Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology [1 ed.]

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Maan Barua

LivEly cities reconfiguriNg urban ecolOGy

LIVELY CITIES

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LIVELY CITIES Reconfiguring Urban Ecology

MAAN BARUA

University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London

Portions of chapters 4 and 5 are adapted from “Feral Ecologies: The Making of Postcolonial Nature in London,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28, no. 3 (2021): 896–­919, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13653. Copyright 2023 by Maan Barua All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1255-­0 (hc) ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1256-­7 (pb) Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052890. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. UMP BmB 2023

For Ma and Manju Papa

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CONTENTS Introduction: The Urban in a Minor Key 1 1. A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure 25 2. The Politics of Commensality 67 3. Lively Capital and Recombinant Urbanisms 105 4. The Micropolitics of Ferality 147 5. Pastoral Formations 191 6. Surplus Ecologies 235 Conclusion: Lively Cities 275

Acknowledgments 293 Notes 297 Bibliography 335 Index 365

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INTRODUCTION THE URBAN IN A MINOR KEY No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. —­Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

There is always some moment when other-­than-­human life bursts into presence amid the clamor of urban routine. Appearing between concrete and tarmac, emerging from tunnels and pipes, on skyscrapers, or in derelict sites, such life is fairly commonplace, but it sometimes makes one pause, to take notice and ask who dwells in urban worlds, and how. In fact, the urban is where a great transformation of other-­than-­human life is happening. Cities shore up creatures from the world over, giving rise to new floral and faunal combinations. They create metabolically dense environments to which all kinds of life adapts, even proliferates. Traffic, however, is not one way; other than humans also transform urban worlds. They initiate and spark encounters; they forge arrangements that do not have the human at their center of assembly. Their actions, even their improvisations, render the urban into a living formation. Divisions between earth and life, animal and infrastructure, being and building are hardly tenable in contemporary urban worlds. Yet many versions of urban theory continue to work with these tired divisions, or worse still, they simply brush aliveness aside as phenomena of little importance compared to the effects of capital, planning, and design. This is often the case in those disciplines of urban inquiry that are caught up in a particular version of the social, one where the living and material 1

2 

Introduction

world is cast outside to an arena of little influence or consequence. This is what I refer to as the urban in a major key: those modes of thought and practice that form part of a canon, that define what the primary matters of concern are, and that wield influence in dictating what relations and events are worthy of conceptual intervention and inquiry. Urban theory in a major key, however, is woefully inadequate for understanding contemporary urbanization, especially when cities are fast becoming “venues for all kinds of countervailing tendencies.”1 Built form has grown at startling speed and at unprecedented scales. Yet we witness the resurgence of urban agriculture and the rise of new practices of metropolitan pastoralism. Certain kinds of nature disappear, while a whole raft of others begin to crowd cities. Many other than humans are rendered sedentary, confined into urban pockets carved up by roads and infrastructure; at the same time, those very infrastructures escalate transterritorial traffic in biota, acting as the heavy artillery that batters down all biogeographic walls. These tendencies are as true of Delhi as they are of London, two urban formations that I discuss in this book. If they are becoming difficult to grasp through conventional combinations of practice and thought, this is in part because major theory, by jettisoning cities of their aliveness, leaves behind an impoverished urban ontology. What might it mean, then, to think of the urban as an ecological formation, or, as Sarah Whatmore evocatively calls it, “living fabrics of association”2—­that is, arrangements where other-­than-­human forces and intensities co-­compose urbanicity in all its dimensions, from infrastructures to economies, from modes of dwelling to politics? What do these fabrics tell us about the material politics of city making? These are the questions this book addresses. In doing so, it joins a body of work that seeks to rethink urban ontology, opening up the latter to more heterogeneous associations than mainstream approaches.3 The impetus here is to summon interlocutors beyond the usual suspects animating urban theory. It is equally about shifting from the acquainted sites of urban inquiry to a meshwork,4 where urbanicity is taken to be that which unfolds through entangled lines of life, movement, and growth; that which issues forth in articulation with infrastructural environments and surrounds; and that which draws anomalous connections with a retinue of beings. This shift might open avenues for a plural reckoning of urban worlds and for an analytical grammar attuned to the lively, and living,

Introduction  3

city. In many ways, this is a risky venture, a detour from more established practice, but it is a risk worth taking if one arrives at a different understanding of urban worlds than what is out there. To formulate a different grammar of the urban, this book has to be three things at once. First, it has to be a work of urban theory. Amid raging debates on new epistemologies of the urban, it needs to consider questions of ontology: what constitutes urbanicity, and how does this constitution bear on ways in which its complex trajectories are lived and understood? Second, this endeavor needs to be diagnostic. An expanded ontology offers up a different set of views on the generation of urban form and the ways in which its economic arrangements take grip; it also interrogates how urban life is governed. It means developing deeper understandings of urban worlds as well as the power relations inherent in how they are inhabited. At the same time, it involves paying attention to tensions inherent in holding sometimes incommensurate urban experiences in a comparative perspective. Diagnosis, however, is a labor of invention, one where new composites of thought and method need to be created in order to grasp a meshworked urban world. In this book, I will often refer to cities and urban formations to draw attention to both how urbanization does not necessarily equate to the city and how various forms of urbanization exceed the bounded city or even take on unfamiliar forms.5 The latter can include peripheries, landfills, and agrarian formations that remain immanent to some cities. And third, an intervention such as this needs to open up new political possibilities: the prospects of inhabiting the urban otherwise, whether this has to do with modalities of everyday life, the ordering and governance of cities, or agitations over staples and over the commons. Such political possibilities need to consider other-­ than-­human life rather than efface them. There has been a tradition in urban theory as well as in architecture and planning to focus on the built environment and to take this environment as primarily the product of prior design inscribed on a material substrate. In fact, inscription is part of a much wider question in the history of urban theory: in whose image is the city made? Implicit in this tradition is the view that worlds are built first, then inhabited only once the activity of building is complete.6 The field is also crowded by a whole gamut of work on how cities, their plans, and their infrastructural landscapes deviate from script, be it via informal mechanisms

4 

Introduction

or subaltern action.7 The basic premise that only humans perform the act of building while other than humans merely occur, however, goes unchallenged. A wider urban ontology must question this presumption, for the assembly of a living city entails more than the activity of building. Cities are continually made and repurposed by other beings according to their own competencies and rhythms. These actions have material and political effects, although such effects are elided in mainstream urban theory. In much extant work on other than humans, living beings enter the urban arena either as animated constructs or as transgressive forces that unsettle metropolitan order.8 Others further extend this focus on representation by attending to other-­than-­human lifeworlds.9 They provide cues for going beyond registering the presence or absence of animals and other sentient beings in the urban sphere by accounting for their ways of doing and being; in this mode, we may consider other than humans as living urban lives. At stake is a much wider sensorium and technics of being than what is usually giving credence in major urban theory. Attending to such lives, ecologically and ethnographically, is vital for drawing out their fuller implications in forging urban worlds. This enables recasting cities not just as human achievements but also as living formations involving a sticky set of connections with other-­than-­human life—­life that is contained but also exceeds design, planning, and assembly. There is a need to summon other than humans as interlocutors of everyday urban practice and the lived experiences of the city. The momentum garnered by such modes of theory and ethnography can also open up urban economies to further scrutiny. More specifically, the ontological hygiene of the economic as a realm cleaved from ecology is called into question. Two approaches are of paramount importance in terms of understanding the economic life of cities. One entails cultural economy, which sees urban economies to be a set of cultural practices in all its aspects—­from production to consumption and from distribution to the realization of value.10 The second dominant view pertains to critical political economy11 and its political ecology variant foregrounding the question of urban nature.12 Here urbanization is read as a process of the transformation of nature produced through the uneven dynamic of capitalism. In the former approach, an emphasis on culture as human activity writ large somewhat elides ecology. What nature or

Introduction  5

ecology does to the cultural economy of cities, other than their presence as vibrant things mobilized by exclusively human subjects, remains undertheorized. In the latter perspective, economy is taken to be embedded in an ecological base, and although that base can be recalcitrant or unruly,13 it is not taken to be co-­constitutive of the economic. The term “embedded” contains the notion that there is something prior to, and cleaved from, the relationships which bring them there. How might one, then, register other than humans not simply as raw materials or external agents that introduce changes and modifications to economic activity, but as forces that shape, steer, and constitute the economic from the outset? Finally, if we take other-­than-­human life to be constitutive of the urban rather than as transgressive presences, a whole other set of questions regarding urban governance comes to the fore. There is rich historical scholarship on how urban formations arise through the expulsion, control, and regulation of animal and plant life,14 and they provide critical insights into how the modern metropolis, particularly those in the West, are imagined as spaces bereft of other-­than-­human life. More recently, a body of work mobilized under the rubric of biopolitics examines how other-­than-­human life is fostered, disciplined, and securitized to govern populations.15 In urban contexts, these insights, however, need further expansion and scrutiny. How valid is biopolitics as an analytical category for explaining the ordering and regulation of life in those cities where histories of governance do not necessarily sit neatly with a model rooted in European modernity? Furthermore, we might ask how the biopolitics of governance might be read in conjunction with political economy. Foucault’s early formulations of biopower hinted at the economic function of biopolitics and anatomopolitics.16 This formulation has been taken up by work on the pharmaceutical industry and its generation of a new economic space: the bioeconomy.17 Exploring what the bioeconomy means in the context of urbanicity brims with potential.

A Wider Ontology As meshworks, cities are open-­ended. They cannot entirely be grasped through the activities of building or planning alone, for the incessant traffic of various beings, their repurposing of urban form, material accretions, and weathering, renders cities porous to an array of forces that

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Introduction

always exceed closure. Cities are not so much nodes joined by connectors, as the analogy of the network implies,18 as they are an emergent and continually shifting formation, woven and knotted by the interlacing trails of its inhabitants, with flows of commodities and infrastructure, both intended and unintended, shored up at any given juncture. It is this world, constituted by movement but also by sentience and action, by moments of subversion and disobedience, that renders the urban alive. Positing a wider urban ontology needs to seriously engage with this aliveness. This means rubbing a number of different urban traditions together to generate productive frictions, then using these frictions to inform questions that one tradition might ask the other. The arguments that unfold in this book are a product of such a movement. The ontocartographies of the urban—­the ways in which urban processes are mapped, situated, and unmapped—­are first opened up to a retinue of more-­than-­human beings, entities, and forces. This pushes beyond a registration of the living world and its denizens as animated constructs to account for how beings compose their own worlds along the grain of design, planning, and assembly.19 Such more-­than-­human or posthuman insights into the aliveness of cities is simultaneously subjected to political economic readings, which emphasize how nature is not given but produced by the interplay of economic, social, and political processes,20 albeit in ways that take lively forces as constitutive of the economic.21 But we cannot stop here, for urban ontologies posited by posthumanism and political economy are not universal. Taking cities to be meshworked implies dissolving an earth/life binary and doing away with the old settlements of Nature and Society; however, it also means recognizing that these divisions have specific histories and are not the same everywhere. Questions of specificity and difference, raised by postcolonial urban theory,22 must also be addressed. Each of these bodies of thought—­political economy, postcolonialism, and posthumanism—­accesses certain aspects of cities but not others. Deploying one tradition to speak to and critique the other can generate a new grammar, but its amenability for an urban theory of our times must be comparative. This is because meshworks are not given in advance but rather form in relation to one another. They diverge; they cannot be reduced to measurement through a universal yardstick. There is thus a

Introduction  7

labor of comparison needed here, one that involves clarifying how any urban formation is produced through relations between things, places, and events. Such relations are particular and often incommensurate.23 Comparison, like the endeavor of generating creative frictions between different bodies of urban thought, is inventive. It is an act of “grounding” the urban in particular ways,24 of establishing forms of “rapport” that alter what is given “due attention” by any analytic or filter.25 Comparison can enable attending to the difference that the diversity of cities makes to theory; it can also open up ways of theorizing against the grain of a set of western metropolitan tenets that have gained precedence in writing cities the world over.26 The commitments of this book are sympathetic to these critiques. The two cities that form the basis of my inquiry in this book—­Delhi and London—­have shared colonial, historical, and ongoing connections. Although the emphasis of this book is not to trace connections per se, the latter emerge at a number of different points and junctures through the text. For instance, imperatives of governing and regulating other-­ than-­human life that emerged in Victorian London were often cut-­and-­ pasted onto colonial Delhi, the legacies of which continue to play out in the postcolonial city. These range from questions regarding sanitation,27 which is to say the control and regulation of so-­called noxious trades,28 to producing the city as a domain bereft of other-­than-­human life.29 Such imperatives, however, also had to be worked anew. Efforts to improve and administer life, as later chapters will show, also encountered other forces and currents that did not necessarily have colonialism and capitalism as precedents, and that placed constraints on the biopolitical project. Attending to these tensions, gaps, and divergences between cities that have a shared history becomes crucial to understanding the phenomenon of urbanicity. At the same time, it is vital to refrain from ranking cities such that order and governance are deemed fully developed in particular metropolises, typically those of the Global North, while they are seen to be incomplete in cities of the Global South. Such reasoning imbues cities with an evolutionary telos, with cities all headed toward the same form of urbanization, capitalist or otherwise. In fact, there are other, more creative ways of attending to interconnections between Delhi and London. Notable here are the histories of the traffic of animals from South Asia to Britain, which now forms

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Introduction

part of the latter’s metropolitan nature. Such figures—­we might call them other-­than-­human migrants—­provide new insight into the western metropolis, enabling us to ask whether urban nature in a city like London is better conceptualized as postcolonial. This question of two-­ way traffic, rather than a model of one-­way diffusion from the imperial metropole to the colonial periphery, provides a better, more nuanced entry point for grasping the meshworked nature of the city. Equally, such figures draw attention to the postcolonial facticity of many cities across the world, whether these lie in the Global North or South. The interconnected histories of Delhi and London also have methodological implications. A key feature of this work is reversing the analytical gaze. What might it mean, for instance, to look at urban practices in London beginning with a rapport derived from Delhi? One example worth mentioning at the outset is the practice of commensality—­ glaringly evident in Delhi, but far more commonplace than imagined in western metropoles like London. Practices of commensality—­that is, fostering relations with other-­than-­human life by providing food—­ bring to bear a whole other dimension of urban life in London that is not always evident when the city is read through the familiars animating mainstream urban theory, be it capital, planning, or design. Commensality enables one to gauge who or what is accommodated in the city, to what extent, and why, just as it reveals the shape of urban hospitality and biopolitics. Such practices of course diverge, and, as a number of scholars emphasize,30 being attentive to divergence, “rather than trying to ‘control for difference,’”31 is critical for labors of comparison. Divergence is not simply variance from a given yardstick. It is a pathway that is constitutive. What makes any city or ecological formation adhere is also what makes it diverge. To put it another way, difference generates urbanicity. Each city, whether Delhi or London, produces its own line of divergence that give it a unique and specific character, which cannot be captured within the structure of what has already formed. Divergence is an event; it is also inseparable from the notion of community, for the latter gives divergence its meaning. Communities test divergences, for they live and verify their consequences.32 A wider urban ontology takes community to be composed of both people and other than humans, as well as coalitions between the two. Comparison is therefore an act of relating such heterogeneous protagonists, whose ethos or habits, needs

Introduction  9

and concerns, diverge in a manner that gives rise to situated and specific urban arrangements. In each such situation, those protagonists addressed must be empowered to evaluate the relevance of any analytical gesture, to agree or refuse to be filtered by that analytic. Specifying lively cities and the endeavor of looking at other-­than-­ human worlds means inventing analytics that do not nestle easily in extant disciplinary orientations. They can even appear alien to the more familiar lexicon of urban studies. Such analytics appear unfamiliar because of what is given due attention in urban theory in a major key. For instance, a number of theorists of capitalist urbanization—­Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Saskia Sassen, to name just a select few—­all point, albeit in different formulations, to how cities are refashioned according to logics of generating surplus value. Capitalist production becomes ontological production in that it brings about an intensive differentiation between people and things, all while subsuming lived experience to a continuous remaking of abstract worlds.33 This simultaneous differentiation and subsumption also proceeds through what some have called the capitalist production of nature, whereby nature becomes a locus of capitalist activity, and its circulation and regeneration become synonymous with capital accumulation.34 However, as Simone and Pieterse argue, it not that global capital “sits above a world of cities orchestrating its circuits below, apportioning things here and there in some kind of command-­and-­control fashion.”35 Such views are often regurgitated by poorly thought-­out critiques of ontology, hopelessly cut off from the lived experiences of others.36 There is far more heterogeneity to ontological production, capitalist or otherwise. Cities in the Global South cannot be seen as mere instantiations of a universal set of economic processes or as empirical variations of the same form of capitalist urbanization. Rather, the city, and urban natures, must be read as “a milieu that is in constant formation, drawing on disparate connections,” a product of variegated forces cutting across scales. As postcolonial urban thinking emphasizes, a comparative endeavor must turn to different and divergent “worlding practices”—­ “projects that attempt to break established horizons of urban standards in and beyond a particular city.”37 Postcolonial critique therefore deflects what is given due attention in the remaking of a city’s fortunes. Cities are products of capitalist dynamics, but not in a manner that takes such dynamics to be universal

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Introduction

or following a singular logic. Worlding practices, in their particularity and diversity, refrain from certain tendencies in urban political economic analysis to hold on to one set of processes as primary while blotting out others. To invoke the idea of worlding is to point to the ways in which the urban becomes sites of varied action and contestation, whether these have to do with infrastructure, aesthetics, design, or political life. Worlding entails both discursive and nondiscursive practices, which drive the flow of distinctive urban codes. Akin to the meshwork, worlding opens up cities at different scales, revealing how they draw on a wide range of materials, bodies, and information, often from multiple sources, as well as revealing that they recontextualize the urban as a matrix constituted by heterogeneous traffic.38 On the one hand, the cast in a postcolonial theater of the urban, whether summoned to understand governmentality,39 informality,40 or aesthetics,41 remains centered on the usual suspects. On the other hand, it can be argued that worlding entails much more than the emergence of cities through the agitations mobilized by human subjects alone. We might therefore return to ontocartographies of the urban posited by posthumanist modes of inquiry, albeit through the detour of political economy and postcolonial urbanism—­a detour that becomes necessary if one is to forge forms of novel conceptual syntheses. Although it is a broad church with promiscuous disciplinary orientations, a common thread that runs through different strands of posthumanist thought is its questioning of the primacy of the human in the organization, ordering, and knowability of the world.42 Posthumanism’s pull on urban theory has been felt for a while. A renewed engagement with its commitments in ways that do not “foreclose multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy”43 lies at the heart of this project. This includes critically analyzing one of posthumanism’s prominent strands: vital or new materialism. In attempts to move away from Marxist economism, new materialists recuperate the agency of things and attend to the potential of matter in shaping political practices and social action.44 New materialism considers agency to be the outcome of assemblages crossing porous bodies, entities, and things. It posits the notion of “thing-­power” to reveal how inanimate things produce effects that are not simply material but also political. This political agency of matter becomes a means to espouse new forms of collectives—­a parliament of

Introduction  11

things—­that generates dissent or affirms new ways of reorganizing and intervening in the world.45 These are helpful cues, but the wider urban ontology this book strives toward diverges from new materialism in a number of ways. It acknowledges and welcomes new materialism’s dissolving of Cartesian binaries, but it is cautious of its tendency to put all actants—­human and other than human—­on the same plane, with an equal capacity to act. The latter results in a monist ontology46 that is of little help when dealing with questions of urban inequality, dispossession, and immiseration. The affective ethics that new materialisms vie toward, heralding the generosity and enchantment of matter, often elides how materials also redistribute harms.47 Such redistribution is the result of asymmetric, even violent, political, economic, and social relations that work in conjunction with how materials flow, where substances congeal, and in which bodies they accumulate. The aim of recuperating elusive effects of matter sometimes eschews political economic—­and now deemed “old” materialist—­concerns regarding the uneven dynamics of class, caste, race, and gender.48 Thing-­power gravitates toward the actions of matter by itself, overturning how materials, and the situations in which they act, come to be produced in the first place.49 The urban ontology posited here strives to provide a more variegated account of action developed through readings of infrastructure, urban economies, and metabolism. Rather than matter, a term to which new materialists constantly refer, the emphasis here is on materials. Matter, on the one hand, is that which is the physical property of things, that which resides within them, and that which can be dissected, parsed, and analyzed. Materials, on the other hand, refer to qualities. These are continually generated and dissolved as materials flow between substances and the media surrounding them,50 whether the latter entails an ambient environment, particular locales, or human or other-­than-­human bodies. Materials move, then congeal, only to become turbulent again, entering new, conjoined relations. At the same time, materials increasingly intersect with the generation and circulation of information, which subjects them to regulatory regimes that aim to govern various milieus.51 This distinction between matter and materials is subtle but crucial, for it moves from thing-­power to the actions of materials as they unfold within a wider, uneven, force field. A wider urban ontology therefore provides

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Introduction

a more variegated account of what happens—­an account that does not dispense with the effects of materials and forces but rather grounds them in a relational matrix inseparable from asymmetric social relations or the power of institutions, capital, and the state. In a different posthumanist register, an entire body of scholarship on animal geographies has developed over the past twenty-­five years that has had a strong urban orientation since its inception.52 Animal geographies have sought to bring the animals back in, both as a means of reworking “our understanding of cities and urbanism”53 and as a means of reimagining the city as a zoöpolis or anima urbis, where the “breath, life, soul and spirit of the city” is “embodied in its animal life.”54 From crucial early work on the social and discursive constitution of animals as a marginal urban group, subjected to all manners of sociospatial inclusions and expulsions from cities,55 to more recent approaches attending to questions of animals and biopolitics,56 postcapitalist and informal economies,57 caste,58 health,59 and governance,60 the field has gained immense traction.61 Discursive tendencies of urban animal geographies, while situating animals within fields of power, sometimes fall short of articulating a material politics of urban life. In a remarkable pair of papers published fifteen years ago, Steve Hinchliffe and Sarah Whatmore deployed the term “living cities” to place on center stage the ways in which other than humans’ beastly presence (and absences) bear on how the urban is sensed, comprehended, and known.62 Moving beyond representation to the geography of what happens,63 this work has opened up ways of accounting for what the urban might mean from the perspective of animal life.64 Cities are recast as formations that are inhabited “with and against the grain of expert designs,” “including those of capital, state, science and planning.” “Urban inhabitants” are taken to be “heterogeneous,” “made up of multiple differences mobilized through human and nonhuman becomings,” and “urban liveability” is seen to involve “civic associations and attachments forged in and through more-­than-­human relations.”65 The wider resonance of these more-­than-­human modes of inquiry, which began in geography, has now been felt in cognate social science disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and environmental humanities. It has resulted in calls for a multispecies ethnography,66

Introduction  13

which aims to expand the ambit of ethnographic inquiry to include other-­than-­human lives. The urban is not necessarily an analytical concern in such approaches; it often serves as a backdrop for studying multispecies relations, although some notable exceptions have remarkable insights into how other worlds are forged in cities in excess of human assembly. The impetus of the current work is somewhat different. Although animals remain the main protagonists through which themes are explored, this book is not an animal geography endeavor per se. Rather, animals are guides into another urban world; they summon a whole other cast of actors and settings of metropolitan activity not always discernible in major urban theory. Aliveness as an urban question is about attending to the ways in which animal life is pulled in all directions by infrastructures, architectural environments, and material assemblages on which such beings have consequences and bearings. Put another way, engaging with a wider ontology of the urban is about an ethnographic endeavor attentive to meshworks rather than to dyadic relations between people and animals. The two endeavors are different, and this difference matters when articulating a wider urban ontology. Drawing posthumanism into conversation with postcolonial urbanisms and urban political economies opens up new ways to ground the economic. Material forces, contrary to the “matter” of new materialism,67 play out over an uneven terrain. Their effects are accentuated and aggravated by sociopolitical situations. At the same time, the political economy of cities is animated by a number of living and material forces, which are recuperated for projects of generating surplus value. In turn, lively forces have bearings on the economic in a number of arenas—­production and consumption, circulation and social reproduction.68 Rather than starting from a formulaic application of a stock theory, whether political economic or new materialist in orientation, one has to develop a “lively” political economy attentive to what other-­than-­human forces can do while remaining cognizant of how such forces get appropriated or are enrolled to serve economic ends. At stake is a story of cities and “lively capital,” or corporeal value in motion,69 but not solely so. Postcolonial political economy reminds us that noncapitalist relations are part and parcel of contemporary cities, which continue as loci of innovation rather than as staid, vestigial, precapitalist remainders of the past.70 The outside to capital is that which might be outside the theater of generating

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Introduction

surplus value, but they can also become avenues for opening other political and economic possibilities for a different urban to come. To summarize, evoking a wider urban ontology requires inventing particular kinds of theoretical engagement and grounding such commitments in ethnographic and comparative endeavors. This involves recasting the urban as a meshwork, where urban formations and cities are stretched in many directions by forces that are heterogeneous and where divisions between earth/life, nature/culture, and environment/ subject become points of tension and contention. Living cities cannot be taken to be products of forces that act in the same way and through the same logics everywhere. The act of comparison, therefore, is to attend to divergences as constitutive acts. Divergence becomes crucial for embracing the incommensurability of urban worlds and its “unsubsumable fragments.”71 Equally, a wider ontology cannot sidestep the question of how capitalist production and ontological production are related. This question needs to be approached in ways that do not squarely place agency on the side of capital. Posthumanist accounts enable understanding how living and material forces have bearings on the economic, while postcolonial sensibilities question universal histories of how life becomes a locus of accumulation. Each of these movements exerts a pull on the other, unmooring a particular theoretical commitment from its familiar vantage point, making it spin in other, sometimes unanticipated directions. This is what I refer to as the urban in a minor key.

The Urban in a Minor Key Major versions of urban theory are those associations of thought and practice that become part of a canon, establish schools of theory, and define the terrain of critical inquiry. They create and perpetuate particular epistemologies, and they code and define what is important and what is not. Major theory follows certain “masters” and moves through obligatory passage points. However, there are other modes of expression and articulation: those that are minor, which deterritorialize or uncode established vocabularies, freeing them from recognized formulations and taking them in a different direction. The minor is not the language of a minority but a language or grammar that “a minority makes in a major language.”72 This can mean borrowing from a major language while

Introduction  15

reworking it to provide another account of the world, or to signal the advent of another world that might be possible. The minor exists only in relation to the major; the two cannot be decoupled. However, the minor can reveal an entirely different story stirring within any field. Major languages also speak to, and often for, the marginalized, but they do so via “assimilation and homogenization.”73 The minor, in contrast, breaks from conventional archetypes and established associations of thought practice. To write the urban in a minor key, then, is to render urban grammar into a polyphony, albeit in the same language as that of major theory. It is about working within the same terrain or field while opening up established modes of practice to variations. A work in a minor key, such as this book, stems from a “cramped space” of expression.74 Major theory is a wide field comprising a rich, evocative body of work. Relevant indicative scholarship with which this book is in conversation includes urban political economy75 but also informality, the subaltern, and the postcolonial.76 Indeed, their tidal pull on urban theory has been immense and will long continue to be felt. Another body of work—­examining cities in vitalist and topological ways,77 looking at their rhizomatic architectures,78 and examining the ways in which urban bodies become the media through which locations, resources, and stories are connected,79 with all kinds of improvisation and experimentation overlapping80—­operates in a minor register. This work is not antagonistic toward major urban theory; its aims are different. The minor stirs up other stories reverberating from the urban. This book’s iteration of the minor works from cramped spaces, not only because its knotting of ethology and ethnography, ecology and economy, lie at the periphery of urban analysis, but also because urban studies is a crowded field. Certain modes of thought claim in advance what the subject of inquiry should be, what luminous arrangement it should be placed under, and what counts as doing critical urban theory. Yet it is precisely this cramped space and the impossibility of writing otherwise that renders the minor into a practice of creativity. Similar tendencies can be seen in postcolonial urban scholarship, although they do not explicitly deploy a minor label. Ravi Sundaram’s work on Delhi’s media urbanism is a remarkable example,81 writing cities for an audience that was yet to arrive. Minor tendencies extend to work on the city’s economic arrangements that strays from the conventional

16 

Introduction

dictums of political economy82 to include accounts of inhabitation and settlement,83 which may be further opened to astral beings or supernatural currents.84 These tendencies in postcolonial urbanism concretize, to cite AbdouMaliq Simone, “new ways of ‘becoming’ cities—­ones which make broader and more judicious use of the various actors who inhabit them.” They bring to the fore “new formations of collective life, less readily discernible” but that “alter the social arrangements and subjective experiences of being in the city.”85 In varied ways, each points to how cities are repeatedly made, remade, and undone, their sociality never complete, their urban form constantly pushed toward ontological heterogeneity.86 This book’s invocation of the minor also owes its debts to recent geographical work, notably by Thomas Jellis and Joe Gerlach, who have reinvigorated inquiry into what the minor—­and associated registers of micropolitics and molecularity—­offer up for critical thinking in the social sciences.87 “Micropolitics and the minor,” they argue, “attend to and works at the edges of knowing, at the register of sensibility minus sensible normativity.” Any attempt to generate a minor language, with all its “conceptual insistence towards a particular theoretical assemblage,” must “refuse” its “apprehension in singular terms.”88 The point is not to adjudicate in advance what counts as minor or micropolitical. However, this does not mean refraining from making meaningful distinctions. The subaltern, for instance, is not the same as the minor. Although both share sensibilities of shunning majoritarian practice and theory, the minor, at least in this work, performs a different labor. Subaltern theory poignantly summons cities that are challenged or resisted by ignored, repressed, and occluded human subjects. It seeks to retrieve voices that are marginalized in the archives or in the lived city while paying attention to subaltern agency in place making and in forging a different kind of urbanicity than that of the elite.89 A minor urbanism, in contrast, indexes a raft of urban phenomena that current writing on subalterns sometimes glosses over. It is concerned with the kinds of politics that might emerge through meshworked arrangements, where “incessant entanglements of effort, body and stuff . . . constantly move on, into and through strange syntheses,”90 and it constantly poses probing questions regarding what matters and what might happen. To rework urban theory in a minor key is to develop a patois, another form of expression

Introduction  17

that subverts a major language from within rather than in a manner that is in direct opposition as certain, but not all, writings on the subaltern move toward. It is an investment in a major language for the purposes of making it minor. A minor articulation of the urban has to be inventive. It must develop concepts that are generative and attuned to heterogeneity rather than preformed categories, whether elite or subaltern. Here, “concepts are lines,”91 in that they stir up cities other than what a major grammar summons or illuminates. As Simone and Pieterse, invoking different forms of worlding, ask, “How is it possible to draw new lines, lines that make unusual connections, but which allow us to see urban phenomena in new ways and thus make different kinds of decisions?”92 Polyvalent lines or concepts that work in a minor key cannot be restricted to any one field, but neither are they about simply cut-­and-­pasting them from cognate disciplines. Rather, they are about “contextual commitments”93 and involve working with minor tendencies in other fields. Three lines of inquiry that lie at the heart of this project are worth touching on briefly. The first line of inquiry pertains to thinking about urban form, landscape, infrastructure, and design. This entails reworking the divisions between techne, or design, and mekhane, or implementation entrenched in modernist notions of building.94 In this view, on the one hand, urban assembly rests on a division of labor between the intellectual and the manual, the theoretical and the practical. A minor sensibility, on the other hand, reveals how infrastructural and architectonic landscapes can be far more improvisational and makeshift, brought about through the actions of a heterogeneous set of agents. In the minor key, urban assembly can take place “without a model and without chance,”95 in that assembly does not always follow a script or a plan, but neither is it simply spontaneous or random. Rather, form emerges through the actions of bricoleurs, both human and other than human, with the latter sparking relations according to their own competencies and associations, with important material and political consequences. Second, drawing new lines can entail reading the economies of cities in ways that go beyond the impasse of political economy and vital materialism. One might draw purchase from a minor reading of Marx, infecting the overt economism of certain Marxists with lively potentials and forces of an entourage of beings, whether these are spirits, animals,

18 

Introduction

materials, or things—­entities to which Marx constantly alluded in his economic writings.96 Production might be reworked from being an exclusively human activity to one of more-­than-­human coproduction, at least in certain processes that involve metabolic and reproductive labor. This is an insight one might draw by extending the critical arguments of feminist political economy, which has long highlighted the importance of social reproduction in capitalism.97 This view might also be extended to the sphere of circulation where the process of metamorphosis, a trope frequently deployed by Marx,98 reveals how capital is enlivened by and enlivens living and material forces. A third modality pertains to ecology and ethology. To refer to urban worlds as co-­composed means developing an ecological perspective that is attentive to the diverse ways in which other-­than-­human sentience, ways of doing, and ways of being unfold and are expressed. However, a minor reading of the urban through ecology cannot simply superimpose ecological science without discerning its underlying epistemologies. To invent new lines is not so much to draw from the endeavors of urban ecology as a systems science; it has more to do with being attentive to ecological currents and how they matter in particular situations. At its best, ecology is not a generalizable polemic but a situated mode of inquiry. It is a science attentive to encounters where pathways and effects cannot be ordained in advance of what comes into composition and what happens. Ecology is about sentient beings that may “enter a rapport for their own reasons,”99 or fail to do so, in that ecologies also entail detachments, which are sometimes ontological and other times strategic. A minor ecology therefore does not take other than humans to be prefigured entities—­mobilized, for instance, by the category of “species” where worlds are tethered to taxonomic identity and where ecological expressions are attributes of, or derived from, that identity. Rather, a minor ecology is transversal:100 it involves heterogeneous protagonists, and relations that bind and unbind within particular surroundings or milieus.

More-­Than-­Human Ethnographies In a similar vein, a minor account of urban worlds, although not entirely reducible to ethnography, involves a different form of ethnographic practice, one attentive to a retinue of beings with which human lives are

Introduction  19

led. One might call this a more-­than-­human ethnography that engages with the space-­times of enmeshment, motion, and relation101 that constitute an urban world. This engagement is somewhat different from the imperatives of a multispecies ethnography that emphasizes the category of “species as a grounding concept for articulating biological difference and similarity.”102 While acknowledging that “species” is a contested concept, multispecies ethnography sidesteps some of the issues that arise when mobilizing species as a pivotal sense-­making term for writing the living world.103 Of particular importance is the notion of “species being,” a concept drawn from Kant, which conflates social life with relations tethered to the same species or to the same taxonomic kind. In this view, “the world of living things appears as a catalogue of biodiversity, as a plurality of species,” while relations that are transversal or heterogeneous fall by the wayside.104 A more-­than-­human ethnography, in contrast, is attentive to a meshwork. Collectives are heterogeneous, and relations termed “social” are never restricted to those among the same kind. Here, ethnographic endeavor moves from multispecies relations to meshworks: the lives of people and other than humans, the actions of lively materials, and the atmospheres of ambient environments, all of which enmesh, and all of which give rise to the urban as a living formation. It involves giving due attention not only to animate beings but to the lines of materials, movements, and growth within which the activity of any agent is situated. This is another way to situate rapports, which stem from the actions of many parties yet are open to possibilities of disagreement, negotiation, and contestation. One might push this mode of ethnographic inquiry further. If other than humans are active participants in forging urban worlds, then they are also observant participants of that world. Here we enter a terrain that multispecies ethnography has not quite ventured into because the latter by and large takes other than humans to be targets of thick description rather than observant beings who might sense, comprehend, and know urban worlds in their own way. Of course, animate beings are not ethnographers in that they do not write up the world, but it would be limiting to argue that humans—­ethnographers—­are the only ones capable of knowledge, whether that knowledge has to do with the urban or otherwise. Such knowledge, as Tim Ingold persuasively argues, “consists

20 

Introduction

not in propositions about the world but in skills of perception and capacities of judgment that develop in the course of direct, practical, and sensuous engagements with our surroundings.”105 Indeed, there can be no observation without participation, and it is futile to police who participates in the material politics of city making and who does not. A less anthropocentric ethnography that is serious about other-­ than-­human ways of being and doing might therefore also flip participant observation to “observant participation.”106 The latter has less to do with the project of an ethnography or writing up the world, and more to do with forms of responsive watching commonplace situations of everyday life—­a capacity or competency not limited to humans alone. As observant participants, other than humans witness urban events, sensing and responding to them in their own ways. Ceding to these competencies foregrounds other bodily and affective ways through which cities may be comprehended and known. Other than humans are skilled agents who not only act but also observe situations and places within the ecology of their material surroundings. They can accrue an intimate grasp of urban rhythms and flows. Even though these forms of observant participation might not be entirely knowable to us, this question is beside the point. What matters is where other than humans, as well as the urban inhabitants who know their ways, lead us—­not as animated constructs but as knowledgeable practitioners in the lived city. Cultivating attention to their ways of witnessing, observing, and knowing is a vital aspect to writing the urban in a minor key.

Lively Cities This book is organized around a series of conceptual interventions. It draws from archival and ethnographic work that I conducted in London and Delhi, some of the latter in collaboration with three remarkable young scholars, Gunjesh Singh, Urvi Gupta, and Priyanka Justa.107 The book aims to develop the minor, and therefore a wider ontology of the urban, in three broad registers. The first register pertains to the minor as that form of city making that operates in a different tenor to that of the major grammars of urbanism and that allows one to rethink what constitutes or composes the built environment and urban surrounds. The second register entails micropolitics—­practices that shape urban space

Introduction  21

and that give rise to distinct forms of politics emerging from interactions, sometimes between heterogeneous company. The third register entails the molecular, which gives credence to relations between bodies and materials, as well as their role in choreographing urban political economies. This development of a minor urbanism is relational and comparative. It unfolds through distinct forays into lively cities by my concern with commensal, feral, and cultivated ecologies—­ecologies that generate conversations and tensions among postcolonial urbanism, political economy, and posthumanist inquiry. The first part of the book, centered on commensality, addresses encounters between people and macaques in Delhi. Commensality—­ being messmates at an urban table—­is a distinctive and vital urban practice. It becomes an avenue for rearticulating how the everyday city is lived and experienced in ways exceeding anthropocentric sensibility. More specifically, chapter 1 intervenes in current debates surrounding infrastructures, which have become a pivotal arena of inquiry in urban studies and in the social sciences more widely. This account recasts the humanist remit of current thinking on infrastructure to reveal how the latter fashions—­and is refashioned by—­other-­than-­human life. Infrastructures are not just anthropocentric projects, although they might be devised as such through their inaugural assembly. Infrastructures furnish habitat. They modulate animal habits and, in certain instances, relations between people. Indeed, animals might themselves become infrastructure. The chapter creates new openings for specifying urban infrastructure while taking understandings of urban animal life in new directions. Chapter 2 interrogates the politics that emerges from commensality and what it tells us about how the lived city is experienced and inhabited in excess of anthropocentric sensibilities. By foregrounding the lives of urban macaques, as well as the varied practices that coalesce with and around them, the chapter shows how commensality becomes a vital, grounded analytic for reading the city. More importantly, the chapter shows how cities are animated by a range of other-­than-­human currents, including deities and astral bodies that act as mediators of relations between people and macaques. The modernist city is thus animated by a range of currents, sometimes dismissed by urban theory; these currents force one to think cities anew. They open up a whole set of vistas

22 

Introduction

for understanding how life is governed in urban environments, in excess of the familiar western models from which much contemporary writing on the urban derives. The second section of the book develops a comparative endeavor by moving from Delhi to London. It shifts from the arboreal world of macaques to the aerial ecologies of parakeets, a bird brought to London from India and elsewhere through networks of trade. Parakeets are regarded as feral—­that is, creatures of captive stock, which escape and establish free-­ranging populations, and which come into friction with a number of urban practices and constituencies. They are also nonnative “migrants,” perceived as not belonging through institutional codes and micropolitical practices of policing ferality. This identity, thrust on the birds, renders them ideal interlocutors for interrogating metropolitan natures in London, as well as for interrogating the interconnected histories of Britain and India. To this end, chapter 3 reevaluates the city of flows: a new moment in capitalist urbanization that supersedes the city as a bounded unit.108 The chapter argues that circulations set in motion by capitalism and erstwhile colonial connections also include traffic in other-­than-­human life, which give rise not only to natures that are novel but those that are postcolonial, tethered to particular histories of circulation and exchange. Such traffic also results in the emergence of a city that I call recombinant, where other-­than-­human life and the infrastructural environment come together to forge novel natures, often involving relations between biota that have no coevolutionary history. The central conceptual contribution here is to develop urban theory through the notion of nondesign, thus furthering a theme outlined earlier on infrastructure while invigorating analyses of capital through conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and critical political economy. Ferality, however, is also a diagnostic. By unsettling domesticity and its heteronormative orders, ferality pries open other ways to inhabit cities. Chapter 4 thus picks up on themes regarding the city of flows to advance current debates about decolonizing the urban. However, it does so through London, an exemplar of a western metropolis, rather than through the familiar trope of beginning with the Global South, as locales that mark out difference. Speaking to themes raised in chapter 2, this intervention also looks at the lived city and practices of commensality,

Introduction  23

albeit one refracted through the figure of the parakeet as an other-­than-­ human migrant and as a means of rethinking inherited analytics for understanding London’s metropolitan—­or rather postcolonial—­nature. A distinct set of relations regarding accommodation and expulsion come to the fore when attending to ferality, as do forms of urban biopolitics and governance that make this figure of an unwanted other the target of control. The third section of the book returns to Delhi. It interrogates another set of enmeshments between people, the dwelt environment, materials, and animal life. This pertains to the cultivated, by which I mean creatures that are reared in the urban sphere and, unlike the commensal and the feral, are overtly linked to questions of subsistence, economy, and social reproduction. The interlocutors here are Delhi’s urban cattle, which enable us to ask a number of questions regarding urban form and its genesis, as well as the ways in which the economic inheres in the contemporary city. Unlike metropolitan London, where urban dairies were moved out of the city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,109 urban dairies persist in Delhi. This provides a comparative scaffold for interrogating urbanization in South Asia, for asking whether the latter is an agrarian question,110 and for contemplating what this question might look like if we took existing practices related to bovine life seriously. In chapter 5, I provide a counternarrative to totalizing claims of planetary urbanization, a trope that has gained much traction in urban studies and which argues, put broadly, that there is no outside to the urban.111 Drawing on archival material on cattle in colonial and postcolonial Delhi, as well as ethnographic work on bovine lives in the city, the chapter argues that other formations—­what I refer to as the pastoral—­ reside within the urban. Such formations do not wither away with urbanization (as teleological accounts of planetary urbanization would have it) but are continually invented anew. The pastoral or the agrarian becomes immanent to the city—­or, rather, it frees the city from a singular notion of the urban. The chapter thus develops a different grammar of urbanicity that understands the completeness of urbanization in a way that is different to theses of planetary urbanization. A pastoral order, including the persistence of urban dairies in spite of state dictate, prompts interrogating what constitutes the economic

24 

Introduction

in urban economies. Chapter 6 thus attends to economic formations that emerge at the interstices of the city and that are centered on relations with other-­than-­human life. By arguing that urban economies are not always totally subsumed by capitalism—­that is, they become fully capitalist in their organization—­the chapter pushes this book in two further directions. First, in conversation with expositions of economic practices vis-­à-­vis commensality and urban recombinance discussed in previous chapters, it recasts the economic as co-­constituted by lively forces and potentials. Second, it shows how certain economic arrangements can remain outside the ever-­expanding drive of capital, often through forms that escape the latter’s codes or modes of social and economic organization. Delhi and London—­and their distinct yet interrelated ecologies—­ open up avenues for a different account of urban life, one articulated in a minor key. The two cities constitute rapports for comparison, as do the varied practices of relating to other-­than-­human life—­practices in which the latter play a constitutive rather than subsidiary role, verifying them and attesting or contesting such practices’ durability. Many of these practices lie in the periphery of urban theory, but they provide vital insights into rethinking some of the staple categories through which analyses of urban life proceed. The book thus brings different platforms of urban experience to the fore, creating the grounds for a different interpretation of urbanicity and the material politics of city making. By doing so, it seeks to rethink what makes cities livable.

1 A MINOR ECOLOGY OF INFRASTRUCTURE

Infrastructural Attunements The upmarket business district of Delhi’s Connaught Place and Janpath had a sudden power outage that lasted several hours. A troop of macaques scrambled down concrete high-­rises to steal food from a chola bhatura, or savory vendor, selling wares on a street corner. On being chased, the animals clambered up pipes to reach safer heights before crossing a busy road via high-­tension cable wires. Amid the commotion, with the vendor shouting expletives from thirty feet below, one animal fell onto the main transformer connecting the power grid, sparking a short circuit. A crowd soon assembled, some trying to figure out what the commotion was about and others irate about a blackout in the April heat. “This is the second time in eighteen months that monkeys have caused a power breakdown,” complained the owner of an apparel store. Emergency repair staff members were called in, but they were unable to remove the electrocuted macaque because other members of its natal troop prevented people from getting close. Almost every rooftop in the vicinity had macaques. They displayed aggression toward onlookers—­especially at repair staff desperately trying to remove the dead animal. It took hours for the electricity to be restored. Delhi’s rhesus macaque population has proliferated in the last three decades, sparking controversies about urban inhabitation and belonging. Macaques’ abilities to negotiate the city draws from their enmeshment 25

26 

A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure

with the infrastructural environment—­pipes, cables, buildings, and walls—­that the animals repurpose for their own mobilities and dwellings (Figure 1.1). When macaques trigger power outages, they pose questions about the material and political life of infrastructure, although not in ways commonplace in what has exploded as an arena of inquiry in the interpretative social sciences. What might it mean, then, to ecologize infrastructure—­that is, to bring to the fore some of the elusive relations that constitute urban form, modes of inhabitation, and attendant urban economies? What might a broader infrastructural ontology, one attentive to arboreal worlds, ambulant geometries, and affective attunements, do to query the urban canon and its major grammar? As Amin and Thrift presciently observe, “Cities everywhere are orchestrated by human and nonhuman means. They are a series of knots which rely on various kinds of attunement in which infrastructure is a vital thread.”1 Bringing the electrical grid, practices of purloining electricity, and the dwellings of macaques into conjunction, I want to provide

Figure 1.1. Macaque-infrastructure enmeshments. Photograph by Chris Goldberg/sunburntback.com.

A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure  27

a different account of the material and political life of infrastructure. Central to the aims of this chapter is the recasting of the anthropocentric ambit of much current thinking on urban infrastructure. First, it aims to reveal how the infrastructures fashion other-­than-­human life, furnishing habitat and modulating animal habits. The chapter develops a nonhylomorphic account of infrastructure, showing how urban form emerges both along and against the grain of grand designs and assembly. Second, it aims to show how claims to staples such as electricity can operate in an infrapolitical vein, summoning a heterogeneous suite of agents, not all of whom are human. Third, it highlights how relations between people and other than humans, in this instance macaques, can themselves become infrastructural,2 subtending economic practices at the urban margins. By doing so, this endeavor extends extant readings of cities through their infrastructure; it also addresses the conjunctions between infrastructure and other-­than-­human life. As producers and products of planetary transformation, cities and their attendant infrastructures escalate circulations. Infrastructure, then, is no longer an effect but a cause, forging the very notion of urbanicity and the metropolis as a spatial, material formation.3 Urban lifeworlds can be seen as becoming infrastructural in all its dimensions, from the economic to the cultural and political. Loosely defined as “matter that enable the movement of other matter,”4 infrastructure evaporates divisions between background and foreground, the sensed and the withdrawn, as it moves things around and between cities. Infrastructure dissolves distinctions between the natural and unnatural, with the uneasy implication that it defines what shows up as real at any given juncture. Much of the innovative work on infrastructure has examined how claims to staples, including water, electricity, and sanitation, provide a new ethnographic and analytical frame “to defamiliarize and rethink the political.”5 As technologies of enchantment that promise economic prosperity, development, and modernity, infrastructures shape experiences of everyday life. They come to the fore as sites of social and material claims, where questions of urban citizenship are produced, contested, and revealed. Ethnographies of urban provisioning infrastructures argue that politics is not only formed and constrained by juridicopolitical practices but also caught in a technopolitical field that can consist of relations among a gamut of things, including pipes,6 energy grids,7 and roads.8

28 

A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure

Yet these analyses often revert to a major urban grammar. The political is recast in terms of identity, for the term “citizen” already forecloses who inhabits or belongs to the city, casting aside a retinue of other-­than-­ human beings that craft and contest what it means to be urban. This is not to say that work on infrastructure ignores material politics.9 In a widely cited collection of essays, Appel and colleagues point out that “as things become political only through relations, we call for a recognition that materials and ideology together participate in the makings of infrastructure, politics and publics.”10 What is at stake is the melding of a governance of matter with matters of governance, thus drawing Foucault into conversation with “new” or “vitalist” materialism11 to persuasively illustrate how populations, publics, and infrastructures are iteratively constituted. Infrastructures turn out to be much more than provisioning networks. Material routines settle and habituate apparatuses of social order and authority in ways that make these apparatuses seem natural, necessary, and even ordinary. Metrics and meters become technologies of liberal government instilled into the quotidian machinery of urban life. It is through infrastructural failures and variance from intended script that material politics often comes to life in this work. “Designs,” Appel and colleagues argue, “are repurposed, altered and populated by heterogeneous dreams, desires and practices.”12 They confound goals and ambitions of their designers. But more pertinently, it is breakdown—­ power failures, faucets running dry, drains overflowing—­that renders visible a material politics of infrastructure and technological conditions under which lives are led. “Infrastructures,” as Brian Larkin points out, “bleed.” It generates atmospheres for understanding pauses, interruptions, and breakdown—­but it also generates fraught “forms of life to which breakdown gives rise.”13

Breakdown However, as the opening vignette shows, infrastructures bleed in multivalent and unexpected ways. They are entangled with forms of life not entirely encapsulated in majoritarian urban grammars. Here, infrastructures might be thought of “as verb,” as that which “continuously unsettles bodies and their arrangements.”14 In fact, power outages triggered by macaques can render visible the dispersed, meshworked geographies of the city. In June 2011, newspapers reported how a power line, tripped

A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure  29

by a macaque in east Delhi’s IP Extension, sparked power cuts in several residential localities—­Lajpat Nagar, Maharani Bagh, and New Friends Colony—­in the south of the city.15 The event threw the complexity of infrastructural provisioning into sharp relief, from electricity transmitters to distributors and their attendant bureaucracies. Staff of Delhi Transco Limited, a public-­sector enterprise responsible for transmitting power, remarked how they first tried isolating the system by stopping the flow of power when the macaque entered their supply substation. Concern for saving the animal was coupled with ensuring that no damage to infrastructural equipment was caused. After dodging attempts to catch it for almost half an hour, the macaque inadvertently got tangled in electric cables. Not only did the unfortunate animal get electrocuted, but “two transformers of 1000MVA also tripped” as a result.16 Delhi Transco was forced to cut power. “We asked the distribution company in South Delhi to reroute supply to other feeders without interruption,” remarked an official, cognizant that power outages “should not have been more than ten to fifteen minutes.”17 However, “the combined load from the affected line was close to two-­hundred megawatts,” an amount “impossible to re-­route effectively.” Power demands in the city were at their peak in the summer heat. Transmitting power through other lines was not an option, as these were “already overloaded.”18 Entanglements between macaques and infrastructures were more far-­reaching than the localized event, rendering visible the electric meshwork that undergirds the city. Disruptions, however, can be much more mundane, folded into the pulse of everyday life. “Monkeys destroy plants but they don’t stop there. Electric cables, dish antennae, CCTV cameras, telephone wires and even PNG fittings are not left alone,” remarks the president of a residents’ welfare association in east Delhi. “They move about with the help of wires. A mishap can lead to a situation that is life-­threatening for people.” Torn wires and cables are a frequent complaint in Delhi. Close attention to practices at hand shows that this is not simply the outcome of macaques’ mobilities but is enmeshed in, and influenced by, a range of currents animating the modernist city. Macaques have become a serious point of contention in Delhi’s Tis Hazari, or lower court complex, where they have begun to hinder the installation of internet infrastructure. The animals’ presence around the courts has been fostered by their regular provisioning by individuals embroiled in litigation.

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A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure

People caught up in what are generally long-­winded and protracted judicial processes in Indian courts often pray to Lord Hanumān, as he is known as sankatmochan, or the reliever of misfortune.19 Offering food to macaques is a means of appeasing Hanumān, an endeavor meant to obtain liberation from distress and disputes. Infrastructural disruptions happen as a result of this concatenated ecology: macaques are seen as intermediaries summoning supernatural powers, and through provisioning, the animals begin to associate courts with food. As a result, and in the words of the secretary of Delhi’s bar association, “monkeys are not only damaging the court’s records but sometimes files and documents are found strewn in the corridors and power cables containing sensitive data are found snapped.”20 Infrastructural disruptions and breakdown have rendered macaques into an urban matter of concern. On numerous instances, macaques have boarded Delhi’s metro, causing mayhem among commuters. Traffic jams caused by macaque troops’ blocking roads are not unknown, and on occasion, they have even entered the city’s international airport, transgressing a security area and forcing a brief closure of the VIP lounge. One animal evaded capture for almost two weeks, keeping the entire airport administration on its toes. Amit, a frequent flyer, remarks how he has “witnessed several incidents when monkeys have created mayhem, not to mention panic among passengers waiting to board their flights.” In cities such as Varanasi, macaques have become the “biggest hurdles in transforming Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency . . . into a Modern city.” “Monkeys destroy all the wires and chew all the wires,” says a communications engineer entrusted with setting up street-­level Wi-­Fi, which is part of the prime minister’s investment in digital infrastructure and commitment to build a hundred new smart cities by 2020. Macaques had apparently chewed up the cables less than two months after they were installed. With urban density preventing the laying of underground cables, the planners’ quest for finding a “smart solution” to the issue has so far remained evasive.21

Infrastructure: A Minor Ecology Disruptions and breakdown bring to life a contestation of urban infrastructure by a retinue of other-­than-­human beings—­contestations that

A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure  31

confound urban planning and intended design. Yet making sense of the entanglements between other-­than-­human ecologies and infrastructure through the language of breakdown is limiting. No doubt “breakdown” suggests its own dispositions, which are generative—­an interregnum during which many things might happen.22 But attending to macaques as a solely disruptive or transgressive force also forecloses other questions that might be asked about the material life of urban infrastructure—­ questions that strike at the heart of dominant metaphors of architecture, planning, assembly, and design in urban theory. Asking such questions requires developing what I call a minor ecology of infrastructure—­that is, to express social and material claims about infrastructure in a key that sees cities as ensembles of human and other-­than-­human rhythms. These rhythms gather a multitude of other stories vibrating within the urban. The minor does not come from a minor language but is rather, to quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s short treatise on Kafka, “that which a minority constructs within a major language.”23 It is not the expression of a minority, who can often be privileged elites; nor is it synonymous with a minority in a representational register. Rather, the minor is about expression in cramped space: the language of the urban canon ascendant in the western tradition, as well as urban theory from the Global South, much of which is articulated in the major key. In the major key, infrastructure is refracted through a notion of design that is hylomorphic, or the stamping of form on inert matter. The term “hylomorphic” will resonate throughout this book, and it is worth dwelling on it briefly. Hylomorphism derives from the Aristotelian idea that to create anything, one has to impose form (morphe) on matter (hyle), an idea that has become deeply embedded in urban grammar from architecture to art, design to technology, policy to planning. Increasingly, the balance between form and matter has become unbalanced. Form is seen to be imposed by an agent, usually humans, with a specific design or plan in mind, while matter, rendered inert or sometimes obdurate, is that which is imprinted on.24 Hylomorphism imagines the urban environment to be an outcome of the activity of building, giving primacy to a world laid out by humans for their use in advance of who or what inhabits it. Variance, as in the repurposing of infrastructure through informal practices and soft subversions, is understood as

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that which exceeds intended script and preordained plan, not a creative process itself. Its consequence, for purposes of this argument on infrastructure, is that questions about who has infrastructural rights, or who exercises them over others, are resolutely couched in molar terms. By molar, I mean that they derive from, and are centered on, a human constant. Consequently, apparatuses of social order and political technologies of liberal government, read iteratively in what is a vast literature on infrastructure, constructs very particular kinds of publics, populations, and calculating subjects, irrespective of whether the latter are elites or subalterns. In this major key, all that is other than human melts into air. A minor practice, in contrast, is to rework a major language from within, to formulate concepts and denominations of the urban canon differently. But the minor does not stand apart from the major, and we cannot have one without the other. The minor always trails the major “like a thing and its shadow,”25 even though the latter is routinely suppressed. This is true of urban theory; it is also true of ethology and economy, subjects I turn to later in this chapter. The major and the minor are two different treatments of the same urban language, one that consists of extracting molar constants (where the human assumes the standard measure and urban frame of reference) and another that consists of placing it in continuous variation. Work on infrastructure is written predominantly in the major key, and as such, it is incomplete, lacking the minor practices that are inventive and that permit making and remaking urban life. To follow the lives of macaques—­their becomings-­with an urban environment—­is to enter into a minor ecology of infrastructure.26 Such ecologies are about the production and proliferation of “polyvalent and collective connections”27—­polyvalent because connections are brought about by heterogeneous agents, without policing who or what they might be, and polyvalent (from valentia, meaning “power” or “competence”) because it includes a range of competencies, of which the human is one of many. Take, for instance, the quotidian rhythms of macaques in Connaught Place, Delhi’s premiere business hub, where much of my fieldwork took place. Simians silhouetted against neon advertising signs and animals peering down from towering commercial buildings are a frequent sight. In late afternoon, some individuals begin to descend to the landmark Hanumān Temple, using the city’s reticulate

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geometry of pipes and interlacing walls to make their way. Devotees hand out bananas that macaques take by extending their forearms. Dominant individuals wait patiently; others scramble. They later ascend by walking along concrete ledges, outcrops, and balconies. Half-­built high-­rises and inaccessible rooftops become roosts, forging spatial folds to be other than human amid a megacity of twenty-­two million people. Architectural features of the city become part of macaques’ urban worlds, as does a range of provisioning infrastructure. They use overhead water storage tanks, dotted across most high-­rises in the metropolis, to bathe. “Monkeys have learned to open their covers, and if the plastic water tanks are empty, they even knock them off our terrace,” says Rashid, who has installed locks on his storage tanks in Old Delhi to prevent macaques from getting into them. Taps become reliable sources of drinking water in an urban environment where basic staples—­and freshwater is a staple for macaques too—­are localized and scarce. The animals know where taps are located within their territories; further, some, though not all, have learned how to open them with ease. Individuals can be seen walking fair distances to access taps, turning their handles counterclockwise through deft maneuvers of their forepaws before putting their mouths to the spout to drink (Figure 1.2). The precious water usually left running goes to waste, much to the chagrin of residents. A video of one individual closing a tap after use went viral on the internet,28 sparking speculative, anthropomorphized memes on macaques’ proclivity for water conservation. Although it is difficult to apprehend what sparked the individual to do so, and no one knows whether closing taps could in the future become a skill macaques acquire if they understand that it reduces antagonism from people, the dexterity and neophilia macaques exhibit reflect the competencies the animals develop when inhabiting complex urban worlds. These are competencies of living with infrastructure that spread and multiply through other-­than-­human learning and emulation—­competencies that may be rarely or never displayed by their conspecifics in rural or forested landscapes. Further, there are not only between-­population differences but also between-­individual variations. Some urban macaques try and open taps but simply cannot. Equally, people respond to macaque infrastructure enmeshments: taps can be replaced with a different design so that water does not go to waste (Figure 1.2). The city brims with such small stories, of other ebbs

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Figure 1.2. Small stories of infrastructure. The tap was replaced with a different design to prevent water waste. Photographs by author.

and flows, which are easily overlooked in mainstream accounts of urban life and infrastructure, and yet they are crucial to what constitutes urban experience. Macaques inhabit and apprehend the city according to their own cercopithecine competencies, bringing novel architectural and infrastructural labyrinths into being, completely unanticipated in their inaugural assembly or design. Central to these polyvalent connections are what

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ecological psychologist James Gibson calls affordances, or what an environment or thing offers or furnishes an animal. Affordances are relational. They are not merely physical properties; nor are they collapsible to a sentient subject. Rather, they imply complementarity between perceiver and perceived. Gibson might well have been thinking about macaques when he refers to architecture as “climb-­on-­able or fall-­off-­able or get-­ underneath-­able or bump-­onto-­able,” whose affordances are “relative to the animal” concerned.29 Affordances are perceived in haptic, optic, and kinetic registers. They are realized not along a humanist axis of calibration but through the actions and competencies of macaques themselves. In contrast to rural areas and villages, where the rhesus is predominantly ground dwelling, Delhi’s urban macaques frequently negotiate the city by realizing the arboreal affordances of walls, ledges, pipes, and cables. Or put another way, the arboreal elements of a city’s architecture are rendered into ground by macaques. In certain parts of the city, only dominant individuals cross busy roads using cables and wires; the road remains a barrier for other members, particularly subadults and mothers with infants, suggesting that there are multiple different ethogeographies to simian inhabitation of the metropole. In many instances, the direction of troop movement “is usually and fairly consistently determined by the oldest males or females in the troop.”30 Individual knowledges also have bearings on the ethogeographies of urban macaques: how they use infrastructure is contingent on an animal’s experience and propensities. Urban arboreality thus emerges through a relation between infrastructure and simian competencies—­macaques’ differential abilities to climb, leap, and scramble, and what provisioning architectures furnish for their quadruped movement. It is nothing more, but nothing less. Polyvalent connections brought about through the realization of affordances poses different questions of the material life of infrastructure than those articulated in a major key. In the latter, materials are about their production as a representational form, which enables bureaucratic, biometric, and calculative regimes to emerge and for aesthetic orders to take grip. “Pipes,” writes Larkin, “turn out to be documents.”31 Through the ambulant ecologies of macaques, as they shift from a rural terrestriality to an urban arboreality, pipes turn out to be climbers and wires turn out to be vines. These infrastructures become part and parcel

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of macaques’ lives; they equally constitute macaques’ plastic habits, including patterned rhythms of maintaining territories, finding food, and getting to safe, inaccessible roosts. Infrastructure becomes immanent to other-­than-­human worlds and their urban habitus, where the latter might be understood as a melding of habit and habitat.32 Infrastructures enable macaques to proliferate in built environments, but they equally take infrastructures along a different material–­semiotic trajectory than that of molar, calculative technologies. This is infrastructure in a minor key, as a whole other story of repurposing immanent to its material life comes to the fore—­a story not of central concern to the urban canon, but nonetheless one without which articulations of metropolitan life would be incomplete, if not impoverished. One might say that macaques, by bringing cables, wires, pipes, and architecture into their bodily habitation of the city, perform an act of incorporation by generating power outages and disruptions; they affect infrastructure from within. They thereby introduce variations to it—­ perhaps only small ones, but they can make a difference. As in a musical score, variations are about working with (urban) form from within: subtle modifications in infrastructural rhythms, introductions of offbeats and counterpoints—­all have material and micropolitical effects. Variations are minor renditions of a major key, creating a “minor mode” that “gives tonal music a decentered, runaway, fugitive character.”33 They strike at the heart of the hylomorphism that scholarship in the major key has found difficult to cast off, even though many operations of the built environment are concretized through negotiations and adaptations of actors of heterogeneous kinds. There are all kinds of adjustments and recalibrations involved, but many strands of major planning and theory continue to operate with an assumption that the urban is fundamentally the product of design, entailing plans conceptualized in advance and then inscribed on the world through promontory, often autocratic practice.34 When infrastructures get repurposed or reoriented for a different set of aims, it is considered a divergence from a goal, or “how systems and practices operate in variance with their purported objective.”35 Building roads becomes a means of gaining lucrative contracts; installing electrical infrastructure enables access to rewarding patron–­ client networks. They are at variance with the intended goals of providing urban staples, but the model of design and inscription—­prior conception followed by implementation—­remains unchallenged.

