The above quote is from Baluta by Daya Pawar, arguably one of the first Dalit autobiographies in Marathi. Pawar recalls his childhood memories, remembering how his mother would forage in the jungle for food, often after paying off the forest guards, and how people from his community were forced to survive on whatever they found edible in the forests or even on the grains left behind in the fields after harvest. Pawar's powerful narrative is a testament to Dalit lives and how they relate to their environment.

Meanings of and attitudes to nature, animals and the environment vary across communities and cultures. They also generate different ideas and feelings depending on the condition of the humans that relate to them. Human relations with animals have always been multifaceted; animals are worshipped, considered kin and also slaughtered as spiritual offerings.2 Even more complex is our relations with animals in the contemporary world, where animals may be employed as performers in circuses, displayed in zoological parks, recruited as research subjects in laboratories and kept as companions and pets in homes. Ideas of morality are often attached to some animals, which are idealised, venerated and ‘used as models of order and morality’.

Introduction

Cinema is a democratic art that fundamentally expresses real-life experiences regardless of any differences. It has an indispensable role in presenting the heritage, culture and ethnicity of the people. Known as Kollywood, the Tamil film industry focuses primarily on the livelihoods of the Tamils, their culture and their social and political life. Films provide a platform to disseminate, express and communicate culture-based themes, political ideas and social realities, which are essential for building a better life for the people. Activists, politicians and ideologues use film as a medium of propaganda to spread their thoughts and ideologies and establish diverse political cultures. Since the 1950s, Tamil cinema has been dynamic in promoting the Dravidian movement and its ideas, aiming to promote self-respect, social justice, self-esteem and dignity among the indigenous Tamils. Vetrimaaran, a Tamil filmmaker, claims that ‘Tamil cinema put forward the principles of Dravidian politics, and the new films lend strength to the ideals of Dravidian politics. Social realities and political circumstances provide themes to such movies’. S. Theodore Baskaran, a Tamil film historian and wildlife conservationist, asserts the history of Tamil cinema along the same lines when he states that ‘over the seventy-nine years of its existence, Tamil cinema has grown to become the most domineering influence in the cultural and political life in Tamil Nadu’.

What Do Animals Have to Do with Caste?

In Indian social geographical context, animals have been both the means and the effects of the production and reproduction of caste. Society may be seen as a multispecies ecosystem where animals hold a significant position in everyday life, rituals and human life events. They appear in people’s lives in multiple ways: social, economic or political. The association between humans and animals may result in doubly reinforcing oppressions or privileges through association with each other. While human–animal relations remain under-theorised in caste studies and caste remains the least discussed in animal studies, they are instrumentalised to maintain the typologies of caste. To consider broadly, in a caste society like ours, the cow becomes holy and a subject of protection, whereas the pig is considered polluting; at times, its sight is also deemed filthy and avoidable. These two animals, in particular, denote the contradictions between pure and impure. Notably, in the Hindu imagination, animals have an assigned caste identity. They are considered to inherently possess social qualities associated with their particular caste assignation.

C. S. Lewis, the British theologian and novelist, once proclaimed: ‘The tame animal is in the deepest sense the only natural animal.’ It prompted a passionate protest from Evelyn Underhill, another theologian who had an aversion for the introduction of modern artifice to nature's pristine being, who said, ‘… if we ever get a sideway glimpse of the animal-in-itself … we don't owe it to the Persian cat or the canary, but to some wild free creature living in completeness of adjustment to Nature a life that is utterly independent of man’.

Both these strands of thought symbolise an age-old tussle among thinkers to define essential animal subjectivity. Lewis eulogised the ‘tameness’ of animals that has played a crucial role in human civilisational projects ever since the first agricultural settlers used bullocks to plough the land. Underhill, on the other hand, is concerned about the primal essence of life, uninfringed upon by motives of human progress. These concerns for nature preservation with utilitarian logic gained potency as human civilisation progressed. But as we shall see in this chapter, human–animal interactions in frontier spaces display a complex dynamism beyond such binary arguments.

