Chapter10 “A Foothold in the Sheer Wall of the Future” Extinction, Making Kin, and Imagining Peace in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Multispecies Communities: Losing Vultures and Sparrows

Ministry begins with a coda that narrates the extinction of white-backed vultures (Gyps bengalensis) from Indian cityscapes:

At magic hour, when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke. When the bats leave, the crows come home. Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years, have been wiped out. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac . . . given to cattle as muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works—worked—like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture bait. As cattle turned into better dairy machines . . . vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead.

Not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. There was so much else to look forward to.11

An important moment that positions Ministry as a critical reflection on neoliberalism is the reference to diclofenac and its connection with bovines. Bovines, despite their veneration as gau mata (mother cow) by the hardline Hindu right, are treated as Bestand (not sentient animals, but “dairy machines”). Their cyborg bodies (“chemically relaxed”) are nodes in a neoliberal production line geared toward satisfying increasing consumerist needs. The key point about diclofenac is the molecular and cellular rearrangement at the level of bovine corporeality, a form of violence that by reducing animal bodies to mere standing-reserve impacts existing multispecies relationships and creates conditions for non-peace. This molecular rearrangement leads cows to be mere Bestand, to be milked productively by humans. But this rearrangement has an even more deleterious underside: for vultures, diclofenac worked “like nerve gas.” Van Dooren writes: “In vulture bodies, diclofenac causes painful swelling, inflammation, and eventually kidney failure and death. Today, it is thought that 97 percent of the three main species of vulture in India (Gyps indicus, Gyps bengalensis, and Gyps tenuirostris) are gone.”12 Vultures, ancient beings that gesture toward an inhuman dimension of time prior to the era of anthropos—“custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years”—are almost wiped out.

There are other avian entities in this passage too. Ministry begins with scenes of leaving home (flying foxes) and homecoming (crows). But the crucial element is what follows the corvid homecoming—“Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing.” The “din” of the corvid homecoming cannot replace the silence in the wake of the disappearance of the sparrows. This blink-and-miss reference to sparrows, one of the most ordinary urban animals, may seem insignificant if we do not consider the illustrations on the last page and the back cover of the original hardcover edition of Ministry. Just as we exit the space of the plot, we notice a small illustration in the style of Mughal miniatures. This image is repeated in the back cover. Inset in these illustrations are a perched vulture and sparrow about to take flight. The extinction of vultures and sparrows opens Ministry; a visual representation of these disappeared avian figures close the text. What do we make of this double invocation of species loss, both narrative and visual, at the beginning and end? The answers, I suggest, lie in the material impact of species loss on extant lifeworlds depicted in the novel and the metaphorical significance of animals like vultures and sparrows in Ministry.

Polyvalent metaphorical associations circulate around vultures. Since scavenging is viewed as a debased activity, vultures have often been associated with filth and greed. Concurrently, the mention of “friendly birds” reminds us of cultural-religious figures in South Asia, like Jatayu or Sampati in the Ramayana—avian figures associated with nobility and wisdom.13 Anand Vivek Taneja also narrates how vultures are venerated as “saintly animals” by Muslims and Hindus alike in contemporary North India.14 On a material level, vultures’ disappearance has had ripple effects in multispecies communities in India. Vultures disposed of the carcasses of livestock. The death of the vulture in India, Samanth Subramanian writes, is “also the death of how we cope with death itself.”15 Disposing of carcasses, they also halted the spread of diseases like anthrax (the high acidic content in vulture stomachs naturally destroy pathogens).16 Moreover, what was once the task of vultures has now fallen on other scavenging species, like stray dogs and rats, leading to a significant population explosion in such species. The increase in stray dogs increases the risk of zoonotic diseases like rabies, while rats carry the danger of plague. Unsurprisingly, the rural populations and the urban poor are more vulnerable to such zoonotic outbreaks. Vultures have also existed symbiotically with humans in India.17 Van Dooren writes that

the mass death of vultures is having economic impacts on some of India’s poorest people. These people, often referred to . . . as “bone collectors,” have made a living gathering the dried bones of cattle and selling them to the fertilizer industry. In the absence of vultures, these bones are now often incompletely scavenged, requiring either extended periods of time before collection or for people to collect the bones themselves.18

While Van Dooren successfully shows the entangled pathways of humans and vultures in a multispecies lifeworld, this passage exposes the limits of his vision. He fails to mention that the “bone collectors” belong to Dalit communities. Caste remains an absent vector.