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Variations, however, are different from variance. They are about immanence. Both people and macaques inhabit the same world in which infrastructure is a constituent, not a world laid out in advance of its inhabitation. It is only in a world of preordained plans that divergences can happen, for designing, planning, and building precede inhabitation, and use begins only when building ends. The course of things is already written into their design. Variance is a deflection; variations are ongoing. They point to a world where processes are always unfinished, where more-­than-­human actions continually work on infrastructure from within. Variance entails alterations brought about by unexpected dreams and desires, while variations imply lines of flight and macaques’ urban becomings that are unimaginable in humanist and hylomorphic ideas of design. As arboreal flaneurs, macaques incorporate walls, wires, and pipes into their patterned territoriality and quadruped movement, placing infrastructure “in continuous variation” and rendering it “a superlineal system, a rhizome instead of a tree”36—­and a meshwork instead of a network. This is not to say that macaques impose form on matter to give rise to other urban landscapes, as the notion of design implies. Rather, the meshwork that emerges is akin to what urban geographer Matthew Gandy calls “unintentional landscapes”—­landscapes in spite of themselves. Exploring what might be characterized as the “constitutive outside” to the conventional understanding of landscape, Gandy questions what are ordinarily regarded as urban landscapes, what comprises the terms by which they are defined, and how they might be opened up to a wider range of voices and perspectives. Taking different types of “non-­ designed urban nature”—­particularly devalorized and derelict spaces such as abandoned railway lines, brownfield sites, and urban wastelands that unsettle the organizational telos of modernity—­as points of inquiry, an unintentional landscape is defined “as an aesthetic encounter with nature that has not been purposively created.” It is “not a primal landscape in the sense of ‘wild nature’ serving an object of aesthetic contemplation, it is not an idealized landscape that confirms to some preexisting conception of the innate relations between nature and culture, and it is not a designed landscape allied to particular social or political goals. It is a landscape in spite of itself,” one that is spontaneous, with “a focus of intrigue or pleasure that has emerged irrespective of its anomalous or redundant characteristics.”37

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A minor ecology further opens the question of landscape to polyvalent and collective connections, thus placing emergence within an extended field of relations. The notion of “unintentional” rests on a distinction between what the scholastics termed essentia, the essence of an object, and accidentia, or properties that arise from chance. What determines the distinction between essence and accident is the nature of the bond between the object and a person. Infrastructural labyrinths of the city become unintentional landscapes when the frame of reference is human design, or when who forms those bonds is taken as a given. But if one were to replace a human with a macaque, shifting the frame of reference to a meshworked ecology where there is no centralized, panoptic eye, then which encounters constitute an urban landscape and what relations give rise to its characteristics, anomalous or redundant, essential or accidental, are radically reenvisioned. Cercopithecine modes of seeing, touching, listening, and apprehending realize other affordances of the built environment, rendering the latter into a living arboreal landscape, although humans may be unique in casting them in representational and discursive terms. Such realization of affordances, and the variations so introduced, does away with the dichotomy of preconceived design and manifestation in architectural form. They give rise to other urban worlds interwoven by a meshwork of heterogeneous lines—­lines that are never foreclosed, sealed, or immune from ambient forces. Rather, they are “lines invented, drawn, without a model and without chance,”38 invented by being drawn through everyday lives.

Meshworks: Inventing Lines In Connaught Place and in Old Delhi, it is not unusual to see macaques crossing streets or making their way into buildings via cables (Figure 1.3). The tangled web of overhead wires, as though a giant spider has woven its way through the city, leaves first-­time visitors spellbound. Wires loop from transformers and balconies; transmission lines knot lampposts and windows; cables dangle across narrow bazaar lanes and twist over crowded chowks. Overhead wires are a meshwork, never sealed by a perimeter but consisting of lines that ramify—­touching, cooperating, parasitizing, hanging precariously, or growing in all directions, like a world of interlacing trails with a life of its own. For some, this meshwork is an “eyesore” that untunes the aesthetics of the city. As “muck”

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with colonial legacies, whose continuation and proliferation rests on “native genius” in the form of illicit tapping, the meshwork is an “unholy mess . . . used by armies of monkeys on their daily journeys in search of food.”39 For others, it is part of the urban fabric, made and remade through everyday inhabitation. The politics of aesthetics aside, examining how overhead wires proliferate—­raveling here, unraveling there—­is vital for understanding how arboreal urban worlds emerge and ways in which macaques’ sensory urban habitus is shaped. It is also critical for a more grounded—­ or arboreal—­approach to understanding the political effects of material assemblages. Vital materialisms have often referred to electricity networks, using it as an example of thing-­power and of dispersed and distributed effects of political agency. However, accounts of the elusive “vital materialities” that it aims to retrieve40 are unmoored from an ethnographic context. For instance, Bennett’s account of power outages, emphasizing the vitality of matter, fails to outline what practices of repair and maintenance go into running electrical grids,41 and therefore what conditions lead to infrastructural breakdown. Furthermore, in a distal account of political matter, the actions of a range of beings are elided. The endeavor here, then, is to account for material life rather than the politics of matter—­

Figure 1.3. Inventing lines. A macaque moves through the electric meshwork. Photograph by author.

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a life where materials intersect with a range of heterogeneous practices, from regulation to generation of information, from informality to the infrapolitical. The rise of Delhi’s electric infrastructure is preceded by a complex history of stately rituals, political action, and legal struggles.42 Equally, it has proliferated by practices of hooking onto the energy grid via improvised (and often unauthorized) connections. The morphology of the Delhi electropolis is the product of two sets of forces: the expansion of informal or illegal settlements and their claims to energy supply, and the state’s attempt to regulate infrastructural access. Delhi privatized its state-­ run electricity supply and distribution in the early 2000s, at a time when decentralization and participation were governmental watchwords. Reforms were aimed at addressing discontent over insufficient coverage and plagued delivery, which grew out of rapid spread in unplanned settlements, and with them increased demands on the energy grid.43 Newly set up distribution companies (discoms) rapidly expanded into unplanned settlements, partly to curtail high rates of theft and distribution losses, but also to expand their consumer base. Unique numbers were assigned to each household, and if connections were illegal, they were regularized through newly installed electric meters. As a tacit means of assimilation, regularizing connections brings marginalized populations into the ambit of the state and capital. However, challenges posed by operative geometries of electrification—­including inefficiencies in coordination, differences in sectorial logics, and a lack of planning—­mean that discoms are caught between implementing directives of Delhi’s urban master plan and attending to informal urbanization.44 Discoms therefore resort to forms of institutional bricolage, where informal practice is accommodated within existing arrangements, which in turn forge conditions for the proliferation of entangled overhead wires. “The problem,” as a discom CEO tells Laure Criqui during her evocative work on Delhi’s infrastructure, “is not the electrification of unauthorised colonies, that’s easy! The real challenge and difficulties come afterwards.”45 For instance, substations and transformers are frequently installed on the berm of roads—­often the only available land in settlements with limited space and high urban density. Unplanned expansions of buildings, both vertically and laterally, including extensions such as balconies, encroach on electrical equipment and

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breach stipulated minimum distances from electrical infrastructure. Such architectonic outgrowths make it easier for illegal connections—­typically clandestine, nonmetered grafts onto a transmission line—­to be devised. These heterogeneous practices are elided in new materialist accounts of the politics of matter and its emphasis that it is difficult to grasp the sources of agency,46 although they remain important for understanding the genesis of urban form. For over a decade, readings of urban infrastructure and planning from the Global South have shown how informality is central to urban planning in India. Arguing against narratives of failed planning, where rapid growth is seen to outstrip planners’ visions and forecasts—­or conversely that planning consistently underestimates infrastructural needs—­ this body of work posits informality as a planning regime, an “instrument of both accumulation and authority.”47 Informality is not synonymous with poverty; indeed, a closer look at cities in the Global South indicates that informal urbanization is as much the purview of metropolitan elites as it is of urban subalterns. Informality is a deregulated, not unregulated, domain; it is not necessarily just a grassroots phenomenon running parallel to the formal and the legal but may also be a mode of discipline, power, and regulation existing at the state’s center. India’s planning regime is read as an informalized entity, operating through deregulated building and installation, unauthorized architecture and material accretions, infrastructural theft and its regularization. Informality is not antiplanning but is seen to constitute the fabric of India’s urbanization. Informality, as a state regime and a feature of structures of power, is “informality from above,”48 and as such, it still articulates processes of urbanization in the major key. Its analytics are arborescent in that they work either by “assimilation, homogenization”49 or by their corollaries, deregulation and fragmentation. These logics of informal urbanization only take us so far in terms of understanding the platform of urban experience as it inheres in a city like Delhi. The analytical filter of informal urbanism falls short in attending to, let alone explaining, how infrastructure becomes an arboreal, more-­than-­human world—­or, for that matter, apprehending the infrapolitics that reverberates within it. An attention to minor practices, on the other hand, reveals heterogeneous agents involved “in the drawing of lines.”50 It shifts attention to an ecology of craft that is the opposite of arborescence. Hooking onto the grid

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through illicit wires, sometimes called katiyas in the vernacular and put in place by a katiyabaaz—­professionals who purloin electricity—­is an example par excellence. The practice of rerouting electricity is to introduce modifications, to bring about new connections and flows. It is a drawing of lines with wires through which rhizomatic cartographies ramify and the electric meshwork grows. The minor practices of the urban electrician or katiyabaaz challenge striated state power and its attendant hylomorphic, matter–­form model from which such power derives. To recap, this model stems from the idea that wood (hyle in Greek), or for that matter any material, is shapeless, and the engineer, architect, technician, or designer gives it form (morphe in Greek). The material world is stuffed into form, causing a thing to appear in the first place.51 Here, ideas and laws assume a model’s coherence. Engineers operate with laws of voltage, capacity, frequency, and load, submitting matter to a specific form—­the grid—­ and “conversely [realizing] in matter a given property deduced from the form.”52 In contrast to the engineer, the katiyabaaz is a bricoleur, operating through rules of thumb but not subordinating these to laws and a matter–­form model. The katiya that is hooked onto the grid is not so much a connector as a graft, a wire that is grown with the electric meshwork, joining into its generative flows and formation. While engineers and the state seek to prepare matter for form, the minor practice of the katiyabaaz works with materials and forces. The katiyabaaz continually rearranges wires in new and different patterns or configurations. He surrenders to the meshwork and follows where it leads, gauging which wires are live, improvising in order to enable diversions, and ensuring the graft is subtle, durable, and can handle vagaries of the weather. “No matter how strong the winds are, or even if there is a monsoon storm, my katiyas will not budge,” proclaims Loha Singh, the protagonist of the evocative documentary Katiyabaaz on electricity theft.53 A limitation of the hylomorphic model is that it leaves “many things, active and affective, by the wayside.” Katiyas or grafts are not about imposing a form on matter but about “material traits of expression constituting affects.” Each graft is a singularity, an undulation that introduces a variation to the infrastructural score, an expression where materials, cables, and flows affect one another. The specificity of the katiyabaaz’s practice lies precisely in the “type of affects he invents”: electric affects.

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The katiyabaaz, like Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the metallurgist, “works inside the mould,”54 improvising on the grid from within, introducing lines of variation that render the electric network into a meshwork—­a rhizome. This is a practice involving materials, which is an expression of qualities rather than matter, which has to do with properties. By drawing lines and rewiring the city through clandestine connections, the katiyabaaz recomposes the electropolis in a minor key. The relation between minor practice and the minor key in music is not simply an analogy. Rather, as in music, the improvisation of wire grafting is a continuous development of the electropolis’s form and a continuous variation of its materials. Minor practice suggests that the electropolis is not simply put in place, as notions of planning and design imply; rather, it issues forth from within, growing in all directions (Figure 1.4). Variation, when it takes a life of its own, becomes identified with creation. However, through improvisation, the katiyabaaz also invents other affects: arboreal affects felt and sensed by macaques—­albeit without a model but without chance. Macaques’ patterned mobility along electric wires, from markets to residences, water tanks to roosts, indicates that the meshwork is as much, if not more, a “tactile” or “haptic space” than a visual one.55 Although macaques are predominantly terrestrial in rural India, they are wary when crossing metropolitan roads, with their high-­speed traffic. Individuals will look both ways several times before

Figure 1.4. Electric wires in Old Delhi. Photograph by author.

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crossing, often waiting until there is no traffic at all. In contrast, the cityscape’s arboreal world, invented through cable-­and-­wire infrastructure, enables at least certain macaques to cross busy streets with ease. If the visual is a primary mode of sensing the city for ocularcentric and bipedal humans, then shifting the frame of reference from the human to the more than human makes us cognizant of other affects resonating within infrastructures—­affects that can only be felt, grasped, and manipulated by paws, not hands. Macaques are touched by infrastructure, and through their plicated movements, they render the electric meshwork into a haptic space. In fact, macaques’ movements through the electrical grid are now considered in the work of infrastructure providers. These providers know that macaques that get electrocuted or entangled in wires immediately draw the attention of their natal troop. To protect their kin, macaques prevent repair teams from disentangling the animal, often attacking onlookers and linemen, making it unsafe for them to work. The infrastructure providers now increasingly collaborate with wildlife rescue NGOs, drawing on the latter’s expertise in dealing with macaques. Such situations suggest that a broader infrastructural ontology that recognizes rather than effaces how other than humans use infrastructure is already being borne out in the multiplicity of the lived city, where the very practice of infrastructural repair is about responding to other-­than-­human affects. The katiyabaaz’s practices of inventing affects, in contrast, is a “minor, operative geometry,”56 one of trait and movement. He follows the singularity of materials, going where a cable or wire leads him, where a bypass might be generated, where he can find a node and secure a connection. His knowledge of grafting is tacit. It is a “pragmatic science of placings-­in-­variation” that operates differently from “Euclidian invariants” and their attendant histories of “suspicion and even repression.”57 Minor geometries are ambulant, playing out in smooth space, whereas those of the state and capital, and their entourage of architects and planners, builders and engineers, rely on striations, including the pregiven separation between design and implementation, planning and execution. By introducing distinctions between “the intellectual and the manual, the theoretical and the practical,” the hylomorphic project of state and capital fashions an oppressive “difference between the ‘governors’ and ‘governed.’”58 The practices of the state and capital comprise a politics

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of matter, whereas those of the katiyabaaz comprise a material politics, sometimes operating beneath the threshold of detectability.

Infrapolitics In Delhi, discoms have come up with a number of measures to suppress minor practices—­an enterprise steeped in a technical and commercial zeal, and one rooted in the hylomorphic matter–­form model. Their engineers derive power from laws and constants, deploying these to govern infrastructure. Wires are shortened to cut distribution losses, cables are armored to prevent tapping, and meters—­providing readings for the laws of physics to be applied—­are sealed in boxes to thwart tampering. Discoms have been aggressively stepping up surveillance and raids. “Laws of physics are deployed to find out where power theft is happening,” remarks a discom engineer. “For instance, power is the product of voltage, current and something called a power factor (cos θ). Through this law, we know that electricity consumed by a household manifests in a relation between current and the power factor. Our new meters measure this relation.” If a power thief fiddles with the meter to create a bypass, thinking that the electricity will flow unrecorded, “the new meters will indicate a highly altered power factor. In fact, if the power factor value is 90°, it could even mean the consumer is generating power!” In 2017, discoms filed close to four thousand complaints of power thefts, and nearly three thousand cases were registered by the police.59 “Completely stopping theft,” a policeman remarks, “is not practically feasible. Numerous administrative and operational reasons come in the way. What’s more, exact connections are often hard to locate when conducting a raid.” Furthermore, local strongmen intervene and hinder officials from carrying out raids, and the katiyabaaz take advantage of the confusion of wires to graft connections that elude state and corporate surveillance. Their exclusion from the political technologies of the state–­ capital apparatus is consciously negotiated. “Why should I be scared of the government when electric current does not scare me?” asks Loha Singh, who mocks the government by purloining electricity.60 Providing illegal connections for a living is a risky and hazardous vocation, but it is also an infrapolitical activity—­a strategy of resisting power laws,

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bypassing state scrutiny without open contestation—­through which infrastructural resources are rewired and negotiated. Infrapolitics constituted through minor geometries are different from the “politics of infrastructure” that has become familiar in urban theory,61 for all kinds of agents are summoned to make infrastructural claims, often through practices outside what usually passes as political activity. Nor is infrapolitics reducible to thing-­power.62 The latter often results in a kind of “naïve realism” allowing things to have a “more-­ than-­relational character,” affirming the vitality of things rather than exploring asymmetries and differences.63 Several households in a lower-­ middle-­class Delhi Development Authority residential colony resorted to abandoning the new electricity meters that the discoms had installed, arguing that macaques had developed a habit of ripping them off the walls. “What monkeys get out of destroying meters we can’t tell,” remarked a resident, “but they play with the meters for a while and then leave them, only to steal another device later.” When complaints were put forward to police authorities, they remarked that “theft laws were for humans, not macaques.” BSES Rajdhani, the local power-­supply entity, apparently replaced more than fifty damaged or missing meters. Although it is difficult to know whether macaques were the sole cause of missing meters—­it is highly plausible that they were surreptitiously removed by people—­there is little doubt that other-­than-­human agents can get enrolled in subversive acts. Macaques’ neophilic propensities, imperceptible from the viewpoint of mainstream urban theory, transcribe people’s attempts to evade state and corporate scrutiny. Indeed, there is much more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in discoms’ philosophy. Other-­ than-­ human agents summoned to make infrastructural claims can extend to the spectral, as witnessed in Delhi’s famous episode of the Monkeyman. In the summer of May 2001, an elusive monkey-­like creature attacked and injured a number of people at night, mainly during power failures, in working-­class settlements in Ghaziabad and east Delhi. “It was a monkey alright, and about four foot tall,” remarked a victim, “but as soon as I grabbed it, it turned itself into a cat with tawny, glowing eyes.”64 The assailant morphed over time, from a macaque to a mutant cyborg, as the scare escalated and the number of incidents increased in Delhi (Figure 1.5). Forensic reports from psychiatrists later concluded

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that the Monkeyman phenomenon was an outbreak of mass hysteria. Interviews revealed that injuries reported by victims often occurred during panic attacks, and most were self-­inflicted.65 Although scholars have eloquently pointed to the spaces of subaltern existence (terraces, vacant lots, and low-­rise buildings in “urban villages”) that the virtual actualized and brought to life,66 and although commentators index splintering urbanisms—­“a city of the exhausted, distressed and restless, struggling with the uncertainties of eviction and unemployment” that the creature animates67—­there is also an infrapolitical dimension to the Monkeyman phenomenon.68 As events of attacks spread across Delhi, the police urged the board of the then-­state-­run power company, Delhi Vidyut, to ensure an uninterrupted power supply “from dawn to dusk so that panicked residents could feel safer.”69 By the middle of May, a few weeks into the Monkeyman phenomenon, the number of hoax calls allegedly sighting the creature went up.70 There were a

b

Figure 1.5. Police artist’s impression of Monkeyman. When appearing in newspapers, captions read: (a) “The police say the creature is 4'6", wears only a dark coat of hair”; and (b) “Eyewitness says it is 5'6", wears black and sports a helmet, with shining red eyes.” Image from Abhimanyu Sinha/Hindustan Times.

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connections between Monkeyman sightings and Delhi’s frequent power failures. Residents called the police every time there was a power failure because they believed that power would be restored before a search.71 This spectral monkey turned cyborg was being deployed by people to make infrastructural claims. By the time the number of sightings exceeded a hundred, over 1,500 policemen were on the streets, patrolling northeast and east Delhi alone. “There are patrols in every residential colony,” briefed a police officer. “Policemen have been posted on rooftops. None of them has seen a thing.”72 The shadowy creature also brought about transformations in public provisioning of electricity. Delhi Vidyut Board sprung into action, repairing street corner lights across the city that had been broken for months. Power cuts during the night had completely stopped in many localities, and crime rates in the metropolis went down.73 Although mass hysteria might have manufactured Monkeyman, the phenomenon and its histrionic personas cannot be seen outside of eviscerating forces that relentlessly dispossess the poor without relief and mercy. Equally, it cannot be read outside of an infrapolitics enacted through the virtual and the fantastic. At stake here are practices that typically go unnoticed and operate insidiously, beneath the threshold of political detectability; that is what makes them effective vehicles for making claims to infrastructure. The spectrality of Monkeyman cannot and should not be dismissed as some form of false consciousness. Equally, its spectrality exceeds the clamor for materiality in and of itself that new materialists invoke.74 Infrapolitics, as politics in a minor mode, does not exist in itself; it exists in relation to a major politics of infrastructure. Infrapolitics is an investment in the latter’s laws, regulations, and technologies for purposes of making them minor. By working with templates, or by extracting constants from variables and subordinating these to laws, infrastructural expansion and surveillance derive from a hylomorphic model. This is a model that derives and accentuates “a society divided into governors and governed.”75 The katiyabaaz, in contrast, follows the singularity of materials; he goes where a cable or wire might lead him, knows how circuits can be bypassed, and understands how new connections might be drawn. The lines he invents can ramify in all directions, intersecting with the tracks of other, more-­than-­human bodies, bringing the latter into the material life of the grid. To graft a katiya, then, is not an iteration of

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steps but rather an itineration, or a journey that takes grid expansion and infrastructural surveillance in other directions. The katiyabaaz works to avoid detection. Creating a bypass is different from open resistance. It is precisely these itinerations that render his practices infrapolitical rather than subaltern. Infrapolitics derives from a transversal and heterogeneous collective, not an organized community or an assemblage of things. It can summon spectral and fantastic figures so that people can stake out positions as legitimate denizens. Monkeyman sightings and attacks do not confront state order or challenge governors, yet they enable residents to make claims regarding infrastructure. Infrapolitics, then, is a mode of politics that “dare[s] not speak its name”; it is “a diagonal politics,”76 a line of flight drawing polyvalent connections with virtual cyborgs. Minor ecologies, then, foreground a whole other set of stories and infrapolitics vibrating within the major logics of infrastructural governance and assembly, graspable neither in the analytics of informal urbanization77 nor through the vocabulary of vital materialism alone.78

Commensality as Infrastructure If cities everywhere are “orchestrated by human and nonhuman means” that rely on attunements “in which infrastructure is a vital thread,”79 then can it be that these very attunements—­those that cross species divides—­become infrastructural? What might this do for readings of the urban that take infrastructural legibility, formation, and materiality for granted? Take Connaught Place’s Hanumān Temple, a space attracting thousands of footfalls every day. Less than a block from the rim of Connaught, with its high-­end retail outlets and corporate offices, banks, and restaurant chains, are rows of stalls selling flower garlands and religious paraphernalia like prashād, posters of gods and goddesses, bangles, and sacred thread. They cater to devotees making offerings at the temple, as do a number of itinerant food vendors and ice cream vans. Astrologers and palm readers wait at tables for clients while the destitute, with their fragile, dispossessed lives, sit at the temple entrance, relying on religious prescription and sympathy to get by. The broad, tiled plaza outside Hanumān Temple is interspersed with banyan trees cutting their way through the concrete, under which tea sellers and hawkers

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operate, keeping an eye out for the police and the Delhi Municipal Corporation. This inadvertent commons, emerging through the pulse of metropolitan wayfaring, is a space of economic making do through which those marginalized by urban life earn livelihoods. Yet an account of economic assembly remains incomplete if one ignores the ubiquitous macaques, too frequently dismissed by the urban canon as background elements in a built landscape where the story of economy is all too human. Devotees, often instructed by priests, regularly feed the rhesus macaques at Hanumān Temple, foregrounding the ongoing, often unnoticed forms of economic improvisation. Kusum, a middle-­aged woman, purchases two dozen bananas every week from Akash, a vendor whose trade is contingent on people buying fruit to feed monkeys.80 His makeshift stall is strategically located by the entrance of the temple, where macaques congregate, to attract buyers for his commodities, the ultimate consumers of which are not all human (Figure 1.6). Kusum, like hundreds of other devotees visiting the Hanumān Temple, initiates contact with the animals that are otherwise engrossed in their own simian doings, moving, playing, or grooming one another. She calls out to them, banana in hand, “Take, children; eat this.” Noticing food, the animals congregate. Kusum talks to the macaques as she

Figure 1.6. Banana vendors in Hanumān Temple, Connaught Place. Photograph by author.

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distributes bananas, referring to the monkeys as bacche, “child,” as they patiently wait, scolding them when they squabble. Feeding macaques is an act through which one receives punya—­a cleansing merit from God—­and through this dān, or gift, volatile energies are harnessed for the individual’s protection, fortune, and well-­being. “Troubles go away when you feed them,” says Akash. He sells over seventy dozen bananas a day, and more on Tuesdays and Saturdays, auspicious days for Hanumān worshippers. Such encounters are as affective, eliciting corporeal responses from human and other-­than-­human bodies, as they are economic, entailing transactions between a motley array of actors. Although written out of mainstream accounts of the informal urban economy, these arrangements and improvisations involving Hanumān devotees, banana vendors, and rhesus macaques can be thought of as infrastructural. They constitute and subtend the maintenance and reproduction of economic life. Here, AbdouMaliq Simone’s evocative contention of people as infrastructure provides a helpful starting point. Moving beyond the physical stuff of infrastructure—­the reticulated systems of pipes, wires, and cables encountered earlier—­Simone extends the concept to include people’s activities in the city, the forms of “economic collaboration between residents seemingly marginalized from . . . urban life.” Economic collaborations involving heterogeneous actors occur less from an adherence to specific rules and more as a result of people’s capacities, with different competencies, motivations, and interests, “to improvise”81—­capacities that become crucial for dealing with the immiserating conditions of metropolitan life. What Simone calls people as infrastructure, understood as a “process of conjunction which is capable of generating social compositions across a range of singular capacities and needs,”82 takes on a different mode of composition here, one where alignments are also brought about by more-­than-­human company and the singular, affective capacities of macaques. At stake is an economy of affect centered on commensality, where the macaques’ own abilities to improvise form a part of economic collaboration. Interrogating economy through these more-­than-­human arrangements and dispositions prompts questions on what constitutes the economic in urban political economy, for humanist refrains of capital, class, informality, and uneven growth are only a part of the story. The

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ontological purity of the economic as a realm removed from the ecological is troubled.83 Equally, modes of economic composition entail capacities and behaviors emerging and manifesting transversally, where motivations, meanings, and interests are shared between humans and macaques. The mechanomorphic grammar of stimulus and response, as well as the arborescent schema of species being confining social interactions to only individuals of the same species, commonplace in conventional ethology, becomes limiting. Understanding how human–­macaque relations become infrastructural requires taking a detour through ethology and attending to what the latter might look like in a minor key.

Ethology in a Minor Key Dilip, a thirty-­five-­year-­old wage laborer, buys an ice cream at the Hanumān Temple. A female macaque stares intently at him as she follows people’s movements. Dilip holds the ice cream out to the animal, whereupon she reciprocates, stretching out a hand to accept it. An exchange has taken place in a contact zone that cuts across species divides—­an exchange that culminates in the taste of a cold, sweet commodity for the simian and feelings of contentment for the human (Figure 1.7a). The macaque displays her teeth to another individual—­a warning to not come too close—­before climbing a banyan tree to take the relished commodity to safety. She adeptly removes the packaging, tearing through the bright Sachmuch Aam (Real mango) logo as though it were the epicarp of a fruit, dropping it on the ground below. People watch, amused. “I cannot afford large amounts of fruit like the rich,” says Dilip as the macaque holds the ice cream in its palm in a humanlike manner, “but I can feed them one ice cream every week.” At stake in these encounters are affects crossing species divides. Many of these encounters can in fact be sparked by macaques, as my collaborative fieldwork with Urvi Gupta, Priyanka Justa, and Gunjesh Kumar in Delhi shows. Juveniles sometimes approach vendors, sit down, and initiate contact through vocalizations while staring intently (Figure 1.7b). Their calls and eye contact are tactile, with fingery sounds and haptic eyes; they are meant to touch, and to be touched by the animal. These juveniles, often losing out on provisioned food when in the company of dominant adults, evoke empathy. They persist if ignored. Inevitably, vendors cave in. A biscuit or rusk is tossed or is held in the

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vendor’s hands, whereupon the animal runs up to take it. A hurried retreat usually follows, whereupon the animal consumes the morsel in safety. These encounters are small stories of urban inhabitation—­small not because of their scale but because they point to different ends. Yet much conventional ethology seems to gloss over affects circulating and moving between porous bodies. When articulated in the major key, ethology gets caught up in views of the species and its attendant notion of species being. In this view, macaques are social, but their sociality is restricted to conspecifics. There is little room for taking encounters with people seriously. Nowhere is this notion of enclosed intraspecific sociality more poignant than in Latour’s tortuous delimitations of primate societies, which he picks up time and again to score points about a sociology of the social. Unlike humans, baboons, Latour argues, are truly social because they do not associate with other nonhumans.84 In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.85 The groundbreaking work of ethologist Anindya Sinha shows how macaques adopt several novel behaviors to elicit affective responses in people. Bipedal begging—­ standing erect on their back legs while making contact for food—­is a strategy that certain animals learn to deploy, particularly when macaque and human worlds coincide. By using the corporeal technique of mirroring their upright human counterparts, macaques generate sympathy to spark affective exchanges. This is done by dominant individuals that are also the “least shy when interacting with humans.” Such affective dispositions are a matter of “temperament,” carried out by individuals “motivated to approach people.”86 In contrast to the enclosed world of Latour’s baboons, the lives of urban macaques are caught up with other beings, not just their own kind. The minor tendencies in Sinha’s work are attentive to “transversal communications between heterogeneous populations.”87 Relations are not solely intraspecific, and all macaques do not bear the same traits posited by the reified category of the species. A minor ethology can in fact be seen as a move from “mechanical effects” to “machinic effects”88—­that is, to relations constituted in an urban world at once metabolic and infrastructural. In contrast, the major science of ethology posits understandings of behavior through arborescent binaries, be they stimulus–­response or gene expression. The same hylomorphic logic of giving form to matter, witnessed by the state science of engineering, is reproduced under a different guise. Genes drive

a

b

Figure 1.7. (a) Provisioning macaques. Photograph by author. (b) Juvenile soliciting food from vendor. Photograph courtesy Urvi Gupta/Urban Animals Project.

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behavior: what macaques do is already prefigured in advance of their encounter with the world. “Genes,” however, as Sinha eloquently argues, “code for proteins, not monkeys.” Arborescent schemata edit out the rich worlds of macaques and the capacities they take on in a rhizome. Behaviors such as bipedal begging are examples of social learning, where sociality is not confined to species worlds. They are “innovations,” where “genetic causation can clearly be excluded in all these cases.”89 Social learning opens up inquiry to the becoming urban of macaques and an other-­than-­human habitus produced through practice, emulation, and habit. In fact, the rhizomatic sociality of macaques is most vividly illustrated in the case of juvenile macaques who prompt and evoke people through novel hand-­extension gestures. Sinha and his colleagues’ work in other parts of India shows that while adults might resort to scaring humans into giving up food, younger animals waiting on the sidelines make eye contact. When the eyes of people and macaques meet, juveniles extend their hand, palm up, soliciting food. The gesture is sometimes punctuated with a soft “coo” call, and if needed, the individual orients its body to remain in the person’s field of vision. The hand gesture, reported for the first time in a wild monkey, is only used by macaques for communicating with humans, never when interacting with members of their own species.90 The “coo” call is unknown in the species in the wild, and the origins of the palm-­up gesture are unclear. “Can it be that macaques saw humans reach out for food with each other?” asks Sinha. This conjecture summons ethology in the minor key, for it shifts the acquisition of characteristics—­whether innate or acquired—­from enclosed species being to the rhizome. Such propositions have long been suppressed by the major science of ethology: the proposal, to cite a notable example, that tool use in certain wild chimpanzee populations was a product of observational learning from humans,91 was shot down when it was first put forward. Yet the practice of ethology in urban settings would be impoverished if it ignored the machinic urban environment in which macaques learn, and which macaques negotiate, not passively but through an invention of affects. A minor ethology might then be seen as studying “the compositions of relations or capacities between different things . . . How do

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individuals enter into composition with one another? How can a being take another being into its world?”92 Such an ethology is more likely to be attuned to the interrhythmicity of the metropolis, forged by multiple trails and movements, ebbs and flows. A minor ethology does not write the human out of the story. In fact, it has the potential to rearticulate the human as the human is drawn into macaques’ worlds, through their propensities and dispositions. A minor ethology leads us to other practices that resonate within the lived city: affective economies at the urban margins.

Affective Economies A man in his midforties steps out of a car and approaches Alok, the banana vendor, as his thela (cart) is parked by a busy road running parallel to the Ridge, not far from Delhi University’s science faculty. A troop of macaques foraging near his thela maintains a certain distance, as though wary of crossing a virtual boundary set by the vendor. As soon as a transaction between the man and Alok is initiated, the watchful macaques start inching closer. Their movements soon turn into frenzy, scrambling as the man tosses his just-­purchased bananas. Dominant males and females are more likely to eat first. Other individuals try to sneak in, avoiding eye contact with the alpha male. Successful individuals clamber up a wall separating the Ridge from the pavement to avoid the dominant animals that sometimes chase, and even bite, lower-­ranked troop members. The action lasts for a couple of minutes. The place then falls silent. Watching the man leave in his car, Alok slowly wheels his thela a hundred meters down the road, to where the troop has moved. Alok follows the macaques with his mobile stall because his livelihood is contingent on their presence: “Just as monkeys don’t stay in one place, I too have to be itinerant.” Both Alok and the macaques co-­constitute an affective economy, one in which transactions are contingent on commensality and microattunements crossing human–­simian divides. Vendors and macaques collaborate not according to some contractual obligation or a set of rules but according to what the word’s etymological roots signal. Col-­laborare implies working together. Labor, as Marx reminds us, is a fleshy, somatic, and social activity,93 and collaboration has a more-­than-­human sociality.94 Collaboration is practice in the making, a working arrangement

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with different capacities to relay, respond, and even improvise.95 Like the ambulant practices of the katiyabaaz, the banana vendor’s craft is one of itineration. Macaques arrive by the roadside in the morning because they know it is a site where provisioning happens and they are likely to find food. Alok occasionally moves his cart along the road, and every now and then, he throws the macaques a banana or two. This keeps the animals close; it also attracts pedestrians or people in cars. This collaboration, which is not contractual and is not bound by strict ties, is a locus of itineraries; movements of macaques, banana vendors, and people fold together. Like the electrical meshwork discussed earlier, spots where people feed macaques are smooth spaces. It is where economic activity unfolds in spite of the striated orderings of the city or state, and in spite of their attempts to regulate what activities are permissible on Delhi’s roads. Human–­macaque proximities reveal how the urban is constituted by a whole other set of improvisations. Dinesh, who sells bananas by the side of a busy motorway in Okhla, has located his stall next to an old well adjoining a kikar grove. Once a week, he gets the municipal water supply truck provisioning a nearby well-­to-­do residential colony to fill the well with water. “I give them 150 rupees. For them it’s cash on the side, and they are happy.” Water concentrates macaques in and around his makeshift stall, the latter comprising a few bricks that serve as seats and two large wicker baskets displaying wares (Figure 1.8). Dinesh’s stall overlooks the motorway, and simian presence is an advertisement. “They draw in people who are driving to work,” he remarks, ushering me aside so his bananas would remain visible to the speeding motorists. “Most of my customers are passersby, but a few are regulars.” Like Alok, Dinesh cultivates molecular proximities with other-­than-­human bodies—­molecular because they entail affects, precepts, and attunements that provide scaffolding to economic relations, enabling activities of selling commodities to take grip and to endure. Collaboration, however, is by no means a smooth or settled activity. Its precepts are crafted in practice, not coded in a set of pregiven rules. As experts at reading bodies and at sensing affects, macaques know that it is not the banana vendor but his clients that will feed them. The animals usually keep to themselves when vendors are alone, other than the occasional foray to try and steal bananas when vendors are not looking.

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Figure 1.8. Makeshift stall, with wells dug for macaques. Photograph by author.

It is precisely these unruly acts that make it difficult to understand collaboration between people and macaques in the same register as between people, although the latter are hardly immune from transgressions. Alok points to a stick he keeps under a plastic tarpaulin covering his thela. “They generally don’t trouble you, but occasionally it comes in handy when you have to chase them away.” Macaques can gauge who poses a potential threat and soon learn what risks can be taken and what cannot. For the banana vendor, the loose arrangements of collaboration are about cultivating distance as much as it is about generating attachment. Crafted through the thickness of practice, molecular proximities are a series of negotiations. Both people and macaques have to learn whether they “can and cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body.”96 These negotiations are at the heart of what constitutes the economic at the urban fringes. Such relations are not only about transactions of money and commodities but also about trans-­actions crossing porous bodies and human–­macaque boundaries. These trans-­actions rely on the macaques’ abilities to improvise and elicit affects in their bipedal, human counterparts and are integral to how humanist notions of economic exchange take grip. Trans-­actions entail tactile and visual encounters that macaques might themselves initiate. Their completion, and consequently

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the realization of value, is also contingent on the bodily labor of consumption by macaques. Furthermore, material–­semiotic exchange is accompanied by the transaction of volatile energies. “Trials and tribulations caused by unfavorable planets dissipate when you feed monkeys,” says Alok, whose clients frequently follow the advice of astrologers who prescribe feeding macaques as a means of negating the malefic effects of astral bodies. These intimate points of encounter are too easily glossed over in accounts of the urban economy—­informal97 or otherwise98—­that are written in a major key. While the cultural economy of cities, which reformulates the economic as a set of cultural practices,99 makes some headway, the relations at stake here are not entirely encapsulated. Commodity exchange is often more than simply traffic in goods mobilized by human subjects. For affective economies, contingent as they are on material–­ semiotic exchanges between humans and nonhumans, the accompanying modes of collaboration, precepts, and attunements are better understood as a set of ecological practices—­ecological because they entail the other than human, which not only includes macaques but also extends to deities and spirits; and because they do not relegate nature to a space outside of the economic. In certain parts of northern India,100 as well as elsewhere, improvisation takes on further, novel formations. This includes processes of bartering or commodity exchange, a two-­way traffic in things where “macaques play an active role.”101 The animals steal items that have no direct food value—­scarves, glasses, shoes—­from pilgrims in temples, then return them as tokens in exchange for food. In most cases, macaques will only let go of the stolen object if preferred food items are furnished. Vendors and shopkeepers in these locales often know what food will entice macaques to drop stolen items. They keep them in stock, then nudge people to buy them so that they can get their valuables back. A set of economic practices take grip that is contingent on barter between people and macaques. Here, macaques influence the transactions of commodities by affecting what food is bought and what is offered. Bartering helps comprehend the semiotic aspects of material–­ semiotic transactions. Exchanges can have meaning for macaques; they ascribe value to what is being transacted. Here value is not necessarily along a humanist axis of measurement but rather is contingent on what

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von Uexküll calls quality, or ton, where a thing takes on significance by virtue of its being drawn into the creature’s own activity.102 Ethologists argue that the likelihood of macaques effectively performing barter increases when opportunities to interact with people rise. Individuals have “more chances to learn about the affordance of the objects carried around by temple visitors.”103 Crafted as it is in practice, bartering entails rhizomatic enskillment on the macaques’ part: individuals can learn robbing and barter on their own, or equally by watching skilled group members perform such acts. Furthermore, not only do macaques learn to be affected104 but they also learn to generate affects in human bodies. In most instances, bartering becomes a customary and enduring practice within troops, spreading as a cultural pattern. Macaques can even diversify bartering strategies by targeting different kinds of tokens. Diversification seems to indicate that through practice, macaques learn what items are valued by people and whether they might be willing to engage in a transaction for the item’s return. Economic activity forged through affective exchanges shows how, in the urban margins, relations between people and macaques take on an infrastructural role—­infrastructural because they provide a scaffold through which economic activity takes place. As infrastructure, human–­ macaque relations are not technological systems (relations between vendors and macaques are social rather than technological) but rather a structure of contact, an intensity in a contact zone within which heterogeneous actors come together and improvise.105 Scholars have termed similar makeshift collaborations in India as constituting a jugaad economy, an economy that derives from “a popular, vernacular expression for improvisation, quick-­fix, intermediate solutions” and that “allow[s] everyday life to somehow function even in the absence of permanent, durable infrastructures.”106 Jugaad emerges in conditions of absence and shortage; it entails an ability to do the most with available materials. Advocates of this vernacular formula even go so far as to state that jugaad is not just about “making do” but is a “transformative mode of ‘can do’ sociality.” The jugaad economy opens up “possibilities through improvisation,” creating “something new and effective, which may allow for thriving,” not just “surviving.”107 Polysemic, connoting resourcefulness and maneuverability, the jugaad economy operates in a gray zone

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between legal and illegal,108 drawing on the power of social relationships to open routes for economic gain. Yet there is little in the literature on jugaad that speaks of more-­ than-­human sociabilities or practices of working together that cross species divides. The ecological remains external to the economic, reaffirming long-­held iterations of the economic in some ways being an ontologically pure realm.109 Like much work on informality, subalterity, and the performance of economic worlds in the urban canon, scholarship on jugaad limits itself to a familiar set of practices and articulates make-­ do through the usual suspects. Although ethnographic, it is not ethnographic enough. As the itinerations of banana vendors like Alok and Dinesh show, there are a range of minor practices and infrastructures at the urban margins—­practices that work with the affects macaques are capable of. There is little room for such heterotopic alliances in current formulations of the jugaad economy, which fails to account for the cosmopolitics that make urban economic relations inhere. There are distinctive forms of political agency at work here, in excess of and adding to what is typically associated with “informal life.”110 This is not occupancy urbanism but a minor or molecular economy that emerges from inhabitation by people and animals as well as a retinue of astral and supernatural bodies. It would, however, be unwise to celebrate minor infrastructures as a solution to the eviscerating conditions of metropolitan life. For people like Dinesh, who lives in an informal settlement and is from the marginalized Valmiki caste, selling bananas is a fragile way to deal with urban precariousness. “There are hardly any other jobs,” he remarks. Nor does being a fruit vendor preclude him from the onslaught of majoritarian logics. In fact, both vendors and macaques are vulnerable bodies at the urban fringes, subject to all kinds of policing and violence. Dinesh recounts how a commotion broke out when the Delhi Municipal Corporation, following state dictates to rid Delhi of its macaques (of which more in chapter 2), came to capture animals from the vicinity of his stall a couple of years ago. “Initially, they paid little heed to my protests. Then I mobilized people from the basti. We told the municipality trappers to leave the monkeys alone. Things got heated but we stood our ground. In the end, they had to back off.”

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These are small acts of resistance at the urban fringes, reflective not of a resurgent agency of innovation in the Global South (as mainstream proponents of the jugaad economy herald) but of struggles amid adverse circumstances where people are dispossessed, cast outside even the realm of the industrial reserve army, what Kalyan Sanyal might call “mere spectators of the thrilling . . . drama of surplus value.”111 Yet adversity makes strange bedfellows, for solidarity in such instances cuts across species lines. It is precisely at such junctures—­precarious communities standing up for vulnerable other than humans—­that the infrastructural role of macaques comes to the fore. They are moments of potential breakdown. They signal the forms of sociabilities and lives that breakdown highlights. Molecular proximities are a scaffold because they enable economic life and social reproduction to somehow carry on despite relentless dispossession. But rather than reterritorializing minor infrastructures into a condition of innovation through which the poor must become makers of their own destinies, immiserating conditions should also serve as reminders of the fallibility of the welfare state and of capital that masks its predatory face.

Conclusion: Reading Infrastructure Ethnographic commitments to the lived city, in this case guided by the rhesus as an unexpected flaneur, marks a point of departure in terms of how cities are read through their infrastructure. Arboreal worlds of macaques, ambulant geometries of the katiyabaaz, and the affective attunements of street vendors foreground a whole other set of relations that constitute the terrain of urban habitation, livelihoods, and politics than tenets in mainstream urban theory. The meshwork, affective economies, and infrapolitics show how infrastructures are much more than a structure of contact, a substrate subtending human life, or a locus of governance and avenue through which people claim citizenship.112 Equally, the terrain opened by this triad marks a departure from the epistemologies and practices of urban studies more broadly, whether refracted through the Global South or elsewhere.113 In this brief conclusion, I highlight the main implications of this ethnographic excavation of infrastructure—­centered on questions of assembly, infrapolitics, and commensality as infrastructure—­particularly in terms of what they

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mean for practices of urban living and for a project of an urban studies to come. This account shows how the constitution, effects, and promises of infrastructure are always in articulation with a sticky connection to other-­than-­human life. This is not trivial, for it constitutes a completely overlooked dimension of urban life, a lacuna that stems from foreclosing ethnographic inquiry. When the theoretical glance is deflected from the usual suspects, we witness how ambulant practices of the katiyabaaz introduce variations to the electrical grid. Not only does it lead to forms of “occupancy urbanism,” or autonomous forms of politics that remain outside the state,114 but it also furnishes possibilities for other-­than-­ human worlds. Macaques, in turn, and by inventing electric affects, work on the electropolis, rendering it into a beastly geometry. What it reveals is a meshworked urbanism, where infrastructures stretch far beyond their being a substrate for human life. The meshwork renders the urban porous to the feverish commotion between and among dyads like animal/human, flesh/information, and specter/machine, excavating a city that is not entirely encapsulated by epithets such as the postcolonial115 or the informal,116 although they are crucial for reading and rethinking both, including cities beyond Delhi. A wider ontology of infrastructure, one attentive to the minor practices of the katiyabaaz and the itinerant geographies of macaques, recasts the urban landscape as alive. By inventing lines through the katiya, which has a “vagabond essence” to it,117 habitat is reworked as that which is not laid out but that which is under continual construction, reproduced and renewed through polyvalent connections. This account of the living city is more than simply recuperating the elusive vibrancy of matter.118 What it excavates is a far more complex suite of entities, agents, and forces, both human and other than human, along with a variegated set of cultural and economic practices—­ formal and informal, licit and illicit—­that give the city its grip. A material politics, as opposed to the politics of vibrant matter, also reworks questions of urban politics and matters of economy. As objects of knowledge and as realms of organization, urban economies are better understood as constituted by a set of ecological practices. These entail heterotopic alliances and transversal collaborations between a suite of actors, be they people, animals, or specters of supernatural currents animating the

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modernist city. Minor practices show how heterogeneous alignments between people and other than humans can become infrastructural,119 and therefore vital to the ways in which the urban poor improvise and reproduce their frail, dispossessed lives. At stake here is a co-­constitution of ecology and economy,120 a lively political economy situated within fields of power where an entourage of entities generates aliveness or struggles to remain alive. The infrapolitical practices witnessed in the city operate beneath the threshold of political detectability.121 They do so by summoning other-­than-­human agents, be they animals, specters, or spirits. These are not marginal, niche phenomena but part of the fabric of the South Asian city. If they do not appear in the extant urban canon, it is because the canon has a tendency to foreclose in advance who or what urban agents are. The labor of ethnography, just as in infrapolitics, is to rework this canon from within. The kinds of alignments through which infrapolitics unfolds distinguishes from both civil society and the politics of rights-­bearing, enfranchised bourgeois citizens—­which some animal studies scholars want to extend to animals122—­and political society, which involves claims to habitation and livelihoods by those “whose very livelihood involve violation of the law.”123 Infrapolitics is diagonal; it is an important set of acts carried out by what might be thought of as an expanded polity not housed in a particular human club. It can be a politics of coalition involving macaques, however loose the bonds, and it can also operate by summoning other agents and fantastic figures, seldom dreamed of in urban theory. Agency here presumes collectivity, but it is not the same humanist collective of the major urban canon. Infrapolitics, molecular or affective economies, and a meshworked urbanism are not only ways to search for alternative urbanisms of transgression.124 They are also an alternative urbanism of inhabitation, whose purchase extends beyond the ethnographic context articulated here. The locales and sites of the city so invoked are informal, but they are more than that. They involve nonconfirming economic practices and forms of urban assembly forged not in the crucible of theory, subaltern or otherwise, but by those who dwell and live in the city, with and against the grain of majoritarian onslaughts. Such practices and forms of assembly are witnessed across the world; they are vital constituents of the material politics of city making. They are actual, horizontal propositions

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emerging from the thickness of practice in the here and now. Alignments through which the urban is negotiated are ecological—­not so much in terms of the habitus of the dispossessed, but rather as a flexible strategy wielded differently by certain strata in the face of immiseration. Yet we could argue that a minor urbanism does not exist without a major one. What, then, might urban biopolitics look like if we turned to bureaucratic and majoritarian practices surrounding commensality?

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2 THE POLITICS OF COMMENSALITY

Governing Urban Life In March 2007, following a public interest litigation by a wealthy residents’ welfare association, the High Court of Delhi issued a ban on feeding macaques in public places. The MCD was instructed to impose fines on offenders and to set up food collection centers near temples so that offerings from devotees could be fed to macaques elsewhere (Figure 2.1). However, in the hope of being blessed by Lord Hanumān, residents ignore the ban, sometimes even feeding macaques right next to MCD signs prohibiting them to do so. “Depositing food in boxes is not the same as feeding monkeys in person,” remarks Vaibhav, a man in his midforties. “We will pay fines, no matter how high they are. These dictates cannot come in our way of appeasing Hanumānji.” For others, the boldness of provisioned macaque troops is disruptive. “Macaque incursions into our homes are becoming increasingly intolerable,” says Vinod, a resident of a lower-­middle-­class colony in the city’s north. “Monkeys have been encouraged by those who feed them, and nowadays they come into our houses to just cause trouble rather than in search of food.” The ban on feeding was soon followed by a dictate to free Delhi of its “monkey menace” by ridding the city of macaques in three months.1 Yet after over a decade of trapping and relocating close to twenty thousand animals, the MCD conceded it was fighting a losing battle. Macaques not only overtook human action but also widespread provisioning by 67

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Figure 2.1. MCD sign prohibiting people to feed macaques in public spaces. Photograph by author.

people made it difficult to impose order. The municipal body returned to the Delhi high court and pleaded that it should be absolved of the responsibility to capture macaques. Macaques, they argued, were wild animals, and it was only fitting that the state forest department, concerned with wildlife management, take on the role. Unwilling to be involved, the forest department responded by stating Delhi’s macaques were “commensal” and had “evolved by adapting themselves to live close to human habitation.” Unlike the rhesus “found in the wild,” Delhi’s macaques, the department contended, “are not shy of human presence and live off them.” “Their habitat” was “gardens and parks within the city . . . maintained by civic agencies,” so it was only fitting that the MCD carry out the task of macaque capture.2 Commensality—­to be messmates on a common table—­is rambunctious. It is both a mundane urban practice, through which relations between people and macaques inhere, and a watchword that dictates the state’s imperatives of regulating macaque populations. Although commensality entails attachments, as witnessed in the trans-­actions between devotees, banana vendors, and macaques in chapter 1, it is also a locus of friction, where interests and motivations of different actors come together and collide. At the same time, the commensal is a frame for defining

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urban macaques and specifying macaque ecologies in anthropogenic and metabolically intense environments.3 It can be deployed by the state or usurped by particular departments to devolve and divert responsibilities of dealing with urban macaques. Macaques are indeed caught up in the politics of urban governance, which proceeds in a major vein. State action of expelling macaques from the metropolis extends to a number of other urban inhabitants and practices, including vendors, hawkers, and street dogs, seen to untune its codified vision of “a modern, clean and globalised capital.”4 At work is a mode of urban planning and governance that works via “aesthetic rule,” centered less on the rational calculation and a synoptic vision that one associates with biopolitics, although the latter is sometimes resorted to. In an aesthetic mode, urban governance proceeds by inscribing “visual markers of order and disorder” to produce an imagined future and toward which energies are directed.5 Equally, a majoritarian politics of governance also dovetails with a vernacular or minor politics of commensality. Here, molecular proximities between people and macaques, as well as simian competencies and actions, place state-­led imperatives in continuous variation. These currents and variations bring to fore a whole other ontological choreography of urban governance, one that has to do with ecologies of concern, where practices are neither stable nor immune to a force field of other-­than-­human potentials. The logics of such governance are not reducible to a singular narrative of biopower, particularly those derived from a model rooted in western modernity.6 Instead, and building on a small body of work on human–­macaque encounters in Delhi and other parts of northern India,7 I turn to what I call a politics of commensality. This is a hybrid concatenation of aesthetic, biopolitical, and vernacular practices that, as urban ethnography reveals, is a partial endeavor, proceeding through contingent, uneven arrangements. This chapter, then, is an intervention that aims to rethink how the lived city is experienced and inhabited in excess of anthropocentric sensibilities. At the same time, it aims to elucidate how the state aims to govern other-­than-­human life. I first attend to urban practices, those surrounding commensality, to show how cities are animated by a range of currents often not visible when the platform of urban experience is couched through a set of western tenets. I then turn to the ways in which

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other-­than-­human life is regulated in both biopolitical and vernacular modes. I do so by looking at hidden histories of the urbanization of the rhesus, revealing how the urban macaque arose as a result of the intersection of different forces—­namely the capture of rural populations for trade and the ready availability of food in metropolitan locales, particularly via provisioning practices. The rise in urban macaque populations has resulted in a range of measures to control them, including capture and relocation, as well as vernacular practices of keeping the animals at bay—­practices that are minor and that have been annexed by the state. I then turn to what happens when macaque populations are relocated to the outskirts of the city and the political ecologies that emerge as a result. I conclude by discussing what a minor articulation of urban practices might offer us for rethinking the material politics of city making.

Commensality as Urban Practice Quotidian acts of feeding macaques, seldom featured in accounts of metropolitan life, are vital for grasping how the politics of urban governance unfolds in Delhi. Motivations of forging commensal relations are manifold. Anuj, a man in his early thirties, reflects on how feeding macaques helped him deal with adversity. He had arrived in Delhi in search of employment after completing his undergraduate degree in the state of Bihar. Anuj’s first job turned into an exploitative situation. “I worked for two years, but my employer never paid me.” He then went to Kuwait to work for a hospital chain, but he soon returned to Delhi when news broke that the documents he and his colleagues had “were illegal” and employers were trying to use this as a pretext to force them into indenture. “This was the toughest part of my life. I gave up hope and began to have suicidal thoughts.” “Nothing ameliorated the situation.” Anuj’s circumstances had made him “skeptical, even angry with God.” Out of desperation, he enrolled in IT classes and started fasting on Tuesdays, when he would visit the Hanumān Temple in Connaught Place to pray and feed macaques. “This routine, and interacting with monkeys, made me experience a deep transformation.” His situation gradually improved; Anuj even secured a position in a multinational company. “All credit goes to God,” says Anuj, who continues his weekly

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routine of praying to Hanumān and feeding macaques. “These visits to the Hanumān Temple have renewed my faith in life.”8 Macaques enable a connection with the supernatural world by providing a way to harness cosmic currents, especially when other means of counseling or help are not availed or are inaccessible to those immiserated by metropolitan life. Although it is problematic to posit cause and effect between provisioning and healing—­in Anuj’s case, new IT skills and employment probably played an equally prominent role—­ritualistic feeding is a way of keeping distress at bay, however temporary or imperceptible its ameliorating effects might be. “You receive punya,” a merit from God, says Vaibhav, who has been feeding macaques daily for the last two years. “Twenty-­one chapatis are made at home each day and I distribute them to monkeys in a nearby park.” “Feeding monkeys cannot be a single-­day investment,” he adds. “You have to dedicate yourself to Lord Hanumān.” Such regularity and intensity in feeding macaques structure commensality. Provisioning not only generates anthropogenic feeding grounds that enable urban macaque populations to proliferate but also profoundly affects the latter’s behavior and temporalities. Feeding peaks during morning and evening hours—­characteristic liminal periods of Hindu worship—­and macaques show awareness of these rhythms, modifying their patterns to access food. Provisioning intensifies on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the days considered auspicious for Hanumān worship, and in places like the Delhi Ridge, troops gravitate toward roads in anticipation of food-­laden cars and motorists (Figure 2.2). “Monkeys somehow know these days are different,” reflects Alok, the banana vendor encountered in chapter 1, who makes a living by selling fruit to devotees. Commensality thus gives rise to a metropolitan temporality that is an intermeshing of religious calendars, work-­structured time, and other-­ than-­human rhythms. As much as it bears on the lives of macaques, it also produces affected human bodies.9 Many people who regularly provide for macaques “adopt” their own troops. The animals congregate when they notice such individuals, but unlike when fed by passersby, they do not scramble. Rather, macaques sit patiently, waiting their turn. A slow ritual then unfolds: the person offers food to the macaque with his or her hand, and the animals mirror the extended gesture, taking the morsel in their forearms and consuming it slowly. “They are my

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Figure 2.2. Macaques provisioned with carrots, as an itinerant banana vendor waits by his stall. Photograph by Priynaka Justa/Urban Animals Project.

companions,” says Mr. Gupta, an affluent middle-­class professional. “The monkeys recognize me now. They never snatch, but take food from my hand. Sometimes they even climb on me, but never bite.” Mr. Gupta has learned to be affected; he feeds macaques at the Ridge every day. Such dedication and daily investment of time do not grow out of “religious sentiment”; rather, feeding the macaques gives him “immense pleasure as an animal lover.” Such affective contagion crossing porous bodies can be thought of as a two-­way process of urban domestication: as much as Mr. Gupta has adopted a macaque troop, the simians too have adopted him. Through commensality, a more-­than-­human sociality of the city is reproduced, although as a practice, it is in no way smooth or settled. A large section of Delhi’s residents, from different social strata, argue that macaques should not be fed. Ravinder, a gardener employed in the Delhi Ridge, says, “It is only the affluent that have enough money to feed them. If you come here on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the entire place is littered with uneaten bananas and thousands of peels. Such is the feeding frenzy that even macaques do not consume all the food. Instead, food ought to be given to the needy, the poor.” Ravinder, like many other contract workers and wage laborers employed in the Ridge—­construction workers, caretakers, security guards—­refrains from feeding macaques

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because he does not want the animals to associate him with food. He points to people on their morning walks carrying sticks, brandishing them when the simians get too close or when they need to cross a troop sitting on the path. One of these individuals, who walks in the Ridge every morning, remarks that “provisioning has increased in the past few years, and so has the monkey population. As a result the number of peafowl has declined. Devotees do not realize that after they leave, monkeys expect food from everyone.” Frictions between people and macaques are further aggravated when the latter exhibit agonistic behavior. Delhi registers five cases of monkey bites every day.10 In 2015, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences reported 387 cases of rabies from rhesus bites,11 and the potential spread of tuberculosis is a public health concern. There was a TB outbreak in the Delhi zoo in 2000,12 and it has been suspected that the spread of tuberculosis among rhesus macaques in neighboring states such as Uttarakhand were via urban macaques translocated from Delhi.13 The possibility of being bitten by a macaque is part of quotidian urban dwelling, particularly around residential areas where macaques live close to people. Parks and playgrounds are common sites of friction, as exposure is prolonged and interactions do not always entail a transaction of food. Rakhi, a forty-­year-­old housewife in Bharat Nagar, a housing colony in the north of the city, says that it has become difficult for people to use their adjacent park because of macaques. “Monkeys are not at all afraid, and are particularly aggressive toward women and children,” she remarks, pointing to several women carrying sticks as they walk in the park. “My son was bitten, and so have many other children. It is becoming risky to live here.” The situation in their residential colony apparently got worse after “outsiders” started bringing “sacks full of fruit and vegetables to feed monkeys and to appease Hanumānji.” “Monkeys,” Rakhi and her husband Vinod argue, “have become much more daring. They break into homes, even open refrigerators to steal eatables. This was not the case a few years ago when we first moved to this locality.” Such incursions into homes, typically carried out by bold individuals, are the outcome of learned behavior. As Anindya Sinha’s ethological work shows, behaviors can spread to other members of the troop through emulation and group-­specific learning.14 Tired of having to deal with incursions on

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almost a weekly basis, Vinod points to the rambunctiousness of commensality: “It is fine for others to follow their religious beliefs, but they need to exercise some restraint. It is people like us who have to face the consequences for the monkeys have now become a burden.”

