emotional and physical pain. Sethi (2019: 1173) questions the validity of the ban on the grounds that the racing ritual itself, however, views ‘animals not as rights-bearing species’. While the real violence that the bulls experience is precisely what makes bull racing a spectator entertainment, Sethi (ibid) goes on to abstract these harms as ‘symbolic’ as she writes, ‘The rite does not disavow violence, rather it embeds its symbolisation within familial and productive relations between people and bullocks’. In a similar vein, Shaheed Tayob (2019) rightly critiques the narratives of disgust that vulnerable Muslim butchers face from Hindu nationalists, thereby entrenching their marginalisation. In arguing however that ‘for Muslims in Mumbai, the cruelty of slaughter is not inherent’, Tayob (2019: 1192) disregards the real cruelties, terror and suffering that animals endure in every scale of slaughter, regardless of site and perpetrator (Narayanan 2023, Pachirat 2012).

Another example lies in Taneja's (2015) analysis of the contemporary sacralisaton of animals, such as vultures in Muslim and Hindu ritual practice in North India, occurring at a time of rapid disappearance of the birds themselves (because of their feeding on bovine bodies who had been administered diclofenac as pain relief, but which causes kidney failure in birds). Taneja concludes that such sacralisation nonetheless harkens back to times when humans and animals lived in more deeply connected ways. Critical questions of whether it necessarily benefits animals to live in such close – and enforced – proximity to humans given their always and already inferior status as ritual commodities and property, remain unaddressed. The implicit notion is that sacralisation of an animal is a counter to the anthropocentrism defining human-animal relations (Taneja 2015) though in fact, such sanctification – even as the act claims to elevate the animal above the human – is not necessarily innocent. Sacralisation is a starkly anthropocentric concept and praxis and may be regarded as a form of non-consensual objectification, with an alarming capacity for profuse violence to the sacralised/objectified animal being (particularly if the animal is also farmed animal/commodity) (Narayanan 2018b). Staples’s (2020) rich ethnography of the rapidly shifting terrain of the meat-eating in contemporary India, and what it means to be a meat eater and a vegetarian in fraught pluralistic landscapes, acknowledges the violence that animals are put through as consumable commodities (indeed, Staples explains that he turned vegan as a personal outcome of his research). He does not however, centralise and more deeply pursue the embodied animal experience of suffering, fear and trauma as an essential element of anti-anthropocentric and anti-racist politics.

This hesitation in unreservedly and fully seeing the animal – even taking into account the obvious contestations around ever adequately representing the subaltern – can be perhaps explained by anxieties about being seen as elitist or right-wing therefore further legitimising existing caste and religious hierarchies, or about appearing to prioritise nonhuman animals over people. Such concerns are not new or specific to the Indian context. Kymlicka and Donaldson (2014) examine how the Left in many parts of the world has for long been suspicious of animal advocacy for similar reasons and has consciously maintained an attitude of indifference to animal injustices. One set of concerns pertain to the worry that animal advocacy will displace time and resources from social injustices. A related worry is that broadening the purview of justice to include animals amounts to trivialising injustices experienced by people. There is also the worry that animal advocacy can be culturally imperialist, i.e., focused on practices linked to marginalised or minority communities, thereby serving to reinforce their exclusion and stigmatisation by portraying them as less ‘civilised’ (Elder et al. 1998).

As Kymlicka and Donaldson (2014) show, these are concerns that have been articulated in the context of social/intra-human identity-based issues as well – gender and race related advocacy for long faced opposition from class-based struggles on these grounds, even while women's and LGBTQ  +  rights have been instrumentalised to perpetuate the exclusion of religious minorities. There is, however, now the recognition that justice is not a zero-sum game: addressing one set of injustices (whether human or nonhuman) does not entail that other (in)justices need to be dismissed. Equally, the underlying discursive structures (attitudes, norms, ways of thinking) that enable discrimination, bias, marginalisation, and exploitation are similar, regardless of whether the subjects of injustice are human or nonhuman.

