A Diplomat’s Dog in India

A review of?Indifference. On the Praxis of Interspecies Being, Naisargi N. Davé, Duke University Press, 2023.

My wife and I are moving to India along with our dog Kokoro, a shiba inu. Kokoro, aged 13 (a venerable age for a dog) has already been around, seen places. As a diplomat’s dog, he had to follow his keeper in his foreign assignments. He has never set foot, or paw, in the land of his ancestors, and doesn’t come with us when we travel to Japan. He remained in France when I was posted in Seoul—not because he was afraid of staying in a country where dog meat consumption is still not uncommon, but because I went to Seoul as a goose father, or?gireogi appa, as the Koreans say to designate a breadwinner living away from wife and kids and sending money home for the sake of their children’s education. Kokoro did come to Vietnam during my most recent assignment. He and my wife had a hard time adapting to the local culture. Pets are increasingly becoming familiar in Vietnamese cities, but many people still regard dogs as uncouth and unclean, keeping them away from human contact. My wife couldn’t determine whether people waving or wagging finger at her and her dog to tell them to go away were being aggressive toward a foreigner or simply discriminatory toward a dog. She had to bring a stick when walking Kokoro in the neighborhood park in order to ward off stray dogs, and was once attacked and bruised by a mutt. Wherever we went, she joined local NGOs or Facebook groups mobilizing for animal protection and pet welfare.

Animal protection in India

I picked up Naisargi Davé’s book because?Indifference?was ostensibly about human-animal relations and animalist cultures in India. The questions that I had in mind were related to the conditions that would await Kokoro and his keepers in our future location. Is there a pet culture in Indian cities, and can one easily find dog food and specialized services such as vets and pet sitters? Do street dogs carry rabies and are they aggressive toward pet dogs and their keepers during their walks? What is the general attitude of the population toward non-human animals in general and dogs in particular? Are there local organizations of pet owners or animal rights NGOs that we could join? Is violence against animals or the unethical treatment of non-human species an issue? Are Indian cows really sacred, and why do they get such special treatment? Davé’s book didn’t provide answers to these questions, at least directly. It wasn’t meant or supposed to. Anthropology, at least the way it is practiced now, is not the discipline that will answer practical questions regarding a foreign country or a particular culture. There are other books for that: travel guides, how-to manuals, journalistic accounts, or expat diaries. Naisargi Davé is not interested in South Asian cultures or civilizations in the traditional sense. Nowadays culture is a fraught concept in anthropology; nobody really uses that notion any more. The frontier of the discipline lies in queer studies, new materialism, animalism, and deconstructing notions of race, gender, and identity. As an author published in a cutting-edge academic press, Davé is committed to pushing the envelope further, not in revisiting foregone notions.

One way she connects with the past of the discipline is through fieldwork and participant observation. Anthropology departs from arm-chair theorizing and cannot be practiced from a cabinet. Ethnographers have to go on the ground, meet people, participate in activities, observe surroundings, and take notes or keep a research diary. Davé conducted her ethnographic fieldwork in several Indian cities over a period of ten years, documenting animal activism and interspecies relations by doing participant observation in local NGOs. She didn’t follow a structured methodology or engaged in survey research; instead, as she describes it, “I followed my intuitions, went where I was invited; and, in general, said yes to who and what turned up.” She associated with several strands of Indian society, from rags to riches, from pariah to nabab. She had several discussions with Maneka Gandhi, India’s most notorious animal activist and heir to the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, but also followed streetworkers in their roaming across popular settlements or red-light districts to heal wounded dogs or rescue suffering animals. She provides a long list of animal rights organizations: People for Animals, Welfare for Stray Dogs, Kindness for Animals and Respect for Environment, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Help in Suffering, Compassion Unlimited plus Action, the Animal Welfare Board of India, Humane Society International, Save Our Strays, etc.