As contrasts, I provide two examples from Dalit autobiographies to consider the ambivalent relationships humans share with vultures in such multispecies lifeworlds structured by caste. Here is Hazari, a “bone-collector,” who was born and grew up in a village in Uttar Pradesh during colonial rule and belonged to the Chamar caste:

Our livelihood came from the work we did in town . . . disposing of the dead animals . . . we watched in the same way as the vulture watches, there is no difference between the vulture and the sweeper in this respect. As soon as . . . a cow, horse or goat died, we brought it to a field to skin it. We took the meat for cooking and eating, and the skin when dry to be sold. We left the carcass for the vultures to clean, and, when the vultures had finished, we collected the bones.19

And here is Daya Pawar, the author of the Marathi autobiography Baluta, who belongs to the Mahar caste:

News that an animal had died in the wilds did not take long to get to the Maharwada. It would pass along faster than the telexes of today. When the vultures and kite began to circle, like aeroplanes, the Mahars would locate the fallen animal. They would rush to get there before the birds picked the carcass clean.

How many vultures? Fifty or so. Their wings flapping, they would make strange sounds. . . . Annabhau Sathe has compared vultures to the velvet-jacketed sons of money-lenders. If you threw a stone at them, they’d flap and move away . . . but their greed drew them back to the body. They probably hated the Mahars. After all, we were snatching food from their claws.20

While my intention isn’t to conflate heterogenous experiences of caste, the figuration of vultures is crucial. In Hazari’s narrative, vultures and the “bone collectors” are presented in a relationship of symbiosis. In Pawar’s, the vulture-human relationship is ambivalent and tense. While the symbiotic element is present (vultures as a form of media—note the reference to telex and aeroplanes), the avians and humans compete for the same resources. Vultures orient the community toward the presence of carcasses. But they are also replete with negative metaphorical and anthropomorphic associations—they were like the “velvet-jacketed sons of money-lenders” who would move when a stone was thrown before greedily circling back. Vultures and humans make kin in a violence-laden relationship of interspecies competition over scarce resources.

On July 11, 2016, Vashram Sarvaiya, along with his brother Ramesh, his cousin Ashok and relative Bechar, were skinning a cow in Gujarat’s Una district when they were accosted by Hindutva gau-rakshaks (cow protectors) who accused them of killing the cow. The video of their public flogging went viral and forms part of an escalating pattern of violence by Hindutva forces against Dalits and Muslims in contemporary India. (Incidentally, India’s nearly $12-billion leather industry is heavily reliant on Dalit and Muslim labour. India is also a major exporter of beef.) The Una violence sparked massive protests, forcing Narendra Modi to condemn it after a substantial period. Reporter Maya Prabhu visited one of these skinning fields necessary for the leather industry in Chamaria Para in Rajkot, Gujarat. This skinning field full of animal carcasses, he writes,

is a tip called Sokra, and it is the most apocalyptic place I’ve ever seen. Hundreds of stray dogs swarm the rubbish embankments, and wade hip-deep in a sewage lake to cool off. Years ago there would have been vultures wheeling on updrafts, perching on sun-blanched rib-cages. A horde of vultures could pick clean a bull’s carcass in half an hour, say Chamaria Para’s older skinners. But India’s vulture population has been in crisis since the 1990s, so the carcass dump is a grim exhibition of the stages of decay.21

The horror-stricken “apocalyptic” attribution stems from class/caste-privilege emerging from an insulation from such locales and activities that Dalit communities have traditionally performed. Crucial here is the depiction of the skinning field as a necro-ecosystem replete with filth (“sewage lake”) and animal forms representing death and squalor (stray dogs, vultures). The description of the “apocalyptic exhibit of decay” notes the vultures’ disappearance and its impact in this entangled lifeworld. Earlier, vultures “wheeling on updrafts” would pick a carcass clean; their absence, mourned by the skinners, means that the skinning field appears like a museum of horrors for the savarna observer—a “grim exhibition” of various “stages of decay.”

While diclofenac has largely been blamed for the disappearance of vultures, the reasons for the disappearance of sparrows (Passer domesticus indicus) is a subject of debate. Over the last two decades, many states in India have reported declining sparrow populations. A 2015 study lists, in addition to “the increase of monoculture crops” and the “replacement of native plants with introduced species,” the following possible reasons for this decline: “Introduction of unleaded petrol which produces toxic compounds such as methyl nitrate, use of pesticides in agriculture, effect of electromagnetic radiation from cellphone towers, eradication of agricultural land, loss of nesting sites due to changes in urban building design, competition among other species of birds, declines in insect populations.22” Neoliberal urbanization has impacted the food supply of sparrows, who are voracious feeders. Moreover, straw, an essential component of sparrow habitations, has become scarce. Sparrows habitually roost and nest on tiled and thatched roofs, architectural aspects that are disappearing in contemporary urban structures.

In 2008, Time magazine named Mohammad Dilawar from Nashik, Maharashtra, as one of its “Heroes of the Environment.” Dilawar tracked Nashik’s sparrow decline and was responsible for building wooden houses for them. He began the Nature Forever society, which spreads awareness about sparrows and helps design strategies to conserve them as an umbrella species. Dilawar laments India’s exclusive focus on conserving charismatic species like tigers while ignoring small ones like sparrows. Comparing sparrows to the figure of the “common man” in Indian democracy, Dilawar says:

Even though the common man, his problems and his welfare is at the centre of the idea of democracy, he is always ignored. . . .