These connections between human and nonhuman oppressions blur, however, when animals are rendered a means of identification for human groups. Identification, in this case, may be understood as the deployment of real and perceived physiological, cognitive as well as aesthetic/charismatic and despised/reviled characteristics of another species to project a perceived identity of the species – celebrated or otherwise – onto the concerned human group. Such identity politics rests on the identification of one with another group, rather than merely/only deploying the group's stated identity in its own standing to advance its politics. In the multispecies political arena, such identification anthropormophises and elides species identities, and more specifically, disrupts material and emotional means of species identification with their own. Identification is usually (Sánchez 2006) – and in the case of other animals, always – imposed, such as framing the cow as a Hindu goddess associated with Brahmins, for instance, or the pig or the dog as Pariahs (Doniger 2009), thus also disidentifying the cow with Muslims or Dalits, or the pig with Brahmins. As Sánchez (2006: 40) writes, ‘It is the socio-spatial and structural positioning of collectivities of social actors that gives rise to discourses of identification’, and implicitly thereon ‘a non-identification, or even a concretized disidentification with one or more social groups and social spaces’. Identification as specific racial or gendered – or indeed, species identities, for instance, may be highly significant at various points in history (Sánchez 2006), such as the visceral resurgence of the sacrality of the cow as a political tactic to assert Hindutva in India. In the case of animals, the double entrenchment of their identification as animals, as well as commodities, or celebrated or reviled symbols, might be the longest enduring and dominant manifestation of identification politics.

The identification politics of humans with animals is correspondingly embodied as/via what may be understood as an imposition of de-identification of animals from their individual selves and experiences. For instance, a cow is not the individual cow, but a representative of the social category of ‘cows’ (usually ‘desi’ cows) in dominant iterations of identity politics. Akin to the institutionalised harms of dehumanisation that scaffolds politics of caste identities, structures and institutions of caste can be understood to be also upheld by different forms of deanimalisation, ‘a fundamental act of species elision that is violent to other animals’ (Narayanan 2023: 83). Deanimalisation can take the form of debovinisation for instance, in the designation of cows as sacred, or buffaloes as contemptible (Narayanan 2023, 2018b). ‘Debovinization can be understood as a stripping, or a de-recognition of inherent bovine vulnerabilities, which denies cows and buffaloes their species truth’ (Narayanan 2023: 84). So too de-porcinisation or the framing of pigs as despicable as an exclusionary tactic marginalises the Dalit community associated with pigs in the Hindu state, while simultaneously erasing and deeming irrelevant the essential nature of being a pig and her associated vulnerabilities, needs and experiences (Narayanan 2021a). Caste itself is thus sustained by conjoining human-animal identities; animals too are regarded as being born into caste, and caste is embodied by ‘simultaneously dehumanizing, sub-humanizing, and animalizing humans, and humanizing, sub-humanizing, de-animalizing other animals’ (Narayanan 2023: 83).

Against such thick and intricate enmeshment of species, caste, race, and religion, excavating a focus on the animals as political beings is a complex endeavour. A rigorous, critical politics of species identity requires that human action and response discard the paternalistic approach of merely considering animals that often continues to privilege human superiority (c.f. Sethi 2019, Tayob 2019). Instead, ‘humans need to reformulate political and social relations in interaction with [other animals] in order not to repeat anthropocentrism’ (Meijer 2019: 2). Where anthropocentric forms of human-to-animal identification currently mediates human-animal relations in political life, this Theme Issue calls for anti-anthropocentrism in political thought and praxis, to counter anthropocentric values, knowledge and structures that reinforce human supremacy (Gillespie 2021). Extending then Spivak's (1988: 25) call to ‘rethink Indian colonial historiography from the perspective of the discontinuous chain of peasant insurgencies’ in multispecies frames, we examine what may be considered such more-than-human ‘insurgencies’, understood in various modes such as resistance, resilience, and surrender, among others, in Indian political life.

It becomes, of course, apropos to ask who is the ‘real receiver’ of such insurgencies (Spivak 1988: 28)? As such, an anti-anthropocentric multispecies politics of identity needs to navigate the dangers inherent in (widely) prevalent culturally imperialist politics. Kymlicka and Donaldson (2014), like Elder et al. (1998) before them, offer insights on how to do so. For one, they discuss the importance of identifying and calling out “intentional instrumentalization of animal issues”, distinguishing the same from genuine animal advocacy (Kymlicka and Donaldson 2014, 124). They highlight the necessity for a change in the basis for understanding animal injustices: from a reliance on socio-cultural norms (which are usually majoritarian) about ‘acceptable’ “human practices on animal bodies” to a closer emphasis on the experiences and wellbeing of the animals themselves (Elder et al. 1998, 195). In all, this body of work argues that deep-seated and lasting shifts towards justice is best achieved through a multispecies lens that pays equitable attention to social (human), ecological, and animal justice concerns, along the lines of Kim's (2015) multi-optic approach.

