Entangled Fictions: Nonhuman Animals in an Indian World

177 Pages·2022·1.776 MB·English

by  Suvadip Sinha

Entangled Fictions
Entangled Fictions: Nonhuman Animals in an Indian World studies the
ethical and affective relationships between human and nonhuman animals
in Indian fctional worlds. While drawing upon existing theoretical and
philosophical texts with nonhumanist underpinnings, Entangled Fictions
argues that the corpus is limited epistemologically and politically when it
comes to their examinations of the nonhuman in India. Deeply infuenced
by the political/existential expediencies of our times, the book traverses
several genres, shifts from fctional to anecdotal, and transitions from
autobiographical to spectra in an effort to introduce readers to fctional
worlds marked by human–nonhuman fuidity and trans-species contiguity
that was imagined and lived much before the telos of human extinction
became either a global or local concern.
Suvadip Sinha is Associate Professor in South Asian Literature and
Culture at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
Series Editor: Karen Raber,
University of Mississippi, USA
Literary and cultural criticism has ventured into a brave new world in
recent decades: posthumanism, ecocriticism, critical animal studies, the new
materialisms, the new vitalism, and other related approaches have transformed
the critical environment, reinvigorating our encounters with familiar texts, and
inviting us to take note of new or neglected ones. A vast array of nonhuman
creatures, things, and forces are now emerging as important agents in their own
right. Inspired by human concern for an ailing planet, ecocriticism has grappled
with the question of how important works of art can be to the preservation of
something we have traditionally called “nature.” Yet literature’s capacity to
take us on unexpected journeys through the networks of affliation and affnity
we share with the earth on which we dwell – and without which we die – and
to confront us with the drama of our common struggle to survive and thrive
has not diminished in the face of what Lyn White Jr. called “our ecological
crisis.” From animals to androids, nonhuman creatures and objects populate
critical analyses in increasingly complex ways, complicating our conception of
the cosmos by dethroning the individual subject and dismantling the comfortable
categories through which we have interpreted our existence. Until now, however,
the elements that compose this wave of scholarship on nonhuman entities have
had limited places to gather to be nurtured as a collective project. “Perspectives
on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture” provides that local habitation. In
this series, readers will fnd creatures of all descriptions, as well as every other
form of biological life; they will also meet the non-biological, the microscopic,
the ethereal, the intangible. It is our goal for the series to provide an encounter
zone where all forms of human engagement with the nonhuman in all periods
and national literatures can be explored, and where the discoveries that result can
speak to one another, as well as to scholars and students.
Entangled Fictions
Nonhuman Animals in an Indian World
Suvadip Sinha
Futures of the Human Subject
Technical Mediation, Foucault and Science Fiction
Sławomir Kozioł
Representing Post(Human) Enhancement Technologies in
Twenty-First Century US Fiction
Carmen Laguarta-Bueno
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Perspectives-on-the-Non-Human-in-Literature-and-Culture/book-series/
PNHLC
Entangled Fictions
Nonhuman Animals in
an Indian World
Suvadip Sinha
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2023 Suvadip Sinha
The right of Suvadip Sinha to be identifed as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-23171-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-28687-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-29802-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003298021
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Introduction: On a Personal Note 1
1 Theoretical Possibilities and Provocations 17
2 Companionable Fiction: Unbecoming Human 42
3 Becoming More Than Human: Poetic Metamorphoses 79
4 Toward a Stray Manifesto 120
Epilogue: Spectral Animality or, How to
Be Haunted by the Dead Nonhuman? 148
Acknowledgements 154
Bibliography 156
Index 164