The same is the case with house sparrows. It’s only ignored because it’s common; it has little glamour as compared to other species. There is little awareness with regard to the ecological role it plays.23

Dilawar’s comment about sparrows being too “common” evokes familiar reactions to this animal, which has co-evolved in proximity with human beings. Sparrows are the very signifier of commonness, lying somewhere between the status of nature (wild) and culture (domestic). Kim Todd writes:

In a world fascinated by the predatory and breathtakingly beautiful, the sparrow is the type of the common and the humble. There is something generic about it. Picture the basic bird, the stripped-down, super-efficiency model, and a sparrow probably comes to mind. . . . The Hebrew word that gets translated into the English “sparrow” means “bird” in general. . . . The root of the old English spearwa means “flutterer.” Its Latin name, passer, was adopted as the root of “passerine,” the name for the largest order of birds.24

This attribution of commonness exists in other languages. In my first language, Assamese, sparrows are called ghorsirika or ghonsirika. Sirika means small animal, ghor means house, and ghon means thick, dense or regular, all attributions of fecundity, commonness and ordinariness, maybe one of the reasons it possesses “little glamour as compared to other species.”25

However, this apparent insignificance can be deceptive, as sparrows can be invasive species—indeed, the sparrow has often been treated as a symbol of “pestilence, urban ills and unwanted immigration.”26 They have been key to the disappearance of local species. Oftentimes, they are treated as vermin and pests (they are often considered avian “rats”), one of the most notorious instances being Mao Zedong’s war against sparrows as one of the four pests (sparrows, mosquitoes, flies and rats) that had to be eliminated. Shapiro writes that Mao’s order was an instance of “environmental authoritarianism” that had a massive and deleterious ecological impact.27 Designated as capitalist animals who did not work for the grain the peasantry’s hard labour produced, sparrows were killed en masse in the latter half of the 1950s. But their extermination had unanticipated effects, since besides grain, they also consumed insects. Locusts and other insects destroyed crops in the following seasons and contributed to the great famine in China (1959–1961). Similar fears have also been evinced about sparrows’ disappearance in India. Since sparrows serve as easily available food for birds of prey, their decline also leads to declining predatory bird populations. They are critical to seed dispersal, thus impacting agriculture. The dull edge of extinction rears its head again as the loss of one species has ripple effects across a lifeworld.28

Geographers Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel write: “animals have been so indispensable to the structure of human affairs and so tied up with our visions of progress and the good life that we have been unable to . . . fully see them. Their very centrality prompted us to simply look away and to ignore their fates.”29 Following Wolch and Emel’s lead, let us return to the last sentences from Ministry’s opening coda. While this segment refers specifically to vultures’ disappearance, it also applies indirectly to the humble, ordinary sparrow. The linear teleologies of “progress” and “development” in biopolitical modernity impel us to look forward at the seemingly arrow-like progress of time. Everywhere animals disappear, but their “very centrality” prompts us to “simply look away and to ignore their fates.” This looking-away is accentuated by the ordinariness of animals like sparrows, which exist largely as background noise. But the zoopolitical also bleeds into the biopolitical in Ministry. Animal extinction is entangled in intimate ways with people rendered disposable and invisible.

Disposable Humanity: The Metaphorical Bleed Between Species-Extinction and Precarious Humans

Ministry’s bleed between the zoopolitical and the biopolitical is not a simple comparison between humans and states of animalization; instead, metaphorization operates at two levels: first, the dull edge of extinction reveals the severe impoverishment of multispecies lifeworlds over longer durations, and, second, it shows a connection between species disappearance and the status of disposable humans who are marginalized and instrumentally treated as Bestand in the neoliberal city.30

The recent exodus of migrant workers from cities like Delhi during the COVID-19 crisis emphasizes their disposability and treatment as Bestand. The utter lack of any plans for amelioration, the freezing of payments, social ostracization, and forcing migrants to walk up to 2,000 miles back home are sordid reminders of this unfolding human catastrophe.31 However, treatment of migrant workers as a standing-reserve, utilized and disposed at will, is no flash in the pan. In the immediate context of neoliberalization, we must turn our gaze back to the clamour to make Delhi a “world-class” city, which has steadily gained ground in the last two decades.32 The 2010 Commonwealth Games are significant here, as they led to massive investments in infrastructure (including operationalizing the Delhi metro), massively rising consumption patterns, increasing automobility, and gentrification, which included the proliferation of shopping malls.