In this Theme Issue then, we consider the taxonomy of species as being illuminated by ethnicity, race, and religion, and nature, theorising the configuration of ‘experience, culture, identity, politics, and power’ (Bernstein 2005: 48) in multispecies terms. For this, the TI probes the various historical and contemporaneous events, institutional structures (global, national, capitalistic, developmental), and highly specific human-to-animal relations that together compose the multitude of human and animal identities in a diversity of sites.

The five papers: Configuring species and caste-religion-sexuality-nature-state in India

The papers that compose this TI tackle the aims and questions discussed above by studying a range of social formations in which the lives of animals intersect with discourses and practices that are linked to varied axes of human identity.

Yamini Narayanan (2021b) advances scholarship on conjugated oppressions by examining how species (in addition to class, caste, gender and tribe) is a key axis along which agrarian capitalism and right-wing nationalism are materialised. Her research in Rajasthan with camels and their pastoralist herders, the Raika, focuses on recent moves by the (Hindutva) state government to commercialise camel dairy farming. This has involved legislative prohibitions on the slaughter and movement of camels outside of the state of Rajasthan, alongside their exploitative commoditisation for dairy, and the coupled sedentarisation of the nomadic Raika. To Narayanan, dairy capitalism, originally in the case of cows, and now with camels, plays a fundamental role in embedding Hindutva in the country by tying it closely with developmental and growth agendas. Pointing to the social and animal injustices that emerge from the confinement, containment and exploitation of the Raika and camels, Narayanan asks what it might mean to reimagine multispecies kinship, as well as Raika and camel flourishing, outside of instrumentalization and extractive relations.

Dave & Gupta's (2021) paper interrogates interspecies sex aka bestiality across the social formations of agriculture, animal welfare/control, sexuality & desire and marital relations. They argue that the identification of interspecies sexual interactions as violent (or not) is contingent not on the nature of the interactions, but on whether dominant social structures deem them to be permissible or not. The interspecies sexual relations that are integral to dairying, for instance, are understood as innocent because they have are aligned with economic and Hindu nationalist agendas, even while the slaughter and beef that are their inevitable correlates are portrayed as violences that justify counter-violence on marginalised social groups, both human and nonhuman. In their words, ‘it is not incidental that Hindu upper-caste mobs commit lynchings of Dalits and Muslims in India over two perceived slights: the eating of (Hindu) cows, and elopement with (Hindu) women. This coincidence that is not one is easily explained: both are violations—neither of cows nor of women—but of the sphere of permissible violence that is at the heart of Hindutva’. To Dave & Gupta, the spheres of permissible and perverse violence are mutually constitutive and that any meaningful contestation of violence requires the dismantling of the supremacies, specifically Hindu nationalism, that underpin both.

Srinivasan's (2021) paper examines the character of contemporary animal agriculture in India, discussing the ways in which conflicts around cows, beef and vegetarianism have impeded critical scrutiny of the growing social, ecological, and animal wellbeing impacts of the sector. She argues that conflation of right-wing agendas with animal justice motivations has led to reluctance to investigate the negative ramifications of animal farming because of the risk that any criticism of the same will automatically be seen or co-opted as driven by sectarian motivations. This has led to the problematic portrayal of animal agriculture in the country as benign, low-footprint, and ecologically safe. Dismantling this image, she shows how the expansion and intensification of the sector has taken novel forms wherein the size of livestock holdings remains small, but with high-tech, and intensifying husbandry practices. She also emphasises that the drivers of animal agriculture in India are not solely linked to nutritional and subsistence needs; rather the sector's expansion is very strongly tied to strongly tied to the potential for monetary gains, at multiple scales, from high-end markets, inputs industries (such as feed, pharmaceuticals, biotechnologies), and non-food co-products. Her analyses show that these transformations generate a range of ecological and animal, but also social, impacts that have remained largely ignored in the Indian context – even though globally, livestock agriculture is recognised as one of the main drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss, and of social displacement. In sum, this paper highlights the consequences and dangers of side-lining multispecies justice concerns and makes a case for a post-anthropocentric approach to critical scrutiny.