Supernatural Currents Provisioning rests on another mode of inhabiting the city, one contingent on other cosmologies that seldom feature in urban theory but that are nonetheless vital for understanding the forces at work in the ontological choreography and politics of urban governance. Many people at the Hanumān Temple and Delhi Ridge act on the advice of priests and astrologers who recommend feeding animals as a popular prescription and cure against planetary trials and tribulations. Prakash, a man in his late twenties, started feeding macaques when marriage proposals were not working out. “My family began to get worried so I went to the pundit at the Hanumān Temple. He suggested I feed monkeys and cows regularly. This has given me confidence, and I am hopeful that a marriage proposition will work out soon.” Kusum, another regular at the temple, feeds macaques “to cope with the adverse effects of planets” in her horoscope. She obtained this prescription through an astrology channel on YouTube. Astrology is among the fastest expanding businesses in India, with a significant hold on the lives and imagination of the Indian middle class, particularly in terms of how they deal with misfortune and questions of destiny.15 Astrology formalizes moral and religious ideas into a language of planetary positions and casts commensality as a remedial practice. “Monkeys are part and parcel of our everyday lives. They . . . live amidst humans, and this is reflected in their behaviors,” says Ravinder Rawat, an astrologer who runs a YouTube channel. “But if we look at monkeys from the perspective of astrology, they are significant in terms of correcting malefic effects of certain planets.” According to Rawat, remedies macaques provide are twofold. They help ameliorate adverse effects generated by Mangal Graha (Mars) on a person’s horoscope—­a planet thought to influence relations with one’s siblings and friends. The other pertains to aspects of Surya (the sun), whose adverse impact diminishes aid and leads to bankruptcy. By introducing their own interpretive gloss to affective ethologies, astrologers recast the actions of macaques as

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omens. “If you see a monkey seeking alms or begging in your home or office,” then it is “the planet Mars expressing itself,” explains Rawat, whereby “you stop getting support from relatives or colleagues.” Kusum, whose family relations are strained, feeds macaques in order to appease Hanumān, a figure “associated with Mars” and “an incarnation of monkeys, as their deified form.” “Hanumān and monkeys are my brothers and relatives,” she remarks, gesturing to fictive kinships with supernatural currents and other-­than-­human beings that permeate urban dwelling. In astrological practice, planets are not only astral bodies but also “anthropomorphic deities, invisible demons and semantic elements of a network of cosmological connections.”16 They are cosmological connections that shape everyday life and configure how the city is inhabited and experienced. By drawing connections between terrestrial life and celestial bodies, astrology brings to fore another ecology of the city, where earthly dwelling intermeshes with astral being and commensality is about satiating supernatural currents as much as it is about fostering molecular proximities with macaques. 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. A number of currents come to the fore through an ethnographic attention to commensality. They show how metabolic intensities configuring macaques’ urban lives are the product of heterogeneous motivations and impulses. Astrologers such as Rawat state that what people feed macaques “should be based on an understanding of one’s situation and what celestial body is to be appeased.” Gram and molasses are to be offered in order to mitigate losses in business, while kheel-­batashe, or candy, is to be offered in “instances when a person’s enemies are increasing.” The widespread phenomenon of offering bananas, constitutive of a molecular and affective economy, is about harnessing the “sun’s powers,” which “become uplifting when monkeys take bananas.” “A person’s image and social standing improves as a result.” Commercial astrological consultations thus have bearings on urban macaques’ metabolic lives. In fact, the familiar association of monkeys and bananas is the product of a postwar history of media advertisements.17 Contrary to popular belief, the fruit is not necessarily primates’ primary diet in the wild.

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The rise in commercial astrology as in India is associated with a market liberalization that took place in the 1990s. Its semantics of destiny has enabled urban middle and upper classes to integrate new forms of sociospatial mobility with their values and aspirations.18 The explosion of astrology as an explanatory framework for one’s fortunes and misfortunes has gone hand in hand with a saffronization of the Indian state, including imperatives to teach what is Brahmanic scripture as a university subject. Far from being a neutral act, then, provisioning can also be read as a caste-­laden practice of the urban middle classes whose proclivity for astrology results in a disavowal of regulations and civic mandates. As Vaibhav proclaimed, court dictates cannot get in his way of appeasing Hanumān. The affluent often transport food in cars, strewing sacks of vegetables, fruits, and pulses by the roadside and parks that macaques haunt (Figure 2.3). “You do not need to feed them with your own hands,” says a lady sitting in an expensive SUV as her domestic help empties a sack of chickpeas onto the pavement. “Others can do so as long as you pay for all the food given to monkeys.” She arrived at this prescription for ameliorating worries through gurus on television and on the internet, a media ecology that has enabled astrology to proliferate and has made gods more, not less, real in India. Astrologers provide

Figure 2.3. Provisioning of macaques by the affluent middle class from their cars. Photograph by Priyanka Justa/Urban Animals Project.

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horoscope readings, but they also blend astrology with health, psychological, and economic consultations. “There are a number of sites and channels from which you can learn about remedies for all sorts of problems,” the lady in the SUV remarks, as her domestic help continues feeding the macaques. The commensal city might thus be seen as a formation that emerges from the tangle of astral bodies, media ecologies, and metabolic life. Its meshworked cosmology needs to be read ethnographically, through the thickness of dwelling that is at once celestial and earthly, involving other-­ than-­human bodies, be they demons, supernatural currents, or macaques, at once plicated in a digital ecology, and laden with casteized hierarchies of being. Staying close to metropolitan experience is paramount in such readings, for one’s interlocutors can easily be stereotyped as ready proponents of a saffronized epistemology. In practice, not everyone personifies these roles. “Macaques are a problem for many of us who work here,” says a priest at the Hanumān Temple in Connaught Place, “and it is entirely the people’s fault.” He goes on to state that devotees often lack civic sense and are not the least bothered about how the waste generated by their mass provisioning will be disposed of. “They even keep the police in their pockets,” the priest remarks, referring to the bribes offered to circumvent bans on feeding macaques. “I discourage people from doling out food to monkeys, but they retort by asking, ‘What kind of priest are you, preventing us from appeasing Hanumān?’” When asked about remedial powers of macaques, the priest responds, “God is god, and monkeys are monkeys,” thereby dissociating simians from supernatural beings. Echoing the state’s dictate, he believes that the only remedy for dealing with the monkey menace is to control their populations.

Regulating Life Although everyday activities and supernatural currents give rise to commensality as an urban practice, they also rub up against state attempts to control macaque populations in Delhi. The latter stem from majoritarian logics and have a biopolitical impulse, but these imperatives do not fall neatly into the logics of fostering and securing life as articulated by the model rooted in western modernity, whether focused on human populations19 or other-­than-­human life.20 Instead, there are a number

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of other genealogies, currents, and practices at stake. Macaques do not get framed as bodies or collectives in need of discipline or improvement—­ witnessed, for instance, in the capitalist anatomopolitics of the animal body. They have, however, been caught up in colonial and postcolonial histories of being treated as a resource or as an economic stock. Interventions in the rhesus macaques’ ecological milieu are not panoptic; they do not rest on the construction, visualization, and surveillance of populations, although there are attempts to police their aleatory movements. The questions that arise, therefore, is how might we track these genealogies, and what might they tell us about practices of urban governance? How might we account for modes of regulating other-­than-­human life in ways that are attentive to specificity and difference and that do not reduce these modes to the usual story of striving to administer life while life constantly escapes administration?

Weedy Histories One avenue pertains to tracking histories of how macaques have become commensal, where political economic currents, the effects of infrastructural environments, and the animals’ malleable life-­history strategies act in conjunction. Primatologists refer to the rhesus as a “weed macaque.”21 In its strict ecological usage, this term has less to do with indexing pestilence and more to do with an admiration for the creature’s “remarkable success” in adapting to various environments, including degraded sites and sites inhabited by humans. Weediness, or the ability to proliferate despite the odds, is “an achievement” only possible “due to the tremendous variability in life-­history strategies” they evolve in different settings.22 Histories of commensality and impulses to govern macaques, biopolitical or otherwise, have never been outside of these life histories and a more-­than-­human sociality of the urban. To understand how commensality has arisen, we too need to proceed in a weedy, rhizomatic manner, attentive to how macaques cope with and proliferate in discordant and disturbed environments. The term “monkey menace,” used by the state and popular media to describe the “problem” of macaques in Delhi, first emerged in relation to frictions between people and macaques in agricultural fields. Its original use was shadowed by concerns over food security. As early as 1928, voices were raised about the “harms resulting from the monkey

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menace,” including its impact on the “Indian food problem.”23 Such sentiments continued to be echoed into the early 1950s. Commentators drew attention to how macaques were “proving to be a menace to the Grow More Food drive” and remarked that “in practically every arable area where food crops are grown, large numbers of monkeys invade the fields and destroy or eat away the crops.”24 In some parts of India, the state even agreed to subsidize schemes offering bounties for macaques under its Grow More Food program.25 At the same time, macaques were deemed an economic resource and were extensively trapped, turning them into commodities for generating exchange value. Since the mid-­1920s, macaques were being exported from colonial India to the West for biomedical research. This intensified after independence, when the state adopted an “export or perish” economic logic. Macaques, the government argued, presented “vast possibilities” for earning foreign revenue; that “many towns and villages” were “harassed by the monkey menace” meant that people would be “glad to contribute to the export drive.”26 India exported over 119,000 rhesuses in the four years 1950–­54, most of them to the United States.27 By the late 1970s, the total number of macaques exported went up to over two million—­a shockingly high figure, and one unimaginable for any other primate species anywhere in the world.28 Yet the configuration of macaques into lively capital—­commodity capital whose value derives from and taps into simian vitality29—­ constantly rubbed up against efforts seeking to thwart capture and trade. Notable were concerns over cruelty to animals and questions of Hindu sentiment. As early as 1925, when the export business was beginning to take hold, colonial authorities warned that “Indian comment on the new trade” was “beginning to assume a distinctly acid, not to say threatening tone.” Unless regulated, “growing resentment” toward the export of macaques could “turn into an agitation of some seriousness.”30 In 1931, while sailing on a ship bound from Calcutta to New York, suffragist, theosophist, and founder of the All India Women’s Conference Margaret E. Cousins came across a consignment of three hundred macaques “destined for laboratories of the vivisectors and for the supply of monkey glands for the new medical fashion connected with the thyroid gland.” Cousins describes how she “saw their awful hell, in heat, unfamiliar movement, unnatural food, foetid air and no exercise.” She published a

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number of articles in the Indian press as “an urgent protest against this infamy,”31 calling for a “law which will make the export of such creatures illegal.”32 Questions were raised during the Fourth Legislative Assembly. Citing Cousins’s article, C. S. Ranga Iyer, a politician and India independence activist, called for a halt on exports. He asked whether the government was aware that macaques, “held sacred by the Hindus,” were being shipped to New York, only to become “victims for the laboratories of vivisectors.” Unwilling to give up this profitable trade, involving the traffic of over 16,000 animals per year, the colonial government responded by stating that capture and export were a “matter of Local Government in most of its aspects.”33 Firms involved in the export business argued that a ban would “not only kill this trade on which thousands of poor men depend” but would also “result in considerable annoyance in cities” that “are annually spending thousands of rupees to rid them of the pest monkeys.”34 Although the trade carried on unabated after Indian independence, objections were continually raised. When Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru visited London in March 1955, the “inhuman treatment” of monkeys was brought to his attention by animal welfare groups.35 In a glaring case, two hundred macaques died in London warehouses while being housed en route to the United States. The government of India announced a ban on all exports without previous sanction.36 Perturbed, the United States sent a commission, representing research associations and pharmaceutical interests, to India. The ban was revoked after negotiations, despite protests from sections of civil society, who argued that such a decision “would be resented by a large section of Hindus and Jains.”37 The government framed new export rules, allowing trade for “specified purposes” to be conducted by “approved exporters” and only under conditions ensuring macaques were “treated humanely.”38 Weedy histories indicate how capture generated commensal formations. Surveys conducted in 1959–­60 by Charles Southwick, a primatologist from Johns Hopkins University, and Rafiq Siddiqi, a zoologist at Aligarh Muslim University, showed that rhesus populations across northern India were dwindling. If unchecked, trapping for export, they wrote, would result in a “precipitous decline . . . within 8 to 10 years.” Most significantly, their work suggested that macaques were not as urbanized

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Figure 2.4. Altered metabolic regimes: a commensal macaque rummaging in a waste bin, 2019. Photograph by author.

as they are today (Figure 2.4). The rhesus was “rarely seen in parks, gardens, civil lines . . . or cantonments,” the exception being Delhi, where a group of macaques “inhabit lawns around governmental buildings, and for years have avoided all attempts to trap them.”39 Delhi’s urban macaque population has in fact been a matter of concern since the early 1930s. In 1931, the then Delhi Municipality had hired a contractor to “rid Delhi of its large population of monkeys.” This contractor’s work was to start “with the Municipal godowns at Nigambodh, on the banks of the Jumna” and “work towards the fort and then to the city itself.” These animals were to be released “back in their forefathers’ haunts in Garhwal or in other jungle tracts where they cannot prove a burden to cultivators.”40 Macaque trapping continued in subsequent years, and in 1949, there was commotion regarding the “growing menace to the nation’s capital” caused by the simians. The “trouble” apparently “began in February 1945 when the city’s ace monkey-­ catcher resigned his job” and his successor “migrated to Pakistan” during the 1947 partition.41 In the early 1950s, the Delhi government noted that “there are very few monkeys in Delhi State and they are found generally in the vicinity of Railway Bridge over the Jamuna and the banks of the Western Jamuna Canal.” These macaques had probably

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become urbanized, reflected in the Delhi deputy commissioner’s comment that “at these places, there are no crops, which may be endangered by the presence of these monkeys.”42 Capture and relocation of macaques from the city, coupled with the capture of rural animals for trade, were giving shape to a distinct commensal ecology. By the 1950s, macaque presence around central Delhi began to be felt. Complaints of macaques “pinching . . . precious files of the Central Secretariat” were voiced.43 A couple of years later, the problem got aggravated. In 1955, members of parliament even wrote to the parliamentary housing committee seeking “protection against the frequent visits of monkeys to their flats.”44 Corroborating Southwick and Siddiqi’s observation, a report from 1960 indicates that macaques had become increasingly prevalent in South and North Avenue, H Block of the Central Secretariat, and in government bungalows in the neighborhood.45 By the mid-­1960s, rhesus populations, especially in rural areas, greatly declined. Urban populations, however, increased marginally, both in terms of the number of troops and their average size. “These changes,” Southwick and Siddiqi presciently remark, “suggest a tendency towards urbanization among the rhesus populations of northern India.”46 The rhesus was beginning to shift from being a predominantly rural to an urban commensal. Two sets of forces triggered this shift. The first entailed selective capture of rural populations, as macaques in cities and towns were deemed unfit for export on account of potentially harboring disease. The second factor was the easy availability of food in metropolitan locales. “In such places,” Southwick and Siddiqi comment, macaques “live approximately in the niche of commensal rodents,” feeding “on scraps of food from shops, houses, storage basements, transient bullock carts.”47 Rapid urbanization of the rhesus sparked public concern, and the term “monkey menace” began to be attached to frictions between people and macaques in metropolitan spaces. “The monkey menace has assumed alarming proportions in Delhi,” wrote a member of the public in 1960, and “the Hindu sentiment alone is to be blamed for the sanctity it attached to this animal.”48 The New Delhi Municipal Committee initiated a “campaign” against “the monkey nuisance in New Delhi,” but officials soon conceded that their efforts to drive macaques away were “virtually ineffective.” Left “exasperated,” they attributed part of this

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failure to the resilience of the rhesus. “The animals,” authorities lamented, “are far too urbanized and worldly wise.”49 Macaque capture continued through the 1960s and 1970s, further fueling the proliferation of weedy ecologies. In the decade 1965–­74, between 35,000 and 49,000 rhesuses were exported every year.50 In 1972 alone, the government earned foreign exchange worth 3 million rupees51—­by no means an insignificant figure. People from diverse quarters, however, kept calling for export bans. In 1963, the newly formed Animal Welfare Board of India, under the leadership of Rukmini Devi Arundale—­the first Indian woman to be nominated to Rajya Sabha—­ recommended putting “an end to the cruelties involved in [macaque] capture, transportation and use in foreign countries,”52 but this had little effect on governmental policies. Questions of hurting “Hindu sentiment” were raised in parliament, notably by MPs of the right-­wing Jan Sangh, to which the government responded by stating that the “two sentiments—­ sympathy for animal and for ailing men had to be balanced.”53 In 1975, during the Emergency declared by the Congress-­led Indian government, restrictions on exports were put in place. The government, concerned about its shaky international reputation, ceded to global calls for primate conservation. An annual export quota was fixed at twenty thousand animals; the government also declared that it was “planning some conservation steps.”54 International animal welfare NGOs soon began mounting pressure to ban exports. An exposé by the International Primate Protection League suggested that macaques were being used for radiation research, which was a violation of the 1955 Indo-­ U.S. agreement. A November 9, 1977, editorial in the Times of India called this practice “diabolical,” aimed as it was at learning “how long it would take a monkey to survive after a massive dose of neutrons and how many times it would vomit before it doubled up and died.”55 The International Primate Protection League appealed to the newly elected prime minister, Morarji Desai, of the post-­Emergency Janata government, asking for “strict enforcement of India’s conditions of export”—­ or, if necessary, a complete ban.56 A few days later, before the Third National Conference on Animal Welfare was scheduled to take place in New Delhi, a meeting between international animal welfare activists and Desai was arranged. “The meeting lasted 40 minutes and the subject of monkey export was discussed.”57

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While inaugurating the conference on November 14, 1977, Desai remarked that it is “a shame and source of sorrow that monkeys . . . are being exported from India.” Indicating that exports ought to stop, he went on to say, “I consider it wrong that there be cruelty to anything. . . . How is it justified for people to live on other living things?” and “Yet more than half the world is non-­vegetarian.”58 Desai then instructed Arundale, of the Animal Welfare Board of India, to announce the ban on his behalf. The sanction was officially declared on December 3, 1977.59 In subsequent months, the United States lobbied hard to get the moratorium on exports revoked, as India was the main source of macaques for biomedical research. Desai, however, remained firm,60 even following up his decision with stringent directions to prevent “unnecessary animal experimentation” in India.61 The ban led to a significant recovery of the rhesus population. In the twenty years between 1959 and 1979, macaque populations in western Uttar Pradesh and adjacent areas of Delhi had shown the smallest declines, in part because the trade avoided these populations, and in part because these troops had adapted to human pressure by increasingly resorting to commensalism.62 Many of these macaques began exhibiting “a tendency to behave as an edge species,”63 drawn to infrastructural environments, including roads and railway stations. By the early 1990s, there was a threefold increase in rhesus groups and nearly a fourfold increase in numbers since 1978.64 In Tughlaqabad, a part of Delhi, populations grew by as much as 76 percent in a period of five years after the ban.65 These demographic shifts were accompanied by a transition from semicommensal habits, where rhesus troops obtained natural forage and avoided people in parts of their home range, to a full-­fledged commensality, entailing a complete reliance on people for food. By the mid-­1990s, commensal macaques represented “the largest population of rhesus in north central India.”66 Weedy proliferations were fostered by an increasing “return to traditional religious values in India.” “We cannot document this with facts and figures,” Southwick and Siddiqi write, “but we have observed . . . greater attendance at religious processions, and more frequent feeding of monkeys at temples, roadsides, parks, and shrines.”67 The early 1990s was indeed a period of significant Hindu nationalist revival, as well as a time when Hanumān worship gained increasing prominence.68

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These weedy histories show that a commensal condition is not a given but rather emerges through reterritorializations and deterritorializations of the macaque body and simian populations. The capture and enclosure of macaques operated via an extractive capitalist biopolitical logic in which the rhesus served as a lively commodity, valued for its metabolic and regenerative capacities, and put into circulation in transnational regimes of biomedicine as earners of precious foreign exchange. These logics of extraction were not about improvement or discipline; they constantly rubbed up against other currents, such as religious sentiments or ethics of vegetarianism, that expressed a valuation of life that cannot be reduced to roots in western modernity. Capture generated patchy, uneven macaque geographies, to which the rhesus responded through weedy proliferations or deterritorializations, forging polyvalent connections with infrastructural environments, sparking affects of empathy, and shifting to altered metabolic lives. By the late 1990s, experts remarked that 58 percent of India’s rhesus macaques were urban. They were now found across Delhi, becoming bold—­and apparently “more aggressive.”69

Majoritarian Logics and Minor Variations In October 2007, Delhi’s macaques made international news. The city’s deputy mayor, S. S. Bajwa, was attacked by a troop of macaques while walking on his terrace. Losing balance while trying to ward off the animals, the mayor fell and later died of grievous injuries.70 This urban event—­the unfortunate and untimely demise of the mayor—­brought frictions surrounding commensality to center stage. The Delhi high court had already given orders to rid the city of macaques in three months, with the orders issued “in the larger public interest” and framed as the “only course of action to ensure human safety from monkey menace without hurting the welfare of the animals.”71 With the mayor’s death, efforts to trap and relocate macaques to the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary in the city’s outskirts intensified. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Delhi witnessed periodic trapping and relocation of macaques to villages in its periphery, carried out by the MCD and urban primatologists.72 Such practices of relocation seem to have been in place at least since the 1930s.73 The biopolitical impulse behind later removals stemmed from conservation logics; to

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reduce numbers in sites where they were “becoming overabundant,”74 and to establish viable populations elsewhere.75 This went hand in hand with a view that translocation would preserve the “traditional veneration” people had toward the animal, as the former was seen to be under threat as the creature turned into a “pest.”76 In the past, macaques were sent to northern Indian states, including Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where they sparked their own set of relations and reactions.77 More recent relocations to Asola Bhatti, regularized and systematized by the state, appealed to an aesthetic order—­the spectacle of a world-­ class city and modern capital. Macaques, perceived as an affront to this codified aesthetic, were to be expunged from the metropolis. Attempts to rid the city of macaques do not follow the logics of surveillance, although it is an attempt to intervene in an aleatory milieu. Rather, they derive from distributing the sensible, “setting the boundary between order and disorder,” what is to be visible or rendered invisible, “thereby allowing the city’s ‘governors,’ be they planners, politicians, or elite neighbourhood associations, to rule by aesthetics.”78 Aesthetic order does not necessarily translate into rational calculation—­there are no concrete censuses of macaque populations or attempts to map their distribution, fecundity, and growth—­but it is steeped in hylomorphic, majoritarian logic. The latter draws from the hierarchical “power (pouvoir) of constants,”79 where macaques are relegated to an inferior pole of a pregiven binary, pitted against the state and against an urban middle-­ class aesthetic of the city as a properly human domain. The majority “assumes the standard measure”80 rather than the other way around. Majoritarian logics are couched in representational registers: macaques are posited as docile bodies that power can work on from without, and as such, majoritarian logics become hylomorphic, giving primacy to human action and viewing macaques as inert populations that can be dominated, controlled, and stuffed into any organizational form. Furthermore, majoritarian politics operates spatially, inverting macaques’ sentient inhabitation of urban and infrastructural worlds into one of occupation—­a worldview in which worlds are laid out in advance according to planning logics and aesthetic charters. Yet majoritarian imperatives of creating a macaque-­free city are mired in interruptions, blockages, and delays—­an impasse generated not only through labyrinthine workings of bureaucratic practice but

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also through the micropolitical “power (puissance) of variation”81 introduced by the affective ethologies of macaques. To follow court dictates, the MCD initially floated a tender, hoping that private companies or NGOs would come forward, but none did. Three months after the court order, in June 2007, the civic body filed for an extension in the Delhi high court. Summer months, MCD officials claimed, were unsuitable for trapping, as females were either pregnant or carrying newborns; furthermore, they were facing a shortage of monkey catchers.82 In the subsequent eight months, spurred by the mayor’s demise, the civic body managed to capture 1,250 animals83—­nowhere near the total Delhi rhesus population. In response to complaints from irate citizens, the MCD confessed that macaques were getting the better of traps and were learning to avoid them. Urfaan, an erstwhile monkey catcher, points to the general reluctance to take on contracts to capture simians, for “once monkeys see others get trapped, they will never enter cages. No matter how much you try to lure them, monkeys see through the trick and don’t fall for it.” Far from being a hylomorphic mastery over other-­than-­human capacities, practices of capture were subverted by macaques’ affective ethologies, exposing the limitations of majoritarian design. Sometimes members of the public disrupted the MCD’s work. An official remarked how capture teams had to remain vigilant because on several occasions, Hanumān devotees released animals from their cages at night.84 Majoritarian imperatives rubbed against other currents animating the city: those of commensality forged through cultural, celestial, and religious sentiment. With the appeal for an extension pending in court, the MCD began stepping up its search for additional monkey catchers, even sending teams to far-­off states to find people. By November 2007, the civic body managed to put eight people on its payroll. Trapping went ahead, and in a year’s time, the number of macaques captured in Delhi rose to 5,200.85 Initial trends suggested that rhesus numbers in the city were on the decline. “Earlier teams used to catch 30–­40 monkeys per day,” remarked an official. “Now, numbers have gone down and teams are [only sent] when complaints are received.”86 The civic body’s hope of imposing a codified aesthetic order, however, was short lived. Although 10,863 animals were captured and relocated by September 2010, “the problem,” an official observed, “does not show signs of ending anytime soon.”87

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As past research in Delhi shows, the spatial logics of aesthetic rule was subverted by the affective ethologies of macaques. Rhesus macaque troops are typically held together through female bonds and a matrilineal hierarchy. Female macaques tend to remain in their natal troops throughout their lifetime, even when free-­ranging groups split.88 The process of trapping, where contractors were paid for the number of animals caught and not the troop in its entirety, altered social compositions. Females began to emigrate from natal troops to form novel macaque associations.89 In fact, female emigration increased when trapping was intense but partial, the latter being the outcome of outsourcing and a hylomorphic logic aimed at decreasing numbers impervious to macaques as sentient, affective bodies. A further unexpected outcome of partial capture and novel group formation was that macaque home ranges doubled in some areas, with animals venturing into parts of the city they never entered before trapping began.90 These weedy, rhizomatic proliferations, unimagined in hylomorphic script, rendered majoritarian logics of capture and translocation futile. The MCD, caught up in bureaucratic codings immune to macaques’ ethologies, went back to its earlier stance: a solution to the problem could not be found—­not because macaques were active and affective agents but because there was a shortage of monkey catchers. “We . . . increased the per-­monkey catching rate from 800 to 1200 rupees. . . . However that too has failed to attract private monkey catchers,” an MCD official remarked.91 Erstwhile trappers were reluctant to work because they had to face animosity from certain sections of the public who, on religious grounds, did not want macaques removed. Frictions with animal welfare activists, who filed complaints against the MCD and contractors for poor treatment of animals, were a further deterrent. As Urfaan, who has given up working under the MCD, remarks, “It became difficult for us to catch monkeys. On one occasion, while working in central Delhi, a group of animal welfare activists even took me to the police station. Although the MCD pays 2,400 rupees for each monkey caught, no one wants to take up contracts.” A shortage of manpower, frictions with commensal practices, and the minor variations introduced by macaques all contributed to the civic body’s conceding defeat. In their battle with the city’s macaques, officials argued, “the simians seem to have won.”92 The MCD, wanting to

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absolve itself of the responsibility of ridding Delhi of its monkey menace, appealed to the Delhi high court. Macaques, the civic body argued, were “not stray animals . . . but protected under the Wildlife Protection Act.” A “wild animal” by definition, macaques were a “wildlife issue,” and the task of managing them, the MCD maintained, “is the mandate of the forest department not local bodies.”93 The civic body added that their officials were not trained to catch monkeys; nor did they have “a distinctive job category for doing so.” However, keen to avoid being entrusted with the responsibility, the forest department argued that the civic body’s claims were invalid. In their affidavit to the court, the department used the term “commensal.” “These commensal monkeys have evolved by adapting themselves to live close to human habitations and sustain themselves on food provided by the residents of nearby areas,” sustaining “themselves on food provided by residents.” Rather than working toward a solution, the MCD, the department claimed, was seeking to “transfer the liability.”94 Commensality thus becomes a point of politicolegal contention, one brought into being through the shirking of bureaucratic responsibility—­everyday practices that unbound legal dictate, as well as the unintentional, new meanings that macaques invent through weedy proliferations. Although rule by aesthetics and its majoritarian logics seeks to override commensality, it is always trailed by a minor politics that places its imperatives in constant variation, drawing from a power (puissance) of action immanent to urban worlds, contingent on multiplicities that cannot be ordained in advance. Variations send urban formations “cascading or leaping . . . forbidding one to close it off, to make it homogeneous.”95 Although over 19,000 macaques have been caught and relocated to Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary to date,96 the majoritarian logics of rendering Delhi free of macaques has reached an impasse.

Vernacular Practices Ethnographic attention to the politics of commensality, however, suggests that binaries between major and minor practices are too simplistic. The state and elite neighborhood associations also seek to intervene in macaque worlds via modalities involving heterogeneous alliances rather than a hylomorphic strategy of control. Such interventions are vernacular

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in that they involve nonstatist knowledge practices and unfold through cofabrications between human and other-­than-­human pathways.97 Vernacular interventions are affective technologies that operate from a different ontology than that of biopolitical imperatives, beginning from what macaques do rather than what they are. They entail attunements to relations of speed and slowness—­the intensities that configure simian bodies and what its capacities are. Vernacular practices, like minor ethologies, are technologies of addition rather than apparatuses of capture, working with macaques’ abilities to respond to, and elicit responses from, other beings. The vernacular is not always in direct opposition to the state, for the latter can attempt to ally with them, sometimes “even going so far as to propose a minor position for them within the legal system.”98 Since the early 2000s, high-­profile government offices and elite neighborhood associations in Delhi have deployed captive langurs—­long-­tailed colobine primates—­to ward macaques off their premises.99 Arriving with their handlers or langur-­wallahs, often on the back of a bicycle, langurs would then be released in these spaces to frighten the rhesuses through a display of aggression. After initial resistance, macaques would resort to the upper reaches of buildings, away from the leashed langurs’, and people’s, proximity. Langur-­wallahs put in nine-­hour shifts to keep localities macaque-­free. Many of these teams were even on the MCD or resident welfare association payrolls, paid between 5,000 to 8,000 rupees a month. “The experiment,” as one resident remarked, “was successful. Monkeys would take food from our refrigerators, bite children and even pet dogs. We were rid of the menace when the langur came along.” The deployment of langurs is another mode of more-­than-­human collaboration, a process of working together, entailing arrangements between animal work100 and human labor. Crafted through practice, these collaborations entail molecular proximities between human and colobine bodies. “You need to understand their gestures, their hints, their nods,” says Urfaan, an erstwhile handler. “Langurs speak. They may not have speech, but they have a language. You have to develop an ability to read what their bodies tell you.” Urfaan is from the Madāri community, a caste for whom training animals has traditionally been a vocation. His work with langurs is not mechanistic, where collaboration is reduced to stimulus and response, punishment and reward. Instead, it is a practice of

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attunement, where he learns to be affected by the colobine, and together they cultivate common habits. “Those who understand langurs grasp their habits,” says Urfaan. He is more interested in the animal’s moods, “how it gets provoked, when it might become angry”—­moods that are molecular and on which animal work depends. “Langurs have an ego. There are days when they will refuse to work, and there is nothing you can do about it.” Similarly, moods are a signature of the activity of macaques. “Monkeys,” he says, are “fickle or chanchal,” for their dispositions change quickly and frequently. “That which hops, bounces, and swings is a monkey”—­that is, a locus of ongoing activity in a field of relations and an index of a mode of urban inhabitation, not biomass or occupants of a laid-­out space. In fact, the very term for macaques in Hindi, bandar, comes from vanar, “forest dwelling,” an etymology referring less to a noun than a verb. In such vernacular ethologies, animals are happenings, movements, moods. Macaques are what they do. While sciences of the state, inseparable partners in aesthetic rule, define bodies through arborescent schema, vernacular itinerations “count its affects.” It this mode of engagement, attuned as it is to how mobile and sensate bodies affect and are affected by one another, that we might term a vernacular ethology,101 the study of animal behavior in a minor mode, rather than understanding animals for purposes of classification and control. Urfaan and other langur-­wallahs were either under MCD contracts working in VIP areas (including residences of politicians and the chief justice of the supreme court), or they were hired by various ministries, which even made provisions in their annual budget to hire langurs.102 The number of langur-­wallahs on the MCD payroll rose during spectacular events, such as the 2010 Commonwealth Games hosted in Delhi,103 in line with the state’s imperatives of projecting an aesthetic of a world-­class city. Wealthier residents of Delhi also had access to colobine labor. Langur-­wallahs, however, led precarious lives in the urban margins, living in slums and vulnerable to the same sociospatial expulsions that macaques are subjected to by the state and its majoritarian logics. The deployment of colobine labor was not a smooth process; its effectiveness was often called into question by the rhesuses themselves. “Monkeys,” MCD officials remarked, “returned soon after the langur

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went away.” “Monkeys figure out our timings,” reflects Urfaan, “and they pattern their movements accordingly.” In certain localities, macaques became particularly aggressive, retaliating against the lone colobine, inflicting grievous injuries and even killing it. The rhesus was “fighting back,” “teaming up to beat the hefty langurs.”104 The vernacular can thus be understood as a form of minor practice, for it is in continuous variation. While major practices of the state are “vehicular,” resting on grammars of commercial exchange, policy, and planning, vernacular practices have their own territorialities; major practices are everywhere, and vernacular practices are here.105 They are never cleaved from a situational ecology that remains porous as to who or what might enable or stall interventions. The use of langurs came to a halt not because of the retaliatory actions of the rhesuses but because of animal welfare concerns. In 2012, influential animal rights activist and politician Maneka Gandhi apparently had a langur-­wallah arrested when she witnessed his staging a “street show” with his two langurs for money.106 Owning langurs was illegal under the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, but langur handlers, Gandhi found, were being deployed for supposed security purposes on a number of government premises, including the offices of the ministries of law and justice, information and broadcasting, and human resources development. The state had carved out a minor position for langur-­ wallahs within its operative structure. Gandhi had a circular issued to all ministries via the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, which stated that “the handler, the officer of the Ministry responsible for hiring the services of the animal” would all be liable for prosecution. All langurs were to “be removed from service immediately and the animals handed over to the Chief Wildlife Warden” of Delhi.107 The ban, coupled with failures in the capture and relocation of macaques, left the state (and its bureaucracy) in a quandary. In 2014, the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) came up with yet another intervention: getting erstwhile handlers to imitate langurs and scare macaques. “The idea came after consultations with langur-­handlers . . . They know what langurs do and can do it themselves. Hence, they have been hired on a contractual basis,” remarked an NDMC official.108 Asking people to mimic langurs sparked outcries from sections of the public. This “indigenous solution,” as a union minister had

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claimed, was disgraceful, “causing untold damage to the marital life” of langur-­wallahs and “traumatizing their children.” The NDMC, on the other hand, contended that mimicking langurs was generating employment and invited tenders to perform this precarious labor. “There is no shortage of talent in India,” remarked the chairman of the civic body. “These people impersonate langurs and are now getting work.”109 Now working as a langur mimic—­or more appropriately, a monkey chaser—­Urfaan corroborates the NDMC’s account. “Keeping langurs became illegal, and our work came to a complete halt. So we told officials of different ministries—­the home ministry, the finance ministry—­ that we could do the work of langurs ourselves.” “Initially, they were skeptical,” he remarks, “but since they did not want monkeys around, officials were willing to give it a go.” Urfaan’s confidence in the state’s being compelled to hire them came from his knowledge of the rhesuses’ dispositions. “Monkeys send emissaries. They tell one another, ‘Go betā, go and see if anyone has arrived.’ If you don’t perform work with langurs for even one day, monkeys will start coming back to previously evacuated territories. They will reclaim buildings and make it their haunt or addā.” The precarious work of chasing macaques is about regulating the movements of the rhesus. It entails affective labor, not just in terms of the immaterial labor of intimacy and contact associated with late capitalism,110 but also in terms of inventing affects that cross species divides. As Ashfaque, a handler turned chaser, puts it, “The task requires one to be alert, attentive, and to be able to project one’s voice.” “We try to channel monkeys’ movements by targeting the neta or leader of the troop,” referring to the alpha male, “and directing him elsewhere, for the entire troop follows him.” Ashfaque mimics the sounds of a langur, a high-­pitched “eeb . . . eeb” interspersed with a resonant “hoop,” and stands his ground, continuing until macaques start moving in the desired direction (Figure 2.5). Although completely sidelined in mainstream accounts of the urban or the state, activities such as regulating other-­ than-­human mobilities can be read as a biopolitical impulse to govern the aleatory (although operating here through alliances with vernacular practices). It is an intervention in a living urban milieu that works by “controlling circulations” rather than working on molds targeting populations. Nonetheless, “canalization,” or the allocation and distribution of flows in space,111 is only partially achieved.

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Figure 2.5. Vernacular practices: a monkey chaser in operation. Photograph by Priyanka Justa/Urban Animals Project.

Affective labors of regulating other-­than-­human mobilities are a form of enmeshment: a situated, intercorporeal activity that entails a correspondence between people and macaques, where entanglements and disentanglements work simultaneously. Moving and responding to one another’s ebbs and flows, correspondence is a form of transspecies semiosis, an act of cultivating recognition. “Our task is to make sure that the monkeys recognize us,” says Urfaan. “They begin to associate us with these sounds. In fact, they will look to see whether we are present or if it is someone else imitating us.” “If you try and mimic these sounds,” he tells me, “the monkeys will immediately realize it is someone else, and they will not even bother to run.” Furthermore, the exchange of meaning between sentient and sensing bodies cannot be mechanically reproduced. “People sometimes record our langur calls on their mobile phones and play them back to the monkeys, but it makes no difference,” says Urfaan, foregrounding the molecular relations between bodies at work. “They will initially run, but soon realize that it is only the sound of langurs and no person behind it. Gradually monkeys will start coming back.”

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The vernacular is crafted in practice. It does not follow the hylomorphic model of transmission, where knowledge is bestowed in advance through policy script or formulas.112 Vernacular ethologies entail intimate understandings of macaque behavior learned with other-­than-­ human company. “Devinder, my langur, taught me a lot about monkey behavior,” says Ashfaque, ceding expertise to his colobine. “It is only by observing his actions closely that I know sounds to make and when, what movements frighten monkeys, and what makes them beat a retreat.” Vernacular ethologies, then, are a mode of knowledgeability that is less about applying knowledge in practice—­as arborescent policy scripts would have it—­and more about knowing by way of practice. Vernacular ethologies are a process of enskilment, not so much replicated as reproduced in the correspondence between bodies and their accompanying, plastic, habits. Furthermore, vernacular practices take macaques to be knowledgeable beings; the human is not the sole figure of an urban episteme. Macaques become knowledgeable through emulation and through habits configured transversally rather than confined to arborescent species worlds. Unlike Latour and his baboons, closed in on their own intraspecific worlds,113 Urfaan and his langurs and macaques are always in association. “Why are they called ‘emulating monkeys’?” he asks. “This is because whatever you do, monkeys will copy, forge, emulate.” Like other monkey chasers, Urfaan cedes to their knowledgeability, however differently that ability is configured. Without this correspondence—­ across so-­called species worlds—­Urfaan’s practice would not take grip. In the vernacular, macaques are taken to be social beings who share a common urban world with humans. Macaques respond to monkey chasers because they are scared, but also because they have dimaag: mind or awareness. “They have been bestowed that much dimaag,” says Urfaan, referring to their knowledge-­abilities, “and they use their dimaag. If they had even more awareness, they would be able to do everything.” Urfaan, Ashfaque, and other monkey chasers lead precarious urban lives. Earning 12,000 to 15,000 rupees a month, they are just about able to make ends meet. “Monkeys are our rozi-­roti, our daily bread,” says Urfaan, whose income has gradually improved over the years. “We earlier rented accommodations in slums but now have our own place.” “Real langurs, however, were better for business,” he adds. “It gave us an

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identity and people would immediately realize that we could be hired to chase away monkeys.” “People hardly believe us when we say that we can scare monkeys without langurs,” adds Ashfaque. Although he contends that what they are doing “is a good job,” enabling him to support his wife and two children, it is uncertain. “Our contracts are not permanent. There is no guarantee as to whether they will be renewed.” There is a distinct political ecology of vulnerable wage labor here. “Being a monkey chaser does not come with any security.” Both Urfaan and Ashfaque want their children to have “proper jobs,” to become “officers” in the very ministries and offices that they work, as vulnerable bodies, to keep macaque-­free.

Shifting the Problem Around “Suddenly there are lots of monkeys in our neighborhood. It is astonishing where they came from,” exclaims Jaggi, a resident of Deoli village, neighboring the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary in Delhi’s outskirts. “I have lived here all my life, and we had no monkeys until two years ago.” A large troop of rhesus macaques, shifting back from an urban arboreality to a rural terrestriality, move along the dusty ground, interspersed with polythene bags and kikar saplings. Some perch atop high stone walls that cordon off the farmhouses of Delhi’s elite from the rural populace. Blue and red Delhi police signs stating “Feeding monkeys is forbidden,” along with the threat of a 10,000-­rupee fine and six months’ imprisonment, appear on almost every other street (Figure 2.6). The macaques, Jaggi contends, have come from the Asola Bhatti sanctuary. “The fifty-­odd monkeys around my home are urban animals. They are a nuisance—­getting into houses, opening refrigerators, and even snatching the chapatis we feed our mules and buffalo.” Like people from a number of villages near Asola—­Chattarpur, Bhatti Mines, Sanjay Colony—­Jaggi complains that Delhi is conveniently “transferring its problem” to their villages.114 Aesthetic orders of the global city, seeking to create an animal-­ free metropolis, generate dynamic and asymmetric effects. Here I want to reformulate Engels’s analyses of urban processes under capitalism, laid out in his Housing Question, in an ecological vein. Engels famously argues that in the bourgeoisie’s attempts to solve the housing problem

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Figure 2.6. Sign in a village neighboring Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, reading “Feeding monkeys is forbidden. Fine Rs 10,000/6 Month imprisonment.” Photograph by author.

and concentrations of poverty, “the breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars” in which the poor are confined, are never abolished but “merely shifted elsewhere.”115 In a similar vein, majoritarian practices of capture and relocation do not solve human–­macaque frictions but simply move them around. Delhi’s monkey menace is transferred elsewhere, shifting the onus of cohabiting with macaques onto the periurban poor. To paraphrase Engels, the very conditions and forces that produce frictions “in the first place, produces them in the next place.”116 In 2007, the number of rehabilitated macaques in Asola Bhatti was approximately three hundred. A decade later, in 2017, the total number of rhesuses moved to the sanctuary had risen to 19,647.117 An explosion in macaque numbers, coupled with the fact that many were urban animals socialized in a commensal milieu, whose ethologies included a predilection for anthropogenic food and the skills to break into houses, had disrupted the lives of people living around Asola. “Monkeys have rendered this place unlivable,” says Aarti, a resident of Chattarpur, pointing to her abandoned vegetable garden. “We can’t even grow anything because of them.” Unlike Delhi’s elite who own farmhouses in the area,

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the lives and dwellings of poorer residents are not as insulated. Those lacking resources to install concrete roofs instead cover them with thorny branches to deter macaques from jumping on them. Macaque bites are not infrequent. “The government dispensary here does not have any injections,” says Aarti, referring to antirabies vaccines. “We need to travel to the city and queue for hours to get treatment,” she notes, adding that her grandchild was bitten by a macaque. “The ordeal of getting a vaccine was as bad, if not worse, than getting bitten. We visited several hospitals before ending up in a private clinic that charged a sum of money we could barely afford.” In fact, human rabies immunoglobulin vaccine is frequently out of stock in state and Municipal Corporation–­run hospitals, so people have to resort to private clinics to get treated.118 Aarti’s granddaughter’s treatment cost her almost 500 rupees; because Aarti is a wage laborer, she incurred transaction costs because she lost an entire day’s work. “Children cannot accompany me when I go to work. This puts them at risk of being bitten. We are tired of getting injections. We end up getting scratched each time they grab a roti from our hand.” Jaggi remarks that unlike the elites who live in gated communities, the poor cannot afford a langur-­wallah or employ someone to keep macaques at bay. “The rich in Delhi want to build a spectacular city. They want to expel monkeys from Delhi, and we suffer the consequences.” As in the practices of capture, relocation was also plagued by chronic bureaucracy. The forest department, entrusted with the task of feeding the rehabilitated macaques, provided two thousand kilograms of food every day, strewn on the ground at designated spots for the animals to consume. Soon, however, a large herd of cattle was found consuming the “vegetables, fruits, sprouts and pulses” meant for macaques. The cattle also destroyed numerous saplings of fruit trees planted to sustain the rhesus population.119 In response, the department constructed feeding platforms twelve feet high, out of bovine reach (Figure 2.7). But one can never be outside a sticky ecology of concern; this material intervention generated unanticipated ethological effects. Platforms clustered food spatially, increasing intra-­and intertroop aggression. As an official noted, “When one [troop] is there, the others stay away. Some of the monkeys are violent and clearly mark hierarchy.”120 As a result, some of the relocated troops began straying into neighboring villages.

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Figure 2.7. Raised platform to keep macaque feed out of bovine reach. Photograph by Amitabh Dhillon.

The movement of macaques out of Asola was structured by a set of further chronic bureaucratic processes. In 2013, an audit by the Delhi government found that proper procedures for the procurement and distribution of food were not being followed. Further, provisioning costs “dramatically rose from ten to thirty million rupees” in five years.121 The budget was consequently stalled, so the contractor stopped sending supplies to the sanctuary, demanding that the government first pay outstanding invoices worth 9 million rupees.122 The forest department’s attempt to offset expenditure by placing food collection boxes in places of worship was futile; devotees, keen on appeasing Lord Hanumān, wanted to feed macaques in person rather than deposit food in boxes. The latter are empty of the affect-­charged encounters that macaques spark. As the situation worsened, animal welfare activists filed petitions demanding action. Macaques, they argued, were going without food, and a scandal was brewing in Asola Batti, where the entire sum of money for provisioning macaques was being “siphoned off.”123 In response, the Delhi government claimed that feeding had been stalled for “administrative and technical reasons” but that an amicable solution was being sought with the contractor, with a procedure of floating e-­tenders being initiated. Bureaucratic procedures resulting in a decline of food, as well

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as intertroop aggression aggravated by raised feeding platforms, resulted in a situation where incidents of macaques moving to neighboring villages increased. “Monkeys are not staying inside the sanctuary,” remarked primatologist Iqbal Malik. “Most have come back to the city. Colonies that never had a monkey problem are now infested with them.”124 Equally, if commensality structures the habitus of the rhesus macaques—­their plastic habits and habitat—­then it is plausible that macaques relocated to Asola Bhatti would have a predilection toward urban areas. A study conducted by Southwick and Farooq Siddiqi in 1988 provides food for thought. They observed that a troop of macaques, trapped within human habitation and released in a distant forest patch, “moved restlessly for several months” before settling near a village “busy with human traffic.” From a human perspective, Southwick and Siddiqi argue, the forest patch seemed better because it had abundant agricultural crops nearby as a source of food, yet the macaques preferred to be near humans. One could contend that the macaques reverted to what was for them a familiar habitat type; had a troop of forest animals been translocated, they would probably have remained in the forest patch. “This is probably true,” Southwick and Siddiqi argue, “but such a conclusion would demonstrate that commensalism is a self-­perpetuating habit in rhesus macaques.”125 An ecological reading of Engels’s formulation of the Housing Question foregrounds a whole other set of relations that are at work in, and emerge through, majoritarian retaking of space. The quest to generate a world-­class city is as much a story of the sociospatial expulsion of other-­ than-­human life as it is one of gentrification, displacement of the urban poor,126 and an enclosure of the commons.127 Although aesthetic rule, and its attempts to distribute the sentient and sensible, results in shifting macaques elsewhere, these interventions set in motion their own situational ecologies. Food placed on platforms becomes a food source that is clustered—­a consequence of having to deal with cattle incursions. This in turn sparks intertroop aggression, so macaques start spilling into villages or returning to urban environments. These are other variations that take the question of relocation, as well as the imperatives of shifting the problem elsewhere,128 in trajectories completely different from those analyses centered solely on human subjects.

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The Politics of Commensality Commensality is an unfamiliar entry point into theorizing the urban, but a powerful one. Its importance lies in the fact that it enlivens a raft of practices and processes through which the urban is experienced by an array of beings, entities, and persons that are not considered when the starting point of ethnographic and analytical inquiry is restricted to the usual refrains of planning, capital, and class. Commensality also foregrounds a whole suite of currents that animate the modernist city, not discernible through the familiar entry points of animals and machines invoked by posthumanism. It is with an entire entourage of deities and demons, animals and supernatural forces that metropolitan life is led. Commensality reproduces the sociality of the city—­a sociality that is heterogeneous and more than human through and through. As a form of coliving, commensality scripts cities in excess of human endeavor. This excess is not an epiphenomenon but rather is critical to understanding the multiple dimensions of the urban, as well as who or what makes it a living formation. The significance of the practices that commensality brings into being for understanding the postcolonial city more broadly is that it strikes at the heart of inherited qualifications of what counts as urban practice. Such qualifications tend to narrow urbanicity into particular sets of strictures, thereby decreasing the range of cities that might be drawn into comparative reflections. Practices surrounding commensality provide a different entry point to what habitat and habitability are, and what they might mean. Livability here is reconfigured as much more than the infrastructures, plans, and designs of cities. It is a mode of dwelling with macaques as well as a retinue of deities, demons, and astral bodies that urban inhabitants summon in ways both visible and hidden, and which may show up as real at any given juncture. These turn the city into a multisensorial domain of dispersed attachments and intimacies129 that figures nowhere in the utopias of planners or the machinations of governance. Dwelling is simultaneously grounded and celestial, exceeding familiar terrain and stretching what constitutes habitat and habitability. Attempts to enable livable cities need to account for this terrain, expanded through commensality rather than eradication. Macaques are seen to channel the presence of astral bodies rather

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than people; they are living shock absorbers, keeping calamities at bay, however temporarily. This expanded mode of dwelling gives rise to a politics of commensality. The latter, as acts of sharing an urban table, is not smooth and settled but rambunctious. The politics of commensality is a politics of inhabitation, exceeding representation and entailing an ontological choreography that is never divorced from a set of sticky relations with other than humans. The manner in which such an urban table is activated is vital. Entities can sit around, their proximities prompting an intensive attentiveness at certain times while failing to do so at others. Commensality involves a technicity of lures, instigations, and even circumventions. Action is not immune from an ecology of concern, and practices of commensality transform all parties—­human and other than human—­that are caught up in its affective exchange and withdrawals. As much as majoritarian logics seek to control macaques, apparatuses of capture seldom succeed, for macaques proliferate in lively and weedy ways, against and along the grain of expert designs. The kinds of concerns foregrounded here are not reducible to straightjacket idioms of informality, a lens through which the variance of postcolonial cities from those of the West tend to be read in particular strands of urban theory. Although informality is no doubt important,130 there are other agitations of practice and habit that make postcolonial cities such as Delhi inhere. To truck in dualisms of the formal and informal relegates other analytics through which we might grasp the richness of urban practice. This is most vividly encapsulated by the vernacular, which I take not so much to be that which counters the glare of the global131 than as pathways and practices that cut across human and other-­ than-­human divides and involve other kinds of competencies beyond what is usually taken to be expert knowledge.132 The vernacular is here, scripted in the thickness of practice and ceding to the earthly powers of other than humans to act. In contrast, majoritarian logics are vehicular, aiming to scale up and be everywhere. Vernacular practices entail different kinds of knowledgeability: a redistribution of who or what is knowledgeable in any situation or circumstance and a performance of knowledge through different abilities. As we see in the case of langur-­ wallahs, they take other-­than-­human capacities seriously and are cognizant of what other bodies can do and how they may respond.

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As nonstatist,133 the vernacular is not in direct opposition to the state. In fact, the state can resort to minor practices by bringing the vernacular into its ambit, as the examples of employing langur-­wallahs in various institutions and offices indicate. Much of these bodily, responsive, and tacit practices have been glossed over in recent work on the state and bureaucracy in urban India. The surge of scholarship in this arena has gravitated toward a “paper” turn, emphasizing the importance of codes and regulations as well as the ways in which documents, circulars, legislation, and communications render the world into an object-­ target of governance. There is no room for simians in this paper turn, for they seem too trivial to be worthy of mention—­except that it is the state and bureaucrats who are concerned with macaques! Further, bureaucrats and clerks sometimes resort to infrapolitics by claiming papers are torn and documents go missing because of monkeys. These ironies aside, the point here is that bureaucratic governance entails engagements with a living and material world that cannot be reduced to paper. The shift to practices, whether statist or vernacular, outlined here are one way out of this impasse. A minor articulation of the urban, therefore, foregrounds a different vocabulary for understanding the politics of governing urban life, broadly conceived. At stake here is a hybrid of aesthetic politics,134 ecological and vernacular practices that are not reducible to genealogies of biopower situated in western modernity. The familiar Foucauldian redux of biopolitics, anatomopolitics, and pastoral politics, deployed to understand how more-­than-­human life is governed,135 is limiting. In the context of Delhi’s macaques, the model of biopower focused on calculation, regulation, and securitization do not stand up to historical and ethnographic scrutiny. Macaques functioned as lively capital realizing biovalue, but there was no anatomopolitics or efforts to improve the simian body. At the population level, we do not see techniques of standardization, normalization, and surveillance that otherwise bring other-­than-­human life into the ambit of governance and control. This divergence is not so much about the failure of postcolonial cities than a reminder that biopolitics is a parochial and provincial set of practices emerging from European modernity that takes on a particular granularity in the postcolonial metropolis.136 Understandings of how (postcolonial) cities are governed require holding together disparate trajectories that can, however, align without

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apparent contradiction. My analysis here is one way of grasping long-­ honed practices of regulating inhabitation that can be remarkably efficient even if their orientations are provisional. More importantly, however, my foregrounding of vernacular practices also opens up avenues through which the urban can be rendered more livable for both people and macaques without resorting to the aesthetic of a world-­class city or by meting out the punitive measures that have long marked the western metropolis. Commensality might render cities unruly, but it does not make them impoverished. In fact, commensality is not just restricted to Delhi. It is an analytic with purchase beyond the single case; it allows interrogating urbanicity in other cities by permitting comparisons. I do so in the next section of the book by turning to another postcolonial city: London.

3 LIVELY CAPITAL AND RECOMBINANT URBANISMS

Other-­Than-­Human Mobiles and the City of Flows First are squawks; then a handful of green birds against the gray London sky. The birds forge a flyway through the city. “Aren’t they noisy,” says a man as he walks down a road in Kensington Gardens, one of London’s royal parks, where people come to watch and feed birds, walk, or exercise. “They do add a bit of color,” a woman accompanying him replies. “But they are certainly not British.” “Did the birds escape from the set of the movie The African Queen, or was it Jimi Hendrix, the musician, who released them in Carnaby Street?” The man solemnly grasps his binoculars as another flock of verdant birds whizzes past, communicating with one another via discordant contact calls. “Whatever it is, they are all over the place and run our bird feeder dry. They have gone feral.” The two bemused Londoners were referring to a bird known as the rose-­ringed or ring-­necked parakeet. A bird of South Asian and West African origin, brought into Britain as commodities for the pet trade, it is an other-­than-­human migrant par excellence. Small, free-­ranging populations of parakeets were noticed around London in the early 1970s. A decade later, their numbers rose substantially, prompting the British Ornithologists’ Union, a body that maintains the official list of Britain’s avifauna, to declare the bird to be “feral,” as their numbers were clearly “self-­maintaining, having survived two recent severe winters.”1 In the past thirty-­odd years, parakeet numbers have increased seventeenfold: there 105

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are approximately 8,600 breeding pairs in Britain,2 making them one of the most successful nonnative birds on the island. Responses to this surge in numbers range from fascination to xenophobia, with the tabloid press exclaiming that there are “50,000 of them, threatening British birds, gobbling crops—­and they are breeding like crazy.”3 As we move on from macaques and the urban infrastructures they enliven, parakeets open up another way of reading cities: the city and urban nature constituted through transterritorial flows. These flows have been broadly understood as urban constellations that emerge through the global traffic in information, raw material, and capital; they structure basic processes of societies, economies, and states. The city of flows is thought to constitute a new moment in capitalist urbanization. As Manuel Castells argues, by razing places, the city of flows supersedes, even erases, the city as a bounded unit, bringing into view a new urban formation not graspable through localization.4 The power of this idea has been such that it has become almost impossible to look at any place in a city without situating it along the routes and trajectories razed by capital. But why begin this reading with parakeets and the figure of the feral? What might these seemingly trivial birds offer for attending to the city of flows when capitalist restructuring, informational economies, and tensions between floating cosmopolitan elites and communities retrenched in their spaces are already known and understood to be its main pivots? A closer look at the journeys of parakeets reveals a whole other dimension to a reading of cities centered on flows. Three important stakes must be laid out up front. First, as other-­than-­human migrants, feral parakeets point to the conjunctural location of the city. This is not only in terms of the traffic in capital, labor, and goods but also in terms of its ecologies that have long been caught up in a sticky history of colonialism. Parakeets draw attention to interconnected histories between Britain and South Asia in that the birds have circulated through trade networks set up by empire. The birds thus become unlikely but powerful interlocutors for pushing against “dominant urban theory that displaces and disperses the postcolonial city into the imperial and global city,”5 albeit in a vein that is not tethered to human subjects alone. This reevaluation of the city of flows furthers the comparative gesture I set out in this book. Building on the previous accounts of commensality, in this chapter I work against the current of grounding urban natures in a

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set of western metropolitan particulars and exporting them to scrutinize and specify cities elsewhere. What might it mean to reverse this analytical gaze? How might one work with filters developed from experiences in cities such as Delhi and deploy them productively to refract urbanicity in a western metropole? What kinds of communities attest to the validity or confirm the incongruence of such a rapport? Second, and relatedly, these feral birds suggest a different politics of urban nature, one that pries open possibilities for rearticulating London’s metropolitan ecologies as postcolonial. As Paul Gilroy observes, the “postcolonial character of contemporary London has a simple facticity which leaves it not really amenable to debate.” Yet “analysis of empire and colony” often proceeds “as essentially unrelated to ecologies of belonging.”6 Third, the traffic in biota from erstwhile colonies and along routes capital traverses, intended or otherwise, foregrounds another kind of political economy configuring the city of flows. Parakeets are, to use Donna Haraway’s term, lively capital7—­that is, incorporated value in motion where the aliveness and corporeal potentials of a being traded as a commodity have bearings on its circuits of trade and exchange.8 Lively capital going feral, I argue, results in another kind of urban formation: one that is recombinant, constituted as it is by novel relations between species with no evolutionary history of co-­composition.9 The transterritorial flows of biota trigger recombinance, and as such, recombinance is a postcolonial condition. In this chapter, I knit together concerns with postcolonial nature, lively capital, and recombinant urbanism through the figure of the feral. Like the commensal, the feral enables another, situated, reading of the material politics of city making. It is an uncanny marker of the urban in that it has both major and minor connotations. In a major vein, there is a whole body of literature on feral cities, which invokes ferality to specify those cities constituted by breakdown, the rise of piracy, predatory practices, and urban populations turned into loose ends.10 Others, such as David Harvey, even refer to capital’s going feral, where “slash and burn” openly becomes “the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere.”11 Feral urbanisms are situations where people “find themselves unmoored as their contributions are actively devalued,” while predatory forces cut “across race, class and gender, loosening the grip these categorizations have on specific bodies.”12 Closely tethered to such iterations

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is the ferality of animal lives. The latter, neither domestic nor wild, are reframed in a major vein and compared to criminals or convicts on the loose. Underpinned by colonial legacies and evaluations, feral creatures live and die “between categories,” or they are caught between “an ethical vacuum and a romance of the escape.”13 Yet these perspectives stop short of developing ferality as a theoretical category. To do so, we need to invoke the feral in a minor key. Just as “the minor ‘mode’ gives tonal music a decentred, runaway, fugitive character,”14 ferality unsettles majoritarian urban assembly and takes the city of flows in unanticipated directions. Here we might draw on the work of feminist and queer studies scholars who show how the feral, by slipping the leash of domesticity, calls into question oppressive colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist structures. This includes the relegation of women to the household15 and a human taxonomy based on race.16 To hold on to the feral as a theoretical category harks back, in some ways, to Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology. Reacting to what he calls the herd history of civilization, “the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal,”17 Nietzsche deploys ferality as a diagnostic. It reveals the organic beneath theological constructs. By invoking the figure of the deserter or fugitive,18 ferality for Nietzsche is also therapeutic. It resituates being in life rather than in a metaphysical environment. Parakeets bring an analogous set of tensions and a parallax view of the city to the fore, showing us a world caught between majoritarian codes defining urban nature and flows that unmoor nature from nativist roots. As a theoretical category constituting, one could argue, the outside to capital, ferality becomes a productive entry point for a minor articulation of cities composed through flows. The argument that follows develops in three parts. The first part tracks histories of the spread of feral parakeets in London and simultaneously attends to how ferality is construed as a majoritarian marker indexing natures that are unsettling and a threat to socioecological order. In the second part, I contrast this with parakeets’ circulation as lively capital to foreground a retinue of agencies that animate the city of flows. The third part turns to the outside created by ferality—­what I call recombinant urbanisms, or the forms of urban assembly that proceed when feral parakeets enter into novel compositions with native fauna and the infrastructural environment.

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Taken together, these arguments draw attention to the ways in which novel metropolitan natures are postcolonial. A brief conclusion attends to the implications of this new mode of analysis for revaluating the city of flows while synthesizing conversations among posthumanist, postcolonial, and critical political economic endeavors that the book seeks to develop at large.