Another increasingly prominent post-liberalization dimension was the rise of what Amita Baviskar calls “bourgeoisie environmentalism”—judicial activism against problems like pollution prompted by upper-middle-class citizens aimed at enhancing elite lifestyles.33 This is congruent with “banishing the city’s working-class population out of sight, their labour available yet invisible.” This occurred in various ways, including closing “hazardous” industries, laying off workers, and demolishing slums. Lalit Batra writes: “The ‘legal and aesthetic pollution’ caused by working-class settlements and factories, according to the idea of ‘bourgeoisie environmentalism,’ denied the ‘citizens’ (read property owners) their legitimate rights in the city. So the idea of reclamation of the rights of the ‘citizenry’ got directly linked to the dispossession of the working classes.”34 Around one million people were displaced in Delhi between 1998 and 2000. The resettlement colonies were “little more than planned slums” lacking basic amenities and often located near hazardscapes. The Bhalswa resettlement colony, for instance, is right next to a landfill where toxins leak into groundwater. Furthermore, the evictees either lost their livelihood or incurred more expenses in commuting from their resettlement colonies to their places of employment.

The first connection instituted between “falling people” and urban avians in Ministry is in the politics of visibility—to extend Berger, everywhere animals and people disappear, but they are hardly seen. The critique of such disappearance of precarious beings, both human and animal, in the face of spectacles carried by the neoliberal electronic media is evident in Ministry, when Roy focuses on the anti-corruption protests of 2011 spearheaded by Anna Hazare, referred to bombastically as India’s “second freedom struggle.” Most of these protests occurred in a popular space of gathering: the area near the medieval-era observatory, Jantar Mantar. The televisual media widely covered these protests. But the same area was also the locus of other protests by what Roy calls “falling people” like the slum dwellers, political dissidents and victims of catastrophes like the Bhopal Gas Disaster.35 The narrator describes the coverage of the protests by the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared from Kashmir, occurring simultaneously with the spectacle of India’s “second freedom struggle.” Thus, “No TV camera pointed at that banner, not even by mistake. Most of those engaged in India’s Second Freedom Struggle felt nothing less than outrage at the idea of freedom for Kashmir and the Kashmiri women’s audacity.”36 These simultaneous protests are willingly ignored by participants in the epic, linear temporality of progress underpinning the “second freedom struggle.” The “falling people” of various hues become background noise, easily ignored, much like the extinction events that initiate Ministry.

Ministry also makes specific comparisons between “falling people” and sparrows and vultures. Recall that Dilawar compares sparrows to the “common man” of Indian democracy—incidentally, a figure rooted in the middle class with a long representational history, from the iconic cartoons of R. K. Laxman to the formation of the populist Aam Aadmi Party (Aam Aadmi means “common man”) during the 2011 anti-corruption protests.37 But while the semantic range of “common man” can be capacious, Ministry emphasizes that populations that have lost their precarious foothold on history fall out of this category to occupy a different world. This distinction is emphasized later, when the denizens of Jannat travel, or rather in another deployment of an avian metaphor, “glide” across Delhi:

They glided through dense forests of apartment buildings, past gigantic concrete amusement parks, bizarrely designed wedding halls and towering cement statues as high as skyscrapers. . . . They drove over an impossible-to-pee-on flyover as wide as a wheat field, with twenty lanes of cars whizzing over it and towers of steel and glass growing on either side of it. But when they took an exit road off it, they saw that the world underneath the flyover was an entirely different one—an unpaved, unplanned, unlit, unregulated, wild and dangerous one, in which buses, trucks, bullocks, rickshaws, cycles, handcarts and pedestrians jostled for survival. One kind of world flew over another kind of world without troubling to stop and ask the time of day.38

The neoliberal city’s division into two worlds existing on separate planes, one flying over the other, is anticipated in chapter 3, when one of the major characters, the hijra (intersex) Anjum, stares into a TV camera and says, “We’ve come from there . . . from the other world (doosri duniya).”39 This chapter goes back to Delhi’s gentrification prior to hosting the Commonwealth Games. In the midst of the celebratory din surrounding neoliberal gentrification, aided by bulldozers that “could flatten history and stack it up like building material,” millions of urban precariat “were being moved, but no one knows where to.”40 “Surplus” people, not the “common man” dear to Indian democracy, were losing their access to the commons. The comparison with sparrows is explicit:

On the city’s industrial outskirts, in the miles of bright swamp tightly compacted with refuse and colorful plastic bags, where the evicted had been “re-settled,” the air was chemical and the water poisonous. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from the thick green ponds. Surplus mothers perched like sparrows on the debris of what used to be their homes and sang their surplus children to sleep.41

The plight of these “surplus” people, resettled in the toxic hazardscapes at the city’s margins, is compared via simile to the plight of sparrows precariously perched in the new metropolis. Both are victims of neoliberal gentrification—the disappearance of sparrows serves as a mirror to the invisibility of the surplus people.

