Interspecies Precarity in Indian Literature

This book explores how literary texts engage with the shared precarity of animals and people at the margins of colonial and postcolonial society, from 1858 to the present.

Synthesizing moral philosophy with postcolonial animal studies, the book contends that close attention to representations of suffering and injustice across species in Indian literature pushes us to confront our inability to truly know other human and non-human animals. Using Indian novels, short fiction, autobiography, colonial essays, and poetry, the book posits that our embodied and existential distance from human and non-human beings compels us to regard each other anew. Chapters include critical discussions of literary texts by colonial naturalists such as Bhanu Kapil, Indra Sinha, Arjun Dangle, Tania James, as well as other writers from India and the diaspora to develop historical and theoretical claims about Indian biopolitics.

Ultimately arguing that literature is indispensable for debates around race, precarity, and species in postcolonial thought, this book will be of interest to researchers and postgraduates in the field of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, critical animal studies and South Asian literature more broadly.