Arborescent Taxonomies and Histories of Ferality The spread of urban parakeets in London tells a fascinating story of the aesthetics of nature and how Britain’s avifauna is defined in nativist terms—­a story that is crucial for understanding how ferality came to be defined in majoritarian terms (Figure 3.1). The present population of parakeets goes back to escapes dating from about 1969, but there is a much longer history of parakeet presence in the city. Reports of free-­ ranging birds in the city hark back to the late nineteenth century. In Ornithological Notes from a London Suburb, 1874–­1909, published in 1910, F. D. Power mentions seeing “the all-­green” parakeet “as many as six times” in what was then a rapidly urbanizing Brixton. They were all solitary “greenish” birds “with a cry like ‘caak.’”19 Solitary escapes thus might have been around in the south of the Thames for a quite a while. In 1930, there were a number of reports from Epping Forest, north of London’s Forest Gate, probably released during a psittacosis scare,20 when hundreds of parakeets were culled in Europe and Britain. Psittacosis, also known as parrot fever, is a zoonotic infectious disease in humans contracted from infected birds. The Epping Forest birds, however, died out after a couple of years.21 In the early part of the twentieth century, a lone parakeet was known to have “resided for several seasons in Kensington Gardens, where he became quite a well-­known favourite.”22 Writing in a column in the Weekly Telegraph in 1917, William North described this particular individual as a “fugitive.” Populations of such birds or animals acclimatized in Britain, North argued, “should actually be described as feral—­that is, once domesticated and then allowed to return to the wild.” In what ranks as one of the earliest accounts of biotic nativism as far as parakeets are concerned, North decried those who wanted to “introduce pleasing strangers into our family circle.” “One of the chief dangers of

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Figure 3.1. “The Great Green Expansion”: map of the spread of urban parakeets in London. Guardian, June 6, 2019. Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2022.

promiscuous acclimatisation,” he argued, “arises from the introduction of an individual without his ‘check.’” Drawing analogies with human migrants, North went on to state that his remarks were not about “some rule against the alien who arrives without a certain sum of money. . . . The check I mean is not for the purposes of the prolongation of life, but quite the reverse. It is, in fact, a means of regulating unduly large families.”23 Such views of constructing the feral as an outsider, as a being to be ejected, uncovers “an intricate and often interwoven set of biopolitical, behavioural and affective forces” that underpin British evaluations of nature. Although these evaluations are modified, their continual return can be explained as “a failure of categorical displacement.” That is, classificatory practices and the coding of difference remain durable, although the harms of what gets through are regulated by the biopolitics of a given

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moment.24 Since 1970, a few parakeets could be seen along London’s southern fringe, and the creature bred in Croydon and near Claygate in 1971.25 A small population of about ten birds, roosting just outside London in Runnymede, were probably escapes from a pet shop at Sunbury-­on-­Thames.26 A comment in the ornithological magazine British Birds emphasized the need to follow “the histories of the birds,” lest the creature “[become] an established breeder,” as parakeets were “known to be hardy in captivity.”27 More alarmist views were soon raised, indicative of how inscribed legacies, classificatory conventions, and an affective biopolitics of race can burst through “a nick in time,” where the past and present combine in novel ways.28 M. D. England, an aviculturist, called for ways to “stop the nonsense (to put it at its lowest) of a parrot” becoming part of the island’s avifauna and “getting on the British and Irish list.” As the number of “feral Ringnecks is still comparatively small,” it would not be too difficult to control their numbers “by trapping and incarcerating them.” Action was needed or “before long it may be too late,” for parakeets could easily go beyond “the reasonable possibility of control.” “Our grandchildren,” England decried, “will not thank us for a bird which could so easily become a menace to fruit and other crops, quite apart from its success in taking over nest-­holes needed by other species.”29 Other ornithologists echoed England’s call for ridding London of its feral parakeet population. “Uncontrolled populations should be eliminated before they become so widespread that such action is no longer possible,” wrote R. B. Tozer in British Birds, adding that “a clear case for immediate action” was warranted by the disease risk parakeets posed.30 Britain’s avifauna as well as its status, distribution, and taxonomy. Maintained by the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) since 1883, the List originated as a means to provide an institutional steer to a research program on taxonomy.31 Now in its ninth edition, the List’s classificatory conventions are steeped in mapping into the origins of Britain’s birdlife. The constituent categories of the List are aimed at providing an “objective baseline” to ensure “common standards in reporting the state of biodiversity” and to advise the “Government on strengthening the law regarding the release and escape of bird species.”32 By coding difference in taxonomic terms, the List lies at the heart of institutional

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framings of Britain’s nature. It is arborescent in that it is a branching tree of hierarchies that imposes organization on nature. Trees are organs of power that proceed through classification,33 and in the instance of the List, it manifests in a coding of what counts as natural and therefore belonging to Britain. Its two main categories—­categories A and B—­ pronounce whether a species occurs in Britain “in an apparently natural state,” the baseline for which is set to 1950. A third category, category C, is reserved for birds that were “originally introduced by man” but that “have now established a regular feral breeding stock without necessary recourse to further introduction.”34 Terms such as “natural state,” used to organize the British List, not only resonate with citizenship law but actually derive from it. Precursors to the List’s classificatory conventions were inventories of British flora that, in the 1830s, first began to indicate the origins of plants and whether they were introduced through human agency. In an article on the indigenousness of British plants written in 1835, John Henslow, a Cambridge professor of botany and tutor of Charles Darwin in Christ’s College, devised a set of symbols for indicating which species were introduced and which were of uncertain origin. Henslow’s notation was widely taken up in subsequent botanical work, notably that of Hewlett C. Watson, a skilled amateur botanist who wrote a number of popular books on British flora. But dissatisfied with the symbols, Watson imported terminology from English common law to define the state and origins of British flora. The son of a lawyer, and for a time apprenticed to one, Watson included terms such as “native,” “denizen,” “alien,” and “colonist” to denote the origins of plants. Three of these were direct applications of law relating to human citizenship rights, much discussed in parliament at the time. Watson’s classification drew from the legal “division of the people into aliens and natural-­born subjects.” The latter referred to those “born within dominions of the crown of England,” whereas aliens were those “born out of it.” Watson specified natives in terms of having arisen in a defined territory and without the aid of human agency. Natives showed strong attachments to the land, while aliens “exhibited lesser, artificial attachments.”35 Such classificatory codings lie at the heart of biopolitical regimes of population management; they regulate the state of alert toward the feral. They are steeped in a biotic nativism—­the identification of flora and

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fauna on the basis of their origin, and the accommodation or expulsion of which proceeds through judgments that are both declared and tacit. The List’s current avatar is also underpinned by a long debate on the status of “races” or subspecies of British birds, a debate that unfolded in the mid-­1940s when geopolitical scrambles and World War II were at their height. Intensive “racial surveys” and “racial maps” of Britain’s birds were drawn; there was significant argument as to whether “local forms” should be considered distinct from their European counterparts.36 These racial assessments were underpinned by questions regarding whether Britain harbored unique avifauna, not just variations of species found in Europe. This is not to say that all views regarding the growing number of feral parakeets were alarmist. Concurrent with biotic nativism were dissenting voices that called for embracing the cosmopolitan nature of Britain’s avifauna. Responding to England and Tozer in British Birds, Bruce Campbell, an author and radio broadcaster, expressed surprise at how people adhered to “the illusion that Britain possesses a ‘wildlife,’” given that the entirety of the island’s landscape had been subjected to anthropogenic modification.37 “What about the Ringneck Parrakeets which are now surrounding London and whose increase M. D. England and R. B. Tozer see as a potential menace?” Campbell asked. “Have we not created a niche for them compounded of London’s relatively higher temperatures throughout the year, the abundance of suburban orchards and bird tables and sufficient old trees with holes? If they compete successfully with House Sparrows, Starlings, feral pigeons and Woodpigeons for space and food, I am afraid I shall lose no sleep.” “I believe,” Campbell wrote “that we must accept the almost entirely artificial situation of our native species over 90% of the country and adopt any practical means of conserving them.” Predating contemporary debates on rewilding by thirty years, Campbell even suggested that “we should not dismiss the possibility of introducing new ones to fit the exotic habitats that urbanisation and modern forestry have created and with which we have to live.”38 The introduction of new species was anathema to the establishment, for the concept of biotic nativism had become “transmogrified” into “an obsession of conservationists and a pillar of modern ecology.”39 Nativism found further scientific credence with the rise of the modern field of invasion biology, a field that seeks to understand and prescribe

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solutions to ecological emergencies. Invasion biology was heralded by the work of Charles Elton, an Oxford zoologist who in 1958 published a hugely influential book entitled The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. Elton, regarded by ecologists as invasion biology’s “prophet,”40 was concerned with population outbreaks and the effects they had on native flora and fauna. Population outbreaks, Elton argued, occurred in native or long-­established populations, but also “when a foreign species successfully invades another country.”41 It was the latter that concerned Elton; indeed, his thinking on invasiveness might have crystallized during World War II, when Britain faced the imminent threat of a German military invasion. “We live in a very explosive world,” wrote Elton after the war. “It is not just nuclear bombs that threaten us. . . . There are other sorts of explosions . . . ecological explosions.”42 Invasion biology amplified long-­held anxieties surrounding nonnatives and couched them as potential agents of ecological disaster. By 1979, parakeet populations were beginning to spread in Britain. The birds were reported from thirty-­two counties, and the popular press described how “local residents” were beginning to “rub their eyes in disbelief ” when encountering parakeets, putting “it all down to the hot weather.” Reminiscent of Elton’s metaphors of invasion, concerns about the birds beginning “to colonise in the London suburbs” were voiced. “There is a population of about 100,” and with the bird’s “penchant for pears and plums the parakeet is in danger of becoming regarded as a pest.”43 In 1983, the BOU officially transferred the species to category C of the British List because the birds’ numbers, estimated to be “probably 500–­1000,” were “clearly . . . self-­maintaining.”44 Concerned that an official listing might be followed by control measures, those sympathetic to parakeets remarked that the BOU had made “an over-­optimistic assumption.” Instead, the public ought to “welcome this beautiful and very ‘different’ addition to our avifauna.”45 London’s parakeet population had gone up to 1,500 birds in four major roosts by the mid-­1990s.46 Because they were “very troubled about the apparent naturalisation or possible future naturalisation of increasing numbers of species,” ornithologists suggested further revisions to the categories of the British List, as unwanted introductions “rarely proved to be beneficial.”47 Previous definitions of category C, which covered

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introduced species, had failed to distinguish between “naturalized aliens,” such as parakeets, and birds like red kites, which had been “re-­established as part of a conservation programme.”48 Naturalized aliens were unwanted, and the BOU committee recommended giving “consideration . . . to controlling the British population of Rose-­ringed Parakeets.” Although the numbers were “relatively small,” prevention was deemed better than cure. Parakeet populations needed to be quelled before they started “to threaten seriously fruit growers’ crops or native hole-­nesting species.”49 This brief history of ferality reveals how parakeets’ presence in Britain has borne witness to two opposing sets of currents: between advocates of biotic nativism and those upholding a more cosmopolitan view of nature, between race-­coded classificatory practices and a questioning of territorial origin as the criterion for accommodation. Parakeet populations in London made sudden increases in the early 2000s,50 with numbers shooting up to close to 10,000 birds in 2013,51 but the bird has yet to develop into a serious agricultural pest. Although feral parakeets are sometimes marked as undesirable bodies, they create openings for another reading of the city of flows, an endeavor that needs to move from roots to routes.

Lively Capital Returning to Kensington Gardens, where this chapter began, takes us to the middle of a motley crowd feeding birds by the Serpentine, a recreational lake in the Royal Park created in the early eighteenth century. Amid people tossing bread to an assorted flock of coots, ducks, and swans is Marc, a man in his midfifties, with Toto, his pet rose-­ringed parakeet. Perched on a harness held by his owner, the cobalt–­turquoise morph is the center of attention (Figure 3.2). Families with children, couples coming to feed birds, and tourists are all intrigued by this pastel blue bird so different from the green conspecifics flying around. Toto is Marc’s second psittacine pet, having kept an “Amazonian blue” parrot before. “Parakeets are quite clever,” Marc remarks. “Their intelligence is equivalent of a three-­year-­old child.” He holds up his mobile phone and plays a parakeet video; Toto pecks at the screen, nasally repeating, “Give me a kiss.” “He can do about thirty words.” When asked where he obtained

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Figure 3.2. A living commodity: blue rose-­ringed parakeet morph. Photograph by author.

the bird, Marc points to a ring on Toto’s leg. “He is from an online trader. This ring is a certificate that he is a captive-­bred bird, healthy and disease-­free.” Sentient and interactive, with a striking color mutation, Toto, like other parakeets, is what one might call a lively commodity—­living commodities whose value derives from their aesthetic and corporeal dispositions, from their very status of being alive.52 An attention to liveliness offers us other avenues to understand the circulation of commodity capital that animates spaces of flows. First, it calls for going beyond political economic/ecological straightjackets where nature is often treated as an undifferentiated and unitary base.53 Instead, liveliness takes other-­than-­ human potentials to be variegated, but also eventful and co-­constitutive of the economic. Fleshy capacities and ethological propensities of living creatures matter in that they have bearings on the spatiotemporal itineraries of circulation, reproduction, and accumulation. Second, liveliness also questions formulations of commodity circulation associated with cultural economy. The emphasis here has been on the conditions under which economic tokens circulate in different regimes of value in

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time and space, a perspective that had its heyday in the turn toward the so-­called social life of things.54 Although attentive to the biographies of commodities, their overt emphasis on the social leaves no room for the ecological and material lives of beings as they take on or shun the commodity form. As Sarah Whatmore presciently observes in Hybrid Geographies, published two decades ago, the “inter-­corporeal commotion of commodities” is “much more than simply a ‘traffic in things’ set in motion by exclusively human subjects.”55 A more ecologically attuned formulation of the circuits of capital might therefore emerge if we take the emphasis to lie elsewhere: in the bio-­graphies or the ecological and material lives of commodities.

From Circuits to Life Courses The second volume of Marx’s Capital contains a series of schemas of the circuits of capital. Reproduced time and again, often with evocative modifications, Marx56 represented the capitalist process of money deployed to produce surplus along these lines:

M—­C

MP . . . LP



P . . . C′—­M′—­C

MP . . . LP

P . . . C′—­M′ . . .

Here, money (M) is put forward to buy commodities (C), namely the means of production (MP), which include raw material, inputs, and machines as well as labor power (LP), which are then combined in the production process (P) to produce new commodities (C′). These commodities are then sold for the original money put forward plus a profit (M′). This amount is reinvested to enable a further round of production and, through this dynamic, capital—­as value in motion—­expands and goes on and on. A lively political economy can take these cues from Marx. His abstractions help us visualize how the material and ecological histories of a living commodity can be brought to the fore and put in conversation with its social and political life. Commodities “pupate” during the course of circulation, Marx notes, deploying a carnal analogy of metamorphosis,57 and what matters in circulation, as he remarks in volume 2 of Capital, is not “the form of the act, but rather its material content.”58 What, then, might the circuits of capital look like if we took input to entail not raw material but living, breathing parakeets? What if the lines

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depicting the circuit are not abstract segments but pathways that are simultaneously social, material, and ecological? We might take these lines to be “living lines” or “flesh lines,”59 and the circuits of capital to be life courses—­the trajectories and biographies of commodities that are alive. Living lines may be molar: rigid and segmented, where transitions are decided in advance and subordinated to the generation of surplus value. They can also be molecular: supple, relating to other bodies and the ambient environment through differential “relationships of speed and slowness.”60 Parakeets might prompt a different visualization of Marx’s schema (Figure 3.3). This is one way to encapsulate circuits of lively capital: the expansion of in-­corporated value in motion. Parakeets initially enter the commodity circuit as wild-­ caught birds sourced from their home range (denoted by CMP in the conventional circuit). The expansion of populations in captivity is contingent on reproduction (R) rather than production (P), a fleshy, tacit process that has been the subject of commercial, professional, and amateur interest. The aesthetic and corporeal potentials of the living commodity are not muted in this process; they have a bearing on how it unfolds and the ways value is realized. Aviculturists have long sought to produce color mutations—­or, to use Donna Haraway’s61 expression, to create value-­added parakeets (C′). These are prized commodities, sparking much curiosity and fetching higher prices (M′). The most notable of these value-­added parakeets are the blue ringneck and the yellow or lutino mutations. Both were famously bred by the duke of Bedford at Woburn in the early part of the twentieth century,

Figure 3.3. Life courses, or the circuits of lively capital. Parakeets enter the circuit as commodities (C), and the process of production becomes one of reproduction, whereupon new mutations, or value-­added parakeets (C'), are formed. These prized commodities fetch higher prices, enabling the realization of surplus value (M').

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and their origins are steeped in a colonial history. The allure of the former mutation was on account of its rarity as well as its aesthetic qualities. The duke, a serious aviculturist and author of Parrots and Parrot-­like Birds, remarked how the bird’s “blue coloration” was “greatly admired by all who see it.”62 The first color mutants were procured from what were probably wild-­caught birds from a dealer in Calcutta. These were sourced by Alfred Ezra, then president of Britain’s aviculture society and an avid bird collector whose penchant for obtaining rare birds for his personal aviary drove the pink-­headed duck, a bird occurring in India and Burma, to extinction.63 The pair of psittacines, believed to be the only blue mutants held in captivity at the time, fetched an exorbitant sum of close to US$1,000. With its animals faring well in captive conditions, the Woburn aviary was able to raise as many as eleven birds in three seasons.64 The gradual expansion of this mutant flesh line, and its contemporary ubiquity as a lively commodity, happened after the duke’s untimely death in 1954. His collection was dispersed, and the original blue mutants obtained from India were purchased by the Keston Foreign Bird Farm, which specialized in breeding rare birds for commercial supply and aviculture in Britain. Populations of blue ringnecks grew65 (Figure 3.4), supplemented by further mutant specimens that the farm obtained “from the wild in India.”66 This reproduction of lively capital is contingent on more-­than-­ human work in that it involves reproductive and metabolic work performed by the birds themselves, which capital presupposes but does not itself produce,67 as well as the human labor of care that goes into the breeding of birds. Lively capital’s reproduction brings in a different view of the turnover of commodity capital—­the movement from C to C′—­than what is portrayed in more conventional political economic accounts derived from a model of factory production. Whether turnover is smooth or encounters blockages is contingent on the reproductive potential of parakeets and the labors of care that go into their maintenance and upkeep. Parakeets are relatively easy to breed in aviaries, which are spaces of high disturbance compared to the open, where the birds have far greater choice in nest-­site selection. The hardiness of parakeets as well as the intimate knowledge produced as a result of experience in breeding them make the transition from C to C′ relatively smooth. However, this transition can also come up against barriers that are uncanny,

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Figure 3.4. Value-­added parakeets: blue ringnecks bred at the Keston Foreign Bird Farm, 1950s. Edward J. Boosey, originally published in Avicultural Magazine 63, no. 2 (1957): 58–­61; reprinted courtesy of Avicultural Magazine.

if not unimaginable in the mechanistic world of factory production that served as the locus of Marx’s schemas. Alfred Ezra, who managed to breed two lutino parakeets in 1934 after eight years of effort, points to a number of factors that stall turnover: “A lutino hen mated to a green male bird nested in early February, laying three eggs. One was broken during incubation, one was infertile and one young hatched out on 3rd March.” Another pair, both lutinos, “laid four eggs in March. All eggs were fertile, but all the young died in the shell.”68 The moods of the living and sentient commodity can slow down living, fleshy lines. One of the main challenges the duke of Bedford faced when getting mutant blues to breed was handling the moods of the male. In a patriarchal tone, he describes the male as a “funny-­ tempered bird” whose “wife,” “for some strange reason . . . appears to get on his nerves.”69 The pathway between C and C′, which includes reproduction, can thus be molecular—­less to do with mass production and more to do with the affective relations birds have with one another and with their surroundings. Over time, improved knowledge of breeding habits, coupled with the fecundity and longevity of a creature that starts breeding at the age of two and survives in captivity for up to thirty-­four years,70 led to greater

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success in rearing mutant parakeets. In other words, the transition from C to C′, parakeets to value-­added mutants, has become much more smooth. By the late 1940s, there were almost equal numbers of lutino and green parakeets in England,71 and both mutants are ubiquitous in the pet trade today. Propensities of the living commodity, including parakeets’ ability to produce color mutations, “more of which have been created with this species than with almost any other psittacine,”72 were crucial factors driving parakeet supply and demand. After World War II, the pet bird industry in Britain boomed, with caged birds increasing tenfold from six hundred thousand in 1947 to six million in 1956. This figure almost doubled to eleven million in 1961, when pet birds in Britain outnumbered cats and dogs put together, in part influenced by a housing shortage and lingering food rationing after the war.73 This is not to say that captivity is an ideal condition for parakeets. Captivity significantly affects parakeet and parrot behavior, resulting in a decline in a number of behaviors they might express in the wild, including flocking, social interactions with conspecifics, as well as foraging for a varied diet. Captive parakeets can also show high levels of stereotypy, which are indicators of poor welfare.74 There have been attempts to improve welfare, typically through strategies of environmental enrichment and alterations to their social environment. These alterations mark what might be seen as an “atmospheric politics” of lively capital, where attempts are made to intervene in the wider milieu of an animal or bird in captivity in order to reproduce lively capital.75 Although large populations of parakeets were bred in captivity, significant numbers also entered circuits of lively capital in the form of imports. Close to 26,000 birds were brought into Britain in the period between early 1970s and 2007. A substantial number of these came from India and Senegal; imports from there peaked between 1986 and 1990, and a further spike in 1997 involved birds from Pakistan. In the early 2000s, most birds were of South African and Guinean origin.76 Variations in the pathways of trade had to do with a number of factors. They included countries becoming signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), alterations in in-­country conservation policy, and concomitant regulations in the trade of wild-­caught birds. Imports stopped in 2007 when, on the back of a SARS scare and the detection of avian influenza in a bird in Britain,

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the European Union enforced a ban on wild bird imports. The entry of wild-­caught parakeets into the circuits of lively capital was stalled, but commodity capital continued to expand through captive breeding. The scale of such enterprise is indicated by twenty thousand birds being bred in a span of fourteen years in the 1990s by members of the United Kingdom’s Parrot Society alone. Numbers for the entire pet bird industry are likely to be several times this figure.77 These pathways of trade further draw attention to the interconnected histories between South Asia and Britain that endured even after the formal end of colonialism. Most parakeets that arrived in Britain from India were trapped in the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the east and north. Most of these psittacines were caught in and around agricultural fields or in light forests by trappers belonging to communities involved in catching birds over generations.78 Trapping involved using clapnets or, often in the instance of parakeets, taking fledglings from the nest. The traffic in lively capital entailed the birds’ passing through the hands of a number of agents before finally being exported by air. From trappers in rural India, parakeets would make their way to a first agent or middleman, usually in a provincial town or city, who would then pass them on to major exporters in Indian metropoles, including Delhi.79 Mortality during transit was high, particularly when moved from trappers to the first agent. Although consignments sent to Britain had to be accompanied by a health certificate signed by an official government veterinarian, mortality continued along other stages of the psittacines’ journeys. Diseases present in birds could quickly spread through a consignment, aggravated by crowded conditions prevailing before and during export. In 1975, for instance, 80 percent of a population of six hundred parakeets sent to Britain was reported to have died from Newcastle disease, a highly infectious viral disease in poultry and other avians, during the first week of their arrival.80 Pathways of trade—­or the tracks of lively capital—­are thus crucial for understanding the interconnected histories of urbanicity (Figure 3.5). Parakeets draw attention to another kind of migrancy: one steeped in the traffic of lively commodities from erstwhile colonies. These pathways, and the connections they draw, are vital for grasping how postcolonial urban natures are created. The terms trade and track are in fact

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etymologically related. The word trade entered the English language via tread, derived literally from Middle Low German track, and initially referred to a “course” or a “way of life.” Many nonwestern societies also couple trade and track; this coupling can provide an alternative set of analytics for envisioning circuits of capital to those of standard urban political economy. One need not go further than the kula, the famous practice of preindustrial and translocal exchange that has long transfixed economic anthropology, to witness how the transactions of things were not necessarily thought outside of their journeys. The “route along which the kula shell valuables are exchanged” is termed keda, meaning “road,” “route,” or “track.” In less literal contexts, keda gives expression to the various relations and “paths” to “which participation in kula,” or transaction, “leads.”81 The couplet of kula and keda have been pivotal to how cultural economy has thought of commodities as counters of exchange with social lives, where flow in any given situation is “a shifting compromise between socially regulated paths and competitively inspired diversions.”82

Figure 3.5. Interconnected histories: the region in India where parakeets were caught (gray shading) and metropolitan centers where they were exported to Britain and other countries. After Tim Inskipp, “The Indian Bird Trade,” in The Bird Business: A Study of the Commercial Cage Bird Trade, edited by Greta Nilsson (Washington, D.C.: Animal Welfare Institute, 1981).

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Tracks are indeed where the uncanny lurk; they furnish an alternative grammar for animating the circuits of capital. One registers a shift from the commonplace view of animals being bounded tokens of exchange to a view that takes a living being to be a bundle of tracks: loci of activity enmeshed in a suite of relations, not so much an entity as an itinerary. In a similar vein, cultural economy’s emphasis on the spatiotemporal journeys of things called commodities could be deflected to take the commodity itself as a spatiotemporal itinerary. In other words, trade and track become inseparable: the status of an other-­than-­human being as a commodity is but a single moment in the life course of a sentient creature. Tracks reveal particular histories and processes through which animals assume commodity form—­or, for that matter, migrancy. It can involve acts akin to primitive accumulation, where parakeets are forcibly captured, torn from their ecological milieus and modes of being, and hurled onto the market as commodities for the pet trade.83 In captivity, life courses of parakeets can also become molar, their trajectories dictated in advance by the quest to generate surplus value, with vital consequences for their being and sentient lives. But equally, as in the kula system,84 what matters in the uneven constitution of the city of flows is not always the paths of lively capital, but rather their diversions. Parakeets can create literal “lines of flight”85 from the circuits of capital, escaping molar segments and becoming feral.

Lines of Flight Lines of flight are abstract and alive. Parakeets constitute a diagonal movement as they flee captivity or are released in a clandestine, infrapolitical manner. On the one hand, parts of the commodity circuit dictated by capital are molar and therefore “binary.”86 Binary encapsulations pervade formulations of life courses of animals and plants in the pet trade. The latter are posited as having either a “wild life” or a “commodity life,” and creatures move from one category to another during their life course as a commodity, undergoing variegated processes of recommodification and decommodification.87 On the other hand, lines of flight “produce choices between elements that don’t fall into either category.”88 To fly off the grid of capital is to have neither a wild nor a commodity life, but rather to take a pathway through the middle—­a pathway deterritorializing lively capital to produce nonbinary life courses and a nonarborescent

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urban world. This deterritorialization of capital might be viewed as yet another iteration of ferality. Lines of flight have continued to mark the history of parakeets as lively capital. Ornithologists argue that “several hundred” imported parakeets may escape or be released from captivity each year in Britain.89 Urban legends have emerged regarding the origins of London’s feral parakeets. One legend contends that they initially escaped from the set of the Humphrey Bogart film The African Queen in the early 1950s. Another legend has it that a pair of birds was released in Carnaby Street by the musician Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s. As Sarah Cox and her colleagues show, these are unlikely sources of the current psittacine population. Rather, their establishment was the outcome of numerous releases and introductions that have continued at least since the 1930s.90 The parakeets seen around Epping Forest from 1930 to 1932 were birds released deliberately, coinciding with several events of human deaths due to psittacosis in Britain. Between 1929 and 1930, the disease, with a mortality rate of 15 percent, had become a worldwide concern, killing eight hundred people globally.91 As the newspapers of the time reported, the “disease scare” created panic, and “people turned their parrots loose.”92 Orders were given to destroy pet parrots,93 and it is plausible that there may have been a further round of deliberate parakeet releases to avoid this fate. Lines of flight can thus emerge from particular affective atmospheres, whether these are of fear, virulence, or liberation. The psittacosis outbreak resulted in an almost two-­decade-­long ban in bird imports to the United Kingdom. A further episode occurred when the ban was lifted in January 1952. In December 1952, the death of a Birmingham pet shop manager raised alarms.94 Efforts to trace birds from a consignment soon ensued, and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was directed to cull three hundred birds in the pet store.95 A month later, as psittacosis spread to ducks, the ministry of health issued a new ban on parakeet imports.96 The disease scare probably induced parakeet releases. Accidents also contributed to lines of flight. On one occasion, 140 “foreign birds,” including sixty pairs of budgerigars and some parakeets, escaped from a Welsh aviary during a storm. The birds were “carried far throughout the county by strong winds.” Four parakeets, including “one without its tail,” returned to the aviary a few days later.97 There were a number of reports of birds living

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freely for periods as long as six months. Practices of commensality, in the form of food being put out by people, helped the psittacines survive harsh winters.98 One bird near Stourbridge had been living freely for close to six months before it was trapped while feeding on fruit behind a greengrocery. The bird was neither wild (to make capture illegal) nor a commodity already owned; the greengrocer remarked that he would keep the bird if it went unclaimed.99 Parakeet imports began again in the 1970s.100 The trade built up rapidly, with 800,000 birds moving through Heathrow Airport in some years, many of which included parakeets. Birds destined for the United Kingdom would be unloaded at Heathrow, an important node in the pathways of lively capital; others continued their journeys, headed for Germany, the Netherlands, or Belgium. Accidental escapes were not unusual. Describing one such occasion, M. D. England, a staunch opponent of ferality, states, “The driver of a van containing crates of birds en route from plane to reception sheds noticed that a box was broken and that birds were escaping from it into the van. On going to report this he left the doors of the van open, with the result that later examination showed the box and the van to be almost empty.”101 These are small archival flashes that make visible these lively moments in what is otherwise a formulaic account of the transport of commodities and goods—­ flashes that show how circuits are always susceptible to diversions. Diversions, one could argue, are vital for understanding circuits of capital in a lively manner. Caused by glitches, accidents, virulence, or infrapolitical acts, diversions, contra molar segments, are not dictated by a prefigured logic. Rather, the history of ferality has been one of small events, acts, and actions that divert normal current, of “small modifications” that “cause detours.”102 They may later gather momentum as a force that steers away from capital’s circuits, or even come back to bite the accumulation of capital. Detours, however, become meaningful only in relation to the paths from which they stray. In the early 1970s, as the feral parakeet population began to emerge, commentators argued that the large numbers of parakeets imported, their ubiquity, and the low demand for “normals,” or nonmutant birds,103 led pet shops to be relatively lackadaisical about escapes. “In my opinion,” remarked England, “the reason for the success of the Ringneck is probably its cheapness, not

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its greater capacity to survive English winters.”104 Furthermore, parakeets, which were obtainable for the relatively low price of “a pound wholesale,”105 were amenable to growing trends of “keeping free-­flying birds” for pleasure,106 where it mattered little to their owners whether the commodity flew away. Lines of flight are not external to but emerge from the circuits of capital. They can branch off after the moment of purchase (C–­M′) when released by their owners, or during the course of reproduction (C . . . Reproduction . . . C′) in aviaries. Escapes can also happen before value is realized, when on display in pet shops. Just as in keda, where diversions are “the means of making new paths,”107 lines of flight are the means of opening up new tracks that unfasten from the schema of accumulation. By doing so, not unlike the lines drawn by the katiyabaaz discussed in chapter 1, who recomposes the electric meshwork from within, these new tracks introduce variations to the circuit of lively capital (Figure 3.6). Ferality troubles the binary categories of wild and commodity life. But in addition, their lines of flight take them from being “officially valued” as commodities to becoming a “threat,” especially when the feral other is poised to become invasive. The orientations of nature toward capital are therefore not clear-­cut “typologies,”108 a schema that is founded on parsing commonalities and difference, and that finds its analogy in the territorial city, with its distinctive inside and outside. Rather, nature–­ capital orientations are fluid and dynamic topologies. Molar segments (the passage from money to surplus) and molecular tracks (the detours taken from commodity circuits) are “immanent and caught up in each other.”109 A set of tracks can shift, bend, and twirl into another without necessarily leaving the same plane. The circuits of lively capital, then, are “not . . . about a dualism between two kinds of ‘things,’” whether wildlife or commodity, value-­added being or threat, “but a multiplicity of dimensions, lines and directions within an arrangement.”110 In such arrangements, lively capital is better understood as corporeal value in motion rather than as “stock,”111 for it is through movement that that value expands and the city of flows comes about. As value in motion, the traffic in lively capital also leads to an intermeshing of the tracks of parakeet populations of different origins and with divergent evolutionary histories. Such intermeshing is a crucial dimension of postcolonial urban natures.

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Figure 3.6. Lines of flight: parakeets fly out of the circuits of capital. Escape can happen after the moment of purchase (C–­M') by owners, or during the course of reproduction (C . . . Reproduction . . . C') in aviaries.

The Phylogeography of Capital The traffic in lively capital alters both the distribution and evolutionary composition of parakeet populations. Questions regarding relationships among different groups of organisms and their evolutionary development are addressed by two interrelated fields, phylogenetics and phylogeography. These fields explore how life has diversified in evolutionary terms and examine the ways in which conspecific individuals might be linked through common ancestors.112 Ornithologists recognize four subspecies of rose-­ringed parakeets—­Psittacula krameri manillensis and P. k. borealis in South Asia, and P. k. krameri and P. k. parvirostris in Africa. Each subspecies occupies a distinct position in a cladogram, a branching diagram that evolutionary biologists construct to depict relations between species according to shared characteristics. The roots of a cladogram point to origins in a common ancestor, while branches or clades indicate how far populations have diverged. DNA analysis suggests that Asian and African parakeets diverged from one another approximately 1.5 million years ago.113 Of the two African subspecies, parvirostris is more closely related to the South Asian parakeets, while krameri is a separate clade (Figure 3.7).114 Phylogenetic trees are arborescent. This is more than mere tautology, for the drawing of trees rests on a model of transmission. In this model, individuals are specified in their genetic constitution as a genotype

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through the bestowal of attributes from ancestors crossing from one generation to the next through inheritance. By plotting haplotypes, which are a group of genes or alleles inherited together from a single parent, a phylogenetic tree or phylogeny is created and represented in the form of a cladogram. As anthropologist Tim Ingold persuasively argues, the metaphor of transmission assumes that such bestowal takes place in advance of an individual’s life in the world. Transmission, in effect, abolishes the past from the present and abstracts time from being.115 In this model, “the unity of life in terms of genealogical relatedness is bought at the cost of cutting out every single organism from the relational matrix in which it lives and grows.”116 Like taxonomy and its classificatory codings, some of which are remainders of majoritarian projects tethered to nativism and race, genealogy too can be arborescent, giving durability to the coding of difference as racial. However, once the traffic in lively capital is brought into the picture, we find that clades get scrambled. They are no longer neatly taxonomized delineations of divergent populations. Instead, they become a relational matrix through which organisms travel, live, and grow. Between 1984 and 2007, almost 110,000 parakeets were imported into Britain and Europe from the bird’s range in Asia. A further 37,000 came from the “African ancestral range.”117 Greater London received significant numbers of birds from Senegal and India during the late 1980s, and in 1997, over 3,000 birds arrived from Pakistan.118 Analyses of mitochondrial DNA of feral parakeets in the United Kingdom and in Europe by Hazel Jackson and colleagues reveal that birds from the Asian native range are more predominant in these populations than those of African origin. But more importantly, thirty haplotypes located in feral populations were not present in any birds from their ancestral range. These, in all likelihood, were the product of admixture,119 a process whereby otherwise reproductively isolated and evolutionarily differentiated populations interbreed to form new genetic lineages. Admixture is a new line of descent, but it is a braided line, in that the tracks of birds of different origins interweave and intertwine. Following Ingold and Henri Bergson, we might conceive of such tracks or braids as a “thoroughfare,” where an organism is “like an eddy cast in a flow” and its lines of descent are “a series of interlaced trails.”120 A thoroughfare

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entails the interlacing of the life courses of lively capital, lines of flight when birds escape captivity, and the admixture of lines of descent as feral populations intermingle (Figure 3.7). Parakeets become cosmopolitan and unparochial, not only spatially but also evolutionarily. In fact, it might not be wrong to say that the traffic in lively capital runs geologic history backward, undoing isolating effects that produced divergent parakeet clades during the Pliocene–­Pleistocene boundary 1.5 million years ago. Admixture also leads to greater genetic diversity, enhancing the bird’s adaptive potential and contributing to its success in establishing feral populations.121 As feral creatures, parakeets are once more subjected to natural selection, in contrast to captivity, where artificial selection is the predominant mode. Phylogeographies of capital are rhizomatic: thoroughfare ramifies in different directions, with tracks converging at times and diverging at others. Genetic analyses by Arlene Le Gros and her colleagues reveal that each European city has well-­differentiated parakeet populations. Furthermore, in Paris, birds inhabiting northern and southern parts of the city are as genetically different from one another as they are from those in other cities. These two populations became distinct because of the isolating effects of urbanization, with birds being reticent to cross treeless urban centers.122 Urban infrastructure, rather than geological upheavals, becomes the new barrier to movement. By causing phylogenetic tracks to split and take their own course, infrastructures become a driving evolutionary force. The city of flows might therefore also be seen as a site of novel evolution. This is most poignant in the case of the altered morphology of feral birds. Le Gros and colleagues have found that feral parakeets in European populations have phenotypically diverged from those in the Indian subcontinent. Birds in Europe have longer wings, a longer skull, and a shorter, stouter beak compared to the Asian subspecies. Such “morphological divergence,” they contend, “is due to a convergent adaptation to environmental conditions.”123 Although selection for particular traits in captivity for generations before being sold (and before birds escape) could also be a determining factor, the effect of urban environments is a more parsimonious explanation. Changes in wing morphology are unlikely to come about in captivity, where flight possibilities are restrained.124

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This conjunction of the life courses of lively capital, lines of flight and descent, are steps toward a political economic grammar that is far more attentive to the complex meshwork of urban life to those formulated through the traffic in goods, commodities, materials, and information.125 It brings political economy and evolutionary biology into conversation and recasts phylogeography as rhizomatic rather than networked. In the analogy of the latter,126 depicted by the cladogram, lines become subordinate to the point or node. The network is arborescence par excellence, centralizing power in nodes. The network also deadens the spatiotemporal itineraries of parakeets. A rhizomatic phylogeography, in contrast, is akin to the grafts on electrical grids from chapter 1: lines and tracks braid and unbraid; they issue forth in some directions and take detours in others. They also encounter blockages, fading away or dying out (Figure 3.7). The meshwork is living, and it is “an anti-­ genealogy.”127 It is fleshy, messy, and alive. Yet ferality can also be reterritorialized. Lines of flight remain susceptible to being brought back into circuits of capital and subordinated to processes of generating value. As Marc, the owner of the blue mutant parakeet Toto, tells me, “There is an illegal market for pet birds.” “I have seen people come to Hyde Park and steal wild parakeets,” he remarks, “and sell these on to pet shops.” Feral birds, however, never fare well in captivity: “They are still wild.” Marc explains how such parakeets, unlike a captive-­bred bird like Toto, “are much more difficult to handle.” These tracks, of birds reentering the fold of capital, are clandestine pathways (Figure 3.7). Through the 1980s, an underground market involving parakeet capture was in operation. As valuable commodities fetching exchange value, chicks were frequently “cut out of nestholes for hand-­rearing and subsequent sale,”128 in part fueled by the ambiguous feral status of parakeets. “Unsexed, immature birds” fetched “£30 each” in a pet shop at the time, and it was “quite possible that nests are being regularly robbed of the young.”129 These routes of feral parakeets returning to the circuits of capital constitute a clandestine set of economic practices, and as such, they are “nodes of arborescence in rhizomes.”130 Just as it is limiting to think of the commercial circulation of animals as shuttling between a dyad of wild and commodity life, it is equally limiting to posit phylogenies as either rhizomatic or arborescent. The two are always in articulation with one another.

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Figure 3.7. Phylogeography and lively capital. (1) Cladogram of the four subspecies of rose-­ringed parakeets. Asian and African parakeets are evolutionarily divergent and are geographically separated. They enter the circuits of capital through capture from the wild at different moments. (Cladogram redrawn and simplified from Ariane Le Gros, Sarah Samadi, Dario Zuccon, et al., “Rapid Morphological Changes, Admixture and Invasive Success in Populations of Ring-­Necked Parakeets [Psittacula krameri] Established in Europe,” Biological Invasions 18, no. 6 [2016]: 1581–­98.) (2) The circuits or life courses of lively capital. These unfold in captivity, and split as new mutant lines (C'Blue) are produced through selective breeding. Divergent parakeet populations can mix in these circuits (R is reproduction). (3) Rhizomatic phylogeographies are produced through lines of flight (that is, birds going feral). The tracks of birds of diverse origins further interweave and braid. Clades converge as well as diverge into new tracks as a result of effects of the infrastructural environment. This articulation is schematic; actual histories are much more complex.

Recombinant Urbanisms The previous sections have shown how parakeets are construed as feral through institutional codes and classificatory practices, and have revealed the ways the traffic of and trade in these birds constitute other ways to articulate cities forged through flows. Ferality is the constitutive outside of both institutional urban natures and lively capital. However, it is not enough to simply reveal why detours or lines of flight arise and how

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they braid to form rhizomatic phylogenies. Rather, one needs to follow such detours, and the lives of feral parakeets that constitute them, to examine what bearings they have on urban landscape and design. Realized according to a creature’s own desires and propensities, detours give rise to what we might call a recombinant urbanism, the entering of an urban formation that involves novel combinations of indigenous and exotic species, and their relations to a wider infrastructural environment. Recombinant urbanism lies at the core of recasting metropolitan natures as postcolonial. “Recombinance” is a term that takes cues from the critical, if somewhat heterodox, subfield of recombinant ecology. Recombinant ecology attends to ecosystems formed through the circulation and transport of biota, frequently from a disparate set of biogeographic locales; it comprises relations between species that often have no evolutionary history of co-­composition.131 Recombinant systems emerge “inadvertently or indirectly,”132 and can be spontaneous. In this sense, they entail unfixed dimensions of “nondesign”133 rather than the hylomorphic imposition of form on matter symptomatic of a long tradition of thinking on urban design.134 My reading of recombinance, however, is somewhat different to more prevalent accounts of spontaneity in that I do not see the latter to be merely the obverse of design. Rather, and building on earlier arguments about infrastructure as a meshwork, I take recombinance to be an ethicoaesthetic paradigm.135 Here ethos has to do with the sentient habits of a creature or a suite of creatures and esthesis, or their capacity to affect and be affected.136 In this reading, recombinance is a vibrant transspecies process of exchange that is simultaneously material and semiotic, which brings into purview new rhythms and communities formed as a result of transnational biotic traffic. Novel associations between “no-­analog” communities—­that is, communities markedly different in composition from those of baseline measurements—­are a characteristic of recombinance. These, however, do not simply “emerge.” Rather, they involve associations forged between mediatic bodies—­bodies of animals and plants that are sensate and sentient, and that play an active role in what habits are cultivated and which relations take grip or wither away. Recombinance is about other-­intentional landscapes, forged through differential capacities of bodies to act and to affect. In recombinant systems,

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affect is itself an ecology in that it is difficult to ordain beforehand what relations will congeal “in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination.”137 Recombinance can be a subversive formation, forging new connections and bringing other kinds of actions into the fray supernumerary to design and urban planning.

Affective Ethologies and Nondesign Contrary to their counterparts in the Indian subcontinent, where large populations are found in rural landscapes, parakeets have become predominantly urban birds in Britain. Their preferential inhabitation of urban areas is primarily dictated by the wider diversity of fruits and seeds that cities furnish—­affordances realized through the creature’s remarkable ability to adapt behaviorally. London’s parakeets primarily rely on garden bird feeders for food,138 and studies of radio-­tracked birds elsewhere indicate that they spend as much as half their foraging time on such feeders.139 Reports of birds taking to feeders in London increased in the early 1990s as parakeet numbers grew. It is plausible

Figure 3.8. Urban parakeet on bird feeder, Kensington Gardens, London, 2009. Photograph by Tony Austin, CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/2.0/deed.en.

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that birds learned to tap into these perennial food sources through emulation (Figure 3.8), as a population in Brighton did not learn to use feeders for eight years even when feeders were ubiquitous.140 This indicates that habits of urban parakeets are cultivated rather than being a simple given. Parakeets’ relations with artifacts in the urban landscape are akin to the polyvalent threads that macaques draw on as they are enmeshed with infrastructure. Realized along a creature’s own axis of calibration, such enmeshments are integral to how recombinance takes place. Parakeets’ adaptation to bird feeders has resulted in novel foraging strategies as well as morphological adaptations. Feral birds in London, and in other parts of Europe, have developed bigger and stronger beaks than their counterparts in the Indian subcontinent,141 a change probably triggered by the harder food items, usually nuts, that have become a major constituent of their diet. Perennially obtainable soft fruits and blossoms, on which parakeets feed in India, are only available during spring and summer in Europe. Furthermore, and in contrast to rural India, where “noisy rabbles . . . often band together in enormous swarms to raid ripening crops of jowar, maize and other cereals, and orchard fruit,”142 daytime flocks in London are relatively small. Flocks usually consist of one to three individuals; flocks may rarely go up to about fifty birds. Small flock size is an active strategy that parakeets adopt to forage in urban gardens and to utilize peanut or sunflower dispensers, as there are constraints as to how many birds can access a feeder at one time.143 Swarms observed in India—­that moment when ferality is seen to unsettle and threaten order—­have so far not been reported in either Britain or Europe. Recombinance, as an ethicoaesthetic paradigm entailing the cultivation of particular habits, thus gives rise to distinct parakeet cultures in feral populations that may be at variance from conspecifics in their native range. Recombinant urbanisms are further fostered by the cosmopolitanism marking floral assemblages of the city constituted through flows.144 The unintended transport of flora or the deliberate planting of ornamental nonnative trees in the imperial metropole has triggered a process of ecofusion,145 generating ecological landscapes that are hybrids of native and nonnative floras. The convergence of temperate and tropical floras has given rise to a seasonality of urban nature that is polyphonous, in that

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the fruiting patterns of trees in London are not only those of temperate European floras but also those of distant ecosystems from which the nonnative animals were brought. Recombinance thus entails asynchronous and discordant seasonalities, especially in terms of fruiting and flowering, which enables parakeets to thrive in the city. In spring, the buds of native beech, silver birch, and alder, as well as those of the nonnative horse chestnut, originating from southeast Europe, become food sources. In late summer, parakeets feed on the fruit of the orange whitebeam, a nonnative tree of unknown origin that has been cultivated in Britain since the late nineteenth century. In autumn, parakeets take to the seeds of the western catalpa, a tree native to the U.S. Midwest.146 Many of these trees have no history of coevolution with parakeets, yet the polyphonous seasonality created by this cosmopolitan floral assemblage, fruiting and flowering at different moments of the year, generates a hospitable environment for the psittacines. The postcolonial nature of urban recombinance is hard to deny, for the new forms of composition that emerge have been dictated by (post)colonial traffic and exchange in biota. Recombinance points to the creation of another London—­one that admits the times and places of overseas to the rhythms of the imperial metropole or global city, creating a novel environment of urban living. Parakeets’ nesting habits bring to the fore a whole other ecology of affects that constitutes recombinance. The birds are secondary hole nesters; they do not drill their own nesting holes but rely on cavities created by woodpeckers and barbets in their native range. Parakeets enlarge these holes; they prefer cavities with narrow entrance passages that turn downward into a larger nesting chamber.147 Initial observations, made as the psittacines were beginning to establish themselves around London, suggested that they used old nest holes created by green woodpeckers.148 Parakeets’ abilities to thrive in new urban environments are thus contingent on the niches constructed by other native species. Equally, the aesthetic value of older trees, which often results in their preservation in London’s urban parks, creates more opportunities for the formation of arboreal cavities,149 on which parakeets depend. In fact, London is beginning to witness parakeets repurposing architectural forms for nesting. Until the turn of the millennium, there was only one report of birds nesting in concrete buildings. Similarly, parakeets were reticent to use nest boxes. In a study conducted in Greater London

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by Josephine Pithon during 1997–­98, only one out of 175 assembled nest boxes were used.150 Use shot up to over 20 percent a few years later; it is hypothesized that this might be due to greater competition for nesting sites as populations have grown.151 Repurposing of architecture is much more commonplace now, indicative of new modes of urban adaptation that constitute recombinance. There are several reports of birds using vent holes in buildings, sometimes to the chagrin of residents. The birds, according to Chris, a professional pest controller, “will nest if there are similar-­shaped access holes to those of woodpecker cavities.” “They enlarge small holes with their powerful beaks, and will also rip off plastic vent covers or plastic proofing material if they can get their beaks under their edges,” Chris remarks. “The damage they do is quite incredible. Parakeet-­proofing is not easy. We sometimes install a metal plate or a mesh of wire on vents.” The cultivation of particular habits and affective relations between mediatic bodies is a further avenue through which recombinant cultures can emerge. In the city of Pavia in northern Italy, a flock of feral parakeets, including some escapes that are cobalt–­turquoise morphs like Toto, have taken to nesting in putlog holes of a castle and its towers even when arboreal nest holes are readily available. By doing so, they have begun to displace common swifts, which now nest at lower elevations of the towers each year. A possible trigger leading to parakeets preferring architectonic substrates is the presence of tawny owls, a predator of psittacines that breeds in tree holes and whose presence is likely to deter parakeets from using arboreal cavities.152 These other-­than-­human relations, crucially enmeshed in urban form but supernumerary to the aesthetics of planning and architectural design, bring another city into being. Recombinant urbanisms are thus about world-­making activities of feral creatures and the ways in which they realize and rework affordances of the so-­called built environment. As an ecology of affect, what relations are composed through recombinance is difficult to ordain in advance. Parakeets are known to displace certain birds from their nest holes; this has long been at the center of calls to get rid of these feral creatures.153 However, recent studies also indicate that other species have begun to nest closer to rose-­ringed parakeet cavities, as their flocking behavior and aggression in keeping predators at bay provides safety for other passerines.154 Feral parakeets thus

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not only shape their own worlds but also modify the spatial distributions of other creatures, often in unexpected ways that cannot be known in advance of a given encounter or combination. Recombinant urbanisms, then, might be understood as a world-­making activity through the circulation of affects, which cross porous bodies and work across heterogeneous assemblages. These cartographies of affect reveal how urban assembly takes place through a conjunction of ethos and esthesis that, unlike notions of design or its obverse, spontaneity, does not foreclose how other than humans compose cities. Ecologies of affect in fact get amplified when we turn to parakeets as prey.

Peregrinations “I can hear Peregrine. I don’t know where she is, but she is calling out to her mate,” says ornithologist Nathalie Mahieu as we stand below London’s Charing Cross Hospital. Suddenly a bird pierces the sky at the edge of our vision, then slows down and lands on what is a metropolitan equivalent of a seaside cliff, towering over the Hammersmith landscape. The female peregrine sits on the topmost ledge on the building’s eastern face, unperturbed by the crowds and traffic 250 feet below. “They started nesting on this building in 2011,” remarks Nathalie, who has been documenting the life of the breeding pair for over a decade. Named

Figure 3.9. Peregrine falcon with one of six parakeets brought to the nest on that day. Photograph by Nathalie Mahieu.

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Fab Peregrines, after the localities of Fulham and Barnes, these avian predators have taken to catching parakeets on the wing and bringing in these feral birds to feed their fledglings (Figure 3.9). Nathalie points to the recombinance at work between peregrines and parakeets. “An important reason for people not liking invasive species is the lack of predators. For instance, the invasive box tree moth and its caterpillar are a problem in Britain, but in Italy, their numbers are controlled by the Asian hornet, which was introduced before the moth. With parakeets, this is no longer true. Peregrines, but also sparrow hawks, tawny owls, and to a lesser extent hobbies, have learned to prey on them.” Nathalie runs a Twitter account for the Fab Peregrines and has been “using the hashtag #eatyourgreens to convey this important emerging behavior to the London public.” “Someone suggested ‘Indian takeaway,’” she adds with a smile, “but I thought that would be rather uncouth.” Peregrine falcons preying on parakeets are a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that foregrounds how recombinance is couched in its own historicity—­an unnatural history that has less to do with pregiven traits or states of nature and more to do with an ethos or habits cultivated in practice and over time. During the turn of the millennium, parakeets had hardly any predators. The only species likely to pose a threat to these feral birds was the sparrow hawk, and the only observed attempt of a native bird of prey attacking parakeets was that of a hobby, which ultimately “failed to take a parakeet near the Ramsgate railway station roost” in the mid-­1990s.155 The popular media, which has played an important role in informing Londoners about parakeets, attributed this lack of predators as the cause of a surge in London’s psittacine population. Articles from the early 2000s lament how England’s southeast had been “invaded by parakeets native to India,” and the “lack of natural predators” meant “that there is nothing to halt a population explosion.”156 About a decade later, in 2013, ornithologists Ralph Hancock and Jeff Martin reported that tawny owls in London’s Kensington Gardens were preying on parakeets. Although the owls’ predominant prey consists of rodents, birds in London’s Royal Parks learned to adopt “a simple but effective method of hunting parakeets.” Perched atop a tall tree, an owl would silently glide down and grab a parakeet. The first signs of evidence came, in all probability, from Bushy Park, where owl pellets con-

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taining parakeet feathers were handed to a Royal Parks officer. “Clearly,” Hancock and Martin write, “predation of parakeets takes place at more than one of London’s Royal Parks.” Over the years, they have found that hobbies have also learned to successfully hunt parakeets in Kensington Gardens and elsewhere, even bringing the feral birds to the nest to feed their young. With parakeets beginning to “feature in the diet of raptors and owls in central London,” Hancock and Martin’s observations are evidence of recombinance beginning to emerge—­a process, they write, is “perhaps not surprising,” given that the city’s “avifauna continues to change.”157 Alterations in the city’s avifauna, including the becoming urban of other parties involved in a given combination or arrangement, is equally important in recombinance. Peregrine falcons are reasonably new converts to urban living. They were seen from time to time in London in the 1990s, but nesting only began in 2001.158 Charlie, the female from the Fab Peregrine pair, was first seen in October 2007 when she was still a juvenile. “It later turned out that she was a ‘rural’ bird born on a cliff in East Sussex where she was ringed as a chick in May 2007,” says Nathalie, who, at the end of September 2008, observed a male, later named Tom, displaying to her. The birds disappeared from the Charing Cross Hospital in 2009, only to reappear in 2010, then commence breeding in 2011. Ornithologists have found that peregrines do not simply turn up in cities and begin breeding. There is a distinct pattern and process of urbanization. During early stages, birds appear on buildings and stay loyal to the site or to a few sites over the course of a year or two, but as nonbreeding pairs. They then attempt to nest, usually on suitable ledges, and if successful, they continue breeding. This pattern of urbanization is replicated in cities all around the world.159 Tom and Charlie nested in the Charing Cross Hospital until 2019, when a new female, named Flame by Nathalie, replaced Charlie. The new arrival was apparently an urban bird, born in Vauxhall, and in fact showed fidelity to inhabiting urban spaces. “Once, after being injured and treated at an RSPCA hospital, Flame was released in northern Kent, as people believed this would be [a] more appropriate habitat for her, but she ended up coming back to London,” says Nathalie. “There is a theory that urban peregrines live in urban areas. Although you need more ringing data to prove this, and occasionally one does get urban birds going out and living on cliffs,

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by preference they will go to another building.” There are a suite of avian-infrastructure enmeshments at work in the becoming urban of peregrines, and thus recombinance is the grammar of conjunction, a ceaseless “and . . . and . . . and.”160 Notable in this case are the falcons’ use of gray infrastructure and the repurposing of architectonic form, rendering buildings into urban cliffs. Repurposing is contingent on the idiosyncrasies and dispositions of individual birds, as well as on the habits forged in conjunction with the lively architectonic environment. “Tom, Charlie, and the new female Flame all have different personalities. Tom and Flame, for instance, are quite indifferent to people and will perch on ledges by glass windows in view of hospital staff and patients,” says Nathalie. “Charlie, on the other hand, did not like people too much and seldom sits on the penultimate floor.” The birds’ favorite perch is on the right-­hand corner of the building, where they also keep a larder full of hunted prey. The larder draws insects, and as a consequence, the number of pied wagtails foraging in the building’s architectonic spaces increases. “One can look out for wagtails in buildings, as a sign for peregrines,” Nathalie tells me, pointing to a suite of other-­than-­human places that peregrines pry open amid the brick and mortar of fixed capital. Their relations to infrastructure are conjunctive because they open up a suite of new niches. A recombinant urbanism, proceeding through animal infrastructure enmeshments, is thus one that takes the built or architectonic environment itself to be living, a rhythm of aliveness.161 In fact, the intermeshing tracks of peregrines and parakeets come full circle through the novel ethological behaviors these avian predators generate in the psittacines. In and around Margravine Cemetery, next to Charing Cross Hospital, parakeets have begun flying silently, without calling, and keeping below the canopy of urban trees. “Parakeets usually fly quite high up in the sky, especially when going to roost, and they are very noisy whilst doing so,” says Nathalie, “but the birds around here have become very quiet, both when flying to their roost and when foraging. This is a change brought about by the presence of peregrines.” Because peregrines primarily hunt in open spaces, swooping down on prey from above, parakeets have taken to flying low and in relative silence. “It took the parakeets two to three years to learn that they need to fly low, and you can see them doing so when they go toward their

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roost in Wormwood Scrubs.” Recombinance is therefore about the ways in which creatures respond to one another in an urban milieu, modulating the habits of one another as they come into particular combinations. Just as vernacular ethologies of macaques see the animal as a verb or a doing, so too is the case in peregrines. The very word peregrine comes from peregrination, or to move through (per) a field (ager). To peregrinate, therefore, is to journey—­here, one couched in a history of recombinance. This involves the becoming urban of falcons as well as a wider assemblage. Recombinance is conjunctive in that it refigures the tired divisions between native and nonnative, urban and rural into heterogeneous arrangements or associations. Recombinance is not replication but the forging of a new ethos. It is an ecology of affective relations, where each track, peregrination, and line of flight of a body responds to the pull of another, creating new openings in urban livability.

Conclusion: Postcolonial Urban Natures Through a close scrutiny of classificatory practices, the trade and traffic in parakeets, and the lives of birds as they forge new urban worlds, this chapter has provided a different formulation of the city of flows. Moving against the current of more conventional accounts of circulation, tracked through raw material, goods, and information,162 I have traveled with an unusual interlocutor, the parakeet, to reveal a different city constituted by flows—­a city not always discernible through a major urban grammar. Other-­than-­human mobiles unmoor rooted notions of urban nature and resituate it along routes, rendering the ecological fabric of the city conjunctural.163 But more importantly, other-­than-­ human mobiles strike at the heart of debates on what constitutes urban nature. They suggest that London’s urban natures do not simply contain elements of life from elsewhere; rather, the very ecological fabric of the city is woven by mobile and migrant life.164 On a wider level, this has implications for how we conceptualize the novel natures emerging in our contemporary world; it draws attention to the postcolonial histories through which such natures have taken grip—­a critical facet sometimes occluded by interdisciplinary fascinations with nature in the Anthropocene.165 Ferality therefore becomes a crucial diagnostic of the contempo-

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rary urban condition. It brings into view a much more complex and conflicted notion of location than those implied by totalizing, and abstract, accounts of places razed by the space of flows. Ferality shows how arborescent codes and classificatory practices continue to underpin evaluations of metropolitan nature, even as it has been long recognized that urban natures are unparochial. Classificatory practices do not wither away but work to regulate forms of urban livability, including judgments regarding what ought to be accommodated and what ought to be ejected. Such practices are often tethered to forms of biotic nativism, which appraise species on the basis of their origins and create hierarchies of living forms. The urban denizen deemed feral is more often at their receiving end. Just as taxonomy furthers arborescence, so too does phylogeny. Organisms, taken out of the relational matrix in which they live and grow, are recoded as figures with particular origins and as descending from specific stock, fueling nativist tropes. Yet as we see time and again, ferality shakes loose of the visceral grip of a racial and arborescent imaginary, except when race itself goes feral, insinuating itself, sometimes arbitrarily, into all kinds of comportments and decisions about what is of value and what is not. This runaway character of cities that ferality foregrounds has meant that we have had to develop a kind of political economy that is different from the familiar in accounts of the city of flows.166 The circulation of commodity capital is not simply the transport of mute cargo, information, or goods but rather is a lively traffic in sentient beings whose mobilities have all kinds of implications for urbanicity.167 The modified political economic vocabulary developed here reorients circuits into life courses, abstract segments into fleshy tracks, and phylogenies into a thoroughfare. This is not mere substitution of one set of terms for another; nor is it some kind of recourse to ontological idealism, as glib critiques maintain.168 Rather, it is a mode of analysis attentive to economies that relentlessly predate on other-­than-­human vitality. A lively political economy is a minor rearticulation of political economic grammar, making it work to different ends. A whole raft of factors influencing the turnover of commodity capital are foregrounded, including affective propensities and reproductive potentials of the other than humans who shape the transition of commodities from production to the realization of value. Aliveness enables and stalls circuits of capital in all sorts of ways incom-

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prehensible in the mechanistic grammar of factory production, whether these be the moods of individual birds or the dispositions of particular populations. Being alive means that parakeets can fly off the grid of capital and bring its outside into purview—­an outside constitutive of urban natures graspable when the feral is taken as a theoretical and ethnographic category. A lively political economy exposes some of the limitations of cultural economy and its overt focus on the social life of things,169 for the lives and afterlives of commodities are far more than that. They are at once social, material, and ecological, refashioning urban natures forged by the city of flows. At the same time, the significance of a lively political economy is that it addresses impasses that literature on new materialisms seems to have come up against, notably in terms of material politics and the political and economic contexts under which material life is produced and reproduced. This minor articulation of political economy that is in conversation with posthumanist and postcolonial thought entails new composites of analyses and method. It is an articulation that is combinatorial rather than resorting to forms of economic analyses entrenched in silos. Such silos are hopelessly unable to address the urban crises of our times, be they race, predatory capitalism, or the question of nature in a world of circulation. Parakeets give another meaning to the ferality of capital—­ the runaway character of the city—­that is not discernible through more established modes of economic thought, neoclassical or otherwise.170 Equally, a lively political economy provides correctives to certain posthumanist and new materialist strands of thought that fail to account for capital’s role in shaping urban natures. Orientations of nature to capital here are seen as topological rather than typological or territorial. Parakeets are value-­added commodities at certain moments, feral creatures deterritorializing capital at others; they can even be reterritorialized and brought back onto the grid of accumulation. Typologies divide worlds, whereas topologies multiply them. And in topologies lie the prospect of the advent of a different city, for another urban to come. This resonates with minor modes of urban thinking that show how, in the itineraries of those who have to do without, there is a generalized unsettlement attained through the capacity to momentarily suture discrepant histories, places, and actors—­a form of city making that is improvisational.171

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By giving cities and urban natures their runaway character, ferality can forge other modes of urban livability unmooring capital, domesticity, and nativity. Urban natures can thus enter into another formation with the traffic in lively capital. I term this formation recombinant, a new urban arrangement that is born out of relations between species with no shared evolutionary history and that resituates London’s metropolitan ecologies as postcolonial. Recombinance is not synonymous with ferality, although scholars have tended to conflate the two.172 Analytical distinctions between the two are important. Furthermore, the novel analysis of recombinant urbanism offered up here sloughs off the anthropocentricism of much urban theory and its articulation of the genesis of urban form. Recombinance is read as an ethicoaesthetic paradigm,173 where other-­than-­human sentience, capacities, and propensities become vital to the assembly of urban form. The mutual cultivation of habits, where lively beings respond to one another’s ebbs and flows, and a creature’s enmeshments with infrastructure, producing new modes of other-­than-­ human dwelling, give rise to a city in excess of the imperatives of landscaping, planning, and design. Yet such novelty is predicated by colonial and postcolonial histories of trade and circulation that have long added, deleted, and re-sorted London’s floral and faunal assemblages. Recombinant urbanisms are born out of these flows, out of topologies that multiply and cannot be read outside of them. In fact, recombinance brings to the fore a point of significant methodological and theoretical import: that postcolonial urban natures are not just elsewhere, out there in the erstwhile colonies, but also in here, at the very heart of the so-­called global city and western metropolis. This endeavor of resituating the postcolonial grounds urban natures vis-­à-­vis the city of flows in a completely new way: one that produces histories and ethnographies of urban life that allow the presence of other-­ than-­human mobiles far greater significance than they have been ceded in the past; one that makes visible a number of processes resulting from transterritorial traffic not confined to the economic or the cultural alone; and one where the legacies of colonialism have contributed to the urban’s ecological fortunes. This different grounding also has significant political import, for it invokes counterarrangements that contest capitalist,

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racial, and nativist currents structuring urban architectures of power. They are counterarrangements that are modest and mundane but in no way unimportant. Here ferality is not just diagnostic but can also become therapeutic, offering up a subversive grammar of urban living to stem the tide of majoritarian currents. The political potential of such counterarrangements has only partially been addressed in this chapter. To realize its fuller scope, we next need to attend to the micropolitics of ferality: the alignments that arise as the urban takes on a runaway character.