Vultures are linked to the representation of caste especially through the portrayal of Dayachand/Saddam. In “The Doctor and the Saint,” Roy says:

The utopianism that Ambedkar is charged with was very much part of the tradition of the anti-caste movement. The poetry of the Bhakti movement is replete with it. Unlike the nostalgia-ridden, mythical village republics in Gandhi’s “Ram Rajya” . . . the subaltern Bhakti saints sang of towns. They sang of towns in timeless places, where Untouchables would be liberated from ubiquitous fear, from unimaginable indignity and endless toil on other peoples’ land.42

Ministry has one major Dalit character, who moves from neighbouring Badshahpur to Delhi: Saddam Hussain/Dayachand (Dayachand takes the name Saddam Hussain after seeing a video of the former Iraqi ruler stoically facing death). Dayachand moves to Delhi because his father, who belonged to the Chamar caste, was lynched for the “crime” of skinning the carcass of a cow. Later, as the denizens of Jannat indulge in some flânerie at the swanky Nando Mall, Saddam/Dayachand reveals that it was constructed on a road neighbouring wheat fields where his father was lynched. The link between caste violence and neoliberal gentrification is explicitly instituted. Moreover, as a controlled, postmodern space, the mall signifies a hub of species-loneliness far away from the multispecies lifeworlds Hazari and Daya Pawar describe.

Furthermore, vultures and their visual-olfactory role return through the repeated mention of smell in Ministry. In order to appreciate the visual-olfactory aspect of Roy’s work, it is necessary to consider the olfactory trope in a broader context. Maya Prabhu writes: “Chamaria Para, ‘the leather-making area,’ is signposted only by the stink. Part rancid, oily ram’s wool and part rotting meat, the odour hangs diffuse in the air along the shale alleys and thickens at the open doorways of ramshackle warehouses.”43 Joel Lee argues that caste functions as a “spatial-sensory order” very often predicated through the foregrounding of smell. His term “olfactory map” describes how in caste-geographies “odorants operate [to] underscore the sensuousness of space and the spatiality of sensory perception.”44 For the savarna Prabhu, “stink” is a spatial signpost that alerts her to Dalit presence and habitations, but as she proceeds, smells orient the subject away from the sources. This differs from Pawar’s (Baluta) and Dayachand/Saddam’s (Ministry) descriptions of finding dead carcasses. Saddam says that the stink orients them toward the carcass: “We find the dead cow easily. . . . It’s always easy, you just have to know the art of walking straight into the stink.”45 The upper castes, however, “all held their noses because of the stink.”46 The phenomenologies of smell, predicated on caste subject-positions, differently orients inhalers to olfactory sources.

As Lee argues in his essay, such instances of living near malodorous landscapes are examples of “environmental casteism” that have deleterious effects on residents’ health and psyche.47 In Ministry, Roy’s comment about disposable people precariously perched like sparrows refers to this form of “slow violence.”48 However, the olfactory plays a subversive role later, as “stink” becomes a subterfuge to smuggle Tilo, one of Ministry’s central characters, and the foundling infant Udaya Jebeen away from the police. Saddam/Dayachand says:

He would come with a friend who drove a pickup for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi [MCD]. They had to pick up the carcass of a cow that had died—burst—from eating too many plastic bags at the main garbage dump in Hauz Khas. . . . It was foolproof plan, he said. “No policeman ever stops an MCD garbage truck. . . . If you keep your window open you’ll be able to smell us before you see us.”49

In multispecies communities where humans and vultures once lived in proximity, smell may possess a different valence than for upper-caste/middle class inhalers. The upper-caste subject’s act of holding their nose is not only a mode of orienting away from biological matter but also a way of marking differences between a “pure” notion of self, opposed to the “polluting” presence of the caste-other. The implication is that objects of disgust/pollution make the subject pull away.50 However, from the obverse angle, the Dalit character uses this same “stink” as a guerilla tactic as he navigates urban space. This leads to a crucial plot twist as a new restoried world—a thriving multispecies community in Jannat—comes into being as Miss Jebeen is smuggled under cover of night and stink. Miss Jebeen becomes a beacon of hope and futurity at the end; so the act of “smuggling” her under the cover of darkness and stink leads us directly to the novel’s utopian closure.

Making Kin: Multispecies Communities in Ministry

Roy says in an interview about Ministry:

The sprawling structure of this book . . . it’s almost like looking at a city whose plans are ambushed. It has unauthorized colonies and illegal entries. People come together in such places.

. . . In a city, you can’t walk past a person without wondering who he or she is. . . . All these people have stories. They’ve come from different places. And this allows them to share their experiences and create a form of solidarity that could not exist in isolated villages.51

If bourgeoisie environmentalism and the desire to make Delhi into a “world-class” city necessitates forms of rationalized, exclusionary planning, places of gathering like Jannat ambush such attempts at standardization and urban “beautification.” What elevates Ministry from a standard compassionate look at the fates of surplus people who are animalized and brutalized is this attempt at imagining a utopian form of being-in-common offering lines of flight from the neoliberal city’s spatial apartheid. Moreover, the distinctive feature of Jannat (Paradise) as a utopian space is that it is where humans and non-humans make kin. Early on, Anjum says about Jannat:

Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo (a stray dog) . . . you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. . . . This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people.52