Introduction
On a Personal Note
This book is probably born out of seemingly forgotten memories of fear
and love that have returned to haunt me. During my growing-up years in
a neighborhood in a northern suburb of Kolkata, I was extremely scared
of a stray dog. The nameless dog used to live in an alley next to my home
and was often fed by a couple of people in the neighborhood. For some
reason unknown to me, the dog developed a strong dislike for me. It
would often run toward me, bark at me, and frequently made threaten-
ing gestures. I was so scared of the dog that I started taking a different
route to my home to avoid any encounter with the dog. On one unnoticed
day, I don’t remember the exact one, the dog died and the stray reason
of my fear was gone. Now love: during my childhood days, I remember,
my grandfather always lived with a clowder of cats. He would share his
cramped living space, his bed, his food, and his time with those cats. Yet,
none of them were wither pets or domesticated. They would enter my
grandfather’s room through an opening on his bedside window, through
the door on their own volition. Like that scary dog in my neighborhood,
these cats too never had names. In spite of my grandfather’s deep caring
approach, some of them would never return and disappear suddenly.
After all these years I have started to realize that these two different
encounters with nonhuman animals have left signifcant impression on
me. My memory of my childhood neighborhood and my home is indel-
ibly marked by the memory of that threatening dog. So is my memory of
my visits to my grandparents’ place by that clowder of cats. They engen-
dered very different emotional and embodied responses – unexplained
fear in me and unconditional love in my grandfather – through their
presence; nonetheless, these nonhuman animals keep spatiotemporally
haunting my dwelling. I cannot proclaim in what ways they now inform
or appropriate my understanding of the relationship between human and
nonhuman animals with any certainty; however, I realize that their arriv-
als and departures have certainly changed the cartography of the fctive
world I inhabit even after so many years.
This book is an attempt to think about these conditions of cohabitation
and think about them through fctional texts. As I will elaborate in the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003298021-1
2 Introduction
following chapters, I do not look at fctional texts for thinking about this
co-belonging and co-constitution just to analyze how they mimetically
represent a multispecies reality; rather, my interest lies in understanding
how these texts construct and bring into being a fctive and fctional world
that ontologically and aesthetically exceeds any singularly humanist and
anthropocentric imagination. That way the following chapters are also a
call for a new fctional politics. This new fctional politics, with its non-
imitative constructive potential, is very similar to what the philosopher
of science Isabelle Stengers calls a radical, non-liberal cosmopolitics. This
new materialist idea of cosmopolitanism is a sharp departure from the
post-Enlightenment, Kantian model. It has very little or almost nothing
to do with national boundaries and transnational locations. It is an onto-
logical one. An ecology of “posthumanist”1 cosmopolitics, as Stengers
argues, can be realized by reaching out for a horizon of justice and
cohabitation made possible through a deep and irreducible entanglement
of human and nonhuman beings. Although Stengers’s observations are
not directly concerned with entanglements of animals across species lines,
her cosmopolitical model, admittedly inspired by Bruno Latour’s earlier
work, identifes a speculative common world about to come into being
not through any humanist desire for reaching out for universal humanism
but through the arrival of wonder generated by different objects getting
entangled with each other. We hear resonances of similar ontological
approach toward cosmopolitanism in Rosi Braidotti and Ursula Heise
too. In her essay “Becoming-World,” Braidotti proposes a posthuman-
ist cosmopolitanism which implies nonhumanist planetarity that is not
determined by either liberalism or American individualism. She writes:
I want to emphasize the relevance for contemporary cosmopolitan-
ism of the ethics of accountability that takes “Life” as its main refer-
ent while avoiding the twin pitfalls of biological essentialism on the
one hand and unrefexive anthropocentrism on the other. In order
to implement this meta-methodological shift of perspective, classical
cosmopolitanism needs to become-world, in the sense of developing
a radical relational model of interaction.
(8)
Freeing the available understanding of cosmopolitanism that either cel-
ebrates transnational movement often determined by one’s access to the
global capitalist order or is overdetermined by the Enlightenment era
planetary humanism, Braidotti proposes cosmopolitanism that arrives
on the horizon through constant interrogation of “the shifting interrela-
tions between human and non-human forces” (14). For her, this nomadic
cosmopolitanism enables a displacement of anthropocentrism and “rec-
ognition of trans-species solidarity.” “[E]nvironmentally based, embod-
ied, and embedded, and in symbiosis with each other,” a “biocentred
Introduction 3
egalitarianism is a philosophy of radical immanence and affrmative
becoming, which activates a nomadic subject into sustainable process of
transformation” (23).
On a similar note, Ursula Heise in her writings (2008, 2016) on species
extinction and the complex web of relationality around the phenomenon
also proposes a new understanding of cosmopolitanism. Rethinking the
human’s position in the Anthropocene requires, Heise also points, a dis-
anthropocentric revaluation of cosmopolitanism. Terming this “a new
environmental cosmopolitanism” or “eco-cosmopolitanism,” she claims
[S]ome of these posthumanisms, including the idea of multi-species
justice, also offer the possibility of extending cosmopolitan models
of thought beyond the human sphere without relying on the kind of
“fat ontologies” that weaken the emphasis on differences within and
beyond species boundaries.
(2016: 203)
Simultaneously resisting different modalities of universalistic thinking
and rejecting cosmopolitanism as a way of ushering in a global political
community based on some kind of humanistic commonality, Heise’s eco-
cosmopolitanism remains a utopian process in constant practice:
[E]co-cosmopolitanism as I conceive it is shaped by an awareness
that very little commonality can be taken for granted and that speak-
ing about the human species, humanity, humanness, or the Anthro-
pocene requires a patient and meticulous process of assembly – in its
most craftsmanlike and technological connotations. Speaking about
species is also an assembly in the political sense, the process of con-
vening a representative and democratic forum for deliberating and
deciding on courses of action that affect all: all humans, but also
many nonhuman species if the goal is some form of multispecies jus-
tice. This may sound like a utopian scenario, and it is: not in the sense
of a political vision that is in practice unachievable, but in the sense
of constructive, long-term political goals that require an imagination
reaching beyond what currently exists. Theories of cosmopolitanism
share this intellectual task with certain kinds of utopian fction.
(2016: 226)
Disentangling the long debate and discussion over how it is the need of
the hour to gather a political possibility that would transcend different
localisms and challenge the inherent danger of parochial nationalism,
Heise asks us to think with impossible possibilities. Although her version
of eco-cosmopolitanism is certainly infuenced by ideas like “vernacular
cosmopolitanism” and “critical cosmopolitanism,” I fnd her proposal of
not considering commonality as a marker and determinant of any form