Trembley's (2022) ethnographic research in India's ‘rat temple’ does precisely this in its analysis of how species and caste hierarchies intersect with each other to produce and reinforce practices of exclusion and marginalisation. Temple priests belonging to the Charan caste make distinctions between the rats that are seen as reincarnations of members of their caste (kaba) and rats in general, and act on them to prevent the kaba from leaving the temple, and from other rats from entering it. These distinctions and linked practices are mirrored in their engagement with local community members who are Dalits. Trembley's analysis challenges the popular portrayal of the temple as a space that exemplifies Hindu environmental consciousness and caste reform. By developing the concept of jatikaran that captures the enmeshment of hierarchical classifications that reach across human and nonhuman bodies, Trembley's paper makes a strong case for close critical scrutiny of any and all seemingly progressive practices to examine the extent to which they are really inclusive.

Lobo, Alam and Bandhopadhyay's work (2022) in the Sunderbans on how people and Royal Bengal tigers cohabit highlights a different aspect of how human and nonhuman identities intersect with justice implications. Their aim is to foreground the voices and positions of subaltern people and of subaltern academics. Through research with impoverished, racialised low-caste Hindus (Dalits/Scheduled Castes), Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) and Muslim forest-dwellers in India and Bangladesh, they argue that tigers in the region generate a complex of emotions among people: fear, greed, humility, compassion, respect and trust, even if they are rarely encountered directly. They juxtapose this ambivalence that with more unidimensional scientific narratives about tigers as being endangered or vulnerable or dangerous. Through these discussions, this paper emphasises the importance of situated accounts of multispecies justice that are rooted in the lived experiences and feelings of people who cohabit landscapes with wildlife.

These five papers together, at the most basic level, establish that it is quite possible to take animal (and ecological) vulnerabilities and experiences seriously without compromising commitment to social justice. Narayanan's analysis, for instance, does not shy away from being attentive to the vulnerabilities of camels in pastoralist and commercial dairying systems, even while describing how the lives of pastoralists themselves are affected by the enmeshment of religious and developmental nationalism. These papers also demonstrate the importance of making clear distinctions between narratives that instrumentalise animals or treat them as mere symbols, and those that are genuinely concerned with animal wellbeing. For instance, Trembley's analysis shows how the religious valorisation of rats as kaba in the temple, far from being rooted in concern for rats, has negative impacts on these animals, both through the trapping and confinement of the kaba within the temple premises, and through the exclusion of other rats as unclean. Similarly, Dave and Gupta, in discussing how the sexual exploitation of animals is politicised as problematic only when it falls outside the bounds of what is considered acceptable (e.g., dairying and other modes of farming), offer a clear example of how to disentangle concern for animal experiences and vulnerabilities from social norms about ‘animal practices’. Srinivasan's paper likewise illustrates the dangers of the purely symbolic and instrumentalised valuing of animals by arguing that cultural vegetarianism and cow protection deflect attention from transformations in farming systems that are harmful to people, ecologies and animals.

These different investigations make headway into the difficult and complex task of identifying and unpacking how social identity-based injustices – whether caste, class, religion, sexuality or species based – intersect and reinforce one another. In the rat temple, the logics of purity and pollution that underlie historical and current caste oppression are mirrored in how temple priests classify, confine, exclude and manage the bodies and lives of rats. Growth and developmental agendas dovetail with cultural and religious nationalism to transform, adversely, the lives of farmers, pastoralists and animals. Patriarchal and religious norms work together to determine in what contexts sexual intimacy/violence is permissible or not, rendering ineffectual and irrelevant consent and desire on the part of individual humans and animals.

These papers demonstrate how unpacking distinctions between identity-based symbolic/cultural valuation and instrumentalization on the one hand, and material human/animal interests and experiences on the other, and examining the cross-species enmeshment of exploitative discourses and practices, enables a clear-eyed view of what, on the surface, might be presented as reform and progressive social change. Religion-based animal protection (as embodied in the rat temple) does not have positive outcomes for either animals or people; rationalities linked to enhancing food security and livelihoods that legitimise the expansion and intensification of animal agriculture are not borne out in practice – indeed, such expansion can compromise access to food and produce indebtedness; Hindutva protection of women, cows and camels is closely tied to their reproductive exploitation, and to the oppression of queer communities; developmental narratives about social progress displace Raika cultures and livelihoods.