By the end, Jannat becomes a refuge for other falling “people,” including sexual minorities; castaways; political dissenters; various injured or abandoned creatures, including dogs, goats and crows; and Tilo and Miss Jebeen, both of whom are hiding from the law. If “falling people” become part of easily ignored background noise during spectacles in popular gathering places like Jantar Mantar, Jannat represents an alternative gathering space under the radar of the vacuous bourgeoisie, who shrilly scream about progress and world-class cities. In such alternative spaces, ruined, vulnerable and broken lives are salvaged and cared for, like Saddam’s injured crow. Furthermore, echoing Haraway’s point about “oddkin,” Jebeen’s “family” is a quintessential queer collectivity. Jebeen’s parentage is revealed at the end—her mother, Maase Revathy, was a brutalized Naxalite cadre who was likely killed (her father’s identity remains unknown, probably one of the security personnel who had gangraped Revathy). But Jebeen now has a family full of “falling people.” This is not the stereotypical restitution of heterosexual coupling at the closure but a queer and contingent collectivity making kin. As they read Revathy’s letter,

Each of the listeners recognized, in their own separate ways, something of themselves and their own stories, their own Indo-Pak, in the story of this unknown, faraway woman who was no longer alive. It made them close ranks around Miss Jebeen the Second like a formation of trees, or adult elephants—an impenetrable fortress in which she, unlike her biological mother, would grow up protected and loved.53

These arboreal and animal similitudes gesture at alternative forms of making kin beyond biogenetic genealogies.

Polyvalent arboreal and animal metaphors are also intricately woven with the portrayal of Jannat, formerly a space of death. We get a brief glimpse of the decrepit graveyard from Tilo’s perspective, just after her return from Kashmir. When she returns years later with Miss Jebeen, she could not recognize it, because it “was no longer a derelict place for the forgotten dead.”54 The reason for the makeover of this space is Anjum, who after her exit from Khwabgah, the hijras’ living space, lives for months in the graveyard as a “ravaged, feral spectre, out-haunting every resident djinn and spirit.”55 Anjum moves there after the trauma of witnessing the 2002 Gujarat riots. Her transition from a form of death-in-life to a renewed sense of life is initiated by a vertiginous shift of perspective where she becomes like a tree: “She lived in the graveyard like a tree. At dawn she saw the crows off and welcomed the bats home. At dusk she did the opposite. Between shifts she conferred with the ghosts of vultures that loomed in her high branches.”56

A “ravaged spectre” communes with the ghosts of extinct animals—their absence is like the lingering pain of an “amputation.” These ghostly communions and her sense of herself as a “mehfil, a gathering . . . of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing” slowly transports her back to the realm of the living. When asked about the funerary rituals for hijras, she retorts with statements rich with symbolic and intertextual resonances: “Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on their bodies in the streets?”57 These statements take us back intertextually to Sophie Mol’s questions in God of Small Things besides referencing the death of the friendly vultures which very few people had noticed.58

As Anjum returns to the domain of the “living,” she begins squatting in the graveyard. She builds a one-room tin shack, adds rooms to this rudimentary structure, and rents it out to people who had fallen off the grid. With Saddam’s arrival, Jannat functions as a funeral parlour, with a criterion that Jannat Funeral Services “would only bury those whom the graveyards and imams of the duniya (world) had rejected.”59 Not only living people or ancient birds who had fallen off the grid but also dead people who did not belong to any grid. Non-human inhabitants like Biroo—“a beagle who had either escaped from or outlived its purpose in a pharmaceutical testing lab”—and Comrade Laali, a red-headed mongrel who gave birth to five puppies and as a “mother” was a great “friend” of Tilo’s, also live in Jannat.60 The uniqueness of this multispecies duniya with multiple modes of making kin is signalled to Tilo when she first arrives with Jebeen: “Anjum spoke as though it was a world that Tilo was familiar with, a world that everybody ought to be familiar with; in fact, the only world worth being familiar with.”61 If the duniya (world) outside was rapidly growing exclusionary, this doosri duniya (other world) was a new form of world-making. The graveyard had turned into “a Noah’s ark of injured animals.” The soil of the graveyard, “a compost pit of ancient provenance,” had become a thriving vegetable garden. Tilo began a “people’s school.”62 A new commons came into being.

One of the most important symbols of utopian hope that gestures toward alternative futurities is the infant, Miss Udaya Jebeen. Hannah Arendt writes, “action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew.”63 If mortality is the central category of metaphysics, natality is the political category par excellence as, through newness, it is oriented toward action. It is unsurprising that many global cultural works use natality and the promise of reproductive futurity as the herald for hope and the possibility of a new politics, especially during closures. Ministry follows this utopian narrative script where Miss Jebeen ties up many of the significations that cross-hatch the deployment of terms like “life” and “death,” simultaneously facilitating the gathering of a queer collectivity.

