Nonhuman Animals in the Spaces of Indian Modernity
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Disorderly Multispecies Living: Nonhuman Animals in the Spaces of Indian Modernity by Sundhya Giselle Walther A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Program in South Asian Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Sundhya Walther 2015 Disorderly Multispecies Living: Nonhuman Animals in the Spaces of Indian Modernity Sundhya Giselle Walther Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Program in South Asian Studies University of Toronto 2015 Abstract The construction and policing of a hygienic boundary between human and nonhuman animals is one of the ways that Western modernity has established the otherness of the postcolonial world. Drawing on Haraway’s idea of “ordinary multispecies living,” this dissertation attends to the representation of disorderly multispecies living in texts from India. Disorderly multispecies living, I argue, is a form of resistance to the hygiene of modernity and a powerful mode of alliance between human and nonhuman subalterns. In this analysis, I bring together the fields of animal studies and postcolonial studies in order to complicate the dominant Western focus of the former and the dominant humanism of the latter, and I also emphasize the intersections between these two parallel fields. Each of my chapters considers a physical and conceptual zone of proximity between human and nonhuman beings. My first chapter analyzes the discourse of conservation and its division of space into human and animal in three texts (by Corbett, Roy, and Ghosh). In the second chapter, I consider the way the body itself is imagined as a space of both multispecies contact and subaltern political agency in texts by M.K. Gandhi and Vikram Chandra. Chapter Three examines the connection between home and nation through companionate relationships in !ii novels by Anita Desai and R.K. Narayan. My fourth chapter analyzes Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and journalistic accounts of the leopards of Sanjay Gandhi National Park in order to redefine the imaginative geography of the city. Here, I consider urban space as multispecies space, and discover in what I call this spatial transfection the potential for cross-species subaltern alliances. Throughout this dissertation, I am attuned to the way that texts instrumentalize nonhuman animals as figures of disturbance; at the same time, I attend to the moments when these textual animals evade narrative control and create lines of flight outside their own appropriation. I show that multispecies inhabitations disturb the function of oppressive discourses, as they apply to both human and nonhuman animals. This study proposes both an ethics of representation and an ethics of reading that has wider implications for the study of relationships between human and nonhuman animals in both literature and in life. !iii Acknowledgments Professor Chelva Kanaganayakam was both a brilliant scholar and a funny, kind, and compassionate mentor. It would not have been possible for me to write this thesis without his guidance, and I will always be grateful to have known him. I also owe an enormous debt to Professors Victor Li and Sara Salih for their incisive, detailed, and constructive feedback throughout the writing process, and also for their support in the last stages of completion. Professor Uzoma Esonwanne kindly stepped in during the late stages of the project, and I am thankful for his guidance as well. Professor Susie O’Brien was a generous and thought- provoking external examiner, and Professor Neil Ten Kortenaar an enthusiastic and rigorous internal examiner. This thesis was written with financial support from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, The Ontario Graduate Scholarship, The Centre for South Asian Studies, and The University of Toronto. I would like to thank the Department of English — particularly the administrative staff who are the too often unsung heroes of us graduate students — and the Centre for South Asian Studies. I am so grateful to the many friends who have supported me during my time in the PhD program. I am especially thankful to the incredible community of women of which I have been privileged to be a part. These endlessly inspiring women celebrated me during the peaks of this program and kept me afloat during the troughs. They also helped me, on a daily basis, to cope with the frustrations and absurdities of academia, patriarchy, and patriarchal academia. My dearest GG(O)W, Killjoys, and Saltmates, you are always in my heart. !iv This project would not have been possible without the nonhuman animals with whom I have been lucky enough to live companionately throughout my