Animating ideologies of caste in the lively city

Toward the end of my seven-year stint living in the city of Delhi, I became convinced that a rat was living inside my motorcycle. I took the motorcycle to a mechanic, who was skeptical of my claim until he opened up my vehicle and a rat jumped out and scurried away, leaving the inside of the motorcycle full of frayed and chewed wires.

Such quotidian interactions with other species, the ways they both contribute to and interrupt the circuits of urban life, form the empirical core of Mann Barua’s Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology. Addressing the lack of attention to animal lives, intentions and lifeworlds in mainstream urban studies (or “major theory” in Barua’s Deleuzian terminology), the book foregrounds two cities and three species: Delhi and London, linked by histories of imperialism and (other-than-human) migration; and macaques, cows and parakeets. Barua (2023) aims to return “aliveness” to cities, which is neglected in the “impoverished urban ontology” of major theory (p. 2). Attention to this aliveness not only brings us closer to the actual, lived realities of the postcolonial city, it also, argues Barua, produces a “different grammar of the urban” (p. 3) that can generate new political possibilities. Barua builds this grammar by creating “productive frictions” (p. 6) between posthumanism, postcolonialism and critical political economy; the book inventively uses each broad school of thought to question, critique and expand the others. So, for instance, the relative inattention to power relations in much “new materialist” literature is addressed with recourse to postcolonial and heterodox Marxist critiques, while not losing sight of the animating possibilities that attention to matter (or more pointedly, urban materials) can bring.

Within the framework of this multivocal theoretical conversation, two methodological choices give the book its particular power. The first is to take animals themselves as “participant observers” (Barua, 2023, p. 198) in the urban milieu, along with the humans with whom they must be attuned to sustain their existence. Following cows on their ambling, but quite purposeful, walks through Delhi, or tracing parakeets in their flights through London, Barua convincingly shows how animals are active actors in – and not merely passive witnesses to – urban infrastructure and economy. He further shows how humans and non-human animals become attuned to each other in a mutual process of learning, recognition and exchange, each shaping the behavior and outlook of the other.

The second methodological choice is to link Delhi and London. Endorsing Paul Gilroy’s (2004) assertion that London is self-evidently a postcolonial city, Barua recognizes the distinct trajectory of each city, but rejects a false binary of (idealized) Global North and (imitative) Global South, tying them together in a generative way rarely seen in urban scholarship. Key to this is Barua’s choice to highlight a research strategy developed in Delhi – namely, to focus on commensality, here specifically referring to humans feeding animals – and apply it in London.

This allows Barua to tell the remarkable story of parakeets’ presence in London, in all its ethological and socio-political complexity. Here, the postcolonial element of Barua’s critique is at its strongest. He draws out the “biotic nativism” of the (largely white) birdwatchers and scientists who fear the “invasion” of “exotic” green parakeets (imported from India, amongst other countries), displacing their xenophobia onto the animal kingdom. Barua uses the neologism of “ethnomorphism” to describe “the projection of ethnic identities onto other than humans” (Barua, 2023, p. 154). It is not just that biotic nativists mistakenly apply human biases to their ecologies; Barua, through, his critical engagement with evolutionary biology and ethology, shows how biotic nativism occludes the actual processes through which parakeet subspecies diverge and converge, including, in contemporary times, as a response to urban infrastructure.

The traffic – both literal and intellectual – between Delhi and London is extremely generative and could be extended even further. For instance, what would “ethnomorphism” look like in Indian context? The reader gets some hints of this when Barua describes macaques’ connection to both the natural realm and the supernatural through their association with the deity Hanuman, an association emphasized by astrologers who instruct seekers to feed the monkeys to correct the “malefic effects of certain planets” (Barua, 2023, p. 74). As Barua notes,

Such an ecology pries open the need to read the city through a range of other grammars than relying solely on those that derive from western ontology while remaining aware that astrology is a casteist practice resting on its own set of hierarchies and divisions (Barua, 2023, p. 75).