4 THE MICROPOLITICS OF FERALITY

Urban Livability A new phenomenon has emerged in London’s Kensington Gardens. On weekends and sometimes on weekdays, a motley crowd of people—­ families with children, groups of tourists, Londoners on walks—­arrive at a spot by the Serpentine to feed what is a flock of about forty-­five rose-­ringed parakeets. People hold out fruit, seeds, and nuts in their palms, whereupon the feral birds alight on their extended arms to gain access to the food. Some bold psittacines clamber on people’s shoulders and even perch on their heads. Images and selfies posted on social media and microblogging platforms, scoring a large number of likes, have fueled the phenomenon. Feeding parakeets has become an urban spectacle (Figure 4.1). Amid the crowd is Khahlil, a migrant from Syria in his late sixties. “From India,” Khahlil remarks, pointing to the birds’ origins. “British bring them, now here.” Tourists, many of whom are in Kensington Gardens for the first time, nod. Khahlil distributes handfuls of sunflower seeds to those who come unprepared, for many stumble on this spectacle and are eager to participate. “Five pounds for your group,” he discreetly tells some American tourists. A man accompanying his family of four nods, and a quiet transaction takes place. Khahlil is watchful, as hawking is forbidden in the Royal Parks and he wants to avoid trouble with the police. “No job,” he remarks. “Family Syria, Syria war.” Practices of 147

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Figure 4.1. Parakeet in Kensington Gardens, September 2018. Photograph by author.

commensality involving feral parakeets offer up frail avenues for Khahlil, who is otherwise unemployed, to eke out a living. “Only enough money for food.” However, and as Paul Gilroy reminds us, “everything in Britain’s post-­colonial garden is not rosy.”1 Elsewhere, a video from one of London’s suburbs gains traction in the media. Irate at parakeets feeding on his fruit trees, James Marchington, a contributor to Fieldsports, a YouTube channel on hunting, demonstrates how to lure birds to garden feeders. A wooden magpie figurine is morphed into a parakeet by reshaping its beak and coated with parrot-­green paint. The decoy, placed near a bird feeder, soon draws parakeets to its vicinity. Once within the field of vision of his rifle telescope, Marchington takes a shot (Figure 4.2). The unsuspecting guest at the bird feeder falls dead. Labeled the “bird table of doom,” the video’s blurb announces that “flocks of ring-­necked parakeets that ravage fruit farms and vineyards of the South-­East of England are at last under threat.”2 These contrasting vignettes—­one revealing the connections that those at the margins of British society forge with parakeets, the other annihilating the birds’ feral presence—­open up a set of questions and concerns regarding the politics of urban nature and the postcolonial city

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Figure 4.2. Eradicating the guest. Still from Fieldsports Channel video on shooting parakeets. Screenshot from FieldsportsChannel.tv, AirHeads Episode 24, CC BY 2.0.

more broadly. Parakeets prompt us to take notice of other strangers in the city,3 to go beyond the familiar set of urban subjects through whom copresence and conviviality, avoidance and expulsion are actualized and debated. Psittacines take us to unfamiliar sites—­the bird feeder—­where the politics of hospitality unfolds. Such microspaces are not trivial. Rather, they are significant but overlooked locales of metropolitan conviviality, just as they are apparatuses through which hostility toward the stranger is enacted to render its milieu unlivable. As other-­than-­human migrants, parakeets pose questions about what postcolonial city making might mean, prompting us to take notice of loose but active alignments emerging in the face of adverse regulations and inhospitable infrastructures. My aim in this chapter is to advance current debates on decolonizing nature. I do so by drawing out the comparative gesture of this book: to work from a rapport derived in Delhi and to see how different communities attest to or negate an analytical filter that might permit new, different insights into understanding the material politics of city making—­insights different from those offered by major urban theory. By holding on to the figure of the feral and of the other-­than-­human migrant, I wish to examine what forms of commensality might look like in a city like London, and how it might enable scrutinizing and rearticulating a politics of livability in the postcolonial city.

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Three themes—­ hospitality, biopolitics, and world making—­ become central to this venture. The first of these, hospitality, has garnered significant attention in the social sciences and in urban theory over the past decade.4 Hospitality foregrounds how proximity to strangers is crafted in practice, and it is practice that this chapter emphasizes. The ways in which mobile figures, whether outsiders or guests, tourists or migrants, are accommodated or expelled have arrangements that are both tacit and institutional. Proximities are more than just the taxonomic coding of bodies as in or out of place, dictated through settled orders of ethnicity, bureaucracy, and habit. They are also proximities that are turbulent and negotiated, granting agency to the stranger as generative of new urban times and spaces.5 A situated, ethnographic attention to hospitality and hostility, one that is cosmopolitical rather than solely involving exchanges within a human club, allows for a closer inspection of the lives of feral parakeets as they unfold in an urban milieu. It grounds the politics of postcolonial urban natures in everyday practices of dwelling and in affective negotiations between human and psittacine bodies. Biopolitics draws attention to encounters with the stranger through the notion of population—­a switch to a larger scale here. In contrast to the hybrid, aesthetic politics of regulating macaques in Delhi, which gravitates toward redistributing the sensible, I qualify the strategies of governing parakeets in London as biopolitical. These strategies emanate from a set of situated cultural techniques, including bird counts and monitoring, that construct the notion of a nonnative population in the first place. They also entail ecological modeling and forecasting that bring psittacines into the ambit of calculability, with the aim of securitizing native ecological populations from the threat of ferality. This is a model of biopolitics located in a western genealogy of biopower, addressed in chapter 3. To this end, and contrary to some shorthand deployed in the ever-­growing literature on more-­than-­human biopolitics, whose proclivities for the topic probably stem more from the prefix bio-­attached to the word politics, rather than a commitment to historical specificity, I read this mode of administering life, particularly feral life, as provincial rather than universal. Furthermore, in this provincial iteration, biopolitics dovetails with what Ash Amin refers to as the “honed vernaculars of racial judgement,”6 a set of feelings and appraisals that mark the same,

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vulnerable, bodies time and time again. If the biopolitics of managing populations operates through a set of provincial, molar techniques of securitization, then it “has as its correlate a whole micro-­management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity”7 that proceeds through everyday practices of dwelling. In the postcolonial garden of Britain, it is the micropolitics of race, what might be termed microracisms, that makes racism so dangerous, as it works to transform the urban into an uninhabitable milieu for those deemed outsiders. Yet it would be simplistic to refer to parakeets as leading abject lives, deprived of bios and relegated to solely zoë, living and dying in a vacuum. Rather, parakeets make urban worlds by inventing affects. They do so not only in terms of recombinance but also by taming people, teaching humans to feed them, thereby giving rise to other ways of being psittacine in the city. Evolutionary ecologists refer to these acts of world making as “niche construction,” a process whereby living beings contribute to “the dynamic adaptive match between organisms and environments.”8 Niche construction is ecology in a minor key, for its emphasis on how living beings engineer worlds challenges the conventional view that organisms only adapt and that their worlds are pregiven and ready-­ made. Could we extend this argument to explore how parakeets might construct niches—­not just in mechanistic ways, but through the invention of affects? What purchase might niche construction through affect have for rethinking urban assembly and livability?

The Politics of Hospitality The bird feeder swivels as a parakeet settles on it. “Their beaks are strong,” says Andrew, a middle-­aged white Englishman, peering through his kitchen window as the elliptic motion of the bird feeder slows down. “They have undone all my attempts to save the sunflower seeds for the goldfinches and other needy smaller garden birds.” Two other birds join the parakeet pecking away at Andrew’s sunflower seeds. The psittacines move about squawking, periodically fanning their verdant tails to display flashes of yellow. “London is plagued by these gaudy, green birds,” Andrew sighs, adding that he contemplates giving up feeding birds altogether. “Parakeets just don’t hold back, returning day after day, until they have run the feeder dry. When will they learn they are not welcome?”

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Andrew’s disparaging views of parakeets contrasts with Francine’s, a young professional in her midthirties. “I love watching parakeets on my feeder,” she says. “Yes, the birds are a bit brash, but I would still consider them courteous.” She frequently puts out fruit and nuts for birds, and she does not mind these verdant visitors. “If I were a parakeet, I would be insulted with the comparisons people make with pesky squirrels. Parakeets are not taking the eggs and young of birds, like the exploding population of squirrels, crows and magpies.” Francine is not particularly concerned with narratives of feral birds outnumbering native British species: “As far as I can see, they are pretty harmless.” “In fact I find them fascinating and strange,” she adds. “They come squawking in green masses and chatter noisily.” Putting out food is an act of hospitality, one of welcoming the stranger to her garden. “Parakeets,” Francine remarks, “illuminate my life.” The bird feeder is a vital but underacknowledged site where the politics of hospitality unfolds. Whom does one invite as guests when one puts out food for birds? Who constitutes a desirable visitor, and who is unwelcome? To leave food out for avian visitors is an act of hospitality, but in no way is it a neutral act. Equally, this particular set of iterations makes hospitality happenstance, a contingent and micropolitical event—­contingent because one cannot know for certain or control who the other-­than-­human guest is going to be or what they might do on arrival, and micropolitical not because these events are small but because they are coded or ordered and organized through affects, where generalities are composed from singular investments that can act impersonally and politically.9 For Andrew, the feeder installed in his garden performs a particular notion of domesticity and fulfills his desire to help “needy” native birds. His is a labor of care, performed with regularity and feeling; he purchases seed mixes, fills the feeder, and watches arrivals while cooking, reading the newspaper, or lounging in his chair. It is this notion of domesticity, cofabricated with a particular avian world, that the unwanted feral unsettles. Their acts of taking food out of turn summon fears of London being overrun by a plague of gaudy green birds, mapping onto broader anxieties over the arrival of human migrants and the threats they purportedly pose to Britain. Unlike his cherished goldfinches, parakeets, as Andrew puts it, are “shamelessly and flauntingly foreign.”

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A micropolitics of race can in fact exist without xenophobia in a macropolitical vein; one can hold on to insecurities in everyday life while subscribing to a cosmopolitan city writ large.10 “You can be anti-­ parakeet without being pro-­BNP,” the far-­right British National Party, “because birds are not people,” writes a woman named Sarah Sands in the comments section of the Independent. “There is a balance of nature in Britain,” she further argues. “We lose it when we cover the fields with bright yellow rape, which does not suit the surroundings. We forfeit it when London becomes plagued by scrawny, diseased foxes. And we should not surrender Wordsworthian countryside to parakeets. I want to see bright people, in muted landscapes.” The stranger thus unsettles a cherished aesthetic of the British countryside. Micropolitical insecurities that render parakeets unwelcome do not necessarily have to do with a steadfast ecological rationale. The author, oblivious of the birds’ origins, exclaims, “If I wanted parakeets, I would have gone to Brazil.”11 Xenophobic sentiments often go hand in hand with a relative ignorance of the other—­those from elsewhere, those “not like us”—­and it is no different with other-­than-­human migrants. Parrots and parakeets are tropical birds, and in the muted landscape of Britain, they appear flashy and gaudy. A micropolitics of race is primarily affective in that racial markers operate through optic, acoustic, and aesthetic filters rather than discursive ones. “Their distinctive squawking might be enchanting when heard for the first time, but it is not so bewitching when a hundred birds fly over your garden or are perched on treetops in the park,” says a woman, pointing to how the psittacines untune the acoustics of the city. “When they come to my feeder—­usually small parties of four or five birds—­ their raucous screeching just drives you nuts. Rooks may appear dreary, but give me a quieter life any day.” As much as nativist evaluations of nature proceed through taxonomies and institutional codes, they also take grip in affective terms, working to render nonnatives into second-­ best urban denizens. “Are we happy,” the lady asks, “to let the squawking of parakeets become the overriding birdsong of London?” An entire semiotic regime casts parakeets as unwanted migrants, perpetuating assumptions that certain marked bodies are out of place, inferior, and a threat. “They have found asylum in south London,” says a man, annoyed by the birds frequenting his garden. “Parakeet immigrants are a threat to our native birds and ought to be culled.” At work here

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is what might be called ethnomorphism, a neologism denoting the projection of ethnic identities onto other than humans. Ethnomorphism might be seen as a subset of anthropomorphism or the attribution of human characteristics onto animals and plants, but it differs in the sense that ethnomorphism does not allude to the singular figure of anthropos but to racially coded difference. The ethnomorphic tendency to liken parakeets to immigrants is further amplified through brazen narratives of their reproductive prowess. Tabloids, particularly media with conservative leanings such as the Daily Mail, run story lines stating parakeets are “threatening British birds, gobbling crops,” and “breeding like crazy.” Allusions to parakeets’ uncontrollable reproduction entails an affective sorting of race: “what’s more, they live up to 30 years—­they have plenty of breeding seasons in them, given they start to reproduce at only two to three years old.”12 Yet for others like Francine, the figure of the stranger arriving at the bird feeder can be fascinating. Her act of putting food out for parakeets is one of cultivating a different domus, or home, one where the stranger is accommodated, even invited. Proximities here are turbulent in that the birds are “brash,” but for Francine, their noisy chatter is part of the cosmopolitan city. “Parakeets are as British as curry,” remarks another man I spoke to at Kensington Gardens. “They add a splash of color to the dreary city skies.” He goes on to note that there are 1.5 million feral cats in the United Kingdom, which harm many more birds than the parakeets ever could. “No one raises the issue of culling cats because that would upset a whole lot of people; even the RSPB [Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds] is wary of doing that. It is easier to point to parakeets because they are seen as nonnative.” Practices of accommodation are perhaps as widespread as those that veer toward the xenophobic, and these practices point to the possibilities for generating conditions where parakeets can be allowed to come forward as denizens, if not claimants, of the urban polis, despite their differences. Acts of hospitality toward birds in fact activate a whole other suite of ecological relations that have a bearing on urban nature.

Provisioning: A Lively Political Economy Feeding birds is a widespread cultural phenomenon in Britain. Surveys suggest that close to half of U.K. households, predominantly urban

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middle class, take part in the activity.13 There is an entire political economy of feeding birds, and a lively reading of these economic arrangements brings to the fore a whole other set of practices constituting the urban to which mainstream theory has paid virtually no attention. If tracks and life courses of living commodities reveal the dynamics of the circulation and expansion of lively capital, then metabolic regimes constituted through habitual practices of feeding birds open up other ways to think of the realization of value: the other than human as a consumer of commodities. Here one might hark back to the etymological roots of consumption—­to come together (con) and take up (sumere)—­ where who or what comes together in the act of taking up a commodity is much more than a set of transactions between humans. Of course, people pay for the purchase of bird food, but these practices would not take grip without guests at the feeder, welcome or otherwise. At stake, then, are a series of trans-­actions that cross different beings and that unmoor the anthropocentricism of cultural economy, thereby reworking the economic as a set of simultaneously cultural and ecological practices. In the United Kingdom, the production, packaging, and distribution of commercial seed for wild birds alone is a full-­fledged, multimillion-­pound enterprise. The bird feeder, at which parakeets are often unanticipated and unwelcome guests, is by no means an economically insignificant site. An industry estimate suggests that the volume of wild bird food traded is a much as 148,000 tonnes annually, with the sector’s annual turnover being £235 million. Although they are typically small-­to medium-­size enterprises, some seed companies have annual turnovers of as much as £20 million.14 The wild bird feeding industry has literally transitioned from “crumbs to corporations,”15 starting out from what were a set of localized cultural practices to those that are increasingly commercialized and marked by global commodity flows. Attending to the specificity of this transition reveals how birdlife in urban gardens is by no means a given but rather is a product of historically situated transformations and metabolic flows. Bird tables and feeders have been around since the early nineteenth century. Acts of feeding, however, were largely spontaneous and not the institutionalized practice of today. The origins of the latter are often attributed to the harsh winter of 1890–­91, when extensive snowstorms repeatedly swept through the south and west of England. Conditions

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generated were not only life-­threatening for people but, as a number of London newspapers brought to public attention, for birds as well. Correspondents described how “under hedges and bushes their dead bodies, consisting of not much more than feathers, skins and bones, are frequently to be seen.”16 Soon suggestions, recipes, and advice for helping birds weather the harsh climate were widely shared and heeded, giving rise to “the start of winter feeding at a national scale, in England at least.”17 A new planned and regularized mode of provisioning had come into being by the early twentieth century. This was a revaluation of the Victorian domestic code and its stipulations of the home economy, in which waste was anathema and every morsel had to be recycled for human consumption. Manuals on how to feed birds had come into circulation, replete with do-­it-­yourself instructions aimed at the lay public. Notable among these was a text entitled How to Attract and Protect Wild Birds, translated from German into English in 1908. Focusing on bird-­feeding experiments conducted by Karl Rudolf Hans Freiherr von Berlepsch, a German nobleman from Thuringia, the text provided practical avenues for setting up nest boxes and feeders—­advice that a growing bird-­feeding public was eager to heed. Von Berlepsch argued that the effective design of devices for attracting birds and efficient practices of feeding needed to fulfill three “necessary conditions.” Food ought to “be readily accepted by those for whom it is intended”; feeding had to “be carried out in all weathers” as a routine practice rather than spontaneous activity; and provisioned materials ought to be “comparatively cheap,” “used by the birds to the last crumb.”18 Von Berlepsch’s dictums, a unique convergence of the promotion of habit, economic efficiency, and design incorporating the other than human’s view, could not be achieved “by any of the old methods of feeding” but required “modern ones.”19 He introduced a number of bird-­feeding apparatuses, including the “food house” and the “food bell” (Figure 4.3), designs of which were highly advanced for their time. Von Berlepsch was no innocent figure, however; his experiments resulted in the death of thousands of birds.20 The text, however, written by Martin Hiesemann, with a foreword to the English edition by none other than the duchess of Bedford, was immensely popular. It ran into twelve editions and was translated into six languages, indicative of the growing rise in bird feeding as a routinized urban practice.

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Figure 4.3. Von Berlepsch’s designs for bird-­feeding devices: the “food bell” and the “food house.” Illustrations reprinted from Martin Hiesemann, How to Attract and Protect Wild Birds (London: Witherby & Co., 1908, now in the public domain).

By 1910, Punch magazine described feeding birds as a “national pastime” in Britain.21 Numerous texts soon followed von Berlepsch’s, and in many of these accounts, the concept of hospitality was seen as pivotal to a set of burgeoning cultural practices. In the foreword to a 1915 book, aptly entitled Wild Bird Guests: How to Entertain Them, the author, Ernest Harold Baynes, explicitly associated the act of offering food to birds with hospitality and the cultivation of friendship and trust. “The moment a person—­be it man or bird—­has accepted our hospitality, has broken bread with us, has eaten our salt, our relation toward that person has changed,” wrote Baynes. “We have been looked upon with the eyes of friendship—­we have been trusted, and if we are even half

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decent we cannot betray our trust.”22 Feeding practices had begun to shift from being primarily about provisioning during adverse conditions to acts of cultivating friendship and trust. More importantly, they were seen as avenues for forging new urban vernaculars, or “the social life of people in towns.”23 In subsequent years leading up to World War II, as bird feeding became a more entrenched urban practice, a visual economy around acts of hospitality began to take grip. “Those who like to see the birds eating,” wrote a correspondent in the Nelson Reader in 1938, “demand a ‘quid pro quo’ in return, in many cases they gain as much from the birds they feed as the birds gain from the food they receive.”24 The bird feeder was being reconfigured not only as a site of affective exchange but also as a luminous environment, rendering visible and cultivating particular imaginaries of urban nature. A small but growing catalog of commercially available feeders had come into circulation, the designs of which incorporated perches so that people could get “a fascinating view” of their avian guests.25 Other designs such as the “Peanut Feeder” and the “Titbell” targeted tits, nuthatches, and woodpeckers,26 species that were desirable visitors. Food offered to birds, however, was primarily readily available material and do-­it-­yourself recipes; the commercialization of seeds was yet to happen. Bird feeding changed in the postwar era, especially in 1950s with the then-­exploding American suburban culture. Commercial seed companies began marketing seeds to families with backyards who were keen to attract a diverse array of birds. In 1958, on the back of successes of commercial wild bird seed in the United States, boxes of Swoop Wild Bird Food arrived on the British market. Swoop contained a dozen different seeds, some of which were of wild plants imported from the Near East and North Africa. In a major departure from the habit of providing leftovers and scraps, acts of hospitality got caught up in global supply chains and capital-­intensive crop production, fast expanding with frontier-­like orientations.27 A new affective economy centered around the encounter was created by Pedigree Petfoods, the company manufacturing Swoop, resting on Swoop’s unique selling point of being able to draw in unusual birds to garden feeders (Figure 4.4). “Any effort you make,” Swoop advertisements read, “will be rewarded many times over by discovering the fascinating variety of birds that are waiting to visit

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your garden.”28 In an era of convenience packaging, Swoop tapped into the affective potential of the encounter and the microspectacles that the arrival of unusual birds at the feeder generated. The product’s commercial success is reflected by the fact that it had cornered the domestic market by 1970 and was on sale in most pet shops and department stores across the country.29 An affective economy centered on encounters also resulted in new urban imaginaries being crafted through hospitality. Besides providing for birds, feeding became associated with reshaping the domus and creating new vernaculars of urban dwelling. As popular books on bird feeding suggested, “the vicinity of offices and industrial premises” could be adapted for “bird gardening,” such that “city centres and . . . factory grounds” could be rendered into “attractive places for birds as well as ourselves.”30 Together with seed mixes, new bird feeders came into the market, notable among them the tubular or hanging bird feeder (Figure 4.4), introduced by the American bird seed company Droll Yankees in 1969. The model was an intervention in ethicoaesthetic registers, seeking to manipulate the habits of birds and modulate affective relations sparked between other-­than-­human visitors. As its patent claim reveals, the design sought to channel affordances for three distinct ends. First, it aimed to minimize the undesirable relations erstwhile feeders set up. Because they were “not designed to feed a plurality of birds at one time,” older models led to “the more pugnacious birds” scaring away “the more timid” ones. By introducing a set of diametrically opposed apertures, the tubular feeder enabled a wider suite of birds to feed “without interference.” Second, the design was a response to “a serious problem”: of “squirrels and similar animals gaining access to the feeder and almost destroying it.” The tubular feeder minimized inadvertent ecologies other models generated. Third, the tubular feeder enabled affordances to be manipulated with greater human precision such that it would “permit only desired birds to feed.”31 It was an instant hit. Over a million feeders have been sold so far, and the model has become a catalyst for experimentation in the design of bird-­feeding apparatuses. More importantly, however, the machinic assemblage that has arisen around acts of hospitality, including the advent of mass-­produced, genetically modified seeds, has rendered the urban garden into a site of globalized metabolic flows. The bird feeder becomes an unfamiliar but

Figure 4.4. Swoop Wild Bird Food and the tubular bird feeder: ethicoaesthetic interventions that have altered urban nature. Advertisement in British Birds 57, no. 1 (January 1965); photograph Public Domain/Alan Levine CC BY 2.0.

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in no way unimportant site for refracting and provincializing questions of scale, velocity, synchronicity, and complexity in the Anthropocene/ Capitalocene/Plantationocene.32 It is in these very localized, if not mundane, microspaces that we witness urbanization as a process entailing the urbanization of nature 33 and its concomitant production of anthropogenic or capitalogenic faunas. I prefer the term “capitalogenic” in this instance because it troubles the singularity of anthropos and undifferentiated humanity as a whole. The urbanization of nature is a highly uneven process; it proceeds through highly specific channels and circulatory pathways. In Britain, tubular feeders and the commercialization of bird food have reconfigured the shape and ambit of what is ahistorically termed native urban avifauna. Bird feeders become engines of the urban Anthropocene—­or, more appropriately, a Plantationocene, a planetary condition where frontiers are transformed into monocrop plantations via the exploitation of labor, the production of cheap commodities, and the creation of simplified ecologies.34 For instance, the goldfinch—­a bird that Andrew put out sunflower seeds for—­was a fairly scarce denizen of hedgerows and weedy fields fifty years ago. Today they are found in four out of five urban gardens.35 A boom in urban goldfinch populations is largely driven by the widespread provisioning of sunflower (and more recently nyjer) seeds. In the early days, commercial wild bird food largely consisted of products such as wheat, corn, hemp, and millet, which were readily available for livestock farming and for the poultry industry. The popularity of sunflower seeds was in part fueled by the gravity-­powered design of the tubular feeder, which worked much better with larger and heavier seeds. Equally important was the widespread availability of sunflowers after multinational food corporations such as Cargill began to invest in oilseed production. By the late 1970s, 5.6 million acres in the United States alone were under sunflower cultivation.36 Birds “came in droves” when these seeds were put out in feeders,37 revealing the importance of distributed forms of consumption in the configuration cultural and political economies of cities, for what matters are not the metabolic pathways of commodity capital or cultural practices alone but rather the machinic effects of urban hospitality. The latter includes the ethicoaesthetics of design and the gustatory proclivities of the birds themselves.

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A lively political economy of urban provisioning provides vital correctives to some of the impasses of new materialism. While foregrounding how matter acts, new materialism has often fallen short of explaining why certain materials are produced in the first place, and what their political and economic connotations are.38 Although other than humans act, and thus co-­configure the economic, there are a number of cultural practices at work. A lively political economy brings a specific material politics to the foreground. It allows us to analyze a material politics where capitalist productions of nature become important while holding on to the generative role played by other than humans. A lively political economy allows us to understand how the transformation of the birdlife of urban British gardens is combinatorial and machinic, a transformation that calls nativity into question. The goldfinch dangling on the bird feeder can in fact be seen as the producer and product of a highly uneven set of ecological, material, and economic flows that are mediated through a range of capitalist practices. A bulk of the global, commercial cultivation of nyjer seeds—­which has played a crucial role in the urbanization of the bird—­is for the wild bird seed industry. India is among the leading exporters of nyjer. Some of the poorer rural parts of the country in which nyjer cultivation takes place are facing an acute agrarian crisis, marked by a spate of farmer suicides, in part driven by debts created by a shift to capital-­intensive agricultural production.39 Export of seeds for bird food means that nyjer is no longer a subsistence crop for the rural poor but instead a commodity cultivated for its exchange value. The urban bird feeder and its associated metabolic flows thus knot dispersed and distributed places rather than supersede “the spaces of places.”40 Their effects are topological, working at a number of scales—­from the microspaces of the feeder to a wider urban avian assemblage, from the London back garden to Indian agricultural fields undergoing capitalist transformation. As others have remarked, the £235 million U.K. wild bird food trade is an “unexpected industry,”41 albeit one steadily on the rise. Urban bird feeding has intensified in recent years, and organizations such as the Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds (RSPB), closely involved with the bird food business, encourage people to feed birds all year round.42 Like the goldfinch, a suite of other species that appear to constitute the

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natural birdlife of London’s gardens, including the great spotted woodpecker and long-­tailed tit, have become urbanized relatively recently. In contrast, populations of traditional garden visitors such as starlings and house sparrows, which thrived on provisioned scraps before the advent of commercial seed, have witnessed declines since the 1970s.43 Hospitality thus activates urban ecologies. It generates anthropogenic feeding regimes and produces urban natures, configuring what avifaunal assemblages show up as real at any juncture. Yet it would be a mistake to read hospitality as a cultural-­economic practice that generates ecological effects. Rather, it entails trans-­actions crossing human–­avifaunal divides. In this reading of the economic, “the ‘consumer’ in some way becomes co-­creator,”44 shaping the scope and ambit of practices deemed economic. Nowhere is this more evident than in the choices birds make when arriving at, or refusing to attend to, feeders. To read economy in an ethicoaesthetic register is to radically extend cultural economy, just as it is to enliven political economy. To further understand the wider implications of birds arriving on feeders, we need to leave the realm of Kantian humanist universalism and foray into worlds co-­composed by parakeets.

Hospitality and the Shape of Urban Space Ethological research on parakeets at bird feeders opens up a cosmopolitics of hospitality, by which I mean that acts of accommodation or expulsion are not immune to relations fostered by avians themselves, and transactions do not exclusively entail give-­and-­take within a human club.45 Experimental work conducted by ornithologist Hannah Peck and colleagues in London46 points to three ethicoaesthetic dimensions of hospitality that take it beyond an anthropocentric and discursive mooring: habits forged through affective relations, existential territories or refrains composed by avian rhythms, and the temporalities that arise from them. Ethological relations of birds at feeders become crucial for reading hospitality as a cosmopolitical practice constituted through interpenetrating ontologies. Bold and gregarious, parakeets territorialize feeders. As a result, feeder visitation rates by smaller garden passerines, such as the great tit and blue tit, have been found to decline. The time that such passerines spend at the feeder also decreases, and much of their stay is spent being vigilant.47 Peck and colleagues’ problematization of behaviors—­

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the formulation of what constitutes a valid and meaningful arena of inquiry—­is steeped in the paradigm of invasion biology. Their interests lie in questions of “neophobia” and “neophilia”: whether native birds are averse to or accommodating of strange avians. The experiments that they designed are driven by this problematic. This included keeping a caged parakeet next to a feeder and empty cages with prerecorded parakeet calls playing on a loop. To study effects of novelty, a similarly dominant but more familiar native species, the great spotted woodpecker, was kept caged next to feeders as a control.48 Effects observed are largely products of this problematic, but they nonetheless provide insights into how ethological relations unfold on bird feeders. Parakeet calls alone, Peck and colleagues found, reduced visits by smaller passerines, but these effects were amplified when a live psittacine was present. Although woodpeckers triggered similar avoidance behaviors, they were not as pronounced compared to responses generated by the parakeet. Furthermore, there was a greater propensity for feral parakeets to arrive at feeders when a caged psittacine was present, as opposed to those situations when it was not. These findings seemed to indicate neophobia in native passerines; the results also reflected parakeets’ tendencies to forage gregariously, contributing to their propensity to monopolize feeding sites.49 Vital in this regard, however, is not to take such responses as absolute but rather as products of singular habits and rhythms of habituation. This is where a counterreading of territorial behavior lies. Peck and colleagues found that feeder visitation rates by smaller passerines in the presence of parakeets go up when the parakeets are part of a landscape’s avian assemblage for a longer time. The “higher likelihood of feeding in the presence of a parakeet within the parakeet range compared with sites outside,” they argue, “suggests habituation to parakeets following prior exposure.”50 Habituation—­or rather familiarity—­can be seen as a critical element of recombinance: the birds learn how to be affected by one another. Equally, urban great tits and blue tits have been shown to be bolder than their rural counterparts, displaying greater territorial aggression on bird feeders as well as more vigilance when there are parakeet calls.51 Territorial acts thus proceed through relational acts of the different parties involved; they constitute an affective ecology. Responses of aversion and accommodation are similarly not innate but negotiated,

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entailing what Vinciane Despret, in her work on bird territories, calls “an art of composition.”52 Bird feeders are much more than artifacts of metropolitan human dwelling. By drawing in and forging avian assemblages, they bring about new urban space-­times. A majority of visits to bird feeders in London, for instance, are made by great tits and blue tits. Competition with more dominant species such as parakeets can displace individuals of these species to other areas, sometimes with lower-­quality food sources. Equally, shifts can be temporal, evidenced in the case of great tits’ taking to singing at dawn as a result of altered avian assemblages forged by supplemental feeding.53 Feeders also attract a suite of other creatures that have become part of metropolitan recombinant assemblages. Notable among these are the nonnative grey squirrels in London, whose presence on feeders, like parakeets, often results in a reduction in feeder visitation rates among smaller passerines. Shifts induced by squirrels tend to be temporal rather than spatial.54 It has been suggested that artificial feeding stations in gardens can increase the dominance of nonnative species, particularly in instances where competition between native species is low. However, it is vital to not consider such relations to be innate and pregiven. As political economies of urban natures show, the very category of what constitutes a native urban garden bird has undergone anthropogenic shifts. Native urban birds do not belong to an ahistorical order of nature. Similarly, the durability of effects are contingent on refrains—­that is, the songs and lines that are repeated and the consistency of their repetition. This is different from saying that behaviors are products of inherent properties differentially borne by native and nonnative species. The latter is an arborescent categorization of behavior and problematizes the other-­ than-­human world through essentialized markers. Rather than an ecology forged through affect and capacities to affect, markers such as native and nonnative authorize “a unitary point of view from which the role assigned to each participant can be deduced.”55 Although there is “no proof of any population level change” in smaller passerines “as a result of disrupted foraging” triggered by parakeets, Peck and colleagues suggest that excluding psittacines from access to garden feeders might reduce competition and therefore benefit native species. As bird feeders are important sources of food for parakeets,

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denying access would reduce foraging areas for parakeets and therefore work to limit the persistence of their population.56 This is the flip side of hospitality: rendering parakeets’ living milieu inhospitable. Nowhere is the latter more evident than in the new architecture of bird feeders, which are becoming sites of “hostile design,”57 a practice of designing structures of everyday dwelling in a way that discourages particular uses. Hostile design generates affordances of deterrence—­affordances that serve to disrupt, impede, or thwart particular utilizations of architecture and urban infrastructure. From ridges in the middle of benches to prevent sleeping to spikes on window sills, hostile design excludes the activity and presence of particular communities from the urban sphere. London has witnessed a surge in hostile architecture, primarily aimed at the unhoused and the home-­lessed. Hostility extends to other-­than-­human bodies, such as spikes installed on buildings to deter pigeons. Even trees are rendered hostile: developers preemptively net trees to prevent birds from utilizing them because nest destruction is illegal and it stalls building works.58 In the case of bird feeders, hostile design can be seen as a materialization of the petty anxieties that lie at the heart of a micropolitics of race. Bird feeder design aims to generate particular affordances that draw in birds. On the one hand, the affordances for which a device is intended have greater durability, although they may pose others that exceed the intended design. The aim of hostile design, on the other hand, is to limit affordances, to close off other possible uses of a thing or device. “The holes of this feeder have been reworked and they are very small,” remarks a lady who wants to ensure that goldfinches get their share of food. “The design of this feeder limits parakeets and other birds with larger beaks. Hence they cannot get at the nyjer seeds I put out for the goldfinches” (Figure 4.5). A shrinking in the aperture of the holes of a bird feeder narrows down its affordances. It is a classic example of hostile design that works in a dual register: to exclude the targeted while remaining inconspicuous to the nontargeted.59 Hostile design takes as its object-­target particular modes of urban dwelling—­ ways of inhabiting the city that particular constituencies or the state view as undesirable. The rendering invisible of exclusion is precisely what makes hostility micropolitical, for it is coded and organized by manipulating affects. In some instances, designs are not registered as hostile by

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Figure 4.5. Hostile design: a wire cage to prevent feral parakeets from accessing seeds. Photograph by author.

those who install them, let alone others who casually watch birds alight on feeders. Hostile design is more than just a summary of architectural interventions and devices. It reveals the shape of urban space. In rendering a milieu inhospitable or hostile, design operates as a double bind: as nonnative and feral birds, a domus or home does not exist for parakeets, and they are denied access to bird feeders because who is welcomed as an avian guest in an urban garden is anchored in ideas of nativity. Yet parakeets can subvert attempts to keep them away. This reveals how hospitality and hostility are cosmopolitical; they are not always about action amid an exclusively human club. Jonathan, a resident of a middle-­class neighborhood in west London, explains how his parakeet-­repellent feeder works, pointing to a wire cage surrounding the tubular device. “It is there to keep out parakeets,” he remarks, but it works “only when the wire mesh of the cage . . . is far enough from the dispensing tube.” “And they are not always effective,” he adds. “I have seen birds peeling back the mesh to get in. It is remarkable how strong their beaks are.” Jonathan adds that the wire mesh also keeps out birds such as the greater spotted woodpecker, which he would love to have as a regular visitor. “In the end it is inevitable that parakeets will get some of the seeds; you just need to accept that.”

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Eradicating the Guest If hostile design works in a molecular vein, then killing parakeets by luring them to a bird feeder has necropolitical orientations that operate through what Amin calls “honed vernaculars” of colonial and “racial judgement.” Marchington’s decoy, introduced in the beginning of this chapter, is deployed to tap into the gregarious nature of parakeets—­their propensity to be drawn to feeding sites when conspecifics are present (Figure 4.6). Here an act of hospitality turns into poison, for the feral bird is first invited, even enticed, as a guest with the help of a decoy, only to be shot. Rebuking “lovers of the Ring-­necked Parakeet,” the Fieldsports Channel’s host draws attention to “a few fast facts.” Parakeets, the host states, “originate in the Himalayas. The rocker Jimi Hendrix released a pair in the 1960s as a symbol of peace and love. They are now London’s fifteenth most common bird with around 40,000 across the southeast. They nest early, so they drive out our own native species such as woodpeckers.”60 The stranger therefore needs to be eliminated, for it threatens urban nature deemed indigenous and worthy of preservation. Marchington, however, is quick to state, “Although these birds are an invasive, nonnative species, you can’t just shoot them willy-­nilly. . . . If you are planning to do this at home, do check out the terms of the general license first and make sure you are legal.”61 In 2009, Natural England, an executive public body sponsored by the Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), added parakeets to the general license, which meant that birds could be shot by a license holder if crops or public health were deemed to be at risk. This inclusion in the general license happened after risk assessments conducted by DEFRA, although the Fieldsports Channel’s Flickr social media page states that “the government had to rush in the general licenses after the European Union banned all bird shooting.” This comment is reflective of the political leanings of these individuals, who express an unease of British sovereignty and class-­ridden “culture” being overridden by directives from the Continent. Shooting, the channel maintains, is “a sport as well as a vital pest control service.”62 Reframing the act of killing into a “vital service” and deception into “sport” blunts the viscerality entailed in the bloody activity of eradication. Both “sport” and “vital service” have strong colonial legacies. Game hunting by colonial personnel in India was often legitimized by

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renaming quarry as “man-­eaters,” “savage beasts” or “rogues,” from which the local populace needed protection, and whose elimination was equated as a masculine and noble act.63 This went hand in hand with casting the “native” as timid and cowardly, and the colonial hunt was one avenue through which white supremacy and colonial moral authority could be performed and asserted.64 These colonial and racial legacies are in no ways a thing of the past but “[work] as a duration . . . as a latent force—­ bursting through ‘a nick in time’” to disrupt “a settled pattern of life.” Such forces surface in “unexpected ways,” their actualization not being

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Figure 4.6. Necropolitics: parakeet figurine used as a decoy to lure birds. Screenshots from FieldsportsChannel.tv, AirHeads Episode 24, CC BY 2.0.

the manifestation of a “pre-­formed latent condition but . . . the product of the past and present combining in novel ways.”65 Responding to how parakeet populations in London might be controlled, a British woman describes, in a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, the actions of her father while stationed in Delhi in 1942. “We had a prolific crop of maize in our kitchen garden which was regularly plundered by flocks of ring-­necked parakeets, so my father and his

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friends organized parakeet shoots with great success. Even I with my bow and arrow managed to bag a few. We ate them regularly—­roasted—­ and they were delicious. They tasted a bit like snipe.”66 While such “sport” would be anathema today, invoking colonial histories in the context of contemporary London are reminders of how colonial tropes permeate judgments about urban nature within certain sections of British society, although the pathways of their emergence are never predictable. They sometimes instantiate in the micropractices of urban accommodation and in everyday sites of urban dwelling too easily glossed over in debates regarding the cosmopolitan city. The video of enticing parakeets and shooting them on the bird feeder was not without controversy. The animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) exclaimed that “luring animals into a garden with food only to shoot and kill them is deranged behaviour.” A spokesperson from the RSPB criticized Fieldsports Channel for glorifying hunting, stating that those following Marchington’s advice could end up with a criminal record. “The tree is leafless with no sign of any crop,” remarked an RSPB representative, stating that it was clear that Marchington’s garden was not a commercial operation. “Under the general licence, if you can’t prove there is just cause for your actions, you’re not safe from prosecution; especially if you’ve not explored alternative forms of control.” “London is not the Wild West,” the spokesperson went on to say. It “is a densely packed place where no one should be firing a weapon from their window.”67 To counter the RSPB’s criticism, the channel uploaded another video a few days later. In a sarcastic tone, Marchington states, “I seem to have upset the antis the last time when I made a parakeet decoy to help me deal with a parakeet that was damaging my fruit trees,” with “antis” being a reference to those voicing concern and dissent, “but since then, I haven’t seen the birds attacking my trees anymore, so with a bit of luck, that’s solved the problem.” Marchington’s voice-­over on the video attempts remorse: “I noticed one of the regular visitors had a damaged wing, although it seemed to be flying fine despite that. I almost started to feel sorry for it.” Almost—­for he soon turns to counter the RSPB’s statement by trying to establish how the parakeets caused damage: “But then I was watching it in the sycamore tree and it started to rip the buds off the twigs. I just hope he doesn’t start doing that to my apple trees.”68

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In fact, the tone and nature of the channel’s reactions to criticism further reflect how racial judgment regarding feral creatures interdigitates with a masculinist, patriarchal, and class-­ridden rationality. Those sympathizing with parakeets are referred to as “the flurries” and “the fluffies”—­terms that cast critics as effeminate, light-­headed, and irrational. As David, a commentator on the Fieldsports Channel, puts it, “Animal activists, or nutters as we call them in Fieldsports Channel towers, have described our recent film on how to shoot parakeets in London as deranged. Their comments appeared in the Evening Standard, the Telegraph, and the Mirror provoking sensible, rational, adult debate,” adding “Yeah, right!” to convey his sarcasm.69 Those willing to accommodate parakeets are written off as incapable of reasoned debate. “PETA lives in this Disney world where all animals are furry and cuddly,” the channel’s owner, Charlie Jacoby, remarks in the Telegraph. “I like animals and birds as well but I also see them as pests and I also like to eat them. I think PETA needs to develop some emotional intelligence about wildlife. These birds are pests and Government has designated them as such.” To shoot birds is to wrest back control. “People who live in towns should be able to manage their animal problems, just as people in the countryside do.”70

The Biopolitics of Populations A “racial debris”71 of the past thus instantiates in bird feeders. Such a micropolitics of race has, as its correlate, a molar biopolitics of population management that aims to control and securitize life, both avian and human. I refer to such practices as biopolitical because they entail an explicit mapping and monitoring of parakeet populations that serve to bring feral birds into the ambit of calculation, normalization and exclusion. Furthermore, strategies are devised to securitize other populations and forms of life from the disruptive effects of ferality. In both of these aspects, quests to administer feral populations differ from the politics of aesthetics witnessed in the state’s attempts to order macaques in Delhi, where populations are not constructed in the same calculable vein. The aim is rather to redistribute the sentient and the sensible. Biopolitics, then, as the fostering of life through statistical management of populations and the racial logics of purity,72 might be reenvisioned as

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a provincial project, locatable in highly specific western genealogies rather than being a universal political technology of administering life process, no matter how life escapes integration into such projects.73 In this provincial milieu, biopolitics dovetails with a situated micropolitics of race. A fear of the stranger regulates the state of alert and dictates specific strategies, declared and tacit, of population management. Counts of parakeet numbers, conducted by zoologists, bird watchers, and other members of London’s public, were instrumental in constructing feral birds as a discernible population and therefore as object-­targets of intervention. The notion of a population as a measurable and collective reality has been at the heart of concerns regarding feral parakeets since the early 1970s, when small flocks of free-­ranging birds started appearing in London. The BOU was keen to determine whether “populations” could be regarded as “self-­supporting,” so the organization asked bird observers and county report editors “to keep all records” of feral birds so that a more “complete picture” of its population status could be drawn.74 County reports, stemming from observations of local bird watchers and published annually, result in “the accumulation of large volumes of data.” Such reports have been deployed as “a cost-­effective method” to “examine trends in populations of scarce birds not otherwise regularly censused.”75 Archives of such casual observations helped generate the first parakeet distribution maps,76 which permitted visualization of distribution and pattern of the birds’ spread. Collated observations also contributed to formulations of population mortality, fecundity, and growth rates,77 rendering populations real and knowable, as potential object-­targets of intervention. More accurate censuses were conducted as parakeet populations grew. Primarily carried out by university researchers and large teams of volunteers, there was nothing biopolitical about such exercises from the outset. However, results lent themselves to state imperatives. Complete simultaneous counts of all known roosts in the city carried out by Josephine Pithon and her colleagues in 1996, 1997, and 1998 generated data on not just number of parakeets but also population growth and trends. In the west of London, numbers were found to be increasing, while some populations remained stable and yet others, in southeast London, had doubled.78 Subsequent counts at roosts in the early to mid-­2000s revealed that the Greater London population was growing at approximately 30 percent per year.79 For government agencies such

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as the DEFRA, the data generated constituted an important “evidence base to inform management decisions.”80 Practices of estimating parakeet populations produce a whole range of statistical models, graphs, and maps, which in turn generate a field of biopolitical visibility where power operates diagrammatically. “A luminous arrangement,” a diagram of power may be understood as a map, graph, or plan of relations between forces and that which makes “power relations function.”81 Diagrams of power do not represent; rather, they map out possibilities through which power can operate. In this sense, diagrams constitute an informal dimension: a particular arrangement of power that traverses through the discursive and the nondiscursive, through the unformed, and through states of flux and dynamics. Diagrams are machinic, with their lines passing through heterogeneous elements and practices, working to organize the latter, to distribute their functions and allocate resources. Biopolitics can be diagrammatic in that the quest to administer life proceeds by visualizing populations and bringing them into the ambit of calculability, discipline, regulation, and control. Practices of counting parakeets illuminate not only feral populations and their locations but also their movements, trends, and patterns of spread. This is most vividly illustrated in the London Bird Atlas, which shows changes in the distribution of parakeets over a forty-­five-­year period (Figure 4.7). The grids or tetrads overlaid on the map diagram how the bird has spread across the city and undergone range expansion. A second map, showing the density at which tetrads are occupied, reveals the relative abundance of parakeets in London. These visual diagrams, by distributing parakeets in space and serializing them in time, construct populations in a biopolitical sense: as bodies posing potential threats and as aggregates in need of intervention. As a major report commissioned by DEFRA in 2007 stated, “the observed growth rate” in parakeets “is among the highest observed in current British bird populations.” Diagrams reveal how parakeets “have the potential for considerable expansion”82 and therefore become object-­targets for management and control. The graphics of spread are, however, only one aspect of biopolitical diagrams. Other diagrams are superimposed, and “from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn.”83 Notable here are the language and models of risk, which brings space-­times of the future and that of anticipation into the fray. Risk is made evident by the state through a set of

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Figure 4.7. Urban diagrams: parakeet distribution and changes in populations in London, 1968–­2013. Reprinted from Richard Arnold, Ian Woodward, and Neil Smith, “Parrots in the London Area: A London Bird Atlas Supplement,” in London Bird Atlas, edited by Richard Arnold, Ian Woodward, and Neil Smith (London: London Natural History Society, 2017).

bureaucratic methodologies, assessments, and evaluations, but they also dovetail with the molecular insecurities generated by ferality. In 1996, scientists flagged the need for preemptive measures to control parakeet numbers, given “the propensity for some psittacines to cause damage and to be able to establish themselves successfully in new areas.”84 These views gained further momentum through future population forecasts. Extrapolating figures based on present trends, some even put the future parakeet population in the Greater London area to reach an excess of 100,000 by 2026.85 This was the construction of a future population—­ one that could pose an economic threat. Models on “vulnerability” to predation “risk” suggested that crop fields and grape orchards around London and southeast England would follow a “slow and almost linear increase in their exposure to parakeets within the next 30 years.”86 Diagrammatic “visibilities,” however, are not solely “defined by sight, but are complexes of actions and passions, actions and reactions.”87

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A micropolitics of affect accompanies the biopolitics of regulating feral populations. In 2009, an experimental study conducted in Brussels blocked the nest holes of parakeets as a proxy for intraspecies competition in order to evaluate the effects of population density on breeding birds. “Forced to look for new breeding sites,” parakeets shifted to nuthatch nest holes, generating “a significant decline” in nuthatch but not parakeet numbers (although parakeet abundance did come down by a third at one of the two study areas). Although contingent on future population projections and reliant on the idea that parakeets will not resort to other breeding strategies, which might well have been the case in one of the study sites, the authors concluded that “the invasive ring-­necked parakeet is indeed a threat to native cavity-­nesting birds.”88 This conclusion was taken as evidence of the threat that parakeets were long seen to pose. The British tabloids amplified the threat of ferality by stating it was not just nuthatches but a suite of other native birds, including “kestrels, starlings and tawny and little owls” that would be affected.89 Yet if there is anything we can learn from the science of ecology, it is the invaluable insight it provides as a science of situations rather than a producer of generalized polemics. A study on parakeets conducted in the United Kingdom by the British Trust for Ornithology, which did not resort to experimentally blocking nest holes, found “no evidence for a significant impact on Nuthatch populations or those of any other cavity-­nesting species within the Parakeet’s current range in the U.K.” The only effects parakeets were found to have had was on the population of blue tits, whose populations showed a marginal 1 percent decline. The lower intensity of competition between individual parakeets in the United Kingdom as opposed to Belgium was put forward as a possible explanation.90 These findings indicate why it is often problematic to transfer and extrapolate—­partly because ethological experiments involve a whole suite of situated “instruments that make visible, that link, that build intimacy into knowledge, that bring out similarities and differences, trajectories and habits.”91 However, the authors of the British study contended that “neither of these observations excludes the possibility of conflict in the future, particularly as Ring-­necked Parakeet populations are continuing to grow.”92 Biopolitical imperatives are in fact beginning to gravitate toward a catastrophist narrative that increasingly sees the future as turbulent.93

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Such turbulence is summoned or rendered plausible through transversal, diagrammatic connections drawn between the rates of spread, projected growth in populations, and forecasts that provide an increasing likelihood of detrimental impacts on agriculture and native avifauna. These feed into a political technology of governance that attempts to secure urban natures by culling feral life. The 2007 DEFRA report on the likely future spread of parakeets explicitly argued that it was important to limit psittacine populations, either by reducing their spread or through wholesale eradication. Parakeet populations being “focused within a relatively small area” meant that there were still opportunities for “coordinated control” before things got out of hand.94 Here, a catastrophist mode of biopolitics, increasingly prominent in new urban agendas of resilience,95 is superimposed on the warnings of invasion biology regarding the latent threat of “ecological explosions.”96 The DEFRA report warned that the task of control would become “ever more difficult” if parakeet populations continued to “increase and expand into the foreseeable future, as expected.”97 A parakeet cull was in fact considered by the U.K. government in 2007. Shooting was believed to be relatively easy, but the government was concerned that too many people would be distressed to see the birds being shot. Although Natural England had added parakeets to the general license on the basis of risk assessments that diagnosed threats to be “moderate,” and on account of “a negative association with native secondary cavity nesters,” public consultations revealed that “stakeholders questioned whether there was sufficient evidence on impact on native birds.” Such counterarguments were in fact overridden by the statutory body on the grounds of needing to be “consistent with the robust precautionary policy on invasive non-­native species.” It held on to its belief that “there is potential for a negative impact.” “We know from past experience that it is often too late to achieve effective control if action is delayed until the adverse impacts of an invasive non-­native species become clearly evident,” Natural England remarked. “The inclusion of these species on the general licenses will enable a proactive approach to anticipated problems.”98 Potential impact, anticipated problems, precautionary policy, and proactive approach—­these are all watchwords in the quest to administer life by summoning the future as turbulent; they need to be kept at bay. Although a rose-­ringed parakeet cull is yet to materialize, in 2010,

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DEFRA culled some monk parakeets, another psittacine with small and localized populations in London. According to a request for information, the government body stated that the cull was necessary because monk parakeets were “an agricultural pest in their native range,” and they “can carry diseases and they have the potential to cause biodiversity impacts.” Infrastructural disruptions were another concern. DEFRA pointed to feral monk parakeet populations in the United States, where “the cost of nest removal alone to reduce the risk of power outages was estimated to be $ 1.3m to $ 4.7m over a 5 year period.” The government body’s decision to cull parakeets followed an anticipatory logic, with the move “taken after considering all the evidence on the threat they pose to economic interests and . . . any potential threat to biodiversity.”99 The cull met with widespread protest, particularly from affected publics or those who had developed close attachments with the monk parakeets. There were disagreements on the justifications for culling, resulting in antagonistic relations between avian control opponents and proponents. As Sarah Crawley, Steve Hinchliffe, and Robbie McDonald have argued, there was a lack of understanding of, and even resistance to, the concept of precaution. The government’s intervention was framed as a rapid response, but in fact it came close to twenty years after the birds had first established themselves in the city.100 Furthermore, the cost of removing just 62 birds, 212 eggs, and 21 nests amounted to £259,000, costing the British taxpayer close to £1,000 per bird removed.101 This led the government body to state that the culling of rose-­ringed parakeets was no longer a feasible option. “There are now thought to be 8,600 breeding pairs across the country—­and the population is growing,” a DEFRA spokesperson remarked. “It is no longer cost-­effective or viable to eradicate this species, which means we must now bear the on-­going environmental, economic and social impacts of these birds.”102 The phoenix of a rose-­ringed parakeet cull, however, raises itself from time to time. In 2017, when there was talk about a potential cull, an online petition generated over three thousand signatories to “ban the culling of these magnificent birds . . . who now call Britain their home.” Those signing the petition made remarks like, “I love seeing them in my garden” and “It’s not their fault they are here—­they are beautiful and deserve to live.”103 Similarly, stories of DEFRA being in discussions about a government-­ordered cull emerged in January 2021, on the back

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of speculations that the birds might become an increasing problem in the long term. The analogy of parakeets as “the grey squirrel of the skies” was invoked once more.104 Coverage in the news media led to DEFRA responding that “while ring-­necked parakeets are one species which could be considered for control,” it was not “planning a parakeet cull.” The recurrent question of culling reveals how the biopolitical and micropolitical anxieties dovetail, but it misses a wider set of issues. As “slow ornithologist” and parakeet enthusiast Nick Hunt, author of Parakeeting of London, remarks, “The problem facing native British birds are not due to parakeets. . . . It’s all the stuff we are doing—­pollution, habitat loss . . . climate change. It’s a scapegoat to point at a few thousand green birds and say it’s their fault.”105

Niche Construction through Affect Yet ferality can give rise to counterarrangements, to other alignments between people and parakeets in the metropolis. As we saw in the opening vignette to this chapter, tourists and Londoners alike regularly feed a flock of about forty-­five birds in London’s Kensington Gardens. These birds have developed novel behaviors in response to provisioning. The birds are neither wary nor shy but perch on people’s arms to feed on food that is held out in their palms. An urban spectacle has emerged through such intimacies. “I stumbled upon the parakeets a few months ago when I came for a walk with my seven-­year-­old daughter,” says an Englishman in his midforties, “and now she insists on coming to feed them every weekend, sometimes on both Saturdays and Sundays!” The psittacines are a particular attraction for children, but proximities so generated also reorient the way adults perceive them. “I thought parakeets were rather annoying at first, especially when the fly past screeching, but coming here I have realized that they are actually fun birds with a lot of character.” Through such intimate encounters Londoners “learn to be affected” by parakeets, to mutually engage with the birds as sentient beings. Such encounters spatialize, prying open the very ground for people to become porous to psittacine bodies whereby anxieties and fears of the stranger are undone, if only partially. This process through which a more inclusive mode of urban inhabitation becomes possible is, at least in part, achieved

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through what I call niche construction through affect. This is a modification of what certain biologists, arguing against deterministic currents in behavioral ecology and evolution, call niche construction, or the processes by which “an organism modifies . . . the relationship between itself and its environment, either by physically perturbing factors at its current location in space and time, or by relocating to a different space-­ time address, thereby exposing itself to different factors.” All organisms construct niches, although they may be ephemeral and not always visible. Niches may be spatial or dietary, but more importantly, they are relational and “mutable.”106 Niche construction through affect entails parakeets—­ or any other being, for that matter—­altering factors in a particular space-­ time address by eliciting affective responses in people. A strongly intuitive concept, evidenced in a range of arenas from the dam-­building activities of beavers to the giant nests of leaf-­cutting ants, niche construction marks a break from conventional understandings of adaptation and evolution. It reorients views of the environment as static and given, acting as an “enforcer” of natural selection, to that of the environment being a milieu that changes and coevolves “with the organisms on which it acts selectively.”107 Niche construction challenges the classical dichotomy in evolutionary theory between organism and environment. In the classical view, environments are conceived as that which poses a problem to an organism, forcing the latter to posit solutions through the process of adaptation. “What is left out of this adaptive description of organism and environment,” writes evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, “is the fact, clear to all natural historians, that the environment of organisms are made by the organisms themselves as a consequence of their life activities.” “Organisms,” he further goes on to state, “do not adapt to their environments; they construct them out of the bits and pieces of the external world.”108 Adaptation is therefore contingent on both natural selection and niche construction, not the former alone. The critical import of niche construction is that it challenges the long-­held view that only humans build worlds and animals simply occur, a view that is intrinsic to the hylomorphic logics of architecture, urban planning, and design.109 Feral parakeets do not simply fit into an already laid out urban world; they construct them via the activity of dwelling. Although niche construction is typically thought of in

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terms of channeling energy flows or modifying material environments, we could extend this in an ethicoaesthetic register to ask whether birds such as parakeets create niches through affect—­by eliciting patterned responses in people and generating new space-­times of foraging. Such a question is not way off the mark, for it is acknowledged that niches are relational and can be constructed through learning, experience, and culturally acquired patterns of behavior.110 By generating affects in people, Kensington Garden parakeets construct a new dietary niche (Figure 4.8), one whose space-­times are interrhythmic and porous, in that they entail rhythms and behaviors that cross psittacine and human bodies. “This place is quite special,” says Oscar, who works as a cook in a London restaurant. “Nowhere are you going to see free-­flying parrots come and feed of your hand like this. Yes, they are bright and colorful, but what is most amazing is that the birds confide in people and you can really feel the birds. It makes bird feeding so much more satisfactory.” Oscar, like many other regulars at this spot, comes every two weeks or so to feed the birds. “I usually bring peanuts, but more so sunflower seeds, as parakeets really like them. It’s a nice outing and fun to interact with the birds. London is an expensive city and in most places going out means spending a lot of money. That’s

Figure 4.8. Niche construction through affect: people feeding parakeets in Kensington Gardens, London. Photograph by author.