As the distance between wilderness and civilisation grew, human–animal relations diversified into various spheres of proximity where they interacted in distinct ways. Irrespective of these differences, every sphere continuously created cultures populated by ideas and representations of other species to deal with their relative distancing.

Birds and animals have distinctly marked and informed Dalit art and literature. Dalit literature effectively mines the imageries of birds and animals as motifs, metaphors and anthropomorphic devices, not only to express Dalit agony and degradation under the caste system but also to subvert the Brahminical sociocultural ethos and aesthetic conventions. Dalit life-writings, novels, short stories, poetry (across Indian languages) and paintings are some of the prominent forms that vividly illustrate this. In her memoir The Prisons We Broke, Dalit writer Baby Kamble affirms:

Baby Kamble's visceral imageries of animals, birds and Dalits vying for the raw meat of the carcasses strikingly portray Dalit precarity and destitution. The juxtaposition of Dalits with scavenging birds and animals shines a light on the dehumanisation of Dalits because of the caste system. Likewise, Telugu Dalit poet Gurram Jashuva exposes the Brahminical notions of purity and pollution in his poem ‘Gabbilam’ (‘The Bat Messenger’), in which the Dalit poetic persona reassuringly addresses the nocturnal bird: ‘You’re a bad omen to them. / For me you are a friend.’

This powerful lamentation follows the death of Karuppi, the beloved pet dog of the eponymous protagonist in the 2018 movie Pariyerum Perumal BA BL. The dog is a crossbreed of Chippiparai, a local breed in Tamil Nadu famous as a hunting dog. In a chilling scene, Karuppi (the black one) is tied to the railway tracks by men from a higher caste, and the protagonist runs to rescue her from being run over by the train but does not reach her in time. Her death inaugurates a series of violent encounters that progressively dehumanises the Dalit protagonist until the lives of dog and human become comparable. In this sense, the dismemberment of Karuppi's body establishes, beyond doubt, the inhuman treatment of the Dalit community at the hands of the upper castes.

For millennia, Dalits have been marginalised and oppressed in Indian society through an association of negative attributes which also include animality. The deployment of the ‘animal’ as a trope makes sense in a caste-structured narrative but it is a troubling metaphor because of the intimacy in life and death the animal shares with the human protagonist. This chapter centralises this two-pronged trope of animality that may signify the intimate relationship, the intimate knowledge that Dalits have of actual animals, and how this very association or affiliation is used to symbolically and materially dehumanise them.

Marginalised communities, and Dalits in particular, have faced exclusion from access to public natural resources due to their social position. As they are a historically oppressed community, it is important to analyse their experiences and interactions with specific animals, birds, plants and other living beings because these associations arise from caste-based occupations imposed on them. The social evil of untouchability compelled them to live outside the social interaction of the dominant groups, forcing them to carry out certain duties such as handling dead animals, tanning animal skins and cleaning. The particular social space that Dalits occupy not only disables them from having access to a clean and safe environment but also forces on them the proximity of animals and birds considered impure and inauspicious. As a result, despite environmental hazards, Dalits have survived as a scavenger community for centuries, sharing space with vultures, dogs, pigs and crows.

The lived experiences of Dalit lives with animals speak of the community's environmental history, which has not been documented fully. Speaking for myself, disposing of dead animals and scavenging were part of my family history, which lasted until the end of the twentieth century. My poems heavily bank on these stories of our environmental engagements with birds and animals like vultures, dead cattle, pigs and crows. The everyday stories and images of vultures I got to know as a child still reappear in my mind's eye whenever I hear the word ‘vultures’.

