As we are coming increasingly to understand, the imperial landscape never was a purely human one. Nonetheless, the conjugation of studies of empire with the nonhuman turn in the humanities remains relatively underdeveloped. An archive of the nonhuman gives us a sense of the amplitude of empire's actors and stakeholders, and of its status as a multi-species arena. Postcolonial theory has undertaken a sustained engagement with the category of the human--a category fundamental to imperialism's mapping of the world and its articulation of its own raison d'etre--though without sufficient consideration of other orders of life or being in the colony. Too often work that straddles animal studies and postcolonial studies highlights an imperial mode of species thinking that involved the bestialization of subordinated groups, taking its cue from Fanon's comment that "when the colonist speaks of the colonized, he uses zoological terms. Allusion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors from the 'native' quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the seething, and the gesticulations" (The Wretched of the Earth). Important as this focus on bestial anthropology and racist humanism undoubtedly is, it is as important to ensure that the nonhuman is not reduced to the contours of human animality alone. Rather, the nonhuman, whether in its bodily or its figural forms, is absolutely needful for a full reckoning of the imperial project.

In British India, several distinct imperatives emerged in Anglo-Indian thinking and writing about the treatment of nonhuman life in the colony: how best to manage the animal as a commodity, whether for labor or for dietary ends; how to deal with dangerous beasts that were constituted as threats to human life and the spread of settled agriculture; and how, simultaneously, to imagine animals--or some animals--as subjects of sympathy and protection. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular, this last element assumed a certain ideological and legislative pre-eminence. This was a specifically racialized and religiously marked variant of the crusade against cruelty to animals that had begun to take hold among Britons towards the end of the eighteenth century, spurred at least in part by an ethics of sensibility that had come to assume a certain ascendancy in ethical thought over the course of the century. As a result of this, certain ideas of compassion and appropriate death, ranged against torture and unnecessary suffering, came to be attached to the cultivation or reform of bourgeois sensibilities, whether in Europe or in the colonies. These ideas came to constitute distinctly civilized emotions, while cruelty, newly redefined and newly racialized, came to be seen as primitive or barbarous. If an incapacity to bear animal suffering came to be a hallmark of civilizational refinement, cruelty--whether defined as a lack of sensibility for the sufferings of beasts, or as a wanton relish for such suffering--was outsourced to lumpen elements at home and to non-Europeans, now seen as particularly heartless about animal suffering. In this new humanitarian dispensation, the animal functioned as a critical figure mediating intra-human relations between colonizer and colonized within the imperial Indian context.

Parama Roy's paper, "On Verminous Life," investigates the ways in which the colony assumed the status of a crucial theater for thinking about forms of cruelty, sympathy, and animal protection. She maps the manner in which this new moral economy of care and inclusion encountered an existing Indic economy of vegetarianism and the non-killing of animals, one that it sought to cast, not as kindness to animals, but as a form of cruelty to them--of vegetarian cruelty if you will. Using John Lockwood Kipling's Beast and Man in India (1891) as her text, she examines the encounter of these two contrasting economies of animal protection and animal cruelty, especially Lockwood's equivocal endorsement of a carefully managed carnivory as kindest to nonhumans and humans alike.

In "Eating, Enmity, and Empire in Katherine Mayo's Mother India," Sandhya Shetty observes how the question of the enemy intersects with a biopolitical discourse on public health and immunity in the interwar era. She argues that at this intersection of biology and political theology, the animal (as essentially edible and necessarily pitiful) becomes central to the differential determination of the enemy in the imagination of a reconfigured empire contending with Indian anti-colonial nationalism. Drawing on Mayo's controversial Mother India (1927), a vitriolic account of the insanitary and cruel life of Hindus, her paper excavates a colonial history of the enemy saturated with the compassionate affect of meat-eaters for the nonhuman animal. She argues that a remarkable alignment between a Christian West and the Asian Muslim is fabricated to produce the Hindu as biologocally unfit enemy, in accord with a dietary logic that invites a fantasy of extermination carried out by the Muslim as friendly, passionate monotheist, and meat-eater. While a Europeam history of the enemy harbors its own particular set of "minor" antagonisms focused on human consumption of the nonhuman, the colonial Indian history of the enemy is distinctive in being ethically and politically staged in the idiom of hyperbolic cruelty versus compassion, vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism.

Needless to say, Anglo-Indian and American criticisms of Indian treatment of animals did not pass without dissent among their subjects. But the responses of animal activists and especially cow protectionists in India--often high-caste and aggressively sectarian, and sometimes animated with fascist leanings--were not without their own ethical difficulties. Naisargi Dave, in "A Story of Two Devis (Or: Why is the Nonhuman Animal So Divisive?)," tracks the problems of fascism and the legacies of liberal empire in the early history of animal welfare in India; she does this through a focus on the careers of the Anglo-French Nazi Aryosophist and militant anti-imperialist Savitri Devi Mukherjee and the dancer, parliamentarian, and Theosophist Rukmini Devi Arundale.

Taken together, these papers highlight the degree to which the nonhuman is key to a comprehensive grasp of the imperial and postcolonial worlds, whether in terms of their imaginative circuits, their political formations, or their bodily registers.

Each presentation will last 20 minutes.