Miss Jebeen, who grows up in a graveyard, is named after another Miss Jebeen—the Kashmiri militant Musa’s daughter—who was killed in a protest in Kashmir and lies in another graveyard in Srinagar. At one point, Musa says that in Kashmir, “the dead will live forever, and the living are only dead people, pretending to be alive.”64 Musa’s comments about living in Kashmir as a state of entrapment in an eternal present, and of death as a mode of escaping and surviving beyond the state of colonial occupation, are relevant to current necropolitical conditions in the Indian-occupied state. Kashmir, often figured as Jannat in the Indian popular and cinematic imaginary, has become a veritable graveyard. In her essay on Ministry’s representation of political and ecological “ruin-worlds” in both Delhi and Kashmir, Rituparna Mitra writes: “In the Kashmir sections . . . we find a compelling engagement with the breakdown of all life into waste by the neoliberal and necropolitical state. Recalling Fanon’s ‘combat breathing,’ living and dying take place under noxious state violence, which seeps into and makes the environment unsustainable and toxic.”65 Conversely, the graveyard, Jannat, in Delhi’s Shajahanabad, becomes a space of life where, as Tilo says in the novel, “the battered angels in the graveyard that kept watch over their battered charges held open the doors between worlds (illegally, just a crack), so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle, like guests at the same party.” Life became “less determinate” and death “more conclusive” in this space of multispecies gathering.66

But “reproductive futurity” doesn’t have the last word.67 Sticking to her ecocentric vision of human–non-human entanglements ranging from the biggest to the smallest beings, Roy ends with an image of Guih Kyom, the dung beetle, “wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell.”68 Entomological studies show that the humble dung beetle may save the world by reducing the scale of global warming. By aerating cow dung pats, dung beetles significantly reduce methane release into the atmosphere.69 Guih Kyom, defending the world with his legs in the air, offset by a miniature image of sparrows and vultures watching like guardian angels—maybe “things would turn out all right in the end.”70 This is Roy’s most powerful imagining of “peace with the Other”—conjuring forms of entanglement, being-in-common and making kin in marginal spaces and ruin-worlds.

The editors of this volume write that “interrelationality among humans and between humans and non-humans is a moral as well as an existential concern.” The imagination of a multispecies utopian space like Jannat reveals the moral and existential concerns of Ministry. Parsing Erich Fromm, the editors of this volume suggest in their introduction that peace in the Other emerges “through being in solidarity, being joyful, and being creative as opposed to acts of peacelessness rooted in our desire to acquire, where we objectify our world and thus see things as distinct from one another, as discrete entities to possess, use, throw away, or even kill.” The Heideggerian notion of Bestand emphasizes the desire to acquire and objectify through processes of Othering humans and non-humans. In contrast, complex, located actions of making kin through processes of solidarity, joy and creativity in lifeworlds of multispecies flourishing like Jannat reveals how peace can emerge not by an obliteration of Otherness, but through acts and practices of learning to live with multiple Others.

Notes

1. 1 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.

2. 2 Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). The quotation in the epigraph is from p. 55.

3. 3 Jason W. Moore, “Introduction: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: Kairos, 2016), 6. Neoliberalization in India is usually dated to the opening of the markets post then-finance minister Manmohan Singh’s epochal Union budget in 1991, although shifts appeared in the 1980s during Rajiv Gandhi’s regime as well.

4. 4 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015), 25. For Berger’s comment, see “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking (London: Vintage, 1992), 26.

5. 5 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 17.

6. 6 Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 5.

7. 7 Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 12.

8. 8 Thom Van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, and Matthew Chrulew, “Introduction: Telling Extinction Stories,” in Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations, ed. Thom Van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, and Matthew Chrulew (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 3.

9. 9 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2.

10. 10 Roy, Ministry, 442.

11. 11 Roy, Ministry, 5.

12. 12 Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 47.

13. 13 For a description of Sampati’s sacrifice that prolonged life and drove death away, see Samanth Subramanian, “Vultures,” Granta 153, November 19, 2020, https://granta.com/vultures/.

14. 14 Anand Vivek Taneja, “Saintly Animals: The Shifting Moral and Ecological Landscapes of North India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 2 (2015): 204–21.

15. 15 Subramanian, “Vultures” (unpaginated). Parsi funerary rituals, in which corpses are exposed atop dakhmas, depended on vultures to remove the flesh. This practice has changed recently with the extinction of vultures.

16. 16 Thom Van Dooren, Vulture (London: Reaktion, 2011), 40.

17. 17 For a sympathetic appraisal of local attitudes to the disappearance of vultures in North India from the standpoint of kinship and moral aspiration, see Taneja, “Saintly Animals,” 216–20.

18. 18 Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 57.

19. 19 Hazari, quoted in Subhadra Mitra Channa, “A Reading of ‘Untouchable’: The Autobiography of an Indian Outcaste,” in Life as a Dalit: Views from the Bottom on Caste in India, ed. Subhadra Mitra Channa and Joan Melcher (New Delhi: Sage, 2013), 73.

20. 20 Daya Pawar, Baluta, trans. Jerry Pinto (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2015), 73–74.

