Animal Intimacies offers sparkling exploration of animal-human relationship

Few who read Jim Corbett’s remarkable book on the leopard of Rudraprayag will have forgotten the story of Putli and the goat. She and her four-legged companion walked through hills and forests grown men were scared of because of the man-eater on the prowl.

As much as the animals, Corbett brought people alive, if in an old-fashioned white landlord hunter’s point of view. His stories are not only about tigers or leopards but about those whose living and working spaces are incomplete sans animals, wild and tame.

Though much has changed, much abides. India is a country that abounds with animal life: goats and sheep, monkeys and wild boars. The legislators of Uttarakhand debate what to do about monkeys that feed on crops. Delhi’s government traps a leopard from a biodiversity restoration site and puts it in a zoo.

Much recent research such as that by the great Frans de Waal (Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?) is emphatic on one point. Many emotions and sensibilities once presumed to be uniquely human are shared by several animals.

Ubiquitous as they are, the relations of these four-legged or feathered creatures to human counterparts is issue for reflection and study. One perennial question is whether there are ways of relating to animals by those who live close to them that the sciences, both humanistic disciplines and the natural sciences, ought to probe more seriously.

Animal Intimacies does more than just enlighten. The prose sparkles simply due to the simplicity of the telling. That said, knowledge sits lightly on the sleeve here.

A full declaration is due, for this reviewer has known the author for over a decade. This is a book based on a doctoral dissertation with which I am familiar.

We tend to think of animals (and ourselves) in binaries. Radhika Govindrajan’s books explores the many layers and dimensions of the animal-human relationship. Boars do destroy crops, but the patterns of foraging have changed as men leave the hills for jobs in the plains and fields are not tended, leaving undergrowth for the often huge animals. British-era laws protected game over people. Her work finds fascinating lore about how the marauders are descended from individual animals let loose in those days.

Animal Intimacies: Beastly love in the Himalayas; Author: Radhika Govindrajan; Publisher: Random House; Pages: 240; Price: Rs 599

 

A much more fascinating story unfolds with leopards. These are big cats that prey on goats and sheep. Again, her detailed and deeply sympathetic ethnography uncovers not one but many kinds of leopards. Evidently, for many residents of the hills the aggression of individual animals hinges to a large extent on how other humans treat the forest.

Early on in the book, we learn of a night a leopard came by, hoping to make a meal of a cow named Radha. Munni Rekhwal flatly refused to move, telling the author, “How can I let her die while I stay elsewhere for my comfort? I will stay here.” The cow, she said, was not eating or drinking due to moh maya (love and attachment). The bond of animal and human can hardly be stated with more feeling.

In effect, what emerges is a fascinating mosaic, where people live, eat, sleep and work in fields, forests, pastures where the human and the animal are in a continuum. The Kumauni hills have extensive state and community forests, interspersed with terraced fields and pastures. Roads expanded especially since the 1962 war and the more recent attainment of statehood have made for wider contact with the plains.

But in many ways there are critical ways in which specific animals are important to the being and identity of those who share spaces with them. This is no romantic rendering of rural idyll. It also lacks the drama of the nature or hunting tale, the mountaineer’s dash to glory. It is much more a rich, interwoven tapestry of stories of a shifting, changing tapestry of animal-human ties in the foothills.

Govindrajan’s stories are enriched most by long discussions with village women, who in turn are often mystified by her status. Her short hair classifies her as a girl but owing to her married status she is seen as a woman. Kanya or aurat? This is especially crucial with bears with whom many young women claim to have special relationships. What matters is there is a bear-human shared space in perceptions and emotion, not a sharp divide of women or men from bears.

Such questions can be explosive politically when we see her tackle the thorny issue of goat sacrifice, long a hill tradition. Goats are specially reared for the sacrifice, which is proffered as sacred food or prashad. Animal rights activists decry it as cruel or as allegedly anti-Hindu. Conversely, the sacrifices have become central to the assertion of a distinctive Pahari or hill Hinduism.

There is a remarkable parallel here with the sacrificial animal in many religions and cultures. This may not be easy for an animal-loving vegetarian like the author (and this reviewer) to appreciate, but it is surely possible to respect such a tradition even while debating its salience. Cows and goats in the Uttarakhand hills have complex relations with the politics of faith.

For the lucidity of the prose and the animal/human characters alone, this book is a reader’s delight. Muni, Radha and other hill folk (four-footed and two-legged) have found here a fine raconteur.
 

The reviewer teaches history and environmental studies at Ashoka University