life. I owe particular thanks to my feline family who showed me such love and compassion during this program: Smoove Mama (consummate hostess), Mario Lemieux (my feline soulmate), Ella Bella (queen of mystery), and, most disorderly of all, little Tim Riggins. Many thanks to the Dickinsons, who welcomed me warmly into their family during times of both heartbreak and joy. Thanks also to my own extended family, who have always been so supportive of me. Uncle Jay and Auntie Shan, and Uncle Veejay and Aunt Sue have been the source of endless meals, endless good advice, and endless warmth. And Yavani is the funniest, most loving, and most determined person; I’m proud to know her. This project would not have been possible without the influence of an animal-loving set of grandparents on one side, and a Hindu Indian set on the other. All four of my grandparents — Inge, Steve, Vidya, and Gunas — shaped me in every way, and supported me in every endeavour. Their own lives modelled strength, perseverance, grace, love, and good humour. I wish they could be here to see the completion of this project, since I owe so much of it to them. I also wish my Uncle Vic could see it, not just because his love of learning and language make up some of my earliest memories, but also because my doing a PhD was originally his idea; hopefully, in some way, he is able to judge the results! I met my husband Phil in the first semester of this program, and it was the best thing to happen in all of my seven years. He has been patient, loving, kind, compassionate, and funny, even while bearing the impossible burden of being the first in the household to finish the PhD. His encouragement keeps me going during the most difficult times, and his sense of fun !v brightens my life. I am so proud of everything he has achieved and I can’t wait to see what the future holds. My parents, Robert and Nama, have unstintingly supported everything I have ever wanted to do, and they have worked unbelievably hard to make anything and everything happen for me. There is no doubt that I could not have written this thesis without the help — emotional and financial — that they never fail to provide. Their belief in me has borne me across every crisis. I am so lucky to have them as parents. This dissertation is dedicated to them. I wish peace, joy, and freedom to all of the beings of this world, both human and nonhuman. !vi Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. The Wild: Tracking Tigers in the Discourse of Conservation 43 2.1. Introduction 43 2.2. Shikari and Conservationist in Man-eaters of Kumaon and The Folded Earth 53 2.3. Conservation and Development in The Hungry Tide 86 2.4. Conclusion 111 3. The Body: Ahimsa and the Politics of Vegetarianism 114 3.1 Introduction 114 3.2. The Serious Question of Food in Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth 123 3.3. Food, Text, and Narrative Multiplicity in Red Earth and Pouring Rain 152 3.4. Conclusion 173 4. The Home: Companion Animals/Companion Narratives 176 4.1. Introduction 176 4.2. The Nation and Its Spectres in Clear Light of Day 182 4.3. Textual Taxidermy in The Man-eater of Malgudi 215 4.4. Conclusion 244 5. The City: Denizens of Modernity in Delhi and Mumbai 249 5.1. Introduction 249 5.2. Subalternity and Species in The White Tiger 259 5.3. Placing the Leopards of Sanjay Gandhi National Park 284 5.4. Conclusion 305 6. The Zoo: Postscript 312 Works Consulted 321 !vii 1. Introduction Raja Rao’s 1938 novel Kanthapura is one of the most important works of its time, and a landmark text in the development of the contemporary Indian novel in English. Early in the novel, one of the villains, the policeman Badè Khan, has a confrontation with a village leader: because of his semi-official position, Badè Khan demands to be given a house, but his request is refused. Khan expresses his anger by giving “such a reeling kick to the one-eared cur that it went groaning through the Potters’ street, groaning and barking through the Potters’ street and the Pariah street, till all the dogs began to bark, and all the cocks began to crow, and a donkey somewhere raised a fine welcoming bray” (14-15). This eruption of collective sound reveals the community of nonhuman animals that shares the human space of the village.1 Kanthapura, perhaps naturally, given its rural setting, is populated by animals. This moment makes clear in a new way, however, how deeply enmeshed human and nonhuman living spaces are in the novel, as animals who have previously been invisible and unheard in the narrative world assert their presence. Kanthapura uses these animal voices to create a moment of disturbance that, in turn, exposes a few key ideas about the spatial and cultural legitimacy of nonhuman animals in this novel.