These papers collectively make a strong case for considering, and equitably so, both human and nonhuman vulnerabilities while analysing the differential implications and impacts of social formations and processes, whether identity-based politics or commodification. They show that much remains invisible through the selective valorisation of solely human interests and concerns, and the concomitant negation of the life-experiences of other animals. To the contrary, a multispecies approach to identity politics that fosters sensitivity and openness to justice concerns beyond the human can provide better understandings of the range and depth of social impacts too.

Conclusions

In this Theme Issue, we have sought to examine whether and how scholarship on identity politics in India, especially that which is based on the instrumentalization of animals, can be expanded by recognising species-difference as a key axis of social difference and identity. We have argued that alongside identities such as gender, caste, class, and religion, species identity as instantiated by the divide between Homo Sapiens and other animals, is a core dimension along which politics unfolds, and injustices perpetuate. Taking species identity seriously entails analytical accountability to the experiences and vulnerabilities of nonhuman organisms, in the case of this TI, nonhuman animals, that are caught up in varied social formations. Such accountability includes attention to the dangers of claims of being able to adequately represent, or even fully understand, the experiences of animal subalterns (Spivak 1988). It also does not have to come at the cost of attention to social (in)justice; indeed, our analyses reveal how a multispecies orientation to identity-based politics and (in)justice can deepen understandings of the multilayered justice implications, human and nonhuman, of contemporary socio-political processes and institutions.

This TI has concentrated on how a multispecies approach to identity can facilitate the analysis of (in)justice, but the scope of such an orientation can be much richer. Identity is already a key lens around which animal rights and justice movements pivot (Calarco 2015). Much of this framing pivots around the idea that other animals are similar to humans in significant and relevant ways, and hence merit ethical, moral and political consideration based on this shared identification. The limitations of such well-intentioned identity politics become evident however, equally with reference to humans’ (subjective) perceptions of species they may not see as similar to themselves, as well as when they do perceive similarities between Homo Sapiens and other species. In the latter case, the imposed identification, particularly with farmed animals with humans, erases their species-specific vulnerabilities to allow their unimpeded exploitation by the capitalism-nationalism complex, as exemplified by the identification of the (dairy) cow as the ‘mother’ of human beings in India.

Critics of identity politics have expressed deep misgivings around politically rallying around identity, based on concerns that identities are not self-evident notions, but are socio-political-cultural constructs that are created in hierarchical conditions based on difference, valuation, and oppression. Feminists have long resisted identity politics around gender, due to the real risks of entrenching gendered binaries or hierarchies. Against the growing trends of global authoritarianism, identity could be a threatening political concept, used to amplify overblown differences between Hindus and Muslims in India, for instance, or erase critical differences between Hindus and Dalits (Natrajan 2021). There are concerns that identity-based politics can have limited scope ultimately, and even, that they are misinformed about the real nature and cause of oppression. As such, critics worry that ‘we should be working to eliminate the salience of identity in everyday life, not institutionalize it’ (Alcoff and Mohanty 2006: 3).

These rich contestations need to be robustly investigated in political animal studies and animal geographies, to formulate a critical multispecies politics of identity. It is our hope that future critical political and animal studies scholarship will enrich radical imaginaries of how perceived and real differences – and even sameness – that emerge through the intersections of species with caste and race, religion, gender and sexuality, and the environment, need not inevitably lead to hierarchisation and exploitation, marginalisation, and invisibilisation. Reimagining the significance attached to species difference, as well as the difference constructed via the human-animal binary, we believe, is at the core of undoing animal and human oppressions; these two modes of critical liberatory praxis are not mutually exclusive. Particularly, akin to rich and important contributions on subaltern environmentalism from Dalit scholars (see Sharma 2017) to negate ‘upper caste’, particularly Brahminical influence in shaping Indian environmental politics, we urgently call for a revival of hidden, lost and contemporary Dalit critical and anti-anthropocentric politics of multispecies difference and identity.

At the same time, we recognise that agency, articulated via identity, is a crucial vector of resistance in advocating, resisting, and fighting for justice in capitalist, and conservative and authoritarian societies. We thus simultaneously urge scholars to probe and differentiate identity as regards individual and collectives of species, via empirical and multispecies ethnographic work, to understand how political agency may be articulated and recognized in more-than-human frameworks to inform a critical multispecies politics of identity. Together, we believe, such critical intellectual and empirical labour can begin to lead us to imagine the fullest potential of a radical multispecies democratic politics.