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not the case here.” This dietary niche, one could argue is a haptic space as much as it is optic, where people touch, and are touched by, parakeets. Whereas conventional examples of niche construction entail alterations of material flows or a modification habitat structure, niche construction through affect is the cultivation of proximities. My observations suggest that parakeets are astute readers of human bodies. This is vital in terms of how affective niche construction proceeds as a situated and material practice. The psittacines perch on low branches, hopping from one to another, occasionally making contact calls with other members of the flock. Some of their forays to extended arms are sallies: a quick dart, a few pecks at whatever is offered, followed by a flight back to the branch from which they came. At other times, individuals perch for longer periods, especially when people stand very still. Their tendency to be gregarious plays out, with other birds following suit and perching on the same person when a conspecific is feeding—­ not unlike their behavior when attending to garden bird feeders. In certain instances, the birds will even come and land on an empty hand if it is held still, suggesting that the psittacines may be reading human bodies rather than directly looking at what food is being held out. Males tend to be particularly aggressive when feeding, preventing females and juveniles from landing on the same hand. Such aggression is seldom directed toward people. Some birds will gently nibble on a person’s finger if they try to stroke or handle it, a signal that lays down what is permissible and what is not. As Marc, a parakeet enthusiast who regularly comes to Kensington Gardens with his pet bird, Toto, explains, “Parakeets don’t like being touched or stroked on their wings. A nibble is their subtle message telling you don’t come too close.” There is thus always an element of distance at work in these human–­parakeet entanglements, no matter how intimate the proximities. Affective niche construction, one could further argue, entails a cultivation of trust, where this trust is “not a qualified or unqualified given, or a delegated property” but is rather “a transactional good dependent on active labor to align heterogeneous bodies.”111 Not dissimilar to the affective relations with commensal macaques in Delhi, alignments here are trans-­actions crossing human and other-­than-­human bodies. This emergent urban phenomenon, restricted to one particular flock of parakeets, is couched in a much longer history of feeding birds

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in Kensington Gardens. Soon after the blizzards of 1890–­91, bird feeding took shape as a metropolitan pastime, and Kensington Gardens was a popular destination for such practices of commensality.112 By the late 1930s, the practice was fully established. Commentaries on the social life of London reveal how “the public as if conscious of an officialdom, make way for the bird-­feeders” in the Royal Parks. They “stand at a respectful distance watching, delighted if a sparrow perches on the feeder’s hand.”113 Feeding birds by hand in Kensington Gardens has thus long been prevalent, but feeding parakeets is relatively recent. Although a parakeet was present in the gardens in the early part of the twentieth century, “where he became quite a well-­known favourite and was fed by visitors,”114 there seem to be no reports of the bird perching on people’s hands. The current flock dates back to 2005, when twenty-­one birds became resident in the area as parakeet populations spread through London.115 According to Ralph Hancock, an amateur ornithologist who has been running an almost daily blog on the birds of Kensington Gardens for nearly a decade, parakeets were “initially concentrated in this bit near the Peter Pan statue—­the spot where people now feed them—­ before they spread all over the park.” Hancock says that the phenomenon of parakeets landing on people’s hands started “about ten years ago,” when one regular visitor and bird enthusiast began feeding some individuals. This triggered a gradual habituation, but parakeets would only perch on a few skilled individuals to whom the birds had become attuned. “The current phenomenon of large numbers of people coming to feed just parakeets took off in about 2015,” says Hancock. “YouTube has contributed a great deal to this practice—­there are several videos of these birds and it has served to draw people.” An increase in the numbers of people feeding the birds has resulted in the dietary niche becoming more stable and persistent. Parakeets, according to Hancock, have become bolder over time. For a species that starts breeding at the age of two, it is plausible that the current flock contains second-­generation birds that have grown up in this milieu of being hand-fed. However, taming, one could argue, is a two-­way process. It is not just people who render parakeets into confiding birds through the cultivation of care and empathy; feral birds also tame people. The affects they generate and the proximities they forge as observant participants

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of the world prompts people to return to the spot. It gives rise to an interrhythmic and patterned activity that produces a persistent site for the birds to feed. The generation of such a niche is equally contingent on the wayfaring of the birds themselves—­their return to a particular space from their roosts, although such motives are primarily to forage. Through the development of particular habits, and through acts of affecting people, parakeets “open up new fields of virtuality,”116 where the urban is not just something to be endured but something that can be activated and oriented. It becomes a landscape of change where other, more hospitable worlds become possible. Here, Lewontin’s argument that “organisms,” by altering their external worlds, “may create an environment more hospitable to their own species,”117 brings in an entirely new dimension to the understanding of our relations with strangers. Acts of constructing niches through affect open up the possibility for a truly cosmopolitical form of urban hospitality, where the latter is not just give-­and-­take in a solely human register.118 Other than humans also participate in forging a more favorable and accommodating milieu; at least they pose new questions on how accommodation might proceed. Such counterarrangements in fact open up an affective commons, one constituted by lines of flight that are inventive and creative. They work against the current of majoritarian urban assembly, which is constituted by molar lines of racial stratification and which produces inhospitable, even unlivable milieus. Affective commons are those “relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance” that constitute any diagram of power.119 I view spaces pried open through human–­parakeet encounters as a commons because they comprise locales for forms of economic make-­do that are not tethered to rent and wage labor. They are affective because the alignments and intimacies between human and psittacine bodies create economic opportunities for those immiserated by urban life. Here we witness commensality, developed as an analytic for understanding urban life through ethnographic work in Delhi, come full circle. Practices gleaned from cities in the Global South illuminate other ways through which urban life unfolds in the Global North—­ways too easily glossed over when cities such as London are refracted through the usual set of analytics. Khahlil, a migrant from Syria, introduced in the beginning of this chapter, makes do by selling peanuts and sunflower seeds to itinerant

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tourists wanting to feed the birds. Khahlil himself stumbled on this phenomenon when walking through Kensington Gardens; he saw an opportunity for hawking, especially given that many people came unprepared. He was familiar with people earning a living by selling food for pigeons in Syria—­or so he claimed. Khahlil not only sells seeds but acts as an interpreter of parakeet worlds, telling people about the psittacines’ origins and how to distinguish sexes. “This woman,” he says, pointing to a female as she perches on the arm of a client. When asked how he knows this, Khahlil traces a circle around his own neck: “Man has ring.” In his limited English, Khahlil tells people that the birds have been brought from India and have made London their home. The amount of money Khahlil makes from selling seeds is meager, but it is one way to get by in a city with few work opportunities for those lacking skilled qualifications and social capital. Khahlil left Syria as war erupted in his country, seeking refuge in Britain with the hope of supporting his family back home. “No good job,” he remarks, as earning a living by selling peanuts is a fragile endeavor. “Only money to buy food.” Furthermore, Khahlil has ailing health, making strenuous work difficult. “I come here sometimes,” he remarks. There are times when the spot is marked by Khahlil’s prolonged absence. Hawking without a license is prohibited in Kensington Gardens. The affective commons is therefore constantly underpinned by regulations and codes, which block counterarrangements and lines emerging from human–­parakeet conviviality. Some regular visitors to Kensington Gardens remark that such hawking ought to be stopped, for being asked to pay makes feeding an unpleasant experience. Yet the contrast between a £235 million bird food industry that has commercialized and profited from commensality and the small acts of a migrant from a war-­torn country trying to make do in the face of adversity and an environment becoming increasingly hostile to strangers could not be starker. Seldom pushy or adamant, Khahlil often gives out seeds for free. “People my country love feeding birds, like in Hindustan,” he tells me, smiling. “I enjoy here.” Similarly, the Royal Parks authorities are not always accommodating of such counterarrangements. On the one hand, “when behaving naturally, parakeets eat flower buds, leaf shoots and seeds from trees,” says an official park ecologist. On the other hand, “feeding them attracts very large numbers, which are causing extensive damage to trees. If numbers

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continue to increase, there is concern that this may result in harm to other native bird species living in the parks, disrupting the balance of wildlife.”120 A Royal Parks spokesperson also remarked, “Millions of people visit our parks every year and behaviour can impact the balance of the delicate ecosystems so we ask people not feed these attractive birds even though it is tempting.”121 Nothing could be more ironic, given that the faunal and floral assemblage of Kensington Gardens has been forged through the circulation of biota and is recombinant and postcolonial through and through. Yet proximities and new affective alignments between those bodies subjected to biopolitical exclusions on the grounds of being outsiders get reterritorialized, often by the very institutional codes and vernaculars of racial judgment they seek to break out of.

Migrantizing London Affective commons, no matter how frail the counterarrangements through which they arise, signal other forms of urban livability. Just as the remainders of race can burst through in the nick of time, weaving past and present into new combinations,122 so too can modes of commoning and the practices of accommodation that they bring about. Affective commons are not pregiven formations; nor do they emerge from any kind of technical fix. They can be spontaneous—­or, rather, molecular—­emerging from bodies coming into composition and through the cultivation of habits mutual to the different parties involved. Such commons are aleatory rather than the product of some kind of design; they can be ephemeral, their durability imbued with contingency. Furthermore, it draws attention to bodies and alignments at the urban margins not easily discernible when postcolonial subjects are taken to be people alone. No doubt there is a need to retrieve human lives edited out by the push toward a global and cosmopolitan city,123 but we also need to make room for other figures with whom such marginal lives are led, and who enter into arrangements that make the urban more habitable. These arrangements, as we see time and again, are subjected to erasure. Feral lives have been constantly marked out as in need of control, even eradication. One stratum of this is biopolitical: a quest to administer life, foster certain forms, and securitize them from contamination and threat. In contrast to the politics of managing macaques in

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Delhi, where there are no censuses and where the state resorts to an aesthetic politics, we witness here a clear endeavor of constructing a population through counts, censuses, and modeling. This strategy lies at the heart of biopolitics and its political technology of rendering life into an object-­target of governance, but it is of paramount importance to see these as provincial practices rather than push for their universality. And, as I shall argue in subsequent chapters, neither are these practices fully formed and then transported elsewhere, serving as mirrors of planned intentions. As feral creatures, parakeets are deemed to be in need of eradication—­not so much because of the problems they create in the present but because of the threat they pose to the future. The biopolitical imperative here rests on an imaginary that the future is going to be increasingly turbulent, even catastrophic.124 This imaginary is informed by a deep-­ seated biotic nativism and the science of invasion biology,125 which has long informed how ecological problems ought to be formulated and therefore how feral biologies are understood. The language of catastrophism that invasive parakeets invoke serves as a guide to both action and thought, shaping decisions taken by governments as well as expert understanding of the knowable and actionable world. It translates into the mantra of precaution and preparedness that is increasingly taking grip over urban governance in the West,126 likely to intensify further with the Covid-­19 pandemic. Yet through the course of five decades over which the current parakeet population has established itself, the bird has yet to become a serious agricultural pest. Herein lies the import of ethicoaesthetic invention:127 parakeets have remained largely urban, preferring to utilize bird feeders rather than form large flocks to raid crops in fields. This should not be read anthropomorphically as a response of parakeets to a biopolitical situation. Rather, it should be read as an expression of their ability to pose other problems and expose state science’s problematization of ecology. Equally, parakeets’ lives should not be seen as bare lives or zoë; they are meaningful and meaning making. In spite of this alternative situation, biopolitics has staying power, and eradication keeps rearing its head, partly because it dovetails with a micropolitics of race, a suspicion and fear of the migrant and the stranger. These are witnessed in everyday habits and in vernacular practices of dwelling that demarcate home, the nation, and its outside—­in other

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words, the very spatial and social contours of who counts for what, and whether or not they belong. A micropolitics of race is not representational. Rather, it is affective, playing out in a molecular vein, through relations between bodies in quotidian urban space. It polices who is welcome at a bird feeder or urban garden and who is not, often proceeding through small acts such as blocking affordances in order to prevent parakeets from accessing food. A micropolitics of race expresses itself through hostile design or acts of denying access in ways that are rendered invisible. But it also is about propagating insecurities through public commentary, whether these have to do with an unsettling of the aesthetic of nature that the feral brings about or the purported threat they pose to native nesting birds. What makes a micropolitics of race so dangerous is that it can exist while adhering to cosmopolitan views in a representational vein. It is precisely for these reasons that ethicoaesthetic invention becomes crucial in scripting possibilities for a different city and for another micropolitics of urban nature, whose prevalence goes beyond the singularity of this particular case and has bearings on how decolonial visions of the urban might be forged. Such invention needs to contest nativist and racial currents, as well as capitalist architectures of power that shape urban space. The affective commons forged by parakeets and people is an actually existing scenario, but one could add to that a raft of other possibilities. This includes foregrounding hospitality in cosmopolitical, rather than cosmopolitan, terms. Routine practices of constructing a home through bird feeding become open to affective contagion and to the possibility that strangers can spark encounters on their own terms. These can give rise to unexpected but meaningful relations that are not overcoded by preconceived judgments from the very outset.128 The forms of conviviality at stake here are not so much acts of living with the other-­ than-­human migrant than living alongside them.129 Relations can be far more provisional than what an ethics of the binaries of entanglement and disentanglement invoke. Unlike entanglement, living alongside does not take engagement—­usually on one’s own terms, no matter the imperative—­as the default. The minor analytics invoked here have resulted in a closer scrutiny and reevaluation of the shape of urban space. Although specific to London, it has wider resonance for specifying the postcolonial city, across various locales, although ones contingent on what communities attest

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or negate the analysis. It shows, for instance, how livability is machinic and meshworked in that dwelling is never outside of an architectonic and infrastructural environment. It is by tinkering with the latter that the other-­than-­human migrant (or, for that matter, the human migrant too) is drowned in an unlivable milieu. Ethicoaesthetic invention that undoes the double bind of hostile design, in some instances even carried out by parakeets themselves when they peel back the wire cage, becomes an avenue for micropolitical action. Such avenues are amplified when we invoke a minor science of nonnative ecologies. These ecologies have been held captive by the statist science of invasion biology, which problematizes what nonnative populations can do only in terms of their impacts, whether actual or potential. The processes of recombinance outlined here join a small chorus of dissenting voices within invasion biology that query its problematization of ecology and judgments on nonnatives on the basis of a species’ origins.130 In a similar vein, the cosmopolitics of hospitality forges relations between evolutionary biology and urban theory in completely new ways. Niche construction through affect foregrounds parakeets as urban bricoleurs, actively modifying environments rather than retroactively fitting into them, in order to create a city that is much more “hospitable” to their own ends and doings.131 Niche construction is to evolution what a minor grammar is to urban theory; both stem from the possibilities of what ethicoaesthetic invention can do in an urban world where humans are only one among a whole cast of actors. As we have witnessed, parakeets migrantize London. They invoke a different micropolitics of ferality that has to do with being open to affective contagion, which can question routine order and unsettle deep-­ rooted habit. They foreground the emergence of a living city that is not only less anthropocentric but also more just on a number of accounts, not least in terms of how cities accommodate the stranger, the migrant, and outcast. These modes of livability forged with feral beings need to be made to count as necessary and valid, especially for a revitalized urban politics in light of the failure of the cosmopolitan imaginary. Yet the living city cannot be taken for granted, for ferality is one among other diagnostics. In a similar vein, the world that ferality heralds is one among other therapeutics. To further a wider urban ontology, we need to move from the aerial to the terrestrial, from the feral to the cultivated.

5 PASTORAL FORMATIONS

From Planetary Urbanization to Pastoral Worlds In 1976, and shortly after Delhi witnessed large-­scale slum demolitions during the Emergency, architect and housing rights activist Jai Sen wrote a remarkable essay entitled “The Unintended City.” Sen took the political and developmental imaginary of Indian urban planning and design to task, lamenting its Eurocentric outlook for drawing inspiration from cities that had “evolved under very different conditions” from those in India. The Indian metropolis, in contrast, was one where it was not unusual to see “a herd of cows . . . taking a quiet route across the central city,” or to witness “herds of goats returning home” at “the end of their permitted grazing time,” blocking “business car traffic” such that “a jam is the inevitable result.” In the bastis of an Indian metropole, “people sleep, eat and live next to and above cattle,” much to the chagrin of “social planners” who “consider this relationship to be ‘curious,’ abnormal and a health hazard.” This pastoral ethos, Sen argued, constituted the unintended city, a “society and city of the poor” that came about in spite of planning and majoritarian assembly. A radical vision of the metropolis, then, was to think of cities without the urban, especially if visions of the latter were colonized by a European imaginary of what the good city should look like and where privileged elites dictated who the exemplar of an urban citizen should be. “That a city should be urban,” wrote Sen, “may sound quite self-­evident, but it is becoming increasingly a 191

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questionable fact as to how ‘urban’ the cities of developing countries are. A great deal of evidence suggests that a new type of city is emerging,” and “what is demanded is a new view of cities.”1 Sen’s prescient argument is a reversal of the predominant gospel that urbanization always takes on a particular form, associated with building, capital, and so on. By freeing the city of an inherited vision, he opens up the possibilities of the city, still sustained, to be something else. Sen’s argument is upheld on two important accounts. First, India has 5.02 million free-­roaming cattle, and according to official estimates, 12,000 are in Delhi alone. Not all urban cattle are stray; a population of close to 9,000 animals is kept in metropolitan dairies,2 some of which are allowed to wander by their owners. Cattle graze in bazaars and ephemeral rubbish dumps, construction sites and derelict spaces. Metropolitan dairies continue to proliferate, in spite of attempts by planners, the city’s elites, the judiciary, and the state to expunge Delhi of its pastoral form—­imperatives that are steeped in colonial concerns regarding sanitation and postcolonial anxieties surrounding urban slums. Cattle, as Sen’s notion of the unintended city implies, continually challenge attempts to forge an urban without the pastoral. The animals evade capture, make do within landscapes of tarmac and concrete, and continually repurpose urban materials and infrastructure for their bovine doings. A pastoral ethos of the city does not wither away but persists and is continually renewed, particularly in the interstices and the interregnums produced in the relations between urban extensions and the core. Second, taking bovines seriously—­tracking their fleshy presence in archival repositories and as sentient beings in the lived city—­enables querying what qualifies as the urban and what is at stake in producing an urban theory for our time. The argument invoked by Sen could not be more different to that of neo-­Lefebvrian planetary urbanization and its calls for a new epistemology of the urban that has gained significant traction in recent times. Preferring “macrostructural forms of argumentation” over thick descriptions, and deriding analytics “derived from everyday categories of practice” for black boxing “the broader geopolitical and geoeconomic dimensions of contemporary urbanization,”3 this epistemology sees urbanization as a theoretical category and as a process rather than as “empirical objects” or bounded units, inexorably caught up in forms of worldwide capitalist restructuring and uneven spatial development.

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Planetary urbanization entails concentrated and extended urbanization. It transforms vast expanses of erstwhile “rural” areas and traditional “hinterlands,” mobilizing labor power for ever-­increasing extraction, production, and circulation such that urbanization becomes “the very tissue of human life itself.” An outside or “supposedly non-­urban realm has now been thoroughly engulfed within the variegated patterns and pathways of a planetary formation of urbanization.”4 Although its critiques of methodological cityism are pertinent, as is its call to view urbanization as a process, the current analysis deviates from neo-­Lefebvrian forecasts in three distinct ways. First, as Shubhra Gururani and Rajarshi Dasgupta have argued, qualifications of the urban in South Asia need to be posed as an agrarian question where “the agrarian and the urban are materially and symbolically co-­produced.” At the heart of this coproduction lie the ways “former pastoralists . . . willingly or by force, give up their land, long-­held practices of work, livelihood, kinship and social relations,” which in turn result in an “intensely contested politics of real estate, land, and infrastructure.” Reformulating the urban as an agrarian question reveals “a highly unequal and tense social-­ political landscape of access, inclusion and displacement.”5 Second, and in contrast to both views of the urban constituted in binary terms of an inside and an outside, as well as those positing a linear trajectory of the urban engulfing the nonurban, I work with a different set of analytical commitments. Here, the urban and agrarian or pastoral are immanent to one another, lying on the same plane and working on one another from within, albeit in historically specific ways. Rather than deriding certain forms of analyses as methodological cityism, the urban needs to be grasped via a number of scales and processes.6 Thus, third, this chapter is a different answer to neo-­Lefebvrian calls for “a new lexicon of sociospatial differentiation.”7 Such a lexicon is derived from archival and ethnographic experience. Contrary to neo-­Lefebvrian critiques of thick description being an unreflexive conversion of everyday categories into analytical commitments, such description grounds processes of sociospatial differentiation in their richness and specificity, drawing attention to processes and scales missed out in calls for planetary analyses. Cattle, along with forms of urban pastoralism, are intrinsically enmeshed in an intensely contested politics of urban access and exclusion. They are crucial to this book’s comparative gesture, which seeks to

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attend to the ways in which urban formations diverge and how such divergences are constitutive of that which we call urbanicity. The ways in which cattle have been policed, regulated, and expunged from Delhi while new forms of pastoralism continually emerge along and against the utopias of planners and the state are not so much a question of Indian cities catching up with European modernity. Nor is it about the postcolonial city following an evolutionary trajectory of urban form as it developed in the West, continuing along this pathway as urbanization becomes planetary. Rather, the story of cattle in Delhi needs to be read as a productive entry point for developing a different conceptual vocabulary, one that has explanatory power and is attentive to sociospatial differentiation. It does mean casting Europe’s metropolitan history as “a regional story,”8 but it need not be parochial, a silo of specificity and difference. In the nineteenth century, animal husbandry in European cities such as London was not uncommon, and clear-­cut divisions between rural and urban life were yet to emerge.9 Unease with “noxious trades” that generated smell and dirt, the development of railway infrastructure that enabled milk supplies to be transported from rural areas, and the “untamed sexuality of the animals” being freely expressed in “public streets” were all factors that led to the gradual decline and removal of metropolitan dairies.10 Although experiences and dynamics of animal removal vary across European cities,11 they can be located in a wider biopolitics of administering bovine life. Such biopolitical imperatives were, at times, cut-­and-­pasted onto Delhi, particularly in the colonial era, thus drawing attention to interconnected histories between India and urban Britain. At the same time, biopolitics also had to be reinvented, and it plays out unevenly, if not partially, in Delhi’s context. There is a rich body of emerging work on cattle in India.12 The cow has been mobilized as a symbol of right-­wing Hindutwa politics, leading to many atrocities committed on marginal groups across the country. Although influenced by scholarship on cattle, bovine symbolism, and politics in India, which have made important contributions to animal studies,13 my emphasis here is different. The focus of this chapter is to engage with cattle as an urban and agrarian question. How and why does a pastoral plane persist in the city, and in what way is it immanent to the metropolis and its spatial formation? What might urban (bio)politics look like if one started from such immanence? My wider

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argument in this chapter is that other formations—­in this case the pastoral—­reside within the urban. They do not wither away with accelerated urbanization but are continually invented anew. Three salient points regarding this argument can be offered at the outset. First, a pastoral ethos of the city suggests that distinctions between metropolis and pasture, or the urban and the agrarian, are not rigid binaries. Divisions are topological in that the two stretch, twist, and bend into one another. Second, although bovine lives and metropolitan practices centered on cattle are subjected to continual enclosure, fostered by uneven relations of property, ecology, and caste,14 urban habitat and habitation are continually refashioned by bovine mobilities and their place-­making itineraries, which can become sources of friction and urban contestation.15 Contra planetary urbanization, the reinvention of the pastoral shows how urbanization can be nonlinear. Third, the twin lenses of agrarian and urban studies prompt us to reevaluate the “entangled relationship between the outside and inside of capital,”16 a relation with significant implications for urban political economy that I shall develop in chapter 6. A view of a pastoral plane being immanent to the metropolis requires developing relational grammars and new composites of thought and method. I go about this endeavor through two corresponding sets of concepts in order to rethink sociospatial differentiation topologically: ecumenes emerging from bovine tracks and enclosures generated by urban striations. By ecumene, I am referring to a spatial ontology of the animal,17 a mode of being inexorably caught up with how a creature apprehends and dwells in the world. An ecumene emerges from the ethologies and mobilities of cattle themselves as they carve out a pastoral plane of habitation in the metropolis. It is historically situated, relational, and rhythmic, forged by the itineraries of bovines responding to ambient environments, practices of dairying, and everyday acts of provisioning by people. Striations, in contrast, are attempts to allocate space and order the presence and distribution of cattle. They create enclosures that strive to enforce binaries of an inside and an outside. Such binaries are not given but steeped in particular, colonial, histories and postcolonial legacies of ordering the urban. My use of striations and ecumenes resonates with what geographers call animal spaces, or the abstract spaces in which animals are fixed through classifications, systems, and tables, and beastly places, or other

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spaces forged by animals through “their own ‘beastly’ ways, ends, doings, joys and sufferings.”18 However, contra beastly places, ecumenes are not solely bound to the animal’s own world; rather, they are forged through conjoint relations of the bovine body in a force field that includes people, materials, and infrastructure. Unlike an animal spaces–­beastly places dyad, ecumenes and striations are not bipolar but topological; one can emerge or pass on from the other. This is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari refer to by the smooth and the striated. The former entails spaces of intensities and forces, with tactile qualities, while the latter are those that impose a plane of organization on movement, canceling out anomalous interactions.19 Ecumenes and the pastoral space they constitute are smooth; enclosures are striated. Together they provide an analytical vocabulary for grasping the uneven dynamics of urban transformations, but in ways that are immanent, topological, and attentive to the other than human.

Bovine Ecumenes In a slow but steady walk, Kaali, a cow owned by a lower-­middle-­class family, ventures out of a congested galli in one of north Delhi’s residential colonies. She passes by a metal-­welding workshop and a grocery store, then the basement of a residence converted into a godown for storing wheat, before turning into a crowded market. In the early morning, paan shops are beginning to open, with vendors hanging up wares wrapped in colorful plastic. One tosses a roti to Kaali as she walks; there is a pause, followed by a deft movement of the tongue before she resumes her journey. She emerges onto a wide Delhi road where cars whizz by—­ commuters desperate to avoid rush-­hour traffic. Kaali’s movement is purposeful and directed. She pauses here and there to inspect piles of ephemeral garbage, nosing around to see if they contain food, but each pause is momentary. She heads down a long path, past a Delhi Development Authority park that was once a pasture, along the Najafgarh drain, with its flowing effluents that unevenly distribute harm, to a large Municipal Corporation garbage collection point not far from a jhuggi-­ jhopri colony (informal settlement). Kaali grazes on freshly deposited waste with a herd of other cows from the vicinity, browsing through the plastic wrappers with her tongue, picking up bits, before a Municipal

Figure 5.1. Kaali grazing in a Municipal Corporation waste collection point and returning to residential colony in the evening. Photographs by author.

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Corporation waste picker shouts “Hai!” and shoos her away. The rest of the day is spent in the vicinity, grazing, resting, and ruminating. In the evening, she retraces her path, past the wall running along the Najafgarh drain, along the road behind a metro station to the narrow galli in the residential colony where Kaali’s owners live (Figure 5.1). Kaali’s quotidian trajectory, like that of many of Delhi’s 20,000 urban cattle,20 brings to life a topography of the city that is bovine, knitting labyrinthine market places, ephemeral garbage dumps, waste collection depots, and public parks. Bovine tracks, although seldom featured in mainstream accounts of urbanization, are most eloquently brought to life by Amita Baviskar in her pathbreaking work on the politics of urban mobility in Delhi. Taking Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” in completely new directions, Baviskar refers to how a cow’s “bovine amble traces maps that are etched deep in memory—­ associations between particular places and nourishment: this dalao (garbage dump), that row of vegetable vendors. The everyday practices of urban cows delineate a carefully crafted route and set of activities: from home to forage and then to rest, often on road meridians where the breeze from passing traffic helps keep flies away, before setting off homewards once again.”21 In Baviskar’s account, cattle come into the picture as fleshy, messy inhabitants of the city, not just animated constructs. They create openings for rethinking what practices count when attending to relations between the urban and the agrarian. Kaali’s quotidian movements are not simply superimposed on a city already laid out, where bovine tracks become part of a metropolitan palimpsest. Rather, her movements are those of a being that participates in the world; they are the movements of one who is an observer of the world. This statement is simple to those who live with animals in their everyday lives, but it appears revelatory for ethnographers. In the clamor to conduct “multispecies ethnographies,”22 this basic tenet has been occluded. If ethnographic practice, including the activity of tracking animals, is one of participant observation in more-­than-­human worlds, then we need to be attentive to how animals are also participant observers or observant participants. They might not be ethnographers, in that they do not put this world behind them and then immerse themselves in the act of writing (a task usually performed elsewhere),23 but

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they are observers who witness and notice, sometimes in ways that put their human counterparts to shame. Pushing Baviskar’s argument further, we could argue that Kaali’s tracks produce urban space. They bring to the fore a smooth cartography of Delhi that emerges in spite of the enclosure of pastures and the urbanization of erstwhile grazing grounds. Kaali’s trajectories are not dissimilar to the evocative bovine ambles illuminated by the geographer Kelsi Nagy in her work on cattle in Mysore.24 Once at the garbage collection depot, Kaali’s routine is fairly predictable. She spends an hour or two feeding, making the most of the household waste that is collected from nearby residential complexes, before lying down to ruminate in the afternoon. This is usually on a road meridian or on the footpath by a Delhi Development Authority park where it is relatively quiet, and where she might lie for a couple of hours unless disturbed. In fact, studies conducted elsewhere in India suggest that the places and times cattle select for rest are not random. They are active decisions made by observant bovines. Favorite locales for lying down are negatively correlated with the intensity of ambient noise.25 Such everyday actions of cattle are by no means unimportant, for it is through this everydayness that other urban worlds are constituted. Spaces of the city forged by cattle are smooth in that they have a “haptic” quality,26 one sensed and felt by bovine bodies. They constitute the animal’s ecumene. In contrast to von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt,27 frequently invoked in posthumanist theory to point to worlds that other-­than-­human creatures forge according to their neurological and physiological apparatuses and phenomenological sensibilities, and the emphasis of which lies on the side of the perceiving organism rather than the environment, the ecumene is about the inseparability of organism and space. Perception is always perceiving-­with the ambient world and is contingent on sentient habits and relational rhythms as much as on neurophysiological propensities. The ecumene, derived from the ancient Greek verb oikéō, “to inhabit” or “to dwell,” is a world composed through tracks and itineraries. It is simultaneously a mode of inhabitation and a map of dwelling, chiming with what Baviskar alludes to by maps etched in cows’ memories.28 The ecumene is vital for undoing the hylomorphic grammar of urban studies, which tends to reserve the

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act of inhabitation to humans alone. It opens up vistas for understanding how smooth, pastoral space is composed through other-­than-­human proclivities. Smooth space-­times of the ecumene and of urban pastures are nonmetric. They are inhabited “without counting.” “Striated space-­time,” in contrast, is measured and ordered, where “one counts in order to occupy.”29 Cattle and their sentient engagement with the urban environment are rhythmic, but these rhythms are not metric or tempered by a sidereal, capitalist organization of the working day. What matters are circadian rhythms and the rhythms of the lived, everyday city. Activity budgets of urban street cows indicate that they tend to feed and rest at specific times of the day, often following patterns as a herd. Individuals congregate and rest in groups during the day before venturing out to feed, collectively or sometimes alone. In urban India, such congregations often entail a process of “assembly,”30 as cattle form loose coalitions that take place through encounters rather than the strict social organization that might be witnessed in cattle herds in commercial dairies or farms. Often bovines on streets have different owners; unlike in farm settings, the animals do not spend all their time together. We might ask whether such an assembly might entail new forms of social organization in bovines emerging from encounters on urban streets. Circadian rhythms of free-­roaming cattle have been found to be different from that of farmed animals.31 Atmospheric conditions such as temperature and light, which are influential in dictating rhythms in farm environments, matter less than the patterned activities of people. Kaali’s habits are in part dictated by the timings of when people dispose of kitchen waste, when garbage is stacked in collection points, and when people might provision food for cattle on road meridians and other spots. Her habits emerge through the activities of a being who is an acute observer of the world, and her ecumene is the product of conjoint human and bovine rhythms. Such ordinary habits, inculcated through participation and observation, become crucial for the emergence of smooth space from the midst of striations. They result in the transition of the built environment into an urban pasture. Bovine wayfaring is composed of different durations. As I discovered in collaborative fieldwork with Gunjesh Singh, Urvi Gupta, and Priyanka Justa, Kaali will often venture into the jhuggi-­jhopri colony in

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the late afternoon in search of food. These forays through what is a narrow meshwork of lanes are brisk, targeted, and purposeful. They reveal the intimate knowledge she has of the informal settlement and its topography. Kaali passes by two-­wheelers and pedestrians, stopping at a vegetable vendor’s cart, sniffing to see if there is any food under the tarpaulin. She then moves deeper into the settlement, where houses appear piled on top of one another and where the border between residence and street is increasingly blurred. Kaali slows down where she knows there is a plastic bucket, pausing momentarily to inspect it for food. She continues, maintaining a steady pace, for the route she tracks is familiar, slowing down only when a known source of food lies ahead. For the ethnographer, whose endeavor is one of “feet following hooves,”32 it is easy to lose sight of Kaali. An unnoticed turn could mean the bovine goes missing in the labyrinthine settlement. Her next stop is at a place where someone has deliberately strewn a large bunch of pea pods for street cattle to consume. These acts of provisioning are not for people’s personal cows, but an act of hospitality extended to itinerant bovines that dwell in the city.33 Her brisk walk continues down an alley where people have hung clothes to dry on lines stretched from electrical poles. Kaali drinks from a plastic trough where water is kept for roaming cattle. These small acts of hospitality only become visible to an outsider when they are led by a cow through the arterial streets of the informal settlement. The bovine’s wayfaring brings to life places in the city that otherwise go unnoticed. Following Kaali’s amble back toward the street makes the latter feel like a much broader road. She saunters to a park in the informal settlement, littered with plastic wrappers and a few odd trees, where boys from the vicinity hang out. Kaali’s grazing amid a concrete labyrinth and its arterial alleyways comes to a halt. She lies down to rest and ruminate, sitting for a couple of hours, away from traffic and noise. In a manner akin to ambulant macaques, bovine tracks and wayfaring bring into view another city: that of the city-becoming-­minotaur. Cattle’s ecumenes, composed by more-­than-­human speeds and durations, reveal the shape of an urban pasture, one that is immanent to the city rather than existing on a separate plane. Ecumenes, as Kaali’s observant wayfaring reveals, are forged through what Baviskar calls the “everyday practices” of urban cows.34 They entail quotidian repetitions

Figure 5.2. Bovine ecumene: Kaali’s tracks (represented by a dark line) forge a smooth pastoral space amid urban striations. Cartography by author, with inspiration from Nagy’s (2020) evocative map of cattle in southern India.

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of quadruped movement in their varying durations (Figure 5.2), from prolonged periods of grazing at specific sites to hours spent lying down and ruminating, from short forays in search of food to more purposeful sojourns that cover considerable ground. Ecumenes are the product of dwelling, and “dwelling is tied not to a territory but rather to an itinerary.”35 Here distinctions between pasture and park, dairy and street are undone. This is not to say that striations wither away; several places are walled off from cattle, and many enclaves shun bovine presence. Although Kaali is a licensed cow, which means that her owners are permitted to keep her within urban limits, state dictate bars her from roaming freely in the city. Such curbing of bovine mobility is part of a long history of attempts to expunge the pastoral from the metropolis, to parse people and cattle into separate urban zones.

Urban Striations Endeavors to striate urban space—­to impose a plane of organization on bovine tracks and enclose the city from cattle and their owners—­hark back to Delhi’s colonial era. Current attempts to intervene and police cattle from the city’s streets are, in many ways, a continuation of the trends set in the first half of the twentieth century that, at its core, turned urban cattle into a problem. My aim here, however, is not to map all dimensions of administering bovine life, which extended to questions of meat and the politics of slaughter.36 Rather, my emphasis is on the itinerant bovines and urban dairies through which topologies of the pastoral and the urban might be animated. I begin with colonial concerns regarding health and sanitation that led to measures for curbing free-­roaming urban cattle. A number of regulations and bylaws were put in place to incentivize people to relocate their animals from the city, although these regulations were continually challenged by both urban pastoralists and the sentient ecologies of bovines. I then turn to events leading up to the design of the 1962 Delhi Masterplan, an intervention critical in rendering the city legible for postcolonial elites and assuring a model of sovereign control.37 Urban dairies featured prominently in the Masterplan, and I shall argue that planning’s attempts to impose order on the “haphazard and unplanned growth of Delhi”38 was one of regulating other than humans as much

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as it was about relocating industry, decentralizing commercial activity, and distributing population density. Charting this history of access and exclusion, allocation and redistribution furnishes other ways to grasp “the dialectic” of urban implosion and explosion that neo-­Lefebvrian theory calls for.39

Cultivating Order In the 1890s, the Municipal Committee of Delhi mooted the idea for taxing milch cattle kept for commercial purposes within city walls. Unsanitary conditions, deemed to be a “natural consequence of the occupation” that cattle owners pursued,40 were emerging as an object-­target of colonial governance, and the presence of cattle meant that costs for sanitation would continually increase. The milch cattle tax, introduced by the Municipal Committee, was not so much intended to recuperate sanitation costs as act as a disincentive for rearing bovines in the city. It was meant to “induce the dairy men to remove their cattle to some place in the suburbs.” However, as the secretary of the Delhi Municipal Committee observed in 1908, “the tax levied was so light that the dairy men preferred to pay it and stay where they were.”41 Taxes were raised again, but it had little effect in terms of relocating cattle “byres” and urban dairies. Keen to “deal more adequately with the owners of cattle,” whose animals not only caused problems for sanitation but also damaged “plants and shrubs planted on the Ridge and elsewhere,” the colonial government brought the 1871 Cattle Trespass Act to effect in Delhi in 1913. This meant that penalties could be imposed on cattle owners whose animals intruded onto cropland or wandered on public roads.42 A cattle pound was established in Delhi’s Civil Station, and the fines levied for animals straying into the Civil Lines—­the heart of colonial establishment at the time—­were double those imposed elsewhere.43 This framing of cattle as a civic and health problem witnessed, as its corollary, the rise of an apparatus aiming to render itinerant bovine bodies docile through incarceration. Five new cattle pounds sprang up in the city between 1916 and 1919, coinciding with the advent of the motor car in Delhi. Fines were doubled in 1920, largely as a result of concerns that “damage from cattle trespass” had “increased greatly.”44 This carceral apparatus of policing bovines came about at a time when a wider technology of

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government was coming into being, one that attempted to order Delhi’s urban bodies and render them “politically docile and productive of a secure capital.”45 In no way, however, were these attempts to striate space and order bovine mobilities a straightforward imposition of power on inert bodies. In fact, reading the archive along its grain, rather than against it, reveals how striations were about constant negotiations with the beastly itineraries of cattle and the reticence of their owners to contain their animals. In a letter from the secretary of the Notified Area of Delhi to the deputy commissioner in 1925, we learn how cattle had taken to grazing at night, “straying into compounds and damaging gardens.” “The havoc they have committed in certain localities, such as the Ridge,” the secretary remarked, “has been very great.” Officials and British residents “complain bitterly of almost nightly depredations against which they are powerless.” Not only did the animals alter their circadian rhythms, but also some “seem to have undergone a regular training with a view of straying successfully during their nocturnal rounds.” The cattle “not only jump walls but evade capture with a dexterity which, to say the least, is astonishing.” Most of these animals, which learned to subvert attempts to keep them at bay, belonged to Gujjar pastoralists “of Chandrawal village and those living in Timarpur,” just north of the civil lines. Gujjar pastoralists allowed their cattle to stray with “impunity,” and even displayed a “readiness” to pay fines, “both at the pound and in court.”46 Both Gujjar pastoralists and their cattle, we could argue, inhabited smooth space. A lively reading of the archive, attentive to how cattle are observing participants in the world, reveals how they constantly subverted colonial attempts to striate and impose order on the city. In response, the colonial British government sought to regulate grazing with greater zeal. Rules banning nocturnal grazing were put in place. Designated plots, such as those in the New Cantonment, were allocated for grazing so as to exercise control over bovine mobility and enclose cattle’s ecumene to particular parts of the city. Pastoralists had to obtain grazing passes, paying an annual fee of 5 rupees per head of cattle, in order to access these plots.47 Furthermore, the government also tried to incentivize the metropolitan population into becoming part of its regulatory order. Rewards were offered to “all persons who brought cattle found straying” to government pounds, and this amount was recovered from

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cattle owners when they came to free their animals—­a sum in addition to the impounding fee that pastoralists had to pay.48 There was thus a constant passage from the smooth to the striated, and vice versa. Although colonial imperatives sought to parse the agrarian from the urban or the pastoral from the metropolitan, in no way were distinctions between these categories rigid binaries. Increased punitive measures, however, were of limited effect in curbing itinerant cattle. “The animals are so trained,” authorities maintained, “that it is difficult to seize them and more difficult to drive them to the pound.”49 As Stephen Legg evocatively points out, the European liberal biopolitical project in India’s context was always incomplete. Although colonial Delhi witnessed considerable investment in calculation, planning, and disciplinary mechanisms, the “attempt to control the urban environment was by no means successful.”50 In fact, tracking cattle’s liveliness through archival repositories shows how the intensification of urban striations by colonial authorities led to a multiplication of smooth space. This is most vividly illustrated by concerns that arose in 1933, when the New Delhi municipality imposed further taxes on milch cattle. The government contended that this was in fact aggravating “the insanitary conditions prevailing in Delhi city,” as those “who keep cows for profit” were beginning to drive their bovines into the older municipality, where taxation rates were lower. “The present state of affairs,” the government argued, “is already bad enough,” and if taxation rates were not even across the city, all it would achieve would be a relocation of the problem in the form of an “influx of more cattle from the New Delhi Municipal limits.”51 Contrary to colonial hopes of ridding Delhi of bovines through taxation and impounding, a census conducted in 1935 found that there were close to ten thousand cattle within the city’s municipal limits.52 “Herded within the city” and straying “about its numerous and congested streets,” urban cattle were described as a prevailing “evil.” Stronger measures “to prevent such cattle from being a menace to traffic and the public” were proposed—­an endeavor, the government maintained, aimed “not to increase the revenue so much as to put an end to the insanitary conditions prevailing in the city.”53 According to a report from Delhi’s health officer, the main threats to urban sanitary order were cattle byres and the widespread prevalence of kutcha stables. They led to an

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“excessive breeding of flies,” which, as a “pest, is known to be the cause dysentery, diarrhoea and other bowel complaints.” The situation was not limited to older parts of the city but occurred in the new capital as well. Gazetted government officials were keeping many more animals than could be accommodated in their allotted space, while in the Indian clerks’ quarters, residents had made “arrangements with gawallas” or milkmen for rearing cattle. These milkmen purportedly “introduced 2, 3, or more cows” than the number allowed, and these were “tethered outside the Clerk’s quarters.” Overcrowding of cattle “resulted in a very serious state of affairs,” rendering it “quite impossible to either keep the area clean or prevent the growing fly-­nuisance in Delhi.” Prosecution was of limited efficacy in reducing cattle numbers, often on account of infrapolitical acts on the part of clerks and milkmen. When “gawallas are prosecuted, the clerks say the cows belong to them,” and when the clerks are prosecuted, the health officer remarked, milkmen step up and claim ownership of the cattle.54 The public health staff of New Delhi were “doing all they can to cope with the situation,” but, as the health officer argued, “it is quite impossible to relieve Delhi of flies” unless byres were built and attendants accommodated “to look after each animal if desired.”55 The issue was further compounded by “stray cattle” roaming “in large numbers on the Ridge and also in the Timarpur colony,” whose “dung-­droppings” on streets aggravated the “fly nuisance.”56 Numbers of stray or wandering cattle were also compounded by Delhi’s “migratory population,” who found it “too expensive to keep their own cattle in byres,”57 so they reared animals in the city’s streets. As Legg points out, the colonial government in Delhi strove to develop a “sanitary consciousness” but failed in creating a “biopolitical ‘health atmosphere.’” This was in part due to a lack of investment in biopolitical regulation, as the government was compelled to be financially stringent. What took grip in the absence of this resource was “a landscaping urge” that sought to “separate and contain the potentially threatening native population,”58 an impulse that extended to the containment of other-­than-­human movement.

Traps as Inverted Ecumenes To deal with disruptions to urban order posed by cattle, the Civil Lines Notified Area Committee in 1936 came up with the idea of installing a

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“movable cattle pound.” This cattle pound was a quadrangular device consisting of a strong iron fence with a gate in one corner, designed so that cattle could be lured in, and a temporary shed in another corner to house the animals. Initially set up in the Delhi Ridge “for experimental purposes,” the device, according to Notified Area authorities, “proved successful” in catching evasive animals that had taken to grazing at night. This movable pound was not only seen as a vital means to “minimize un-­lawful grazing” but was also deemed a measure that would increase revenues of the Notified Area committee through collections of fines. The movable device was no ordinary pound but, in the committee’s words, “a trap for catching cattle.”59 “Traps,” as the anthropologist Alfred Gell incisively points out, “are lethal parodies of the animal’s Umwelt.”60 Not only are traps a model of its creator, be the latter an individual hunter, a community, or the state, but they are also models of its victim. Gell provides a number of examples to illustrate this. Take rats, for instance; these animals poke around in narrow spaces and burrows. Traps for catching rats are prepared in the form of “an attractive cavity” that lays out, for the rodent, its “last, fateful foray into the dark.” They represent, subtly and abstractly, the “parameters of the animal’s natural behaviour, which are subverted in order to entrap it.”61 We might extend this insight to argue that traps are inverted ecumenes. Models of traps reveal the outward form of the victim; they also reveal the spatial world the animal is immersed in, and with which the trap must work. This is clearly articulated in the Civil Lines Notified Area Committee’s description of how the movable pound was to operate. Cattle “will go into the trap,” committee secretary Maninder Singh argued, precisely “because of the animal instinct of following other cattle along the same path.”62 In other words, the mobile pound intervened in the ecumene of cattle; it intervened in the world of an animal that even the colonial state had to accept was sentient and observant. The trap, laid along trails and trajectories forged through repeated movement and habit, functioned through inversion. The open itinerary of grazing cattle is closed by quickly shutting the iron gate. Unlike capturing cattle by chasing them, the mobile pound was effective precisely because it worked with the rhythms of bovine ecumenes and by taking an observant animal by surprise. As the Notified Area committee further

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elaborated, the trap would be “put up at night, on our own lands” and “on short cuts by which the animals enter.”63 As quintessential examples of smooth space, shortcuts are not only new, shortened trails generated by cattle’s own wayfaring; they also override the planned routes of urban order. To lay a trap, then, was about state intervention in smooth space, albeit for purposes of striating and reterritorializing urban pastures. Traps, however, are not merely technical devices. They are “quintessentially social,” revealing “a nexus of intentionalities”—­not only “between hunters and prey animals”64 but also between the colonial state and urban denizens in the former’s quest to produce the ordered city. The cattle trap enabled the colonial British government to overcome constraints posed by its own laws for impounding cattle, thus revealing how the state too can resort to tactics of creating smooth space, albeit for purposes of ordering and control. As per the Cattle Trespass Act of 1871, pounds could only be established in places determined in advance by the district magistrate. Any other animals found trespassing on cultivated or public land had to be “impounded in the pound established for the village in which the land is situated,” so no sanction could be accorded to a movable cattle pound. A trap, in contrast, was deemed “a means to seize cattle which otherwise are difficult to catch,” which needed no sanctions.65 They could be set up in smooth space to serve the colonial government’s landscaping urge to contain entities that threatened their idea of urban order. Traps, as Gell hints but does not quite articulate, bring about a spatial and ontological transformation. Through incarceration, they induce a shift from open itineraries and smooth spaces to enclosures and striated spaces. This is a transformation from the agrarian to an urban order. However, such transformations are in no way complete or settled. A census conducted in 1940 found that cattle numbers in the city had not come down despite the colonial government’s efforts. The municipal area of Old Delhi had 6,125 cattle, more or less the same number counted in 1935, while the New Delhi municipal area had 2,160 animals, only a thousand less than the figure a decade before.66 Some had abandoned cattle rearing, largely because cultivated urban land was being converted into dwellings, but “the stray cattle nuisance in Delhi” was “becoming a difficult problem and practically uncontrollable” as a “large number of cattle” were “brought [into] the area from surrounding

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villages and let loose.”67 The presence of stray cattle was further aggravated at the time of India’s partition in 1947. Because a majority of cattle owners who lived near Ajmere Gate, Turkman Gate, and Delhi Gate in the north of the city had left Delhi, “their cattle were let loose in the New Delhi Municipal area.” “The conditions prevailing at that time were such that no effective raids could be made by the Municipal Watch & Ward staff,” responsible for controlling cattle, and these animals “roamed about wherever they liked with impunity.”68 Attempts to rid the city of cattle continued after independence, drawing on the same colonial concerns over sanitation and a desire to inculcate a civic sensibility. At the same time, smooth spaces proliferated, largely on account of infrapolitical acts of both cattle and their owners—­ acts that become evident when cattle are tracked in the archives in ways that do not erase their beastly presence. The Delhi Municipal Committee lamented the presence of what they called Haria cattle, reared in villages in the southern part of the city, that were “very wild, shy” and “very difficult to handle.”69 Such cattle, belonging to Gujjar pastoralists, were “very difficult to catch” and “impossible” to impound “because when an attempt is made in this direction, a Haria cow simply lies motionless on the ground as if dead.”70 Not only were the animals evasive and agile but, in key moments, they also resisted capture by the state. The state was structurally constrained by antislaughter sentiment and laws that prevented killing cattle. “Even if any of them is caught by means of a rope,” the Municipal Committee continued, “it lies flat on the ground and refuses to move.” To impound these animals, lorries and thelās or carts had to be brought in,71 increasing both effort and cost. The Municipal Committee claimed that the Haria cattle were “so trained that they would not let anybody come near them.”72 Reports from the period continually emphasize that these cows were “specially trained”; they even mention how these bovine observers had learned to read human bodies. Haria cattle, according to on-­the-­ground accounts, could “recognize the municipal staff  ” and shied away from their presence.73 Resistance to impounding also came from the Gujjar herders and milkmen “who obstructed seizure of stray cattle” and used “physical force to rescue cattle” that the Watch and Ward staff had “roped in.” “As a result chowkidars,” or watchmen, were “forced to resist and lathi blows . . . [were] exchanged.” Occasions of forcefully releasing captured animals

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were not infrequent. The unwillingness of onlookers to provide evidence in court made it difficult for the state to pursue legal action. The infrapolitics of resisting state capture also entailed forms of correspondence between cattle and their owners. “When the gawallas,” or milkmen, “see the Municipal chowkidars approaching,” the Municipal Committee reported, “they shout in a particular way and thus make their cows, which are specially trained, to run away.”74 These, one could argue, were minor acts of subversion that came about through interactions between herders and their bovines; they confounded state attempts at imposing its organizational order on the city. From 1948 onward, the Municipal Committee set up even more cattle traps across different parts of the city to deal with “nuisance cattle,”75 but attempts to striate pastoral space created new problems. The state had already been incurring losses for almost a decade by impounding cattle, for the 1871 Cattle Trespass Act compelled it to “keep and maintain unclaimed cattle for a period of 14 days” before putting these animals up for auction.76 The amount recovered through fines and sales was not enough to recuperate the costs of feeding and maintaining the incarcerated cattle. A fivefold increase in fines, from 4 to 20 rupees, introduced by the Delhi Municipal Committee in hopes of deterring grazing and increasing revenue, only compounded the problem. Many animals, often individuals that were “scraggy, diseased and deformed,” went unclaimed as owners were reticent to pay increased fines. “When put to auction,” such animals did not “fetch more than a few rupees each,” and for some, no bids were made at all.77 The Municipal Committee complained that Delhi had no institutions for maintaining such cattle; indeed, people even refused to accept them as “free gifts.” As a result, the committee initially resorted to “the practice” of driving such animals “out of the limits of the Town after unsuccessful attempts to dispose them by means of auction.” However, the same cattle would “re-­appear on the scene of their previous ravages,” and when impounded again, they had “to be fed at public expense for 14 days” (Figure 5.3).78 The ethology of cattle and the actions of pastoralists show how the history of the city involved constant negotiations and uneven passages between smooth pastoral spaces on the one hand and striated metropolitan environments on the other. These passages suggest that the development of metropolitan form is not one of a linear transition from

Figure 5.3. Cattle pound, Delhi, 1954. Photograph by James Burke/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.

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the agrarian or pastoral to the urban, as teleological views of cities would have it. Rather, such passages from the smooth to the striated and vice versa are movements folded into one another, where the pastoral is immanent to the urban and can introduce variations to the latter from within. Imperial endeavors of creating a landscape of colonial order floundered,79 and attempts at striating bovine ecumenes were partial and incomplete. Nevertheless, they continued to exert an influence over Delhi’s postcolonial ethos, notably in the imaginaries and anxieties of urban planning.

Diagramming the City The question of dealing with cattle was reoriented with the Delhi Masterplan of 1962, an intervention that sought to order pastoralism and urban bovines on a far grander scale than preceding attempts. The Masterplan, as Ravi Sundaram argues in his groundbreaking analysis, was a transposition of colonial and bourgeois fears of “urban collapse and decay caused by the ‘blight’ of slums” onto postcolonial burdens of governance “confronted by claustrophobic urban space.” As the postcolonial elite’s answer to colonial inequalities, the Masterplan was meant to be a rational model of management that would combine “both claims for social justice and a technological dream-­world of the future” through planning and centralization.80 The Indian government sought help from the Americans to redesign urban Delhi, particularly from the Ford Foundation, an organization that had one of its largest bases in the city and whose agendas were mediated by the optics of modernization theory and development rhetoric so as to provide a counterforce to growing communism in Asia.81 A quintessential diagram, the Masterplan was based on a vision of order that sought to separate work, commerce, and industry and to inculcate proper civic citizenship. As Albert Mayer, an American architect and planner who had come to India in 1946 at Prime Minister Nehru’s invitation, and whom the Ford Foundation hired as a consultant for the Delhi project, put it, the aim of any plan was to “minimize internal frictions of space, the tensions of functional and social mix-­up.”82 Frictions extended to those engendered by cattle. A vital element of the Masterplan was to separate the pastoral and the agrarian from the urban. The logics of the Masterplan, as Sundaram points out, were hylomorphic, displaying clear admiration for Le Corbusier’s auteur imagination

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that combined “abstract freedom with the ability to imprint on built form.” The Masterplan was simultaneously a luminous arrangement, one that aimed to “redistribute populations and environments to allow for the free circulation of light and reason” while creating “new enclosures and hierarchies, nurtured by new surveys of populations and objects.”83 Nowhere is this will to impose a luminous order against the contours of other-­than-­human dwelling more explicitly stated than in Le Corbusier’s celebrated The City of To-­morrow and Its Planning, written in 1925. Le Corbusier introduces the modernist architectural imaginary by comparing the ways of man, the figure of reason, with those of the pack donkey, whose sinuous tracks are symptomatic of the failed, unplanned city. “Man,” writes Le Corbusier in a highly gendered, Apollonian vein, “walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going.” The “pack-­donkey,” on the other hand, “meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-­brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags,” taking “the line of least resistance.” The pack donkey is both material and metaphor. It is an allusion to the animal tracks that were often the basis of transport and freight in medieval towns. It is also an evocation of the inferiority and backwardness of those yet to become modern. Le Corbusier’s political aesthetics of the straight line—­which materializes in his famous design of the Chandigarh grid—­is pitted against “the pack-­donkey’s way.” The latter is capillary and implies “sickness or death,” while “the modern city lives by the straight line” and “is the proper thing for the heart of the city.” “The curve,” Le Corbusier decries, “is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralyzing thing.”84 Here we can read Le Corbusier as invoking the diagram of the modernist city par excellence: the abstract line that replaces rhizomatic pathways of cattle, the speed that leaves behind ruin and decay, the power of geometry that brings order. In the modern city, “the street is no longer a track for cattle, but a machine for traffic, an apparatus for its circulation, a new organ, a construction in itself and of the utmost importance.”85 That Le Corbusier chose quadruped movement as a counterfoil to rationality, equating the former with “heedlessness . . . looseness, lack of concentration and animality,”86 is no coincidence. It reveals how the politics and aesthetics of modernist planning—­very much the zeitgeist when the Delhi Masterplan was being drafted—­relegated other

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modes of inhabiting cities. Cattle and the trades associated with them were at the heart of what planning saw as in need of removal. Modernist architectural imaginaries interfaced with more local urban planning imperatives in the genesis of the Delhi Masterplan. In 1956, the newly formed Town Planning Organization, largely composed of local planners, released an Interim General Plan for Greater Delhi. Although overshadowed by the main 1962 Masterplan, this document, as Sundaram persuasively shows, “[provided] a critical optic of early postcolonial urban planning.” Views expressed in the interim 1956 plan bore “almost a representational anxiety, borne by the need to balance the claims of modern urbanism, the ‘social question’ left by colonialism, and the legitimacy of the plan itself.” After “indicting colonial urban design for dividing Old and New Delhi,” but lauding it for having preserved urban form, the interim plan called for “a rational land use that would separate residential, commercial and industrial spaces.”87 Crucial to this spatial reordering were envisaged slum clearances, the displacement of “noxious trades” and “non-­confirming industries” to locales outside the city, and the relocation of private dairies and gwalas to specially designated areas. Discussions regarding designated areas were already underway in municipal and state government circles. Both the interim 1956 plan and the 1962 Masterplan tapped into these visions. Although the 1962 Masterplan is heralded as a break with colonial urbanism, it was in closer proximity to the colonial landscaping urge than is commonly assumed.88 In the early 1950s, the government proclaimed that “the stray cattle nuisance in Delhi State has reached the stage” where “the situation has become quite abnormal.”89 Close to 1,800 animals were rounded up from the city in two months, and rates of fines substantially increased, but neither measure had any “deterrent effect” (Figure 5.4). Many animals roamed the city freely at night. In the government’s words, such cattle had become semiwild. Arrangements to spray the cows with colored water were made so that the police could take stringent action against cattle owners the next morning. Captured cattle were branded and given away, free of charge, to a contractor who deported the animals outside the city limits. The contractor’s role was to ensure that the bovines did not return to Delhi.90 Nonetheless, such “action taken under the ordinary

Figure 5.4. Cow walking through the street, Delhi, 1953. Photograph by Frank Horvat.

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provisions of law” had, by and large, “proved ineffective.” Nor would the enactment of new, more stringent bylaws, the government opined, “meet the abnormal situation.” Urban cattle and their persistence were deemed “grave and deep rooted maladies.” “Drastic remedies and stern measures” were needed to deal with this situation.91 The state realized that imperatives of rendering Delhi free of cattle would not work unless the problem of urban milk supply was adequately addressed. “With the increase in the population of New Delhi due to the influx of refugees,” a 1949 report from the Municipal Committee states, “milk has become scarcer and its quality worse than ever. In their frantic search for securing decent supply of good quality of milk, the majority of upper and middle class citizens are desiring of maintaining their own milch cattle.”92 The dairy trade was “in the hands of different private agencies, who in their anxiety to make profits” were “resorting to heavy adulteration and malpractices.” The state made elaborate plans to constitute a centralized milk supply scheme, which would involve rehabilitating urban dairies that, in municipal areas alone, included “2,545 private and commercial cattle stables” housing “6,600 animals in milk, 100 dry animals and 4,600 young stock.” Dairy producers and their animals were to be “evicted from the Delhi urban area” and resettled in “specially established cattle colonies,”93 thus enabling “authorities to keep some effective check on the quality of milk.”94 In fact, eliminating cattle from urban areas was part of a national plan. Dairy experts and various commissions looking into the matter of cattle wanted Delhi and its proposed model of dairy cattle colonies to be a blueprint for regulating the milk supply in other cities of the country. “Delhi is not only one of the largest cities in India. It is the Capital of the country and the seat of Central Government,” stated an expert committee report on cattle commissioned in 1955. “It is, therefore incumbent on the Government of India to ensure that the Delhi plan . . . presents to the various States in the country a model which can be adopted by them.”95 These views fed into the 1956 interim plan. The removal of dairies, and therefore milch cattle, from the city, Indian planners argued, “depends on the speed” with which “the Delhi Milk Supply Scheme is able to meet the major demand of the city for milk.”96 The two-­volume Work Studies, a run-­up to the 1962 Masterplan containing research produced in collaboration with town planning staff,

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reiterated this argument. “With the better milk supply schemes, cattle,” the Work Studies state, “will be practically eliminated from urban areas and the problem will get automatically solved.”97 An affiliated set of currents relegating the pastoral emerged from what Sundaram calls “slum anxiety”: a technics of seeing where slums become “the imaginative embodiment of urban decay and postcolonial shame.”98 The planning documents of 1962 were in many ways anticipated by a major survey of Delhi’s slums conducted by the Bharat Samaj Sevak, a social service organization. The survey described the slum as a “miserable environment,” breeding “despair and a fatalistic approach to life.” Delhi’s “slum situation,” the survey contended, was aggravated by noxious trades and “the practice of keeping animals in slums.” Cattle were predominantly reared for commercial purposes, but only about a third of households had provisions for stables. They housed animals in “whatever open ground that is available or, in the alternative, share the dwellings with their owners.”99 The survey called for “remedial measures” that included a prohibition against keeping animals in slums and congested areas, in addition to a more widespread “removal of cattle and obnoxious trades from the city.”100 For urban planners, the solution to the cattle problem rested in zoning practices. Rooted in the influential metropolitanist tradition of the time, zonation was an argument for a continuation of the nineteenth-­ century urban form, including “a strong downtown with its urban bourgeoisie, a factory zone with working people.”101 It was, as Sundaram argues, a model of the productive city based on a capital–­labor relation with a high centralization of infrastructure. We could say that zonation was inherently a diagrammatic strategy of organizing metropolitan space that entailed a “mixing of non-­formalized pure functions,” encapsulated by the abstract geometry of straight lines and zonation, “and unformed pure matter,” or the canvas of the city that planners worked on.102 As the interim 1956 plan spelled out, zonation was about promoting “public health, safety, and the general moral and social welfare of the community,” to be achieved by parsing pastoral and agrarian elements of the city from those deemed urban. “Village trades viz. keeping milch cattle” were to be moved to designated “urban villages,” not only to “strengthen the rural economy” but also, through centralization, to provide “cheap milk” to the metropolitan populace (Figure 5.5).103

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Figure 5.5. Diagramming the city: Zonation—­Interim Plan, 1956. Reprinted from Delhi Development Authority, Master Plan for Delhi, 1957, volume 1 (New Delhi: Delhi Development Authority, 1957).