Since the inception of literature, animals have always been speaking, even if they may not have always been audible. Especially in Dalit writings, the constant presence of animals and birds such as dogs, buffaloes, cows, pigs, vultures and many more cannot be disregarded. The Tamil writer Cho. Dharman uses the figure of the koogai (the Tamil word for owl) in his narrative to raise some pertinent questions on how the state deals with caste atrocities in India. Dalit lives are often marked by a degree of liminality, rendering them non-human. ‘Owl’ is commonly used as a term of abuse, similar to how caste names such as chamar and bhangi themselves are used as swear words. In Tamil, another word for the owl colloquially is aandai, which is, again, often used to ridicule or to insult someone. The Hindi word for owl is ulloo, a slur that implies stupidity. So, by placing owl as a central figure in the narrative, is Dharman reclaiming an expletive or is he creating an alternative meaning to the word?

One of the major objectives of this chapter is to question the construction of animalities. Animalities or animal-ness is often posited in contrast to a conventional understanding of basic human nature (such as possessing autonomy or self-awareness) and underlining the human–animal distinction by relegating animals to an instinctive bestiality.

Besides the physical presence of the owl in Koogai, it also serves as a vehicle for the need to raise Dalit consciousness, subjected to dehumanisation, by embracing the Ambedkarite ideals of self-dignity, liberty and equality. Koogai interrogates and addresses the overlapping binary construction of the marginalised Dalit, often rendered as the other, and the animal.

The domestic yak is believed to have originated from its wild ancestor, the wild yak, as early as two million years ago on the Tibetan plateau. The word yak comes from the Tibetan word gyag, which refers to the male yak. Yak-rearing regions in India include Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, with a few numbers reported in West Bengal. Yaks in India are mostly reared traditionally under the transhumance system by the nomadic tribes who are mostly Buddhists in their religious orientation. Like in Ladakh, where it is reared by the Changpa, a semi-nomadic tribe, in Sikkim, it is reared by the Aho, Bho and Bhutia tribes, who are predominantly Buddhists. In Himachal Pradesh, the Buddhist tribes in Spiti are engaged in yak rearing, whereas in Kinnaur and Chamba districts, Hindus too are involved in rearing this bovine. Monpa, a Mongoloid Buddhist tribe, are involved in rearing Yak in Arunachal Pradesh. They have close relations with animals, like other tribes, but have a special bond with the yaks. As per the 20th Livestock Census 2019, Ladakh has the highest yak population (26,221), followed by Arunachal Pradesh (24,075), Sikkim (5,219), Himachal Pradesh (1,940) and West Bengal (61). Internationally, apart from India, yaks are found in China, Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia and Nepal.

In this chapter, we examine the relations of yaks with the people who rear them, that is, the Brokpa, to understand the role this bovine plays in the lives of the herders of this tribe – socially, economically and culturally. The word brokpa combines two Monpa words, brok meaning pastoral land and pa meaning people living on the pasture.

Growing urbanisation in India has resulted in people getting inevitably exposed to new and different cultural experiences. Eventually, it makes people, who until then regarded themselves as natives of a place, loosen their grip on their local cultural identity and embrace a global civic identity. It has become routine for Tamil youth from the hinterland to migrate to the urban centre of Chennai, seemingly aspiring to participate not only in its growth story but also in embracing the lifestyle changes that come with it. Kwame Anthony Appiah has illustrated how in urban environments people encounter commercial artefacts and establishments that bring other cultures into close proximity to their own. Such a shift happens mainly through a rapid process of urbanisation that includes migration, lifestyle changes and advancement in communication technologies. A cosmopolitan, according to Appiah, is someone who has learnt to live with their roots in a wider world, with mutual respect for other traditions. He suggested a co-existence of modernist values with respect for tradition among people in a globalized world. Moving forward, the intermingling of diverse cultures is also about the differences that emerge among them. As a result, natives often emphasise the uniqueness of their own culture against universalist values. This process is identified as ‘tribalism’ in anthropological terms or ‘localisation’ in sociological terms. Further, the pursuit of universalist values in a modern world has come to imply moving from the anthropocentric, that is, where human lives are deemed more important, to an ecocentric worldview, where all lives are deemed equal.