Dog riots and cow vigilantes

Some organizations originated in the colonial period and were significantly shaped by foreigners or expatriates. Others follow a purely domestic agenda and reflect local cultures of animal protection. Ja?ns, for instance, are strict vegetarians who try to avoid all harm to humans and animals; many Ja?n monks and nuns even wear fabric over their mouths to avoid breathing in insects or microbes, and sweep ahead of themselves while walking to avoid treading on bugs. Almost every Ja?n community has established animal hospitals to care for injured and abandoned animals; many Ja?ns also rescue animals from slaughterhouses. Dogs are considered sacred in the Zoroastrian religion, and an attempt by the British government to exterminate Bombay’s stray dogs in 1832 led to a mass protest known as the Parsi Dog Riots. The Great Mutiny of 1857 originated because rumors circulated that Indian soldiers’ bullet cartridges were greased with pork fat (repulsive to Muslims) or beef fat (insulting to Hindus.) The Gau Seva Sangh or Society for Service to the Cow is associated with the Hindutva right and has sponsored laws banning cow slaughter in almost of all of India’s 28 states. Cow vigilante groups have been accused of enforcing this ban through violence, often leading to the lynching of (mostly Muslim) meat sellers and cattle traders. For Davé, cow protectionism “is not animal welfare: it is exclusively about the cow, the cow as a weaponized symbol that separates those who eat or slaughter cows (Muslims, Dalits, tribal people, and Christian minorities) from those who, by doctrine, do not (caste Hindus, or?sarvanas).” Davé also makes a distinction between “hands-on” and “hands-off” animalists. The first get their hand dirty and “pick up poop” or enter their fingers into dogs’ behinds to extract maggots; the second keep their hands clean and are also designated as?laptopwala?or?AC-wala?(those who reside in air conditioning.) Davé follows the formers in animal shelters caring for three-legged dogs, paralyzed pigs, and a long list of species; in street patrols doing community service for suffering animals; and in inspection visits of slaughterhouses or poultry farms.

Davé notes contradictions that often shock foreigners or distant observers of Indian society. Compassion for suffering animals can coexist with indifference for the plight of humans or cruelty toward other species.?Ahimsa, a central doctrine in Hindu, Ja?n, and Buddhist thought, is often invoked to laud the moral relationship between people and animals in India. But it can also be read as an abnegation of responsibility, a haughty indifference toward every social issue that does not directly involve the abuse of animals, or the refusal to expose onself to ethical quandaries. Her ethnographic vignettes include the story of Abodh, a street veterinarian who gets his hands dirty from cleaning the wounds of animals and only asks for water to clean his hands as a form of retribution; of Dipesh, a street worker who patiently cleans a dog’s butt infected by maggots and disposes of the worms on a discarded newspaper, then expresses indifference when the dog almost gets run over by a car; of Retired Brigadier-General S.S. Chauhan who cares so much for his cow (named Kamadhanu) that he gives up drinking milk after she stops lactating; of Amala Akkineni, a South Indian actress who converts to the animal cause when she picks up a goat hit by a lorry on the side of a road; or of the Brahmin who has a run-over bull suffering agonizing pain be removed ten feet from his land to the road where he can be shot without compromising the landlord’s?ahimsa. Less savory stories include mob killings of Dalit or Muslim villagers accused of having slaughtered a cow, or the many cases of bestiality, or animal sexual abuse, reported by the media. In a provocative chapter co-written with Alok Gupta, Davé draws a parallel between sexual violence against animals and livestock insemination, which she labels “permissible interspecies sex.”

Ethnographic vignettes and biographical portraits

Davé traces the history of animal protection in India through three portraits of women who advocated for the rights of animals from very different perspectives, which she calls “the odious,” “the genial,” and “the luminous.” Savitri Devi Mukherji shows that moral attention to animals can be morally repulsive. Born in France from European parents, she developed a fixation on cats and Aryans as well as a lifelong animosity toward Britain. She came to India in 1932, stayed briefly at Rabindranath Tagore’s ashram in Shantiniketan, and became an apologist of Hitler and his crimes against humanity (which she found “hopelessly amateurish” in comparison to other atrocities.) Crystal Rogers, by contrast, was moved by compassion toward sentient species, humans and non-humans alike. The author of the autobiography?Mad Dogs and an Englishwoman?was “the original?kutta-billi?activist” or dog-cat lover, creating several shelters for abandoned and injured animals that exist to this day. The third character, Rukmini Devi Arundale, was a student of the theosophist Indophile Annie Besant and has become an icon of the animal welfare movement in India through her sponsoring of the Prevention of Cruelty against Animals Act (PCA) in 1960 and her participation to the the Animal Welfare Board of India until 1986. She also espoused the cause of Bharatanatyam, a traditional dance from Tamil Nadu then scorned by the elite, and created the Kalakshetra dance academy in Chennai. In addition to these three biographies, Davé mentions the attachment to animal welfare by the Nehru-Gandhi family. Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of India’s independence, was an animal lover in the bourgeois sense of the word. He considered it a point of pride to push through the PCA Act. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, sponsored the wildlife conservation initiative Project Tiger in 1973 and wrote that “someday I hope people will shoot only cameras, and not guns, in the jungle.” Maneka Gandhi married Indira’s younger son Sanjay, who died in a plane crash in 1980. An animal rights activist and a politician, she led protests against the opening of the first McDonald’s restaurant in 1996, stating that “we don’t need cow killers in India.”