The main 1962 Masterplan reproduced some of the above suggestions verbatim,104 indicating that local planners and postcolonial anxieties had an important say in the spatial reimagining of the city. Regulating other-­than-­human denizens of the city was in no way an epiphenomenon; it was at the center of this postcolonial diagram of power. Diagrams, as discussed earlier, are a “presentation of the relation of forces unique to a particular formation,” and they entail a “distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected.”105 As historian Awadhendra Sharan points out, the trope of the rural—­and by extension the agrarian and pastoral—­in the Masterplan entailed a “nationalist

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modernization” of the colonial language of nuisance and environmental blight. “Rural persons and rural industrial processes” were made to “stand in the place of the native, as that which was prior and inferior and in need of transformation.” The task before planners such as Albert Mayer was to pave a transformation from a rural sensibility “to one of engaged civic disposition.”106 Cattle and rural life were not unfamiliar territory for Mayer. Reflecting on rural development work that he conducted in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, in 1955, Mayer decried the problem of stray cattle. “As long as cattle roam in the village street,” he wrote, “even a modest degree of village sanitation is difficult to maintain.” Preempting the Masterplan’s condemnation of rurality and squalor, Mayer commented on how “the Indian villager” was reticent to build cattle stables, on account of having “for centuries been used to living with cattle close at hand” in the cramped spaces of his “front room or yard of his house.”107 Removing cattle and redistributing pastoral space was thus a vital element of the Delhi Masterplan’s imaginary, for it would not only improve “efficiency, production and working conditions” but would also generate “healthy surroundings under which people will live and work.”108 As “a visual and geographical device”—­a diagram of power—­the Masterplan rendered urban planning into “the naturalized science of the postcolonial city.”109 However, “there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up,” points that are “unbound.”110 These unbound points escape the fold of urban order and the assemblages it strives to create. In the mid-­1960s, shortly after the completion of the Masterplan document, there were two thousand dairies within the capital, harboring a cattle population of nearly twenty-­five thousand animals.111 The MCD’s licensing department was entrusted with the task of removing “encroachments made by the squatters on footpaths, road berms and roads and rounding up of stray cattle.”112 The “catching, taming and disposal of stray and wild cattle” were imperatives dictated by both local government as well as the national gosadan scheme under the country’s Second Five-­Year Plan.113 Nearly five thousand cattle were being caught every year by MCD staff. Those animals deemed productive were transported to transit camps and then distributed free of cost to “bonafide breeders, Gaushala institutions and farmers’ cooperatives” in neighboring states “for breeding purposes.”114 Despite intensified efforts to remove cattle, estimates indicate that Delhi still had

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six thousand free-­roaming animals on its streets.115 Almost 80 percent of Delhi’s cattle owners, particularly gwalas and dairies operating in unlicensed premises, let their animals loose at night so that they could graze undetected by MCD staff. Such cattle, seldom fed regularly or at fixed hours by their owners, grazed in an urban pasture, living “on crops in fields, vegetables in kitchen gardens and market squares, shrubs, plants and the grass in gardens and parks.”116 A reduction in maintenance costs was a major incentive for letting animals graze in the city. Time and again, the MCD emphasizes how dairy owners “prefer to let their cattle stray about and have free feed” despite the threat of fines.117 Those “operating in unlicensed premises” found it “profitable to let the animals loose.” Cultural sentiment and protection afforded to cattle meant that “a rampaging cow is seldom harmed.”118 The escalation of such practice was the beginning of the new pastoral regimes one witnesses in the city today. By the mid-­1970s, the MCD was beginning to impound and auction over ten thousand animals each year.119 Surprise raids were conducted, cattle were caught and released on the borders of the Delhi state, and there were intensive efforts to deal with the problem of surplus cattle—­animals deemed superfluous—­through sterilization and castration. (Debates on surplus cattle stem from Malthusian arguments regarding overpopulation, a theme the next chapter addresses.) The state even mooted a plan to sell impounded cattle at nominal rates to landless villagers in neighboring Haryana. Each of these efforts was undermined: dairy owners incited public anger and thwarted raids by describing municipal staff as “butchers from slaughter-­houses”; there was stiff opposition and hostility to castration, and in many instances, it had to be completely abandoned; and Delhi traders purchased cattle meant for landless Haryana villagers through benāmi or anonymized bids.120 The MCD conceded that “it has not been possible to completely eradicate cattle nuisance,” arguing that this was because of a lack of organized dairies. “Unauthorized dairy owners and other individual owners” find the trade “so lucrative that imposition of fines has had no effect on them.” Even the “launching of prosecution is not [a] deterrent.”121 In fact, as attempts to striate the city and expunge pastoral elements intensified, smooth spaces multiplied. Attempts to organize Delhi according to colonial and postcolonial logics, including the imposition

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of sedentariness on itinerant cattle, led to the opening up of patchworks of new smooth spaces. The latter was the product of both bovine and human activity, often involving coalitions between the two. To counter this proliferation, the MCD, in the late 1970s and 1980s, began assisting the state government to relocate urban dairies to designated “resettlement sites.”122 This endeavor to relocate sixty thousand cattle to ten “dairy colonies” was firmly rooted in the zonation logics of the Delhi Masterplan. “Rehabilitation,” the state argued, was being done with “the view to remove the unhygienic and insanitary conditions and traffic hazards being created by these cattle in the congested areas.”123 However, as the MCD remarked, “during various raids in zones, the attitudes of the people had become hostile.”124 The multiplication of smooth spaces as a result of striations gave rise to a different pastoral formation, one that can be seen as a patchwork woven by bovine tracks and the vicinities they juxtapose.

Patchwork Urbanism The archival record of how particular planes of organization were imposed on the city reveals that bovine ecumenes—­including those of cattle like Kaali—­are not simply a given. Rather, they are products of situated histories where the agrarian or the pastoral has been immanent to the development of urban form. Despite colonial government and postcolonial state effort, cattle and urban dairies have never been completely jettisoned from the metropolitan environment. It would therefore be a mistake to view the history of Delhi’s urban cattle as an incomplete unfolding of a biopolitical project rooted in western modernity, where the city is stuck in an interim stage of development as it strives to become a European metropolis. At stake here is a different genesis of urban form where, contrary to the planetary urbanization thesis,125 the urban continues to be pastoral in some of its aspects; indeed, it is continually refashioned by bovine mobilities. This pastoral regime of the city, and consequently the ecumenes of cattle, underwent further shifts in the 1990s as India liberalized its economy and Delhi’s built environment witnessed a phase of rapid, uneven expansion. Urban intensities—­material arrangements of the city and the forces through which such arrangements congealed and coalesced—­were

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redistributed along two important lines. The first pertained to the decreasing profitability of keeping cattle, acknowledged even by official planning documents. “It is accepted fact,” Delhi’s Eighth Five-­Year Plan stated, that “only high yielding cattle can be [profitably] kept in the [Union Territory] of Delhi” because costs of “land, labour, feed stuffs and sheds” were fast becoming steep.126 The second entailed further enclosure and building on already limited grazing areas. For instance, Vasant Kunj, where many dairies had been relocated in the 1970s, once had an open grazing field for 2,700 buffalo. By the early 1990s, these grounds had been converted to a built environment through a rapid housing expansion.127 Many Gujjar pastoralists found themselves embroiled in long legal battles with the state and real estate companies over land ownership.128 Feeling the pinch, cattle owners were reticent to reclaim animals impounded by the Municipal Corporation, with figures suggesting that in some cases, the number of unclaimed cattle was as high as half the number caught.129 This redistribution of urban intensities led to the emergence of a new pastoral plane, one constituted via patchwork. The latter might be understood as a nonhylomorphic constitution of metropolitan space woven through bovine tracks like Kaali’s. Unlike conventional grazing land, which is allotted and marked by a perimeter, patches have no center. They are “amorphous,” composed of “juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of ways.”130 It is through the ambulant tracks of a bovine bricoleur that patches are juxtaposed and sutured, with tracks through the street in a residential colony serving as both dairy and stable, with roads’ berms furnishing places for Kaali and other cattle to rest and ruminate, with municipal garbage collection depots acting as sites of provisioning, and with congested lanes in a jhuggi-­jhopri colony performing the work of pastures. Patches are constituted by bovine movement and are inseparable from them, just as they are inseparable from the bodily comportments of an observant being that participates in and responds to the world. The emergence of an urban patchwork via cattle itineraries travels in a direction opposite the striation of pastoral space; it entails space becoming smooth amid striation. This passage, however, is not without friction. From the late 1980s onward, experiences of the road in Delhi fundamentally transformed as the city began to be increasingly

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organized around automobiles and travel. “Road culture,” Sundaram argues, “mobilized new discourses on speed,” with roads quickly becoming “a site of conflict, between passengers and drivers, bystanders and motor vehicles”131—­to which we might add conflict between bovine itineraries and vehicular velocity. “Thousands of cattle are idling around the streets,” remarked a traffic police officer. Cows were “clogging” Delhi’s roads, interrupting the flow of traffic, and keeping the advent of a new world of velocity and spectacular consumption at bay. A “few drivers toot their horns at them or gently bump them with the fender,” but “not a soul takes the pain to move cows off the road—­they all skirt around them.”132 Accidents resulting from trying to avoid hitting cattle fueled the “unending flow of images of death, of broken human bodies and crushed machines” that had come to mark Delhi’s roads, which were inexorably caught up in frictions between “the new urban design of a city of speed and efforts to desperately manage a world of motor-­ machines that seemed to have lifelike effects: contingency, unpredictability, and excess.”133 It was cattle’s ethologies—­or, in the Delhi high court’s words, their “erratic behaviour”—­that made bovines an “immediate road hazard.” Negligence on the Municipal Corporation’s part, the court observed, led the stray cattle problem to “spiral out of control.”134 At work here, to invoke Le Corbusier again, was the modern city striving to refashion the street from “a track for cattle” to “a machine for traffic, an apparatus for its circulation.”135 Attempts to drive out cattle intensified, fueled by older colonial logics of sanitation and postcolonial anxieties regarding rurality and slum life, but equally fueled by a new appeal to aesthetic order promoted by urban elites136 keen to remove Delhi’s tag as a cattle capital. In response to a public interest litigation filed by Common Cause, an NGO with a history of securing judicial orders against unauthorized residential colonies, the Delhi high court observed that urban cattle depicted “a very dismal picture of the capital.” “The capital city of Delhi,” it stated, “should be a show window for the world.” Harking back to the Delhi Masterplan, the judiciary flagged zoning violations. It noticed that the MCD had relocated only 37,000 out of the planned 60,000 cattle to the ten dairy colonies designated in the early 1980s, largely because “land meant for dairy” had been diverted “for other purposes,” including building and urban regeneration. With close to 2,700 unauthorized dairies and 14,000 cows still

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extant in municipal zones, there was an evident “disparity between what was envisaged by the planner and what was realized after execution at the ground level.” Using a vehicular metaphor, the court lamented that “stray cattle on the roads” were sending “a wrong signal.” An order demanding that Delhi be “made free” of stray cattle in two years was issued.137

Relocation and Its Discontents An intensification of cattle capture followed court dictate of removal, bringing new tensions to the fore, particularly around infrastructures for rehoming animals. Government-­run gaushalas or gosadans—­shelters for unclaimed and old or unproductive animals—­were either on the decline or, when extant, did not function efficiently.138 Gaushalas had been developed as institutions for housing unproductive animals and for improving cattle breeding in Delhi since the mid-­1930s,139 and by the mid-­1950s, the city had eight state-­run gaushalas with 575 acres of allotted grazing land.140 In the early 1990s, two of the gaushalas had closed down, and at the turn of the millennium, the six extant shelters only had capacity for 8,000 animals.141 This was nowhere close to the number of cattle being caught by the MCD, which ranged from 14,000 to 30,000 animals annually.142 To counter this shortfall, the Delhi government began allotting considerable expanses of land to various NGOs to set up new gaushalas, in hopes that they would help put “an end to the ‘menace’ of abandoned cattle” on the city’s roads.143 Older policies of discouraging itinerant cattle through the imposition of fines gave way to much more stringent actions. Cattle owners had only three days to retrieve captured animals, after which cattle were taken to a gaushala. The fines and transport costs, amounting to 65,000 rupees, were sometimes more than what the animals were worth.144 As a result, over half the animals went unclaimed. The MCD commented on the reappearance of cattle, stating that they sometimes caught the same animal twice. It was suspected that owners later retrieved their animals from gaushalas, which were not under municipal authority. The gaushalas’ role in handling cattle ended once unclaimed animals were transported to cattle shelters. “After that it is anyone’s guess how and why the cattle return,” remarked an MCD official. “The roads just get refilled.”145 Dairy owners’ using political connections to force the release of seized cattle was not unknown. The MCD claimed that the city had a

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“milk mafia” that wielded considerable political clout and was “the biggest factor standing in the way of meeting the court order of clearing cattle.”146 Operating as it was under constrained circumstances, the MCD was compelled to make concessions. These were vital for the emergence of a patchwork urbanism. Of significance was the MCD’s adoption of a policy to only declare dairies set up after 1981 as unauthorized, therefore refraining from relocating urban dairies that had been established earlier. This went against the Masterplan’s vision of shifting all dairies to designated zones, and the MCD was reprimanded by the court for failing to relocate a single dairy in five years.147 The MCD’s stance on dairies drew a thin line between what was permitted and what was forbidden; this fostered itinerant cattle. As an urban cattle owner remarked, “No one has told us not to let [cattle] go onto the road. . . . We have to let them go out, so they can eat the grass and food off the streets.” “If someone complains, we fetch the cow and bring it back.”148 In 2009, the MCD also reversed some of its no-­cattle policies by allowing people to keep one milch animal at home, provided they obtained a license and prevented the animal from straying.149 The state’s imperative of relocating dairies to designated colonies outside the city reveals how attempts to control and order pastoral space continued to be fraught with their own challenges and lapses. In 2004, on the basis of zoning regulations drawn up in the Masterplan, the Delhi government identified Ghoga, located in the city’s northwest outskirts, as a potential site for a dairy colony. According to the MCD, dairy owners were given opportunities to book prospective plots in the identified colony, and their eligibility was to be judged according to the number of cattle each applicant owned.150 This initiative was deemed to give dairy owners “a last chance to rehabilitate themselves in a proper recognized dairy farm.”151 By 2007, there were close to 11,000 applications for plots in the Ghoga dairy site. However, as many as 1,905 dairies located within the city remained indifferent to the proposed relocation and did not apply. The high court ordered strict action, stating that these remaining dairies should not be “given any further indulgence by extending the time for making applications” to move.152 By 2011, the MCD had spent close to 200 million rupees on the Ghoga dairy colony project, but fewer than 300 of the city’s 2,300 dairies had been relocated.153 Many dairy owners complained about relocating

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to Ghoga. Their reluctance stemmed from the fact that the colony was located on the city’s outskirts, so it was “impossible for dairy owners operating from other parts . . . to shift their base there.”154 For small-­ scale dairy owners with limited capital, relocation was compounded by rules laid down by the state. No applicant could take possession of a plot until full payment had been made to the MCD, and not before they had begun constructing a shed on the allocated piece of land. Applicants who failed to do so often witnessed MCD authorities seizing cattle from their dairies within the city,155 therefore holding already precarious dairy owners to ransom. In 2016, a further eighty-­six illegal dairies were relocated to Ghoga by the MCD, but the state’s imperative to remove all dairies from the metropolis had, by and large, failed. As an MCD official remarked, “Ghoga lacks basic requirements that are needed to run a dairy colony.” Notable was the lack of transport and infrastructure to distribute milk from the city’s outskirts. “The illegal dairies, therefore, got re-­established and controlling stray cows took a hit too.”156 Those who moved to the dairy rued the loss of opportunities. “Why will people shift when they are getting a better rate for milk and other products in the city?” asked one cattle owner who shifted his dairy to Ghoga. “When we came here, we were promised that a supply chain will be developed . . . and that we could sell milk at the market rate to a single vendor. But currently we neither have our own contacts to whom we give milk or we sell it individually—­at two rupees less than the market rate.”157 Much to the MCD’s chagrin, informal housing began to spring up in Ghoga. Many of these structures were built on existing stables and now accommodated families who used the dwellings for residence. Irked that the dairy colony would become a shantytown, the MCD served eviction notices and even partially demolished one house. The president of the Ghoga Dairy Owners’ Association, while noting that dairies should not be used solely for residential purposes, stated, “The Corporation should relax its norms and allow people to live in these dairies.” “In villages,” he added, “people usually live near their cattle.”158 Rurality had come back full circle to haunt the Masterplan.

A Pastoral Ethos Patchwork is vital for understanding how the pastoral is immanent to the urban. Dairies and bovine ecumenes are not solely an outside that

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gets enclosed, built up, and gentrified, although this might often be the case, but also form an urban plane that is continually forged anew. Patchwork has a makeshift quality. It operates in gray zones and can arise through loopholes and lapses in laws and surveillance, witnessed, for example, in the instance of Kaali, a registered cow that is allowed to wander on streets against the dictate of municipal regulation. Although patchwork shares elements of human resourcefulness and maneuverability outlined by anthropocentric formulations of jugaad economies,159 the latter does not encapsulate a suite of other relations in play.160 Patchwork results in other-­than-­human productions of space; the itineraries of Kaali and her bodily comportments, like those of many other free-­ ranging urban cattle in Delhi, are part of the improvisation that brings an urban pasture into being. A patchwork urbanism can in fact be understood as “an accumulation of vicinities,”161 arising through the resourcefulness of dairy owners as well as the sentient habits of cattle and the city mapped by their itineraries. Here we might draw further distinctions between striated spaces of urban organization and patchwork or smooth, pastoral space. On the one hand, “striated space,” posited by the diagrammatic logics and the zoning strategies of the Masterplan, “is defined by the requirements of long-­distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of reference.” On the other hand, patches are haptic spaces that are auditory, olfactory, and tactile. Reversing the primacy of vision, in patches, “the eye itself may fulfil [a] nonoptical function.”162 Take road dividers, which are built to regulate traffic and impose a spatial order on urban mobility. Cattle invert this order by drawing the dividers into their own activities of being and doing. They become places to ruminate after a morning’s graze, with the animals sitting nonchalantly, twitching their ears and flicking their tails every now and then to ward off flies. Dividers are relatively quieter than footpaths, where there is constant pedestrian motion. They are infrastructures that furnish haptic affordances, becoming locales to be other than human amid speeding city traffic (Figure 5.6).163 A realization of these affordances by cattle results in a smooth pastoral space emerging from striations. Traffic dividers also become spaces of commensality. People on their way to work pause and put out food for cattle on these apparatuses

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Figure 5.6. Cattle repurposing infrastructure [above]. Dividers as spaces of commensality [below]. Photographs by author.

meant to foster the circulation of traffic (Figure 5.6), strewing a range of foodstuffs, from vegetable peels to rotis made especially for the animals, as it is considered auspicious to feed cows. A motorist or pedestrian will pause, empty the contents of a polythene bag or plastic box onto the divider, and perform a salutation or prayer, sometimes even touching an animal’s hooves as an act of obeisance, before continuing on. These brief, passing encounters are nonetheless vital for how patches

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emerge, for the latter open via the wayfaring of people as much as they do from a bovine ambulation slowing down or halting. In some parts of the city, matkās, or clay pots, are fixed into the soil in the middle of a divider in order to regularly provision the street cattle. This is convivial design stemming from micropolitical acts that undo the double bind of hostile urban design.164 Even though the city is striated into a space from which cattle must be expunged, and even though the road is transformed into an apparatus for the circulation of traffic, the infrastructures that enact these striations are modified so that bovines might subsist. These amendments of infrastructure are not heroic activities of rebellion or a radical transformation of the metropolis. Nor are they moments that “blast open new theoretical geographies.”165 Rather, they are mundane, ordinary acts through which the urban is rendered habitable to other than humans, and a more hospitable city becomes possible. Patchwork is tied to what one could term a pastoral ethos of the city, an ethos forged with bovines and their capacities to affect and be affected. Like the electrical grid rendered into an arboreal world by macaques, a patch is also “sonorous and tactile,”166 although it has a different corporeal and affective history. A pastoral ethos is inexorably caught up in the genesis of metropolitan form, both in terms of attempting to impose order on the city by expunging it of bovines and multiplying the patches that craft urbanicity anew. As Jai Sen provocatively remarks in his essay on the unintended city, “the road” for urban development envisioned by planners is linear, “a one-­way road” leading “from the village to the city.” “But commonsense tells us that roads go two ways.”167 Sen’s perceptive observations tell us that the pastoral does not wither away as cities hurtle toward capitalist organization or as planetary urbanization transforms everything in its ambit. Rather, the pastoral constantly deterritorializes this organization of the urban, making it reel in bovine, quadruped directions.

The Urban in a World of Pastures The urban is not a formation where the pastoral is that which is cast outside or erased. Rather, it is a formation constituted by the pastoral from within. But urban formations also continually reinvent their pastoral form, where other-­than-­human denizens repurpose brick and tarmac,

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infrastructure and streets. The pastoral ethos of the city, as Delhi’s metropolitan history reveals, is not so much a story of how cities of the Global South vary from the telos of European metropolises, where the latter are considered the norm. Rather, it is one that casts aside histories of European cities as a regional phenomenon. Equally, a pastoral ethos decenters analytics drawn from European experience and furnishes an alternative set of vistas for grasping urbanization as an uneven, dynamic process of sociospatial differentiation—­one that has important implications for rethinking urbanicity. We could therefore contemplate whether the world-­making activities of the observant bovines we witnessed in Delhi are not an aberration but perhaps something more routine in terms of how the urban unfolds in many parts of the world. This harks back to Sen’s provocation for thinking about cities without the urban,168 if by the latter we mean a staid and formulaic story line of the development of metropolitan form, replete with the usual processes of informality and enclosure, gentrification and the expansion of capital, where many other intersecting modes of existence are simply swept aside. The provocation here is to strive for another conceptualization of contemporary and historical urban experience that might begin with attending to “cities in a world of pastures” alongside calls for engaging “cities in a world of villages”169 and “cities in a world of cities.”170 The pastoral ethos of the city seeks to understand neo-­Lefebvrian forecasts of complete urbanization171 in an entirely different way. To make meaningful analytical distinctions and to draw out their political implications, we have to find a spatial vocabulary that listens to and describes what archival repositories and ethnographic attention to bovine lives reveal. The concepts developed here—­bovine ecumenes and smooth, pastoral space; urban striations and the patchwork that arises from them—­help us articulate patterns of uneven spatial development without resorting to the excesses of planetary urbanization. Far from being “blunt conceptual tools,”172 they resituate the urban as an agrarian question, albeit in ways that deviate from more established accounts.173 This spatial vocabulary is less about trucking in dualisms of the urban and the agrarian and more about the immanence of the pastoral to both the genesis and ongoing regeneration of urban form. The revelation here is that cities are not necessarily always deagrarianized but rather witness

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a continual renewal of agrarian, pastoral, or even nonurban form. Relations between the agrarian and the urban are topological in that the urban stretches, bends, or twists into the pastoral, and vice versa. Such a vocabulary recuperates cattle—­or, for that matter, other than humans—­as sentient inhabitants of the city steeped in the same histories of enclosure and urban renewal, and whose quadruped itineraries produce space.174 This space might be mundane, but it is in no way less important. Such recuperation takes the agrarian or pastoral seriously; it develops viable alternatives to totalizing accounts of planetary urbanization without sacrificing explanatory potential or value for reevaluating urbanization processes elsewhere. What this means for a politics of urban inhabitation cannot be reified, but a few basics might be envisioned. First, we cannot go about attempting to design and plan cities hylomorphically. The colonial landscaping urge, postcolonial diagrams, and the more contemporaneous appeal to an aesthetics of a world-­class city have all met with subversions, be they through the infrapolitics of grazing cattle at night, coalitions between pastoralists and their cattle, or the reticence of dairies deemed illegal to move. In fact, as we witness time and again, smooth, pastoral space multiplies as attempts to striate it intensify. Thus, second, other spaces of inhabitation may be pried open from the urban’s very fabric; these can be the grounds for fostering a different politics of dwelling and mobility. A classic example in this case is the street, which Walter Benjamin poignantly calls “the dwelling place of the collective.”175 Although work in subaltern urbanism alludes to the street as a space of alternative political economic activity,176 a minor articulation draws attention to how collectives can be more than human. In excess of being a conduit for pedestrian movement or a space where hawkers and vendors sell their wares, the street becomes a pasture. This repurposing of the street takes center stage in contemporary frictions around urban mobility in Delhi; it sparks debate as to whether roads must necessarily be an apparatus for the circulation and velocity of traffic such that petrocapitalism might continue unabated.177 Furthermore, these heterogeneous coalitions are different than those foregrounded in observations that the metropolis now serves as the locus of a sociopolitical mobilization analogous to the role of the factory in the industrial epoch.178 Third, the outcomes or imperatives

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of such coalitions need not be radical or heroic. In Delhi, we witness a suite of ordinary practices that render the polis much less hostile to cattle, be it by provisioning animals by repurposing dividers on roads, or putting out troughs of water for itinerant bovines. These are not simply parochial endeavors. They provide a vital counterchallenge to the increasing proliferation of hostile design that has cropped up with capitalist urbanization in many cities of the Global North.179 Such acts are often written out of more grand claims for a just city that deride place-­ based narratives for developing “blind fields.”180 Rather, it is the totalizing gaze of planetary urbanization that blinds, for it fails to see how the material politics of city making operates at a number of scales, each of which have something important to say about how the urban is rendered habitable. A new vocabulary of sociospatial differentiation that varies from forecasts of complete urbanization does not mean it eschews political economy. It cautions against totalizing accounts of urbanization that fall prey to the temptation of positing capitalism as the master driver of all economic organization; it cautions against taking capital’s transformation of all production and universalizing wage relations as a historically given inevitability. Cities are indeed witnessing new matrices of transnational capital investment, but not all urban economies are necessarily subsumed by the “worldwide totality formed by capitalist urbanization.”181 Planetary urbanization occludes other economies, including those unfolding in pastoral spaces, that can elide being placed in the organizing structure that is capitalism. It is these minor forms of economic organization that I take up in the next chapter.

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6 SURPLUS ECOLOGIES

Rethinking Urban Economy When one follows a path past one of north Delhi’s metro stations, across the Najafgarh nullah and toward a middle-­class residential colony, the smell of fermenting hay hits the nostrils. Behind a row of small workshops engaging in small-­time mechanical repair, or chhota-­mota kaam, lies what appears to be a plot of dusty, vacant land. Piles of waste are stacked here; a small group of people sifts through material brought from a municipal garbage collection depot. A number of cattle inhabit this space, some tethered, others roaming freely at their slow bovine pace. The cattle, which belong to a community of Gujjars, are milked in the mornings and then largely let loose to graze in the vicinity. The bovines often make their way to ephemeral garbage dumps to feed. In the evening, the cattle are herded back or return on their own. Some animals are fed, but not all. The animals are milked again, with the product sold to customers who live nearby. This is an urban dairy, one that has not yet been resettled by the state; its everyday economic operations unfold in the form of a meshwork relying on housework and the labor of care, on waste or the detritus of commodities, and on the sentient actions of cattle themselves—­animals often deemed surplus by the state, excessive, lacking use values for capital and an impediment to the latter’s expansion. This pastoral order—­the persistence of urban dairies despite dictates and capitalist urbanization—­prompts asking what constitutes the 235

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economic in urban economies. What becomes of the economic when it involves not just practices of informality at the urban margins but also bovine corporeality and capacities? What kind of analytics does one need to grasp economic assembly when it unfolds in a smooth pastoral plane rather than in the striated spaces of urban order? In this chapter, I further this book’s analyses of lively political economies. I aim to show how the economic and the ecological co-­constitute one another from the outset, but I also argue that not all urban economies are entirely subsumed by capitalism. Here I take cues from political philosopher Aditya Nigam’s work on urban economic organization. In what is an original formulation, and by reworking concepts from Gramsci as well as from Deleuze and Guattari, Nigam attends to what he calls molecular economies—­economies that exist alongside modern, capitalist economic sectors but that escape the latter’s codes or attempts at organization, order, and regulation.1 Molecular economies, Nigam argues, are those economies that can remain outside the ever-­expanding drive of capital, but as arrangements of productivity and innovation rather than as atavistic remnants of the past. Molecular economies are noncapitalist rather than precapitalist in that they do not index conditions that are antecedent to capitalism but can emerge from capitalism’s very grounds.2 Molecular economies deterritorialize capital’s structure, taking it along a different line of flight. There are parallels between the outside to lively capital invoked by ferality and the molecular economies emerging in smooth space. Both signal the need to engage with the noncapitalist as a theoretical category, although there are significant differences in terms of what constitutes the outside to capital and what trajectories this outside takes. The analytic of comparison is useful here—­not as a means of comparing like with like, but in terms of accounting for the variations and situations involved in urban economic assembly. Furthermore, just as ferality brings liveliness into the heart of capital, we could extend the molecular to that which entails an array of other economic actors, including bovines, that do not count in more conventional political economic analyses of urbanicity, whether steeped in Marxist political economy3 or in more variegated, postcolonial accounts.4 Molecular economies prompt a minor reading of urban political economy, and by extension urban political ecology. Both have dominated

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debates regarding nature and cities’ economies since the 1970s. Focusing on urban restructuring, entrepreneurialism, and interurban competition—­or, in its ecology variant, urbanization—­as a process of socioecological transformation, urban political economy has provided critical insights into how economies of cities take grip, expand, and generate the uneven dynamics of everyday metropolitan life.5 A criticism leveled at certain strands of political ecology/economy, however, is its tendency to reduce urban processes to economic materialism, treating culture as that which is subsumed by or epiphenomenal to the economic.6 By privileging particular processes and deploying them in a lawlike manner, exhibiting situational variance rather than historical difference, the economic ontology posited by urban political economy gravitates toward the universalistic. As a result, there is a proclivity to take hold of one set of processes—­abstract capitalism—­as the master driver while blotting out others7—­much to the ire of those refracting political economy from locales and histories outside the Anglo-­American sphere,8 or those subjecting urban shifts, events, and crises to situated ethnographic scrutiny.9 Such a universalist ontology has been called into question, notably in what is broadly termed the culture/economy debate. As opposed to political economy’s exposition of the economic as a stable, singular, and ontologically separate entity immune from culture, relational takes reimagine urban economies to be constituted by a set of cultural practices. Culture and economy are located in the same phenomenological plane where cultural elements are not reducible to be outcomes of a singular logic of capital but are in a compositional and functional relation with the economic.10 The vision of the economic brought forward is one that is cultural in all its spheres, from production and consumption to circulation, distribution, and regulation, which are themselves envisioned as performative acts aspiring to goals that can be varied, and that are not just about meeting material needs or accumulating surplus value. Traditional scalar and hierarchical distinctions between macro-­and microeconomies are undone, and their difference is recast as that which has to do with configuration, duration, and reach of assemblages rather than some form of tiered organization. My invocation of a molecular economy is somewhat different than this. It espouses an ontology of the economic that is not only cultural but also ecological from the outset.11 This is at variance with urban

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political economy’s argument that the economic is “embedded” in an ecological base.12 Notions of embeddedness, while troubling the idea that nature is an unproblematic stage on which the real business of economy takes place, posits nature in a unitary fashion and places agency squarely on the side of capital. Similarly, analyses of informal economies have largely stopped short of providing a more differentiated account of nature when specifying urbanisms of the Global South,13 even though other-­ than-­human bodies are so prevalent in the metropolitan formations they ventriloquize. Thus, while cultural economy espouses economic formations to be performative and renders them open to difference, it retains a residual anthropocentricism, eliding a range of other bodies, metabolic pathways, and practices that give urban economies their function and form. In their stead, an economic ontology co-­constituted by ecology makes room for lively potentials as productive forces that have bearings on and shape economic arrangements. Urban dairies like the one described in the vignette above often fall outside the ambit of capitalist accumulation; they are not necessarily organized around wage labor, and their produce is not always put forward for further valorization. An iteration of certain economies being molecular thus joins a body of work that eschews unitary narratives of capitalist urbanization,14 creating openings for attending to what might constitute capital’s outside. In contrast to totalizing propositions such as the world capitalist economy and planetary urbanization,15 which tend to espouse the historical inevitability of capitalism as a force that subsumes everything it encounters, molecular economies are about historical contingency. Contrary to neo-­Lefebvrian laments, specifications of molecular economies are not a dismissal of political economy “as outdated vestiges of ‘northern’ epistemologies.”16 Rather, they point to an imbricated relationship between the inside and outside of capital17 where, as ethnographic analysis reveals, the outside is a line of flight, escaping from the very ground of capital. More importantly, molecular economies provide openings for the possibility of imagining noncapitalist economic formations amid capital’s ever-­expanding tide.18 The molecular maps onto another dimension of capital: bodies that its internal dynamics construct and relegate as surplus. Informal dairies and their surplus bovines are seen as an impediment to a capitalist reorganization of the dairy sector and a hindrance to the capitalist

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gentrification of the city. Bovine lives get intimately enmeshed with the visceral excesses of the city, notably waste, which it brings into realms of value through cattle’s metabolic comportments. This is another mode in which I articulate the molecular: as relations between bodies and the “moving materiality”19 of urban life. These three iterations of the molecular—­as ecological economy, escaping capital, and relations between bodies—­in this situation constitute what I call a surplus ecology. The term is a neologism that denotes a set of relations between bodies purportedly cast outside the pale of value, the fraught material politics of urban waste, and varied but partial attempts to administer life and bring it into the fold of the economy. At stake here is a very different articulation of economic assembly and urbanization as process, one too easily overlooked when ethnographic endeavor is derided in favor of distanced analytical commitments,20 and which vary from multispecies endeavors focusing on western, capital-­intensive dairies.21

Molecular Economies “Keeping cows is our khāndāni peshā, or family profession,” says Sohan Lal, an urban dairy owner in north Delhi, who has been tending cattle for almost fifty years. “My entire family is involved in this business of raising and tending to cattle.” The number of cows they keep has dwindled over time, largely after government-­imposed restrictions on stray cattle within urban limits and after movements to relocate stables to designated dairy colonies. Undeterred, Sohan Lal and other Gujjars like him continue with their vocation in the heart of the city. Women in his household feed the cattle and collect their dung to make cakes to be later burned as fuel, while Sohan Lal’s sons herd the animals back to their dairy in the evening after they are set loose to graze (Figure 6.1). Sohan Lal encouraged his sons to find other employment, as he believes the dairy business is not profitable in the long run—­a view many Gujjars have been expressing since the mid-­1990s.22 “My sons went and worked as labor in a McDonald’s in one of the city’s malls, but left after five or six months. They now help out in the dairy.” “For me, there really is no other choice—­I don’t have any formal education,” says Sohan Lal, “and opportunities for my children to do anything else are severely limited.”

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Figure 6.1. Cattle from an urban dairy. Photograph by author.

Sohan Lal’s dairy is a smooth space par excellence. It is situated on contested land that is currently lying vacant because of an ongoing property dispute. The undeveloped plot is repurposed for various economic practices, from sorting waste collected from nearby municipal waste collection points to serving as a dairy where cattle are tethered or allowed to forage. A small shed housing cattle has been constructed using one of the boundary walls, with the latter doubling as a surface for drying dung cakes, which are later burned as household kitchen fuel. The emergence of smooth pastoral space is fostered by the slowdown in capitalist urbanization; prolonged litigation means that the transition of money capital to fixed capital is postponed. During this duration—­a lull in the metamorphosis of capital—­the plot is put to other uses. Such economic activity is molecular—­not because of the smallness of its elements but because of the nature of its mass and flows. As Nigam argues, molecular economies typically “emerge in the interstitial spaces of the planned modernist city, violating the segregated ‘zoning’ of master plans, often even according a range of civic amenities ‘illegally.’”23 Nowhere is this more evident than in the patchwork urbanism recounted in chapter 5. It might be argued here that molecular economies are not necessarily delinked from global, major capitalist flows but rather are a regional variation of capitalist processes in which other forms

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of economic organization are parasitized on through vertical integration and centralization. This might be the case, at least to a certain extent, in the organized dairy sector, which relies on migrant labor and particular economies of scale. Molecular economies, however, as exemplified by Sohan Lal’s dairy, are not ancillary components of global capitalist economies. They elide the codes of macropolitics or the binary regulation of bovines and urban dairies by the state. Molecular economies escape from macroeconomics, the imperative of which is to assign economic activity to a specific place in the structure that is capitalism. State regulation and mainstream economics consider such molecular economies to constitute a serious loss of revenue to the government, so through various means that could also include integration, they strive to bring them into the ambit of accountability.24 Molecular economies thus operate in articulation with molar economic imperatives, where economic practices unfolding in smooth pastoral space are subjected to constant striation by capital and its biopolitical order. Creative avenues generated by the molecular can sometimes be reterritorialized into new sources of profit.25 The manner in which Sohan Lal’s dairy is organized demands extending Nigam’s specification of molecular economies to include other-­ than-­human bodies that perform unwaged work. This creates openings for accounting for the outside to capitalism, especially when this outside includes elements that exceed humanist assembly. Many of the forces and energies absorbed or cast aside by capital are potentials that capital presupposes but does not itself produce. Bovines, we could argue, are not stock or raw material but rather are workers in a molecular economy. Such a proposition is an extension of political economy steeped in a long legacy of viewing work as an exclusively human activity.26 Work, in its Marxist iteration, is characterized by purposeful activity, entailing objects on which human actions are performed and involving instruments for carrying out that activity. It is, above all, a process that takes on a static thinglike character only when the process is extinguished and seen from the inverted viewpoint of the product. Marx uncannily uses the example of cattle in the first volume of Capital to argue that animals are not workers under capitalism but instead “raw material” (that is, products filtered through “the agency of human labour”) or an “instrument of production” (that is, a thing or a complex of things that human

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workers interpose between themselves and the object of their labor and that serves as a conductor, directing their activity onto that object).27 This idea that animals do not work continues to shape much contemporary political ecology that aims to take economies of nature seriously. It would, however, be a mistake to conceptualize animal work through anthropomorphic extension.28 Bovines, to paraphrase Haraway,29 are hooves, not hands. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into detail, but four points of departure from conventional political economic interpretations of work are salient. First, intentionality and functionality need to be seen as immanent in the process of work. This stands in opposition to humanist accounts that view work as an act of imposing a prior design on an external substrate. Second, and relatedly, products of animal work are ontogenic. They entail a process of growth, where people not so much make cattle as set up conditions so that bovines, or for that matter any other being, take on their forms and disposition. The consequence of such a move is that the processes of bodily incorporation become central to political economic analyses. Production and reproduction, work and metabolic work come together such that one aspect iteratively feeds into the other. Third, such work is porous, performed relationally with a suite of other actors who have bearings on a skilled agent’s activity. This allows for thinking of other-­ than-­human work—­or, for that matter, human work—­as molecular, entailing compositions between human and more-­than-­human bodies, movements, and affects. Fourth, and by extension, the temporalities of other-­than-­human work is rhythmic, emerging from metabolic growth and corporeal movement in the city rather than from capital’s chronometric division of the working day.30 Other-­than-­human work is a historically situated condition rather than a given, natural one. Ontogeny, porosity, and rhythm are steeped in active histories of expropriation and exploitation, just as they entail histories of symbiosis and care. A striking feature of the organization of molecular economies is the ways in which dairy owners respond to increasing labor and production costs involved in the herding, upkeep, and care of cattle. For Sohan Lal, as my fieldwork with Gunjesh Kumar, Urvi Gupta, and Priyanka Justa shows, a typical day begins early in the morning, when food, usually bhusā, or wheat straw, and a mixture comprising rotis and other foodstuffs, is prepared and offered to the milch animals. The animals are

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then milked, with each cow producing ten to twelve liters a day, before being let loose to graze. Relatives and family members, predominantly men, are involved in running the dairy business. Unlike the large-­scale, government-­approved commercial dairies found in parts of Delhi, including Ghazipur and Bhalswa, which hire migrant workers from other Indian states, like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and provide them with basic dwellings to live and work in, small-­scale dairies rely on kinship networks to tend to and care for cattle. This is not a relation between capital and wage labor but a set of economic practices where profits are distributed through tacit codes and internal negotiations. Women perform labors of care that extend to other-­than-­human bodies of the household, whose lives become vital for social reproduction amid urban immiseration. “What other work will we do?” asks Paro, Sohan Lal’s wife. “We don’t have any other vocation, and neither do we want to go and work elsewhere.” This is not to say that patriarchal hierarchies are somehow undone in these spaces; rather, there is a gendered division of labor, and women carry out some of the most menial tasks. However, the economic is not the sole reason for keeping cattle; Gujjars and other castes have been associated with the trade for generations, and for them, reasons for maintaining dairies are also cultural. As Sohan Lal alludes, it is their khāndāni peshā. One avenue by which other-­than-­human work enters this cultural economy is through the deflection of human labors of herding and costs for provisioning food onto the bovines themselves. Some cattle owners are selective in terms of which animals they feed, usually provisioning for milch animals and leaving the rest to their own devices. “Profitability has decreased,” says Baldev, whose animals share a dairy plot with Sohan Lal. “We cannot feed so many cows. Our dairies are run along old lines, and for them to become profitable, we need capital investment. That we are unable to obtain.” However, this does not mean cattle are simply abandoned, as the popular media and some animal rights activists like to portray. The itineraries the animals track through the city, salvaging fodder from garbage dumps and waste collection depots as well as from places where they know people put out food, are forms of urban world making. Similarly, everyday acts of hospitality by urban publics feeding the animals render the city more habitable for bovines. The ecumenes of cattle become a component of the economic as bovine

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work reproduces the animals as productive and profitable bodies. My argument here is not to allude to a physiocratic idea of biology’s being the source of value but to be attentive of how the work of other than humans is tapped into to create wealth at the level of the metabolic and reproductive body—­a feature characteristic of both molecular economies and dairies organized along capitalist lines. Some Gujjars like Sohan Lal herd their cattle home every evening before milking them, but other animals, like Kaali, encountered in chapter 5, make their own way back home. Certain animals can be seen feeding in the city at night (Figure 6.2). Even though they may not return to their stables, they are not ownerless animals. “Feed has become expensive,” Baldev adds, “and it is almost impossible to hire manpower.” The knowledge cattle possess and their abilities to negotiate the reconstituted metabolism of the city—­knowing where to graze or find food, how to negotiate risks, including avoiding capture, and when and how to return to their stables—­are not a given but are cultivated. “When we buy a new cow, she is guided to places where people feed them,” says Paro, who has been involved in the family dairy business since her marriage. “The animal then learns to follow the same route.” “It is like taking your children to school,” she remarks. “Our cattle learn in a similar way. Calves are taught to foray on their own when they are about two years old.” There could be no better example of the ontogenic and porous

Figure 6.2. Free-­roaming cattle at night. Photograph by author.

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nature of other-­than-­human work: to cultivate is to set up conditions of growth, within which an animal—­or for that matter a person—­learns to navigate complex urban worlds. It is through correspondence with this ambient world that beings take on their form and dispositions; skills are not hylomorphically added onto a body, but instead the animal becomes enskilled as it grows. The comparison between raising children and bringing up cattle is not mere analogy; such a comparison implies that both people and cattle are active participants in the same world and that relations between them are social rather than technological. Cattle, then, are not so much raw material or mute instruments of production, although they may appear as such from the viewpoint of capital. They are bovine workers. Molecular relations reveal how culture, ecology, and economy are co-­constituted from the outset. Other-­than-­human work is an attentive, perceptual, and sentient involvement with the material world. To salvage food is not the act of an automaton; it involves dexterity and judgment. As Paro puts it, “Our cattle learn how to find food, and with time they become quite experienced.” Ethological work on cattle indicates that the animals learn and return to locations where food was previously found. They cultivate a spatial memory that helps them forage efficiently. Grazing becomes a patterned activity when food is clustered, typical of garbage dumps in metropolitan environments, leading to the animals’ following similar routes at particular times of day. However, cattle are able to innovate when food availability becomes variable,31 eking out new sources through exploration. Bovine ethnographies in other Indian cities suggest that certain cattle can even learn to untie plastic bags to get food out.32 Molecular economies thus involve innovation on the part of both cattle and urban dairy owners; they unfold along itineraries that constitute bovine ecumenes. They are economies of variation. In contrast, capital-­intensive dairies are molar and strive to develop work models that are based on constants. This is witnessed in some of the commercial dairies in Delhi that render cattle sedentary milk machines and deploy migrant wage labor to generate surplus value. Dairy owners operate under uncertain conditions and resort to a range of strategies to escape molar and macroeconomic codes. The molar can involve governmental superstructure, including laws striating urban cattle mobility and a number of means through which production is

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regulated and reorganized, including licenses and permits, relocation schemes, and setting up intensified dairy units. Dairy units work to reterritorialize molecular economies into the ambit of a formal economy where “every transaction must be recorded, taxed and brought within the state’s legibility.”33 Equally, the molar involves a majoritarian politics of aesthetics. “Sewer lines in the locality continually get clogged by dung from these units,” says Manohar, a resident of a middle-­class colony not far from the dairy. “What’s more, a foul odor constantly emanates from them.” Residents like Manohar often complain to the Municipal Corporation, asking for dairies to be removed. “The stench is so bad that if nothing is done, people will need to sell their flats and leave from here.” MCD raids on dairies are not infrequent, and, as some of the dairy owners confide, they take evasive action. Sometimes dairy owners are tipped off, so the cattle are hidden in a forest patch along a major sewage drain. The animals are pushed through a hole in a wall that separates the drain from the main road. The interstitial and derelict spaces on the other side provide cover so that they remain unseen during a raid. Such acts—­which sometimes involve collusion with low-­ranking Municipal Corporation workers who warn the dairy owners in advance—­are subversions of the zoning regulations of the Masterplan. They unfold not in direct opposition to the state but along a diagonal trajectory that is about effacing one’s legibility from the state. Because urban dairies are deemed illegal by the MCD, Sohan Lal and Baldev cannot go register complaints with the police when incidents of cattle theft happen. “Gangs from Haryana and sometimes Rajasthan turn up at night,” says Baldev. “They are armed, and force us to give up our cows.” He says that the stolen cattle are sold elsewhere. “One Jersey and two desi cows of mine were stolen. Each cow costs about 80,000 rupees, so it is lucrative business. On the other hand, losing even one cow is an unrecoverable loss for us.” When incidents of theft become frequent, at times once every two months, dairy owners take recourse by hiding cattle in derelict spaces at night. Hideouts, routes of escape, and openings carved into walls are “holey spaces,” bringing forth a city that “is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean passages, stems.”34 Molecular economies thus derive not just from the interstitial spaces of the planned, modernist city but also from spaces that are “holey,” a word whose roots include “to hollow” or “to carve

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out” and “to cover” or “to conceal.” They emerge through small acts of evasion. The latter can entail both physical escape from state scrutiny and avoidance of subordination to a sedentary capitalist work model and its molding of economic activity. Molecular economies involve effacing bovine lives from the state’s legibility; this is also the case with bovine deaths. As Yamini Narayanan has shown, there is considerable innovation in concealing cattle slaughter, in part because the state, through antislaughter laws, “effectively creates a situation of non-­compliance in which an industrial scale of cow slaughter simply goes underground.” Drawing on the concept of jugaad, Narayanan highlights how concealment operates in the “illicit transportation to slaughterhouses” and involves “intricate social contracts between stakeholders along this production line.”35 Sohan Lal and Baldev are symptomatically silent about what happens to cattle when they are old or dying. Furthermore, male calves are not always nourished after they are born, and data from government-­aided cattle shelters in Delhi indicate that 80 percent of all animals brought in are either bulls or male calves.36 However, there is a much longer history of the construction of bovines as surplus, which can be tracked back to a colonial project of improving cattle.

Surplus Bodies The planning imaginary of zonation and its imperatives to redesign cities in ways that follow a western telos of urbanicity finds its corollary in a molar political economy: the view that other economic practices should be subjected to regulation and improvement so that such economies can grow. This is an imperative that, as Nigam points out, is a simple replication of the economies of the West, “where agriculture must be replaced by industry, villages by cities and finally, everything must become part of the formal economy.”37 We witness this logic not only in the long histories of relocating cattle from Delhi but also in the ways the state has sought to act on bovine bodies in order to improve their productivity. Improvement, rooted in colonial developmental imperatives but morphing through later Nehruvian ecological modernization, is an attempt to assign cattle a specific locus in capitalism’s structure. It casts aside, as its corollary, a population of surplus cattle, with this population

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comprising animals that are deemed superfluous, lack use value for capital, or even act as a barrier to the accumulation of capital. The rich historical scholarship on cattle in India provides compelling accounts of how religion and economy, statist and vernacular views congeal around the question of improvement,38 and it is not my aim to repeat what has been outlined in this work. Rather, the endeavor here is to attend to how the category of surplus cattle was invented and what it tells us about molar codings—­alliances and filiations of the state and capital—­from which the molecular seeks to escape. By doing so, this chapter further draws attention to some of the interconnected histories between India and Britain. Biopolitical logics that emerged in the western metropole were imposed on the colonies, although their transfer was in no way a linear process. Attempts to administer bovine life met constraints and took their own route, often becoming hybrids of biopolitical and vernacular practices. The debate that India had surplus cattle in relation to its needs arose during the close of the nineteenth century, after a series of famines had erupted across the country, causing significant numbers of human and cattle deaths. The colonial government, steeped in Malthusian doctrine, began voicing a need to manage cattle according to “scientific principles” such that weaker animals could be carefully “weeded out” so they would not be a burden on fodder supply.39 Commenting extensively on the state of India’s cattle, John Augustus Voelcker, an agricultural chemist invited by the colonial government to conduct a study on improving agriculture, argued that their quality was poor. This poor quality was attributed to the “inattention” that Indian villagers “paid to matter of breeding and selection,” and it was further compounded by “the superstition that exists against the killing of bad cattle.” Voelcker lamented the proliferation of “stray” cattle, particularly the “sacred or ‘Brahmani’ bull” released on particular occasions as acts of piety or public service, which are allowed to roam freely, without interference or harm. The serious damage to crops and the deterioration of stock these animals caused through breeding was not something a famine-­stricken colony could afford.40 By the late nineteenth century, the regulation of biological standards of domestic cattle and measures to eliminate scrub bulls of mysterious ancestry and unidentifiable breeds were already underway in

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Britain.41 Voelcker’s observations set in motion a program for cattle improvement and for dealing with what was believed to be a bovine excess in the colony. Concerted efforts to distribute “good bulls” and eliminate “worthless males” garnered momentum by the 1920s. The Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, appointed in 1926 with the aim of examining the condition of agriculture and rural economy in British India, observed that “inferior animals” were “of two kinds.” The “most difficult to deal with, is the animal known as the ‘Brahmini bull,’” which were deemed to be “of a good class” in erstwhile times but now involved the dedication of “the cheapest type of animal that can be secured.” What was “in former days a gift to the community” had “become a curse,” expediting decline in the quality of cattle. Because slaughter would have raised public outcry, the commission recommended castration as “the readiest remedy for the evil.”42 The cow protection movement in India by this time had begun singing the tune of milch cattle improvement, and it did not challenge the colonial state’s position that the quest to preserve all bovine life ran contrary to scientific improvement.43 The Royal Commission’s recommendations stemmed from a Malthusian argument on cattle overpopulation, one that held sway during its day in imperial Britain. Falling productivity in Indian cattle, the commission observed, was being compensated by increasing the number of working bullocks, thereby triggering a vicious cycle that reduced available food and further deteriorated stock. Deteriorated stock, envisioned as emaciated and underproductive, constituted India’s surplus bovines. Cattle, according to colonial developmental logic, had to “yield a profit,” and the grounds for “stock keeping” needed to be “strictly economic,” which meant that bullocks had to be “fully employed” and cows ought to be “of a heavy milking strain.” Large-­scale measures to “reduce the number of useless bulls” were well underway. In the Punjab province alone, under whose jurisdiction Delhi lay, 218,000 castrations were effected in one year between 1926 and 1927.44 This went hand in hand with the selection and distribution of quality stud bulls, an initiative that garnered traction in the 1930s with the appointment of Viceroy Linlithgow, who had in fact chaired the Royal Commission report. Linlithgow established a scheme for cattle breeding, much of which was carried out by state veterinary departments and the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), formed on the recommendation of the

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Royal Commission. The viceroy presented three Hariana bulls for the Delhi Mofussil at his personal expense, with the aim of producing better cattle and reducing excessive numbers.45 The quest to improve bovines was not simply an imposition of imperial science on an Indian context. Rather, the colonial government had to adapt to local consideration and make do with what suited the Indian cultivator and dairy owner. Improvement entailed working with what were identified as the best indigenous breeds, as experiments with importing and crossbreeding Indian cattle with European breeds proved too expensive. European cattle were also “generally unable, even under the best conditions, to maintain themselves satisfactorily” in the Indian climate. Furthermore, the purpose improved cattle were meant to serve—­as milch or draft animals—­was a point of contention. Animal husbandry experts at ICAR argued that maintaining Indian village cattle as “true breeding dual purpose stock” was going to be “a colossal undertaking.” Improvement therefore ought to proceed according to what was “most needed in the locality.”46 Improvement, along with the question of surplus populations it raises, retrieves the political economy buried in Foucault’s original formulations of biopower and its two-­headed technology of biopolitics and anatomopolitics. Disciplining, securing, and improving populations and bodies, Foucault argues, function as an essential element in the development of capitalism.47 However, attempts at retrieval have to be careful to not reduce histories of improvement and the production of surplus to a Eurocentric genealogy of biocapital—­the conjunction of biopolitics and capitalism—­and take these genealogies as uniform and universal. It was not that capitalism and concomitant forms of biopower were fully formed and then given to the postcolonial world, where the norm itself was already in place. Rather, particular forms of biopolitics and anatomopolitics had to be situationally instituted as the norm in order to create conditions for the accumulation of capital—­processes that were highly uneven, partial, and incomplete.48 But neither is this institution a question about the specificity of “an Indian case” defined against an all-­encompassing generality. The production of surplus bovine populations need to be subject to a form of scrutiny where “classic” models of biocapital—­the norm itself—­becomes open to question and from which more far-­reaching political economic analyses might be built.49

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The will to improve cattle, and therefore the problem of surplus animals, had specific iterations in the urban sphere. In 1927, a government census revealed that there were at least eight-­four stray bulls in Delhi, and these “undesirable itinerants of the city” quickly became a biopolitical concern. A “majority” of these bulls were “of such poor quality” that they were, in the government’s view, triggering a “deterioration of stock.”50 Stray bulls were also deemed a threat to public safety, but the government was aware that “Hindu opinion would strongly resent any measures” taken against the animals.51 Bylaws to regulate these undesirable itinerants were subsequently framed by the Delhi district board in 1931. No person was allowed to keep a bull older than one year unless a certificate had been issued in advance. Furthermore, the owner had to provide a written agreement giving power to the board to castrate the animal at any future time if authorities found it to be “unsuitable for covering purposes.” Officers from the civil veterinary department were entitled to suspend a certificate at any time, during which period the onus lay on the bull’s owner to ensure that the animal did not cover a cow.52 In the subsequent decade, the number of bovines castrated across the country by the civil veterinary department doubled,53 but the problem of undesirable urban bulls was in no way resolved. Just as smooth pastoral space multiplied when the colonial government attempted to striate it, itinerant life exceeded attempts to bring it into the ambit of biopower and capital. “Scrub bulls,” the veterinary department observed, “are as a rule far too abundant in the towns than even in the rural areas.” The progeny sired by these “decrepit and mongrel bulls” was being “hopelessly degenerated all over the Province rather than [improving] their milk yield.”54 A distinct cultural and ecological economy was at work. The colonial government lamented those who let Brahmi or Brahmini bulls loose—­an act it saw as propagating “the sound breeding of the sacred” rather than of better animals.55 Hindu religious attitudes, however, were not always pitted against colonial scientific intention. Cow protection movements of the time began to embrace cattle improvement, and there was two-­way traffic between colonial imperatives and vernacular concerns.56 Yet cow protection movements are only a set of what was a broad suite of practices pertaining to cattle. The colonial government targeted a

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number of urban subalterns, including dairy owners and cattle herders, seeking to bring them into the ambit of its developmental project. However, just as there was a failure in creating a biopolitical “health atmosphere” in Delhi,57 so too did colonial attempts to create economic subjects fail. “The economy in cattle-­keeping indeed lies in breeding on rational and scientific lines,” the government discerned, but “unfortunately very little care is given to these laws.” The proliferation of Brahmi bulls rested on cultural and religious practices that the government was wary of unsettling, and their presence disrupted imperatives of instituting an anatomopolitics—­the material improvement—­of the bovine body. Equally, the ecology of these bulls played a role. They influenced the progeny of a cattle herd to a greater extent than the cow, for if there was “one sire for 100 dams,” then the bull would influence “the herd 100 times as much as any one individual dam,” no matter how carefully the dams were selected. The “situation in the towns at the present moment,” the civil veterinary department contended, “is going in a quite opposite direction” to improving the quality of cattle. Framing bylaws that sought to curb itinerant bulls also had little effect, for it was “not easy in a big city like Delhi to trace the offender.”58

Surplus as an Urban Problem Subsequent censuses of livestock and the barrage of statistical data that became available began to give further credence to the category of surplus cattle. In 1944, W. Burns, an officer on special duty for the department of education, health, and lands, provided the first quantitative estimate of surplus cattle in the country. He argued that if the efficiency of working bullocks could be “increased by 60 per cent of the present level” through disease control, better management, and selective breeding, then “existing numbers of bullocks can be reduced by 4 millions and 10 millions” in eastern and central India. This would “materially reduce the pressure on fodder” that surplus animals were causing.59 Burns’s views were replicated during India’s postcolonial development paradigm, which was characterized by Nehruvian ecological modernization. In 1959, a report on India’s food crisis, drafted by a team of American agricultural specialists and sponsored by the Ford Foundation, brought the question of surplus cattle to the fore once more. It contended that a third, and possibly as much as half, of India’s cattle population was surplus in

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relation to the food supply. Aware of the cultural politics and the complex Hindu sentiment against cattle slaughter, the report emphasized population control rather than culling, recommending that all bulls reared for “natural service” should be kept in “compulsory confinement”; young bulls not needed for breeding should be castrated; and “surplus cows and heifers” should undergo “compulsory sterilization.”60 Indian counterparts, in contrast, held different views. They saw the problem of surplus animals largely as an urban problem, a view that cow protectionists had expressed since the early part of the twentieth century and that was also voiced in the Royal Commission report.61 An expert committee on the Prevention of Slaughter of Cattle, drawing on data from a number of Indian metropolises, argued that surplus bovines were produced by the “paucity of stable accommodation,” the result being that “cows and buffaloes, when they go dry, are sold for slaughter. Without taking recourse to this practice, the city milk-­man faces the danger of going out of business. He therefore adopts the short cut but very wasteful method of disposing off the dry animal to make room for a newly calved one to keep up his trade.”62 Bound by the view that slaughter was not an option, the committee recommended salvaging urban cattle and placing them in gaushalas. As we saw in chapter 5, removing cattle from cities such as Delhi and making arrangements for milk supplies to be obtained from rural areas were deemed ways forward, mapping onto parallel postcolonial anxieties regarding slums and the need to restructure the city as a polis without bovines. Through the 1960s, the view that cities—­as sites of maximizing economic imperatives—­resulted in the generation of surplus animals continued to be reiterated. The Central Council of Gosamvardhana, a government body comprising cattle experts and high-­ranking bureaucrats that was formed to organize and coordinate the management of the nation’s cattle, reported that “one-­way traffic in high-­class milch animals from breeding areas to large cities” continued unabated, “progressively leading to the depletion of and deterioration in the quality of cattle in the breeding tracts.”63 Controls to check the inflow of high-­yielding cattle into urban areas were introduced, and a program of salvaging valuable cattle from cities to dry stock farms was endorsed in order to improve the bovine breeding stock (Figure 6.3).64 These efforts went hand in hand with a continuation of colonial policies of curbing “the problem

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Figure 6.3. Hariana bulls from the all-­India cattle show held at Bahadurgarh outside Delhi, March 1954. From Public.Resource.org, photo 37992, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.

of uneconomic and useless cattle.” The Imperial Council for Agricultural Research, which had morphed into the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, tapped into American agricultural technology and know-­how to introduce contraception and painless methods of castration. Nondescript cattle, a term for bovines deemed useless and not identifiable with any particular breed, often “maintained only for their [manure-­ producing] value,” were some of the primary targets.65 Postcolonial logics of improvement, however, registered an important shift from erstwhile efforts of creating biocapital in British India. The “Cow of the Future”66 was to be attained not by improving indigenous breeds, as was the earlier norm, but through crossbreeding with “exotic” cattle. In the 1960s, at the time of India’s Third Five-­Year Plan, there were efforts to replace what was deemed a large population of low-­yielding nondescript animals with a “general utility animal” that had both improved “milk and work qualities.” The latter were to be attained by crossing indigenous breeds with Jersey and Holstein Friesian cattle.67 By the Fourth Five-­Year Plan (1969–­74), crossbreeding had become the main emphasis of cattle improvement policies,68 with the aim of upgrading low-­yielding indigenous milch cattle to bring about

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an animal equivalent to the green revolution’s purported success with wheat and paddy.69 Crossbred cattle were widely promoted in the subsequent decades, in part fueled by the World Bank’s investment in India’s dairy sector. By the late 1980s, crossbred cattle formed close to 5.5 percent of dairy units across the country.70 Their widespread prevalence was marked by the fact that in 2012, Delhi had 67,000 exotic and crossbred cattle—­ two and a half times the number of indigenous breeds.71 Current estimates suggest that there are 57,000 crossbred animals, as opposed to 27,000 indigenous and nondescript cattle.72 The introduction of crossbred cattle, while increasing milk yield, has had major economic and ecological consequences. As costs for maintaining cows went up, care for male cattle declined. Concentrated feed demanded by crossbred animals unevenly affected poorer farmers unable to provision such feed, which included millets and pulses that formed staples for some of the most vulnerable sections of society. The introduction of crossbred animals also led to the local extinction of certain indigenous cattle—­animals that were deemed nondescript and economically unviable, lacking use values for capital.73 By and large synchronized with international development rather than being based on farmers’ needs,74 improving cattle via crossbreeding has been about placing the animals and the dairy sector within capital’s structure in a molar economy. The 1970s in fact witnessed a vibrant academic debate on surplus cattle in India. In a forum published in Current Anthropology involving a number of Indian and American contributors, geographer Frederick J. Simoons critiqued anthropologist Marvin Harris for what were then called cultural ecological explanations of cattle surplus in India.75 On the one hand, Harris’s argument, couched in the logic of adaptation (or what might today be seen as neofunctionalism), was that there were no surplus cattle, for the relation between people and bovines in India was symbiotic rather than competitive. Owners letting cattle wander, Harris contended, was as an efficient use of plants that would otherwise have been wasted. It made economic sense in a range of ecosystems,76 although it ran counter to what had by then become a “fairly incontestable” view that India’s cattle population was surplus in relation to the food supply.77 On the other hand, Simoons argued that many wandering cattle were allowed to do so on religious grounds and had, in effect, past

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usefulness. He cited several Indian animal husbandry specialists and economists who contended that legal restrictions on cow slaughter hindered improvement in the quality of India’s cattle, and that cows were culled largely “by neglect and starvation, and those which survive may not be the best ones.” A number of government initiatives, including the establishment of gaushalas and gosadans under India’s First Five-­Year Plan, were a response to “the problem of unproductive cattle and their adverse effect on the economy.”78 Simoons, as well as others engaging in the forum, pointed to what might now be seen as a cultural economy. In India, “religion, economy, and society are inseparably intertwined,” and it was “improper to interpret the functioning of the sacred cow concept solely in terms of economic materialism or cultural ecology.” Harris’s approach, Simoons lamented, was one of a “classic functionalist reification,” where “functionality” was “overstressed” and “inefficiencies played down.”79 A fresh look at this debate might cause us to gravitate toward the remarks of a number of Indian commentators, notably anthropologist S. L. Malik and economist S. N. Misra, who took both Harris and Simoons to task for resorting to a form of economism while leaving the category of the economic unquestioned. To the “average Indian-­ cultivator,” Misra argued, “the cow has both use value and sacred value.” “The existence of surplus,” in contrast, is the product of a “dominant neoclassical bourgeois economic theory in general” where “the invisible, omnipotent, sacred god-­the-­market . . . supposedly never leaves any surplus of anything, no matter how powerful the forces of opposition, religious or otherwise, it meets on the way.”80 Misra’s observations are pertinent on two accounts. First, they highlight how the question of what constitutes surplus is not independent of economic epistemology. Second, they open up the very norm of biocapital and its constitutive outside—­an outcast surplus—­to interrogation and scrutiny.81 The pertinence of these critiques is reflected in Simoons’s admission, toward the end of his essay, that “one cannot merely look on cattle in Western terms.”82 This is all to say that the very existence of the category of surplus cattle was contingent on its historically situated epistemic invention and was then actualized through highly specific material practices of enumerating, regulating, and improving bovine bodies. In tracking the colonial and postcolonial will to improve cattle, we witness the work of what

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might be called an “overcoding machine,”83 an assemblage that strives to regularize, collectivize, and organize cattle and to place them in the structure that is capitalism. The state’s attempt to create biocapital, understood as both the biopolitics of administering bovine life and an attempt to enroll cattle into economic processes of producing surplus value, was always partial and incomplete. Furthermore, attempts at constituting a biopolitics of cattle and dealing with the category of surplus it invented were always in correspondence with cultural forces; they had to be situationally instituted as the norm, not merely cut-­and-­pasted from a Eurocentric model. These legacies continue today. In 2002, a report by the National Commission on Cattle instated by the government of India lamented the rise of so-­called useless cattle and attributed their proliferation to cattle rearing’s becoming “financially unviable” at the level of subsistence farming. The commission recommended “harnessing of all cattle by-­products,” including “dung and urine for various purposes,” to deal with this quandary, spelling out, in considerable detail, the value of these products besides advocating measures for “marketing” them.84 In addition to relocating dairies to designated colonies and rehoming bovines in cattle shelters, strategies for dealing with animals deemed surplus, notably those cattle with lower milk productivity and those left by metropolitan dairy owners to fend on their own, involved an attempt to create a cultural economy whereby other, nonmilk products could be promoted. This is a move that the current regime has taken up with full gusto. The question of surplus thus exposes the pathways through which bovine life is brought into or cast from the ambit of a formal molar economy. However, urban cattle rearing and its attendant economic practices involve other circuits of valorization, the orientations of which can be molecular or minor.