21. 21 Maya Prabhu, “India’s Dalit Cattle Skinners Share Stories of Abuse,” Al Jazeera, August 25, 2016, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/08/india-dalit-cattle-skinners-share-stories-abuse-160816122203107.html.

22. 22 Manjula Menon, M. Prashanthi Devi, and Rangaswamy Mohanraj, The Decline of Passer domesticus in India and Conservation Priorities (Chennai: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015), 6–7.

23. 23 Rama Devi Menon, “A Voice for the Sparrow,” The Hindu, May 13, 2010, https://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/A-voice-for-the-sparrow/article16566861.ece.

24. 24 Kim Todd, Sparrow (London: Reaktion, 2012), 7.

25. 25 Todd, Sparrow, 8.

26. 26 Todd, Sparrow, 8.

27. 27 Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and Environment in Revolutionary China (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17.

28. 28 In his essay on Muslim ecological “ethics of the garden,” Taneja writes about the ambivalence displayed by the anticolonial figure Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad toward the common sparrow during his time as a political prisoner in Ahmadnagar Fort. Unlike the “affective inspiration” he derives from bulbuls, Azad’s initial reaction to the ubiquitous sparrows with whom he shares his cell is one of antagonism. It eventually turns into a form of living with otherness encapsulated by the Urdu word sulh, which means both accommodation and peace and signifies a modality via which the self is transformed. Azad merges the generalizing ethics of “bagh men jane ki adab” (the ethics of entering the garden) with a concern of living with and alongside the particularity of individual sparrows. See Anand Vivek Taneja, “Sharing a Room with Sparrows: Maulana Azad and Muslim Ecological Thought,” in Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia: Places and Practices of Power in Changing Environments, ed. Riamsara Kuyakanon, Hildegard Diemberger, and David Sneath (London: Routledge, 2022), 228–42.

29. 29 Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, “Preface,” in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, ed. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (London: Verso, 1998), xi.

30. 30 For a recent comparative study of species extinction and genocide, see Susan McHugh, Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2019).

31. 31 See, for instance, Navmee Goregaonkar, “Deserted, Demeaned and Distressed: The Lot of Migrant Workers in the Delhi-Haryana Region,” The Wire, May 29, 2020, https://thewire.in/rights/migrant-workers-delhi-haryana-lockdown

32. 32 For a study of Delhi as a “world class city,” see D. Asher Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

33. 33 Amita Baviskar, Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi (New Delhi: Sage, 2020), 4.

34. 34 Lalit Batra, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Slum Dwellers in ‘World-Class’ Delhi,” in Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in the Megacity, ed. Bharati Chaturvedi (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010), 27.

35. 35 Roy, Ministry, 88.

36. 36 Roy, Ministry, 119.

37. 37 For discussions of the “common man,” see Christel Devadawson, Out of Line: Cartoons, Caricature and Contemporary India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014).

38. 38 Roy, Ministry, 415.

39. 39 Roy, Ministry, 114.

40. 40 Roy, Ministry, 102–3.

41. 41 Roy, Ministry, 104.

42. 42 Arundhati Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate” in My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction (London: Haymarket Books, 2019), 697.

43. 43 Prabhu, “India’s Dalit Cattle Skinners.”

44. 44 Joel Lee, “Odor and Order: How Caste Is Inscribed in Space and Sensoria,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37, no. 3 (December 2017): 470.

45. 45 Roy, Ministry, 92.

46. 46 Roy, Ministry, 92.

47. 47 Lee, “Odor,” 486.

48. 48 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 268.

49. 49 Roy, Ministry, 268.

50. 50 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 85.

51. 51 Ratik Asokan, “The Air We Breathe: A Conversation with Arundhati Roy,” The Nation, July 17, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-air-we-breathe-a-conversation-with-arundhati-roy/.

52. 52 Roy, Ministry, 88.

53. 53 Roy, Ministry, 432.

54. 54 Roy, Ministry, 355.

55. 55 Roy, Ministry, 67.

56. 56 Roy, Ministry, 7.

57. 57 Roy, Ministry, 9.

58. 58 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things: A Novel (New York and London: Random House, 2008), 328.

59. 59 Roy, Ministry, 84.

60. 60 Roy, Ministry, 87.

61. 61 Roy, Ministry, 310.

62. 62 Roy, Ministry, 405

63. 63 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9.

64. 64 Roy, Ministry, 362.

65. 65 Rituparna Mitra, “Precarious Duniyas in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Life, Death and Repair in ‘Ruin-Worlds’,” Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2022): 380–98 at 385.

66. 66 Roy, Ministry, 404.

67. 67 For reproductive futurity, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

68. 68 Roy, Ministry, 444.

69. 69 Atte Pentilla, Eleanor M. Slade, Asko Simojoki, Terhi Riutta, Kari Minniken, and Tomas Roslin. “Quantifying Beetle-Mediated Effects on Gas Fluxes from Dung Pats,” Plos One. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0071454, August 07, 2013.

70. 70 Roy, Ministry, 444.