But those vignettes and portraits aside, Davé refrains from providing “context.” Asked by a colleague from another discipline to give some context to her anecdote about the dog’s butt infected with maggots, she answers tongue-in-cheek with a long description of a dog’s anatomy and a chemical analysis of anal glands secreting a strong smell that keeps parasites away. For her, we should not talk about dogs and animal welfare in general, but of this particular dog in a specific situation. She echoes the anthropologist Donna Haraway who, in When Species Meet, criticizes Jacques Derrida for describing his reaction to a cat staring at him naked without indicating the cat’s name or taking a cat’s point of view. While she limits her perspective to the ground level, she also offers a meta-analysis of her topic: she doesn’t write directly on animal ethics in India, but on what it means to raise the issue of animal welfare in specific situations. She also warns against the scientific impulse to “look, stare, take in, pillage, acquire, ingest, dissect, admire, anthropologize, steal, exhibit, repair, voice, recoil, sell, and possess.” Curiosity—the basic drive of the social scientist—is a politically tainted notion. As she confesses, “I can say for myself that, as a dyke, the curious gaze of normal people is rarely a pleasure.” As she puts it, “one should at least sometimes just leave folks alone.” The requirement for total transparency, like language for Roland Barthes, is fascist by nature. Instead of the inquisitorial gaze of the curious observer, she advocates “indifference to difference.” Indifference calls for a different politics as well as a poetics of relation and identity. Naisargi Davé concurs with édouard Glissant when the French Caribbean poet proclaims: “we clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.” Her particular form of opacity is called queerness, or the refusal to conform to heteronormative scripts: “as for my identity,” she echoes Glissant, “I will take care of that myself.” We should have respect for mutual forms of opacity: in the words of the intersectional feminist and poet Audre Lorde, we should be “at the watering hole / not quite together / but learning / each other’s ways.”

Pets and diplomacy

Over the years and along my foreign postings, I have accumulated many stories about pets and diplomacy. The dog of the US Ambassador to Seoul was quite a celebrity, and his separate twitter account attracted many followers. During morning walks, people stopped his master in the street because they recognized the dog, not the diplomat. There is a popular hashtag for #diplocats on Twitter, with Larry, the cat from 10 Downing Street, as a frequent guest star. Instructions on relocation always have a few paragraphs on pets, describing the minute procedures that dog or cat owners have to follow in order to bring their animal companion with them. Some countries have set quarantines or procedures so complex that they have to be planned at least six months in advance, while other countries, such as the Maldives, prohibit bringing in or owning dogs by law. Pets are a sweetener in international relations: state visits sometimes end with the offering of a pet or a live animal as an official gift, and China conducts its own panda diplomacy by sending giant pandas to the zoos of friendly countries. In 1949, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru received a letter from the children of Japan with an almost preposterous request: they had never seen a live elephant and wanted him to send one to them—which he did, starting India’s own brand of elephant diplomacy. Some gifts carry a mixed message, such as the dog Pushinka given to President Kennedy by Premier Khrushchev in 1961. As one of the puppies of the first dog to survive space travel, Strelka, Pushinka was a gesture of friendship but also a lingering, living reminder of the Soviets’ early victories in the space race. But pets can also be weaponized: witness the picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, reportedly fearful of dogs since one attacked her in 1995, looking distinctly uncomfortable when Russian President Vladimir Putin brought his large black Labrador Koni into a meeting at his summer residence in Sochi, Russia, in January 2007.