This raises a pressing question: if not a western one, what is the ontology into which monkeys – as well as cows – are being interpolated? A casteist one, Barua suggests, but the implications of this suggestion are left unexplored. One path of exploration is to put Barua’s text in conversation with foundational as well as contemporary anti-caste texts that critique Brahmanical (upper-caste) ontologies, and their projection of hierarchy onto the very fabric of the cosmos. Tellingly, the term jati can mean both caste and species; it is a term of categorization and differentiation, tied to an ideology that organizes both human communities and animal species in an “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt,” to adapt the terminology of the anti-caste leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1947/1990, p. 26). Given the casteist ontologies that permeate the Indian urban milieu, Barua’s methodological focus on commensality – prohibitions on which form a classical part of the caste system – could be extended to explore the policing, and possibility of transcending, both inter- and intra-human hierarchies.

Attention to the lived realities and animating ideologies of caste could also add new dimensions to the political economy debates in which Barua intervenes. The final chapters of Lively Cities focus on the political economy of small-scale dairies in Delhi. Barua, drawing on the heterodox economic thought of Aditya Nigam (2014) and Kalyan Sanyal (2007), suggests that small dairies form an outside to capital, in part because they rely on family labor as opposed to wage labor, and rely on waste collected by waste workers (rather than commercial feed) to sustain their cattle. Barua, in his careful analysis of the functioning of these dairies, argues that they can lead to lines of flight away from capitalist exploitation, which overly-universalizing (largely western) narratives of capitalism occlude. In this, Barua joins a chorus of thoughtful critiques of monolithic, teleological characterizations of capitalism, especially in postcolonial settings.

However, as even voices within this chorus have asserted – including, in different contexts, theorists like Vinay Gidwani (2008), Harry Harootunian (2015) and Shankar Gopalakrishnan (2013) – drawing a sharp line between an “inside” and “outside” of capital can minimize the ways in which non-waged work, and various forms of petty commodity production, are nonetheless tied to capitalist market forces. The small-scale dairies, while not necessarily employing wage labor, are nonetheless disciplined by forces of capitalist competition, as they find themselves in the midst of commodity chains, selling their milk at competitive prices to – in the case Barua describes – sweet shops. If the line between the “inside” and “outside” of capital is blurred by a complex articulation – in Stuart Hall’s (1980) sense of the term – of various labor arrangements, it becomes even more complicated by the overlaying of caste norms and class relations. As Gidwani (2008) and others have argued, capital is often parasitic on the logic of caste, channeling its hierarchical energies into market-based divisions of labor. Barua describes a commodity chain in which waste collected by waste workers is sold to pastoralists, who feed it to cows whose milk is then sold to sweet shops. While the caste of the sweet shop owners is not given in Barua’s account, the waste workers and pastoralists both belong to castes whose work has traditionally been in those two domains, respectively, in a hierarchy then transposed onto the contemporary economy.

While this transposition is not the main focus of Barua’s argument, the book does initiate a critique of the “rampant casteism that dehumanizes those considered low in its racialized hierarchies” (Barua, 2023, p. 263) and the way this interacts with waste-work economies in particular. Barua also expands this insight to include non-human animals, who find themselves trapped in the “eviscerations” imposed by a highly unequal urban economy and ecology. Further theorization of the casteized capitalism that imprisons human and non-human alike in these inequalities could give a deeper understanding of the terms and the stakes of a more just urban lifeworld.

Lively Cities, through the productive frictions of its theoretical framework, and through its novel methodological choices, is a welcome invitation to both theorize and create a different kind of city. The reflections above, perhaps generating more frictions, represent just one possible response to this invitation. Many more figures could join the cow and monkey in accounts of the postcolonial city, including those less revered in Hinduism – the buffalo, for instance, or the pig, or the goat, or the rat that gnaws through vehicular circuitry. Pushing these lines of enquiry can only make the city more lively, more animated, more attuned to current injustices and incipient visions for new urban ontologies.