Not quite together but learning each other’s ways
Curiosity and care don’t always go hand in hand. Love harbors a violence founded on the desire for difference. In Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being, Naisargi Davé tells us how context and politics enclose, embag, settle, surround: what they cannot defend but only endanger. Underlying the imperative to protect is the assumption of innocence: of silent dogs, hens and cows. But animals are neither innocent nor voiceless beings—vulnerable Dalit and Muslim lives are exposed to routine bloodshed in their name. Animals resist politically to a political system through political speech. Davé shows how they speak in queer tongues.
India’s very identity is built on the foundation of exclusion. For millennia, Hindu scriptures and society refused to treat Dalits as human beings deserving of dignity and equality. Untouchability survives through its remnants even today. The denial of citizenship to queer folx mirrors the mutual exclusion of the human subject and animal object. Davé sees through the heteropatriarchal pretensions of Western liberalism to care for animals and that of leftist humanism to do otherwise. Many foreground the consumption of beef as proof of their solidarity with the Dalit cause. After all, one must be radically loyal to the context of vegetarianism-as-violence in the ‘real’ India. Little does it matter that Dalits would prefer people cleaning their own toilets than capitalizing on a practice for which they are oppressed, maimed and killed. Such performance is the very essence of Brahminism. The cruelty of context is that in seeking to explain everything, it explains little. It strives constantly to render the odd, the strange, and the queer useful for the norm.
Indifference poses a challenge to this conforming fidelity. The tyranny of consistency demands the death of exceptions as a rule. Davé explains how contradiction-thinking serves one purpose alone: to exhaust the otherwise that threatens the norm. For example, if someone rids an infested dog of maggots and heals it, why did he not save the maggots too? Such questioning springs from an ethics that is imminent rather than immanent, ensuring that things stay the same, where nothing unthinkable is possible. Followers of imminent ethics are at war with the world, something quite different from a world at war with us. The animal becomes a concept made real in something to seek out and performatively consume—a manifestation of the passionate investment in difference rather than an indifference to it.
How does one speak of indifference in caste-stratified India? The indifference that Davé proposes is not with respect to the politics of caste. It’s rather a critical commitment to the immanence of caste, and therefore its undoing: an indifference to difference. Animals are subject to casteist stratification as well: touching dog poop defiles whereas handling gobar, or cow dung, does not. The proximity to an ‘upper-caste’, anthropatriarchal imaginary of a Hindu nation informs what separates the permissible from the perverse, the bestial from the homely. Permissible violence, which therefore must not be called so, invades both the state-sanctioned abattoir and the home. Caste Hindu mobs commit lynchings of Dalits and Muslims in India over two perceived violations: the eating of ‘Hindu’ cows and elopement with Hindu women. What get violated are neither cows nor women, but the sphere of permissible violence that is at the heart of Hindutva.
Just as the alternate sphere of perverse violence justifies the existence of the permissible, so does the purported innocence of animals (or cows) justifies the violence done for their protection. Meanwhile, the overlords of the meat industry—Hindus, Jains and Sikhs—accumulate profit without getting their hands dirty. The silence of the Mother Cow reinforces her innocence in the eyes of her protectors. They fail to perceive that often, the subaltern does not speak, and that is politics too. It constitutes a right to opacity, an indifference to the politics of Man. Silences are acts of refusal. We need only listen alongside differently, with queer tongues, to hear them. Care is born first of indifference, out of respect for the opacity of the object Other: women, queers, commodities, and other animals. Naisargi Davé argues in favor of indifference not as a lack, but as a stance, born of the queer desire and belief in an otherwise way of being.
She cites this love poem by Audre Lorde, “For Judith”, to make her case:
Hanging out
means being
together
upon the earth
boulders
crape myrtle trees
fox and deer
at the watering hole
not quite together
but learning
each other’s ways.
Indifference is now available on the Navayana website for Rs 450. Get your copy today.