Minor Circuits of Value The plot where Sohan Lal’s cattle are raised becomes a smooth space, not just through bovine presence and the repurposing of land for dairying but also through its rendition into a site for the sorting and segregation of waste. A community of waste pickers arrives at the plot in the mornings, sometimes traveling for close to three hours, to sift through

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maal (stuff) and throw away postsegregation chaff. Waste is transported to the plot from various Municipal Corporation dhalaos or garbage collection points by the private companies that are increasingly taking control of the city’s waste sector. The sector is still dependent on a dispersed army of 150,000 to 200,000 informal waste workers, without whom much of Delhi’s kuda, or garbage, would end up in landfills.85 Privatization of waste in Delhi has led to new enclosures, stopping a large number of informal sector waste workers from accessing what was once a fraught but vital commons. “One of the major setbacks for our work nowadays is the outsourcing that is taking place in this neighborhood,” says Ismail, whose entire family has been working as waste pickers “for generations.” “We do not have access to kuda as in the past. The situation became worse after the MCD and private companies began collecting waste from households. Access to dhalaos has been sealed and we sometimes have to bribe officials to buy waste.” For waste pickers, enclosures have resulted in a considerable decline in income, putting their status as independent workers into jeopardy. Most are relegated to selling their labor power rather than salvaging materials to sell as commodities. Enclosure has resulted in more stringent, inflexible work regimes, consequently precluding women—­who also tend to perform housework—­from possible avenues of employment. Furthermore, tacit and social sharing mechanisms that promoted “a certain degree of equity in earnings across waste pickers have begun to fray.”86 However, it is from such striations of capital as enclosing and sealing off waste that the molecular emerges. If the lines of flight of parakeets in London reveal how commodity capital is deterritorialized, then the molecular pathways of waste in Delhi tell us another story of urbanicity and its minor economies. Waste pickers at the dairy plot, or for that matter in many of Delhi’s landfill sites, sort through and set aside discarded bread, half-­ eaten rotis, and other stale food, then sell these to the dairy owners every evening. Waste salvaged in this manner becomes cattle feed; in some parts of the city, the waste is also furnished to poultry farms. The meager 6 to 7 rupees that waste pickers get per kilogram of discarded foodstuff constitutes what Ismail calls side income—­extra cash earned in an interstitial zone between what private companies permit and what they do not. For dairy owners, operating on the smallest of margins, salvaged

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waste becomes a cheap source of nutrition for their animals. The realization of the exchange value of salvaged waste is contingent on other-­ than-­human bodies as consumers. “Initially people used to sell such waste at throw-­away prices,” says Sohan Lal, “but now an entire chain of suppliers has developed, especially in and around some of Delhi’s major landfills.” Waste, in its materiality of rot and decay, marks the visceral excesses of the city, but when kept out of aesthetic purview, it also renders molecular economies invisible. The molecular here entails relations between the moving materiality of urban life and the proclivities of grazing cattle. On any given day, it is not unusual to see cows from the dairy make their way along a road toward the edge of a residential colony a couple of kilometers away. The animals’ destination is a Municipal Corporation dhalao, a concrete shed painted red and green, accessible to the street through a large doorway, where a number of cattle can be found opportunistically feeding amid the stashed garbage (Figure 6.4). “This dhalao is a regular haunt of these animals,” says Kamal, a migrant worker from Bihar who, with three others, labors to monitor the deposition and collection of municipal solid waste. “The animals come here to feed as there is a lot of kuda for them—­from vegetable peels to old chapatis.” As we talk, a pile of waste falls; a waft of fermenting air envelops the

Figure 6.4. Cattle grazing in a Municipal Corporation garbage collection depot. Photograph by author.

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ambient atmosphere. Kamal chases out the cattle that have unsettled the piled-­up garbage. “We have to keep sweeping up the rubbish all the time. These animals scatter the kuda that we stack.” Kamal and his three coworkers from Bihar are precarious employees of a private waste management firm. “We come here at about seven in the morning, and stay till seven or eight in the evening,” says Kamal, reflecting on the long working day. “The collection trucks that transport waste to the sorting sites are only allowed in at night, and we have to remain on duty until then.” As a contract worker, Kamal’s main role is to maintain bin space; he must exercise strict ownership of waste on behalf of his employers and ensure that all materials deemed valuable travel to the company’s sorting site instead of ending up in the hands of other waste pickers. Kamal and his coworkers have to follow Municipal Corporation guidelines regarding dhalaos, which specify that garbage collection depots should be “aesthetic.” They should be covered and well ventilated—­and they should bar “stray cattle, other animals and birds” from gaining “access to the waste.”87 Kamal and his fellow migrant workers try their level best to keep cows out, but because the animals now associate the dhalao with food, the task of discouraging bovines has become practically impossible. “The cows arrive at 9 a.m. or so,” says Kamal. “They come from different dairies, and some of them [are] from households that keep cows for milk.” “Each animal has its own timings,” he explains. “These ones are here in the afternoon, and others come in the morning. There is also a batch that forages in the evening, at around 8 p.m., just before the collection trucks arrive.” Municipal collection points or dhalaos thus become an important part of urban bovine ecumenes; in many parts of the city, they are places vital for finding food. In molecular economies, cattle and their metabolic activities become conduits for what we could call a minor circuit of value. My invocation of the minor is in a twofold sense. First, it reveals how waste returns to realms of value via other-­than-­human proclivities and via bovine bodies deemed superfluous or a hindrance to capital. Second, such circuits are minor because valorization is not always for purposes of capitalist accumulation, although capitalist economies and minor circuits are interlinked. “Waste,” as Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy argue in their exemplary work on the subject, “is the political other of capitalist ‘value.’”

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Its “travels and perils . . . give us a ‘minor’ history of capitalist surplus accumulation—­the things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of ‘value’ at particular moments as superfluity, remnant, excess, or detritus; only to return in unexpected ways.”88 Cattle grazing on ephemeral garbage dumps or at Municipal Corporation dhalaos, as well as organic material retrieved by waste pickers and sold to dairy owners, are some of these “unexpected ways” in which waste returns to the realm of value. The journey of waste here is minor or molecular, salvaged through human and other-­than-­human acts, and not always with a capitalist extraction of surplus as its aim. The life courses of waste in molecular economies are “supple.”89 They are different from Gidwani and Reddy’s scripting of a minor history of value, where the predominant focus is on how waste gets reterritorialized by capitalist production. Waste reenters the money–­commodity–­ surplus (M–­C–­M′) circuit of capital in a molar and segmented manner, involving an enclosure of waste and the concomitant rendition of waste pickers into wage laborers. These molar circuits, as geographer Carlo Inverardi-­Ferri poignantly shows, unfold not just in formal urban economies but also within informal modes of economic organization.90 In minor circuits, in contrast, waste salvaged by other-­than-­human bodies is not in the form of exchange value, although it is the case when waste pickers sort out foodstuff to sell to dairy owners. But in neither pathway is labor’s use value—­whether of waste pickers or bovine bodies—­always returned as use values for capital; nor is the organization of the production process one of labor confronting the worker as capital.91 The metabolic work92 of cattle becomes a crucial aspect of minor circuits. Broadly understood as the body work that animals perform and that can be put to diverse economic ends, metabolic work is ontogenic. It is corporeal work in both macro-­and microbiological registers, from the sentient, feeding body to the infoldings of the gut. Through metabolic work, which is voluntary and involuntary, organisms transform one substance (waste) to another (protein) in ways that anthropogenic machines cannot yet replicate. Such labor is indispensable for capitalist production in the context of industrial agriculture, but it is no less important in molecular economies. In fact, salvaging waste to feed animals and deploying the bodily work of animals to convert waste into value is not uncommon in Delhi.

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For instance, inhabitants of informal settlements frequently collect organic waste from restaurants, canteens, and messes to feed pigs, giving rise to a “slum ecology” where animals “metabolize waste into food, allow for the repurposing of materials, and make toxic, abandoned environments into urban farmyards.”93 At stake is the informal “waste work” performed by other-­than-­human bodies, including “scavenging” by urban animals,94 but more importantly, they involve minor circuits of value that become one among many means through which the poor deal with urban precarity. Other-­than-­human work in the form of metabolic labor is vital, for without it, waste would not reenter the realm of value and thus foster the kinds of urban flourishings that exceed state dictates and capitalist imperatives of restructuring the city. Metabolic work and simple reproduction, or the acutely modest accumulation that marks molecular economies, are iterative. Such forms of reproduction and accumulation, derived through and with lively potentials, give cities their creative potential, their ability to escape along other lines of flight. Here we have yet another deviation from new materialist lines of argument95 that are central to this exposition of urbanicity. Molecular economies are about a politics of materials in that they have to do with the ways in which materials interface with life—­how they flow, accumulate, leach, and move across bodies of diverse kinds. Yet there is also a historicity to the rise of urban waste regimes, just as there is a distinct political economy to the production of materials deemed waste. A material politics thus accounts for asymmetric relations that bring particular bodies, materials and their interrelating into being while maintaining how lively potentials and other-­than-­human forces configure the ambit of economic activity. Minor circuits in fact can have a profound influence on how the economic congeals in cities. To better grasp how bovine bodies become crucial to the ways molecular economies are performed, we need to invoke how the animals themselves feel, smell, and taste as they bring about a sensory and metabolic exchange of materials with the ambient environment. Paro points to the individual proclivities of her cattle: “This one is very fond of greens, and will wander into the jhuggi-­jhopri colony to find vegetable peels and stems that people leave out. She is always on the lookout for such food, even when at a dhalao.” Then, drawing our attention to another cow that is ruminating, she adds, “This other one

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is fairly content on what she finds.” One could see these individual propensities and tactics play out while following cattle in the area. One of Baldev’s cows was distinct in terms of her strategy of sitting on road dividers, then getting up in a flash when passing cars slowed down to offer her food. In a similar vein, the variations in Kaali’s ecumene—­ her sojourns into the narrow lanes of the Wazirpur informal settlement encountered earlier in chapter 5—­come into being through bovine gustatory and olfactory propensities. Ethological studies indicate that cattle, like most mammals, have an acute sense of smell. Food is selected on the basis of smell, and the animals can detect odors many kilometers away.96 There is thus a visceral organization to the pastoral plane in which molecular economies unfold. This viscerality is constituted by both human and other-­than-­human bodily sensations and experiences of the metropolis and its metabolic life.

The Metabolic Commons An expanded visceral urbanism enables recuperating both other-­than-­ human and human bodies as sites of politics and analysis. Metropolitan India, as Gidwani and Reddy argue, is witnessing an “eviscerating urbanism” in which the rapid, parasitic colonization of land and the transformation of the commons into commercial space are producing two distinct ecologies: one of an urban bourgeoisie actively tied into circuits of global capital, and another of an underclass “living off the commodity detritus of these global circuits, whose lives are of indifference to the state.”97 The latter is most vividly encapsulated by Ismail when he explains how, “during waste segregation,” he and his family are compelled “to handle needles, broken glass, not to mention medicine bottles, chemical sprays, and injections.” “This mixture constantly creates health issues for us. We often develop itching, and skin rashes are very common. Handling such material sometimes also causes bukhaar or fevers.” “Every strata of society ill-­treats us,” Ismail remarks, pointing to the rampant casteism that dehumanizes those considered low in its racialized hierarchies. “Households in these areas do not want to employ us as they consider us filthy.” Bovine bodies are also subject to eviscerations, both through the model of enclosure, which entails casting aside animals as surplus and

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striating pastoral space, and through the model of intensification, which stems from metabolic transformations of the city that unevenly distribute bodily harms. On the one hand, enclosure, charted extensively in chapter 5, seals up urban commons and strives to relocate dairy owners to designated zones of the city. On the other hand, intensification can operate in the newly configured pastoral spaces of the metropolis. Illustrative are the pastures emerging from the commodity detritus of capital where bovines are exposed to a toxic ecology of hazardous substances. Intensification is a form of evisceration, for it has fraught consequences for cattle’s metabolic lives. “Numerous items from wires to iron are found inside cows,” says Dr. Kapoor, a veterinarian who works with one of Delhi’s gaushalas, “but plastic is the deadliest of them all.” He remarks that across the city, two or three animals die per day as a result. “It is disheartening to see what we find; one postmortem revealed fourteen kilos of plastic in its stomach.” In 2018, significant media attention was generated over the mysterious death of thirty-­six cows in a week at a gaushala in Najafgarh. Cattle death was initially attributed to negligence on the shelter’s part,98 but it later emerged that fifteen of these animals had eight to ten kilograms of plastic in their stomachs. Some cattle also died of acidosis caused by consuming rotten food.99 Many of these bovines had been brought in from the city’s streets. “The problem of plastic ingestion,” according to Kapoor, “is getting worse. When I first began working in Delhi in 2015, we witnessed one or two cases a month. Nowadays, there is not a single cow brought off the streets that has not ingested a life-­threatening amount of plastic.” His observations are corroborated by reports from other parts of the city, where twenty to thirty kilograms of plastic are routinely found in cattle’s stomachs once necropsies are conducted.100 The accumulation of plastic in bovine bodies has earned India’s urban cattle the moniker “plastic cows.”101 Intensification is in no way a given condition of pastoral spaces formed through waste, but is the product of a number of intersecting forces. According to official estimates pooled from sixty cities, India consumes 16.5 million tonnes of plastic and generates 9.46 million tonnes of plastic waste each year.102 Delhi ranks amongst the worst in terms of India’s rising metropolitan plastic consumption. Although the city issued a ban on polyethylene bags in 2009, later expanding it to all packaging and single-­use disposable plastic,

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this effort was unsuccessful in curbing the problem of plastic consumption and proliferation. More stringent rules were introduced in 2016, including phasing out nonrecyclable plastics and charging merchants who use plastic bags. However, succumbing to pressure from businesses, the government ended up relaxing these rules.103 Single-­use plastics comprise as much as 43 percent of plastic used in packaging, and consumption has outstripped the capacity to recycle.104 Micropractices of waste disposal also play a role. “Wet waste is increasingly put into plastic bags by people in households, who find it to be a convenient mode of disposal,” remarks Kapoor, reflecting on how this material, paradigmatic of the cheap natures of the Capitalocene,105 ends up in bovine bodies. “Plastics accumulate unsegregated in dhalaos, municipal waste bins, and by the roadside where a large number of urban residents drop their garbage. These are the very places in which cattle forage” (Figure 6.5). The mass production and consumption of plastics intermeshes with the feeding ecology and anatomy of cattle. “When cows feed upon material that is not connected to the soil, they use their tongues to manipulate particles into the buccal cavity,” Kapoor explains. “Poor segregation means that polyethylene bags and organic waste get mushed, and cows often lack the dexterity to separate the two.” Cattle do not necessarily ingest plastic by choice. Experiments suggest that they tear open plastic bags when feeding at garbage dumps, but this act often results in partially

Figure 6.5. Cow at a Municipal Corporation dhalao. Photograph by author.

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torn bags. This contrasts with animals such as macaques, which are able to open garbage bags with their hands and pick out food material with much greater dexterity.106 “Separating plastic from food becomes especially difficult when flimsy, single-­use plastic is involved,” says Kapoor. “What happens as a result is that plastic and food are masticated together, and the former becomes part of the bolus [that] cattle push into their rumens.” Ingestion of plastic clogs the stomachs of bovines and causes impaction, a failure in the ability to digest food, and an overheating of the body. New ecologies of bodily harm are generated via intensification as chemicals leach from plastics and cause immunosuppression, endocrine disruption, and carcinogenicity in cattle, not to mention their entry into human bodies via milk.107 “The dhalaos are congested with plastic,” remarks Sohan Lal, who is concerned about the health of his cows. Most of his animals are crossbred Jerseys, but he also has a few Sindhi and Gir cattle, which are indigenous milk-­producing breeds. “On my part, I try to minimize letting my cows loose, and somehow manage to feed them hay and concentrates in the evenings.” Although Sohan Lal is reticent to let all of his animals roam freely, especially the more expensive breeds, Baldev remarks that “not everyone can afford to keep their cows tethered at home, for the cost of cattle feed is rising sharply.” Cattle’s metabolic vulnerability emerges through a suite of concatenated ecological and economic practices. Studies suggest that female bovines are more susceptible to the development of ruminal impaction than males, partly because nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy and lactation increase appetite and lead to a greater proclivity for consuming anthropogenic food. Older animals, especially those over ten years of age, are also more susceptible to impaction.108 Dairy owners tend to feed milch animals fairly well, but older, unproductive females and bulls receive less attention. “It is not that we want our animals to suffer,” says Baldev, who is only too aware of the ways that rumen blockages hamper the metabolic work cattle perform. “Consuming plastic also lowers the productivity of our animals.” It would be erroneous to resort to an apolitical ecology of exposure and harm here—­a trap we might fall into if the focus is on the vibrancy of matter rather than the politics of materials and the wider structures with which the latter are in articulation. Dairy owners are not only hounded by the state for keeping cattle but also stigmatized by urban

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middle classes for their produce. The latter often refer to such milk as zahrilla dudh, “poisonous milk,” because it purportedly smells bad thanks to the cattle’s waste-­intensive diets. Poor milk quality is attributed to dairy owners’ greed, but those who deride dairy owners often remain symptomatically silent about the enclosure of grazing grounds and the detritus generated by the consumption of spectacular commodities. “The milk stinks,” says Guptaji, a resident of a middle-­class colony not far from the dairy. “What else will the milk be if cattle are feeding on garbage all day? I am appalled by the selfishness of these people who, to save money, refuse to care for their cattle and let them loose on the streets to graze.” Although Sohan Lal has a few customers who buy milk for personal consumption, as he has built a reputation for looking after his animals, Baldev is compelled to sell most of the milk, at marginal profit, to sweet shops or mithāi dukāns. Urban middle classes who want to see small-­scale dairies removed from the metropolis refer to the fraught effects of metabolic intensification on bovine bodies as a rationale for their cause. Some believe the only way to reduce the problem of plastic ingestion is to move cattle to shelters. “Running dairies in unregistered premises is a violation of law,” says a spokesperson for the charity People for Animals, “and so is abandoning animals to the streets to fend for themselves.”109 Urban elites and animal rights activists too often retrieve a very particular kind of bovine: one whose lives are dissociated from those of the urban poor. As Amita Baviskar’s poignant analyses of “bourgeois environmentalism” show, this is a seemingly class-­neutral discourse of the environmental quality of life, expressed through notions of “public interest” and sometimes “animal rights,” that disavows a public sphere that is much more embodied and corporeal.110 In fact, it is easier to propose locking up cattle than to address commodity consumption or waste privatization. However, the enclosure and development of grazing grounds come back to bite. With the intake of animals in gaushalas having increased tenfold in the past decade, the MCD is weary because the shelters are already overburdened.111 Visceral urbanisms tracked through bovine bodies elicit a suite of important questions on the urban commons,112 especially in terms of the corporeal avenues through which urban resources, particularly waste, are organized, distributed, and policed. Although the urban commons

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is being relentlessly enclosed, there are concomitant practices of commoning—­performative acts through which a commons is brought into being—­that exceed enclosure. In their intervention on Delhi’s urban infrastructures, Shruti Ragavan and Shubhangi Srivastava illustrate how cattle, by incorporating elements of the city—­roads, footpaths, traffic islands—­into their own ways of doing and being, open avenues for a “more-­than-­human commoning.”113 Ragavan and Srivastava index an expanded sense of community that makes a commons—­a community entailing a raft of other-­than-­human beings whose actions rub against the utopias of urban planners and speculative financial investors. Others refer to such urban sites as a “multispecies commons,” as a “kind of place in which human–­animal entanglements are made more explicit” and where the social is expanded from a limited, anthropocentric framing, to “other threads that coalesce to create a greater, tangled web of ecological processes.”114 The commoning of waste along minor circuits and its curtailment by the state, bourgeois environmentalists, and private capital, or the evisceration of human and bovine bodies through a fraught politics of producing, consuming, and redistributing plastic, point to the viscerality at the core of aspirations for a more inclusive city. One might see this as a politics of the metabolic commons: a “commons of basic staples.” As McFarlane and Desai point out, “For an increasing number of urban residents in India, the struggle for the urban commons is a metabolic struggle.”115 The metabolic commons entails bodily processes—­ both human and other than human—­through which staples are utilized, transformed, and put into circulation. Urban contestations over spaces to graze cattle and access to waste are steeped in reproducing life. Similarly, choices made by the state or the Municipal Corporation, particularly in terms of enclosing waste or incarcerating bovine lives deemed surplus, are metabolic ones. Too often they entrench rather than ameliorate the visceral struggles of metropolitan residents, especially those “who don’t qualify as a visible part of India’s urban metabolic modernity,”116 whether human or other than human. There is a correspondence between molecular economies and the metabolic commons. The model of enclosure means that waste is appropriated into the money–­commodity–­surplus (M–­C–­M′) circuit of capital, subordinating waste pickers to its molar form of economic

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organization. In other words, waste pickers are forced to enter into a commodity–­money–­commodity (C–­M–­C) relation, which hinges on selling their labor power (C) on the market. In contrast, commoning entails a C–­M–­C relation where waste pickers salvage materials (C) that are then sold for money (M) to buy basic staples (C), but their labor is not necessarily returned or retrieved as use values for capital.117 Waste and labor therefore flow through minor circuits of value that confound the state’s and capital’s “attempts to discipline and contain life within the domain of utility and accumulation.”118 Might it therefore be possible to hypothesize minor circuits in metabolic terms in which money is not always an intermediary in petty commodity production,119 or where the life courses of waste need not start or end in commodity production? Could we have a different denotation of M and C in the C–­M–­C circuit, where M denotes metabolism and C the commons—­a minor circuit that flows along the lines of commons–­metabolism–­commons? This opens up possibilities for another kind of political economy, one that deviates from the grand designs of planning and capital. It also brings to the fore a politics of inhabitation that does not necessarily concur with recent prescriptions of urban life by critical animal studies. A situated ethnography shows how it is not only bovines but also particular sets of relations and practices that are subjected to eviscerations—­ forces that also work to marginalize and render invisible people who do not count as a part of India’s metabolic modernity. To invoke a politics of the animal through transcontextual understandings of commodification, or to treat western particulars of the dairy industry as a universal condition, blots out a range of other economic practices in which bovines and people are enmeshed—­practices that are constantly disavowed by urban elites, the state, and animal rights activists alike. Yet molecular economies are intrinsically linked to struggles over the metabolic commons. The lives of street cattle in Delhi are fraught in the sense that metabolic intensification, including the abundance of plastic, generates toxic and eviscerating environments. It is precisely for this reason that we need to work with insights from critical political economy against some of the excesses of new materialism and its quest to recuperate elusive material worlds.120 New materialism cherishes vitality as a positive resource while neglecting or ignoring the fatal and hazardous consequences of materials.121 The generosity and joy of materials122

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have to be excavated politically. On the one hand, there is little doubt that commodities spark affects of enchantment, but to put it bluntly, this is often for middle-­class and elite consumers. On the other hand, the toxic detritus of commodities comes back to haunt the same vulnerable bodies time and time again. The affirmative vitality of things espoused by new materialism is ultimately unable to address the ontological and political questions at stake. The metabolic commons can be a different entry point and could generate other openings for political change. Rather than reifying matter as separate from human agency,123 we could look at the potential for creating points of alliance. The metabolic commons—­as a locus where the urban poor and cattle come together, with both deemed superfluous and surplus by capital and the state—­is one such common ground. The lives of dairy owners like Paro, Sohan Lal, and Baldev; the lives of their cattle, which traverse the city in search of food; and the travails of waste pickers like Ismail and his family are intricately entwined in their striving to procure basic staples amid extreme immiseration. Such actually existing coalitions between human and other-­than-­human denizens of the city, however fraught, proceed through molecular pathways and minor practices. They subvert onslaughts of the state, capital, bourgeois animal rights activists, and environmentalists. It is from these lives, alliances, and struggles, rather than from critical animal studies or new materialist theory, that we might begin to contemplate possibilities for a more just city to come.

Conclusion: Surplus Ecologies The economic cannot be read as an ontologically pure domain separated from culture or ecology; nor should it be seen as “embedded”124 in the ecological. Instead, I have argued that economy, culture, and ecology are co-­constituted from the outset. Contra urban political ecology/economy, and to a certain extent contra cultural economy, this recuperates the other than human as a productive economic force that has bearings on urban economic assembly and arrangement. Such a reading has wider implications for understanding urbanicity, and it stems from analytic innovations via ethnographic and historical specificity. A lively political economy, one attentive to both ecology and economy, cautions against

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placing economic agency squarely on the side of capital, irrespective of whether capital is understood in lawlike terms125 or through situated difference.126 A much more differentiated account of urban nature comes to the fore; it points to alternative ways of doing urban political economy without sacrificing its critical insights. An attention to molecular economies is in no way a retreat from the conceptual tools of political economy.127 Rather, it sharpens them to permit a much more nuanced analysis of the economic. This difference in interpretation has significant conceptual and political implications. Most notably, a close scrutiny of surplus ecologies —­ecologies emerging through relations between bovines constructed as superfluous, dairy owners operating in smooth space, and the life courses of urban waste—­reveals how not all economies are integrated into the capitalist market; nor do they change to a capitalist mode in their actual organization of production. This insight, which is drawn from and extends Nigam’s crucial formulation of molecular economies,128 suggests that there can be a simultaneous existence of different modes of production in the urban sphere. The proliferation of molecular economies eschews the historical necessity of capitalism. It is not that formal subsumption will give way, at some point, to the real subsumption of labor and nature by capital,129 wherein the wage relation is universalized, animals become use values solely for capital,130 and animal-­related production takes on the form of capitalist organization.131 The urban, as I have argued earlier, retains or reinvents its pastoral ethos while altered metabolic environments become fertile grounds for molecularity, a holey terrain that is crisscrossed by minor circuits of value and that provides openings for other ways of metropolitan economic make-­do. The molecular may be linked to capitalism—­or, rather, capitalism can strive to parasitize on the molecular, to reterritorialize it. Yet molecular economies can also take on a runaway character, not being geared to capitalist accumulation. Surplus ecologies enable a critical analysis of capitalist urbanization without resorting to totalizations and grand narratives of a form of urbanization that is planetary.132 A similar inflection of biopower and bovine biopolitics shows why it is problematic to treat such forces as fully formed in the West and a given to people in the postcolonial world. There is little doubt that a biopolitical logic was violently thrust on people and cattle, so as

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to contain them within the ambit of utility and accumulation while casting aside bovines deemed surplus. As Brian Massumi argues, “the theory of surplus value in the richest sense concerns the singular vivacity of a quality’s appearing and the revivification this potentiality bequeaths: it is a theory of surplus value of life.”133 However, in no way was this process of accumulation from life all-­effacing or complete. Biopolitics was, and continues to be, in correspondence with a cultural economy that, at certain moments, can even run counter to (post)colonial ideas of improvement. What this means for an analysis of urban economies and biocapital is that attempts to place bovines and people into the structure that is capitalism, whether through bull castration, crossbreeding, or intensive dairying units, are marked by a proliferation of molecular economies, both cultural and ecological in all its facets, that is constituted by flows that are supple. Such economies emerge in the face of urban gentrification, the forcible expulsion of people, and the mass dispossession that has come to mark the lives of the urban poor,134 but they also entail endeavors of seeking to efface legibility from capital and the state. These are features of a postcolonial city that has resonances beyond the singularity of this case. A pastoral ethos and its attendant economies are not some kind of variation from the iron laws of capital or biopower; rather, the very norm of biocapital is put under scrutiny and called into question. It is precisely for this reason that we have to refrain from taking dairies organized along western, capital-­intensive measures as a frame of reference for specifying economies centered on animal life135 and for articulating a more-­than-­human politics of the urban. There are many other alliances and coalitions at stake and at work,136 which are glossed over when the molecular elides ethnographic and analytical inquiry. In this sense, surplus might be seen as patterned potential, where alternatives are realized through actually existing practices. New patterns are composed as molecular forces attempt a bid to freedom, however slight. The possibilities that are opened up through minor readings of the economic, as well as through actually existing molecular economies, are ordinary rather than heroic or radical. These possibilities need to start by recognizing that capital has never eliminated surplus anywhere, whether surplus is understood in terms of the effluent detritus of commodities, as nondescript cattle, or as an army of unemployed or precariously waged

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laborers—­if that, for many are simply cast outside as floating populations and as spectators in the theater of producing surplus value.137 The three cannot be equated in the same breath, but all form surplus ecologies produced by capital. Although steeped in their own fault lines and fractures, all retain possibilities for commoning. Value, as molecular economies indicate, can be produced in other ways, in spite of capital’s tendency to destroy all other modes of valorization in the urban sphere. Molecular economies thus entail actually existing noncapitalist practices with multiple forms of property and multiple kinds of use values. Waste can become use value for cattle, through the latter’s own proclivities and metabolic propensities. Contrary to the dreams of planners, the state, and the urban elite, what lies outside the domain of capital is not a hindrance to be kept at bay or pacified through some redistribution of capital’s surplus. In many ways, this domain can become a site for experimenting with possible ways of organizing urban economies for purposes other than generating surplus for capital, without ignoring the need to ensure affordable access to the basics of shelter, sanitation, and sustenance. Herein lies the political import of a wider economic ontology and for an urbanism written in a minor key. The metabolic commons has salience for wider conceptualizations of the postcolonial city, just as it has resonances for thinking about urbanicity more widely. The metabolic commons should be read as a locus for human and other-­than-­human alliances, which could become starting points for postcapitalist transformations of the city in a molecular vein. They can provide far greater purchase for thinking about a more just city than those mobilized through the language of animal rights. Molecular economies are examples of actually existing practices; they provide an antidote to the capitalist exploitation of other-­than-­human metabolic work, witnessed, for instance, in capital-­intensive dairies.138 To invoke a commons–­metabolism–­commons circuit is therefore a call to work with existing avenues of more-­than-­human solidarity. Such avenues eschew the punitive biopolitics of the state as well as the antihumanism of animal rights activists, whose arrogance rests on claims to alone know what is good for everyone. Alliances of this sort are not a form of vanguardism but an endeavor of taking other lives and urban subjectivities seriously. They vie for public attention and open up new challenges, which are both legible and can be built on.

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CONCLUSION LIVELY CITIES

Lively cities are never settled. They are sites of action and agitations of habits, practices, and happenings. This book has been a response to this agitation. To grasp diverse currents that forge what we might call the urban has meant developing new composites of thought and method. These are not entrenched in silos but are drawn from different modes of knowing not easily emplaced in a singular conceptual framework or discipline. But neither is this a borrowing en masse from allied disciplines. Rather, developing new composites involves working with minor tendencies within other bodies of knowledge and drawing them into a new conceptual urban grammar, one that weaves ecology and economy, landscape and dwelling, politics and everyday life. Such a grammar that summons heterogeneity and difference can be unsettling. It also offers up a processual and political ontology of lively cities—­what they can do, and what they can become. In this book, I have sought to rework major urban grammar in three registers. Put another way, I have sought to articulate a minor urbanism in three overlapping keys. The first register pertains to the minoritarian, or the reworking of a major language from within,1 whether such a language has to do with a dominant urban theory or majoritarian forms of governance and control. The minor is about improvisation2 and itineracy; it gathers steam from heterogeneous associations. Its political manifestations occur covertly rather than as open resistance, subaltern 275

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or otherwise, often operating below the threshold of detectability. The second register entails the micropolitical, which has less to do with the small or the local, and more with the variations they introduce. At the same time, modes of power and the honed judgments of race can also operate micropolitically,3 acting on bodies in spaces of the urban everyday. The third register has to do with the molecular, which in this work gives credence to relations between bodies and materials, as well as to the ways in which they overflow or escape from the organization and ordering of the urban into totalizing structures such as capitalism.4 Time and again, this work returns to the hylomorphic model on which much urban theory and practice is based. In certain strands of urban theory, hylomorphism becomes either a pivotal organizing idea or an undercurrent whose assumptions remain unquestioned. Logics that form are imposed on matter; that prior design dictates the shape of the built environment, the scope of economic activity, and even the makeup and constitution of an organism, largely remain latent, even in the face of attempts to break out of staid, static iterations of urbanicity. To invoke the urban as a formation that is both alive and enlivens has meant going beyond this model in all of its avatars, whether it has to do with building, producing, or constituting being. A critique of this model is not merely an academic exercise; it heralds alternative models of thought and practice. A nonhylomorphic urban grammar has political consequences and is vital for reenvisioning urbanicity. Articulating cities in a minor key results in the invention of a series of concepts that strike at the heart of the notion that worlds are built first and inhabited later.5 Inhabitation, in the latter view, becomes an act of occurrence and occupation. Such a proposition is a heuristic. One witnesses a residue of hylomorphism even in notions of transgression and unruliness, espoused by the rush to write about animal life in cities. Transgression is the flip side of planning in that it indexes unplanned activity that impinges on intended spatial organization but leaves the hylomorphic model intact. This book has instead invoked modes of dwelling and wayfaring,6 a form of inhabitation that unfolds along lines and tracks invented by an entourage of beings as their lives enmesh with infrastructural and metabolic environments. This alternative model, formulated ecologically and ethnographically, retrieves other than humans as denizens rather than mere occupants of cities. Their actions co-­compose

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urban worlds. One implication of this alternative view is that it goes beyond the assumption that built environments are the product of human design—­an idea latent in much contemporary urban thought, practice, and planning. Emerging debates on spontaneity and nondesign also leave unquestioned the underlying ideas of giving form to matter. In such articulations, landscapes, infrastructures, and environments emerge in opposition to design, often without prompting, or accidentally. The intended script is deflected as “form is loosened from technical function.”7 Similarly, spontaneity indexes that which simply happens. It is nondesign because the actor orchestrating the design is no longer there. A minor articulation, however, is to turn this formulation on its head. The living city appears as an unintended, spontaneous formation if we look at things from a human vantage point. However, alternatives come into play the moment we take design not to be the imposition of form on matter or a linear process of conception and parturition, but to be the interplay and intra-­actions between materials and forces. Here also lies a crucial distinction between this project and new materialist invocations of “matter.”8 Materials respond to questions asked of them by a suite of interlocutors, be they human or other than human. This is vividly exemplified by the recombinant urbanisms tracked earlier: the formation of urban assemblages through the correspondence between an array of creatures and their relations with an ambient, infrastructural environment. Such correspondence is not random but simultaneously material and semiotic; relations congeal through a being’s own propensities and the questions asked of it by a wider urban milieu. An alternative account of the genesis of urban forms foregrounds an entirely different view of the becoming urban of nature. The human is one among many competencies and powers making and unmaking cities. Urban assembly also emerges through conjoint acts involving actions of people, animals, and materials. The repurposing of roads into new pastures is one example; such repurposing brings another city into view, one not based on expert designs but emerging through everyday acts of dwelling and wayfaring. This is not to say that hylomorphic models and their powers to act suddenly vanish when their foundations and working assumptions are challenged. Hylomorphism derives from, and reinforces, the distinction of society into governors and governed.9 Its

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logic of imposing form on matter is so deeply entrenched in planning and governance that it continues to hold sway despite decades of failure. And as we repeatedly witness, it is only in moments of exasperation that the state cedes to the limitations of carrying on with business as usual. Situations, sparked by a raft of beings, prompt thinking and acting otherwise. Lively cities, of course, are not the same everywhere. The cultivated, feral, and commensal all point to different ecologies and divergences within and between cities.10 Each signals a different mode of becoming urban, hinting at the plural ways in which urbanicity is made, remade, and unmade. Nor are cities bounded territories. Rather, they are stretched and pulled in different directions, often simultaneously. Many other formations, whether pastoral or agrarian, remain immanent to cities, reinventing themselves or persisting as unsubsumable fragments. This is a different kind of challenge that critiques of “methodological cityism”11 do not adequately address. Other formations that reside within the urban draw attention to a multiplicity of scales and processes through which urbanization unfolds—­an urbanization not graspable through a sole focus on the global.12 At the same time, such formations also summon unfamiliar urban forms and an outside to the city that is not necessarily geographically elsewhere but resonates in here, within the metropole and its contours. This is the importance of thinking topologically. The rural and the agrarian persist; they are reinvented; they proliferate. Different modes of becoming urban free the city from an inherited vision, creating the potential for it to be something else. Any comparative endeavor must track divergences and critically interrogate its rapports. What is given due attention, and from where, matters. It lies at the heart of any project that strives to derive an alternative vocabulary that deviates from a set of metropolitan tenets. The question of who or what has rapport cannot simply proceed through the language of just one party. Urbanicity has to be grounded in ways that point to the postcolonial configuration of the metropolis, whether Delhi or London,13 and in ways attentive to the circulation of biota and the micropractices of accommodating or expelling the stranger. Equally, purchase might be gained by reversing the gaze. Analytics that are drawn from platforms of experience in a city like Delhi can enable asking other questions of London. The point here is that analytics, particularly those we could call postcolonial, should not be seen as silos, their validity

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confined to explaining very particular worlds. Rather, they can become openings for querying the urban elsewhere, provided we are careful about how an analytic or filter rapports. This is not so much about grafting established forms of postcolonial thought onto other contexts as it is an endeavor of opening up urbanicity to minor variations, where a whole entourage of interlocutors, otherwise absent when the urban is couched in anthropocentric terms, can appear on the scene. Such interlocutors must be allowed to call into question the validity of any analytic, just as they may enforce its efficacy. More importantly, postcolonial urbanism in a minor key means taking such other than humans seriously—­not just as vital presences but as observant participants of the same world they inhabit with and alongside people. Invoking living cities is also to acknowledge that just as other than humans are part of people’s worlds, so too are people a part of their worlds, however differentially apprehended and however loose the arrangements. This means alluding to a sociality that is expanded, transversal, and rhizomatic. As a consequence, familiar categories of urban living, be they concerned with habitation or modes of dwelling, with collective practices or everyday life, are overhauled. Habitation and dwelling are recast as activities unfolding in the company of other than humans, whose own habits, sentience, and knowledgeabilities have bearings on how people’s activities are conducted. Dwelling alongside fosters interiority; heterogeneous company extends to celestial beings and astral bodies, in no way epiphenomenal but constitutive of the urban fabric. In other words, at stake is a different subjectivity, one that is meshworked and environmental.14 Conversely, an expanded sociality also means that other than humans are urban subjects who participate in the material politics of city making. They read human bodies and exapt urban form. These acts fundamentally alter the space-­times of cities and even call into question what it means to be human in contemporary urban worlds, whether in a city of the Global South or North. Other than humans spark affects that draw people into their lives, sometimes on their terms. What material and ecological dispositions forge community and a commons can no longer be taken for granted. As witnesses to events and happenings, other than humans can be seen as new incarnations of the urban flaneur, bringing to life a whole other way of seeing the city and participating in

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the rhythms that instantiate metropolitan life. Such instantiations cannot be grasped when ethnographic and analytical endeavors are steeped in dictates of major theory. On the one hand, in the viewpoint of such a major theory, other-­than-­human lives are inconsequential or, worse, not even taken into account as lives. A serious engagement with other than humans, on the other hand, points to the inadequacy of theory in a major key, for the latter falls apart when the actions, desires, and potentials of a retinue of beings are brought into the fray. As a word of caution, however, we must be cognizant of not putting too much emphasis on beastly presence. Other than humans also produce the urban by retreating from its gaze, by escaping, hiding, and running away. By doing so, they bring about a city that is holey and perforated, a city where the panoptic impetus fails no matter how all-­encompassing it strives to be in the current moment. Espousing a wider urban ontology has meant moving beyond some of the excesses of new materialism while reworking what constitutes urban economy. Contra new materialism’s politics of matter, a material politics, developed here through ethnographies of infrastructure, commodity flows, and itineraries of waste, as well as ethologies and histories of relations between bodies of diverse kinds, foregrounds the asymmetric, power-­laden field within which other-­than-­human agency unfolds. A material politics recasts what is political about material life; it is not a question of things or matter acting solely through its agentive potential derived from properties. Rather, the political has to do with questions of how and why materials are produced, the situated ways in which they are governed (or not), and the historical circumstances through which their agency is expressed. It is not that the force of things does not matter. Materials act, and such action is reflected in their qualities: the potential to compose relations, differentially, with varied bodies; the manner in which they unevenly distribute harms, and which come back to mark the same vulnerable corporealities. A material politics brings back the political economy occluded in new materialism, although much differently than straightjacket economism. That liveliness not only has bearings on economic activity but is constitutive of the economic from the very outset has been a point of this book’s departure. It has therefore reevaluated the economic as simultaneously social, cultural, and ecological in all its aspects, from production

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to circulation and social reproduction. This reading of the economic does not dispense with analytics of critical urban political economy, as certain adherents claim.15 Marxist analysis, broadly put, can seem to come out intact in this analysis, but it is not a reductive Marxism. Rather, the conversation among posthumanism, postcolonialism, and critical political economy developed here renders the analysis much more attuned to questions of nature and its heterogeneity, whether in the urban or elsewhere. We witness, for instance, how the metabolic and reproductive work of other than humans becomes vital in production and the social relations that constitute it. Animal bodies are at once fixed and variable capital,16 transforming materials into protein in ways that anthropogenic machines cannot. The bodily labors that animals perform are a dimension of social reproduction, as are their skills in negotiating and foraging in urban environments, which give rise to a new pastoral ethos in the city. Similarly, processes of circulation, when taken as life courses, point to the co-­constitution of culture, ecology, and economy, rather than the Marxist redux of economy being embedded in an ecological base.17 Ecological propensities of commodities, themselves historically constituted, influence circuits of capital, including turnover time, and the scope and ambit of their flows. Such propensities can also deterritorialize capital, witnessed in the case of London’s feral parakeets, giving rise to new urban natures. In certain instances, consumption too can involve trans-­ actions crossing porous bodies. Other than humans become cocreators of certain economic arrangements, witnessed in both Delhi and London, although with different histories and social relations. Other-­than-­ human potentials and forces have more pronounced effects in certain situations; they are not all-­pervasive across urban economies. Nonetheless, they constitute vital aspects of urban life and the production of a differentiated nature—­aspects sometimes relegated in urban political ecology/economy. Divergence, as a constitutive pathway of urban economies, has important analytical and political implications. It is not that postcolonial cities lie on an inclined plane, striving to reach a more advanced stage of capitalist economic organization, exemplified by the western metropolis. Economic trajectories are not teleological; nor are they borne out by historical necessity, although there is no dearth of arguments, policy

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imperatives, and planning visions that subscribe to such views. The clamor to push cities along such trajectories is equally prominent. A similar argument is also borne out in neo-­Lefebvrian perspectives on planetary urbanization, which sees capital as an all-­encompassing force that restructures cities and places according to its own logics of social and economic organization.18 Variegated forms of economic organization find little room in such analyses. In contrast, and following others,19 I have argued that there is an outside to capital that resides within the urban. After all, there is no urban without this heterogeneity, without an inside–­outside maneuver.20 This outside can be molecular, arising from the very terrain of capital and escaping its structuring codes, witnessed, for instance, in the urban dairies that emerge in Delhi’s interstitial spaces. Similarly, we see how an outside might be constituted when parakeets, as lively capital, go feral and fly off the grid of commodity circuits. Both constitute an outside to capital, but they have different histories that are not necessarily commensurate or reducible to the same set of processes. However, both point to the topological relation between capital and its outside; the two are not binary but stretch or bend into one another. These variegated and topological processes caution against holding on to one set of transformations, namely planetary urbanization, as primary while eliding others. This is important for cities in the Global North as much as it is for those in the Global South. There are plural, often incommensurate, modes of economic activity across cities. These have to be kept in focus if we are to create a more nuanced account of urban economy and the material politics of city making that follow. A minor reading of the economic thus takes modes of urban economic organization to be heterogeneous rather than uniform. Furthermore, urban economies are composed by several forces that capital presupposes but does not itself produce. We witness, for instance, how those dispossessed by capitalist urbanization resort to forms of petty commodity production in ways that do not involve wage labor or the subsumption of life and labor by the capitalist work model, even though capital can parasitize on such production or seek to integrate them within its structure. Equally, noncapitalist production and consumption can be mediated by money, albeit for purposes of accessing basic staples or needs rather than for accumulation and expansion.21 These processes are

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prominent in cities like Delhi, but they also take grip in London, where those relegated to the margins of urban life have to resort to forms of make-­do in order to eke out a living. More-­than-­human work also becomes a feature of such noncapitalist economies, just as they are part of the unwaged work in capitalist ones, except that in the former, they foster circuits of value that are minor in their orientation. Here, labor performed by people and the work done by animals are not returned as use value for capital, and both parties confound attempts to discipline and contain life within the ambit of accumulation. We can thus see how much of life in cities actually lies outside the domain of capital. These are resources that help people survive against all odds. They are resources on which a lot can be built. In cities of the Global North, I could draw attention, for instance, to the cultivated city in the form of urban agriculture practiced by various communities, especially migrants. Urban agriculture can be a means of subsistence or income supplement, even a kernel for claiming the city, but it is also more. For many from erstwhile colonies, urban gardens are a space for cultural expression,22 a plot where other modes of being become possible amid immiseration.23 Produce from such locales is often retained for neighborhood consumption rather than used for commercial purpose. Production here is thus not put to capitalist ends, and, as Sylvia Federici argues,24 urban agriculture often serves as a site to collectivize reproductive labor. At the same time, the invisibilized work of care that goes into such agriculture and therefore social reproduction, from capital’s viewpoint, cheapens the workforce. Although contestations over urban community gardens are rife, and growing food in the city often takes on a makeshift temporality, such practices fundamentally disrupt the rural–­urban divide that marks both agriculture and urbanicity.25 In other words, we could contend that through urban gardening practices, the urban in the Global North is also becoming an agrarian question, albeit one that follows different pathways than cities like Delhi. In fact, the phenomenon of shrinking cities, where urban centers undergo significant depopulation, often through an interplay of economic, political, and environmental forces, gives credence to reformulating the urban in this way. Detroit, for example, is a city that has witnessed significant depopulation and abandonment, where residents have been fighting hard for an urban livestock

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ordinance that would permit small animal farming within city limits.26 Urbanization is nonlinear, but in addition, practices involving other-­ than-­human life might be making a comeback in cities where a long history of urban biopolitics has worked to keep them out. A minor reading of the urban here enables drawing attention to a number of enlivening practices that reverberate within the city, in excess of the travails of sunk capital, emptiness, and decay. Micropolitical strategies that resist or elide the grip of capital are another crucial entry point for forging alternatives to business as usual. In contrast to the utopias of planners, the state, and urban elites, these strategies ought not be seen as nuisances that untune the aesthetic of the world-­class city, or as hindrances to imperatives of bringing economic arrangements into the realm of productivity and surplus value. Although continually brought onto the grid of capital, molecular economies—­ including those witnessed in Delhi—­retain the potential for taking the urban along other trajectories. They can become loci for supporting other forms of economic organization that can in fact be more immune to the vagaries of capital compared to those deeply embedded in capital’s structure. Alignments between people and other than humans, which form molecular economies, become steps toward a more inclusive city, one that accommodates, rather than ejects, other-­than-­human life. One needs no reminder that minor, micro, and molecular arrangements of cities, whether these have to do with economy, the urban environment, or modes of dwelling, are constantly striated. They are marked out by rules, codes, and boundaries aiming to control, regulate, and expunge beastly presence. There has been a surge in scholarship on this aspect of urban life, but where this endeavor has departed from extant analysis is in its rethinking of the ways in which urban life is administered. A first point of divergence lies in situating biopolitics rather than taking it as a form of power that is all pervading or a force field that is homogeneous and assumes the same form everywhere. Biopolitics holds when we locate it in specific genealogies rooted in western modernity. There are evocative histories of how discipline, securitization, and governance, of both human and other-­than-­human life, emerged in a city like London and had significant bearings on the ways in which institutions, public space, and the home came to be organized.27 But it is not that biopolitics was fully formed and then transferred to other contexts,

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such as Delhi under colonial rule. Rather, the norm had to be worked out anew, and the task of administering life assumed its form in relation to a highly particular cultural and ecological economy. This is exemplified by the histories of attempting to regulate and improve cattle. Although certain laws and legislations developed in Britain were cut-­ and-­pasted onto the Indian context, they met with currents and forces that stalled implementation or posed other questions such that norms had to be reworked. In no way was a biopolitical project complete; nor was it entirely successful—­not only in relation to bovines but also in terms of governing the wider urban sphere.28 A failure to recognize such divergences once more places cities along a teleological plane, repeatedly witnessed in arguments about capitalist modernity. The governance of life in any particular formation is historically situated and specific to the ways in which life is summoned as the object-­target of governance. Equally, the nature of working arrangements administering life, as well as how these arrangements shift depending on what is constructed as a population to be governed, play a vital role. Biopolitics can dovetail with a micropolitics of race, evidenced through capillary actions of power where the stranger is drowned in an inhospitable, even hostile milieu. Governance can also take the form of a hybrid of aesthetic and vernacular practices, where minor tendencies might be appropriated by the state. What is important for an urban theory attentive to living cities, postcolonial or otherwise, are the practices through which life serves, or fails to serve, as an arena for the exercise of power. A second point of departure concerns the relations between biopower and political economy. Antonio Negri, for instance, calls for reading biopolitics alongside the real subsumption of society to capital,29 where biopower pervades the entire fabric of social life such that there is no longer any life or time extrinsic to the time of capitalist production.30 Extending this argument, scholars such as Nicole Shukin contend that “in the nauseating recursivity of this logic, capital becomes animal, and animals become capital.” However, “a perfect tautology of market and species life is never seamlessly or fully secured but is continuously pursued through multiple, often competing, and deeply contradictory exercises of representational and economic power.”31 As ethnographic and archival readings of living cities indicate, biopolitics in Delhi emerges

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vis-­à-­vis the economy, when other than humans become use values for capital, at least in the case of cattle. Yet in the case of macaques, we see no anatomopolitics of the simian body, although they were at one time a resource and were put into economic circulation as living commodities producing biovalue for medical laboratories. Intensification of attempts to control macaque populations in the city began in the 1980s and 1990s, following aesthetic logics rather than biopolitical ones. In neither case, however, was there a real subsumption of life by capital. This is not simply because life exceeds attempts to administer it. That might be the case, but equally important is the fact that not all life, nor the economic spaces centered on life, gets placed under the organizing structure that is capitalism. This is a vital lesson we must learn from the actually existing histories and practices of urban living. A third point of my departure from extant scholarship on urban biopolitics pertains to new techniques of administering life, which come to the fore when divergences are taken into account. These have to do with casting the future as increasingly turbulent and therefore to be kept at bay. Here, biopolitics is caught up with a catastrophist imaginary, a will to intervene in the present in order to postpone an imminent chaotic force. This is precisely what one witnesses in calls for culling parakeets when models summon futures that appear hazardous even though their populations are not yet invasive. In no way value neutral, forecasting is steeped in longer racial histories of suspicion toward the stranger. A catastrophist biopolitics is also closely linked with the emergence of resilience as a mantra in policy circles, including U.N. Habitat’s New Urban Agenda.32 Resilience goes hand in hand with new regimes of austerity. It rests on the idea that the urban poor must somehow deal with a turbulent future on their own as public spending to mitigate risk is withdrawn. As certain critics point out, resilience “vaccinates citizens and environments so that they can take larger doses of inequality and degradation in the future.”33 In lieu of the language of resilience, we might invoke the idea of resourcefulness or the various avenues through which people create openings and claim their place in urban life. We witness how such openings can draw from more-­than-­human alignments, as a number of actually existing situations illustrate. Such alignments are by no means settled

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or ready-­made, but involve negotiations and are couched in political contestations. They include struggles over urban habitat and habitation, as well as “struggles to control meaning making,”34 including what constitutes livability, the shape of urban space, and who or what counts as a denizen and who does not. A minor grammar of the urban tells us that the collectives or agents embroiled in contestations over meaning, habitat, and habitation are not always the state, political parties, or even social movements. Everyday acts and ordinary practices become equally vital in forging resourcefulness; they include enactments of other than humans, no matter how small or modest their achievements. This should not, however, mean that resourcefulness ought to come at the cost of a withdrawal of the state or the denial of infrastructures subtending urban living. Far from it. What is needed is an acceptance of other-­than-­ human life as a vital element of urbanicity rather than effacing it or subjecting it to punitive action. Such imperatives become important if we have to devise ways of surviving a turbulent future, and they call for doing a material politics of city making in new ways. Fostering such alignments need not take recourse in the language of rights. Too often the animal rights–­based argument tends to invoke “the human” or “we humans” in a singular and undifferentiated manner, pitting the figure of anthropos against animal life. At times, such arguments mirror what authoritarian biologists have long voiced in regard to wildlife conservation: valuing animal lives over those of the rural poor.35 Animal rights activism becomes its urban incarnation, especially when driven by the middle classes and bourgeois elites. It cherishes animal being, no doubt important and in fact welcome, but it disavows the urban practices of those whose lives are proximal to animals. However, much of the rights-­based arguments addressing the urban poor, including those living precariously in informal settlements and those who are continually caught up in struggles over livelihood and belonging, fail to pay sufficient heed to their practices and proximities to animate life. Other than humans can often appear trivial to the poor’s concerns, given that many urban dwellers have yet to acquire a right to the city. Yet the lives of the poor and those of the animals they dwell with need not be seen as binary, with different settlements required for people and animals. A counternarrative that works from the ground up

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and from alignments between human and other-­than-­human life recognizes how struggles for staples and dwellings may be shared rather than being mutually exclusive. Here we might consider what it might mean to engage with an activity like planning, which operates largely in a major key. There are perhaps two salient points that can be made. First, a wider urban ontology, which recasts who and what constitutes urbanicity, would mean rethinking the premise that planners typically start from: cities as spaces for people that can be orchestrated and organized according to a preformed plan or design. Many other questions about planning come to the fore when the urban is recomposed in a minor vein. This includes a critical look at what constitutes urban economic activity and the need to account for a more plural set of practices when planning urban futures. As we have seen, when a singular version of the urban is posited by planners, they miss out on, or rather relegate elsewhere, a whole raft of other ways that people make and unmake cities. A wider urban ontology calls for creating avenues such that other forms of livelihoods might flourish. This would mean experimenting with different forms of production, rather than focusing just on those aimed at expanding surplus value. It would also entail different visions of public and private space that are open to heterogeneity and are not directed toward capitalist profit. Second, it would mean prescriptions have to be alive to agonism, especially when the other than human is concerned, for a planning of the old style, including logics of master plans, cannot simply be resurrected. Dwelling alongside other than humans is a messy business that creates its own set of tensions. As Jonathan Metzger argues,36 this implies designing apparatuses that articulate interests forged with other than humans, or even those that can ventriloquize the interests of other than humans. Such forms of planning mean thinking and acting “in the presence of ” those whose interests are being articulated,37 to make room for them to dissent and to rethink how a problem has been formulated rather than capturing it in advance. Creative solutions to making cities more livable might benefit from an ethicoaesthetic endeavor,38 to learn how to be affected differently and how to make room for other kinds of practice and habits. However, the difficulties of “incompossibility”—­ that worlds can be mutually exclusive and thus not “compossible” with other possible worlds39—­always remain.

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What is crucial is to attend to actually existing popular practices. Cities have an expanded sociality, stretching from the intercorporeal to the interpersonal, grouped to looser forms of coalition. They point to other avenues for achieving more just cities. Actually existing modes of cohabitation can in fact be far more creative and inventive than dreamt of in urban planning and theory. Such practices can be starting points for envisioning other urban worlds, but they must not be taken as glorifying powerlessness. Infrapolitical acts are one modality where the thickness of alignments is accessed and harnessed to subvert majoritarian onslaughts or to create openings in situations where cities have long suffered from deficiencies in urban infrastructure. However, infrapolitics alone will not suffice. A gesellschaft politics working with dispersed alliances and obligations might yield dividends, especially if they can complement other forms of public claim to basics of shelter and sustenance. There is no silver bullet, but what matters, time and again, are the concerns of others—­concerns that must be allowed to be voiced rather than simply ventriloquized. There are, of course, differences in the forms that coalitions and alignments take, and these cannot be prescribed in advance. Alignments can result in the emergence of an affective commons, evident in both London and Delhi, where other than humans trigger proximities and construct niches in order to render the urban more hospitable and habitable. Such commons, or more appropriately commoning, are inherently about public space and often entail place-­making activities involving dissent, no matter how small or ordinary. Equally, alignments can entail struggles over the metabolic commons where both marginalized people and animals lay claim to the city in order to reproduce their ways of doing and being. They indicate how value can be produced in ways that do not have to succumb to molar, capitalist models—­a crucial lesson for both urban theory and planning. Alignments are important because they foster a politics of use values, the salience of which cuts across cities of the Global South and North. Such urban possibilities that stem from cohabitation rely on creative powers that deterritorialize majoritarian assembly. These creative powers are often in the vernacular, situated in the space-­times of everyday life and involving more-­than-­human pathways and practices. The purchase of the vernacular is that it can be far more accommodating of

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difference or of that which is considered messy and unruly by the aesthetics of capital and the state. Seen this way, the vernacular is a different ethicoaesthetic practice, one that also creates an oikos or environment, be it through a public culture that channels forces toward deliberative disputes or in resisting majoritarian onslaughts on the civic sphere. The purchase of the vernacular goes beyond simply accommodating other than humans. Vernacular practices include diverse labors making cities tick, often in the face of failure of urban regulatory power. By adding other elements into the fray, including those not considered by the state and development-­driven agendas, such practices can perform the crucial work of repair and restoration, especially when other, curative, infrastructures are not in place. Although it cannot be the purpose of any minor articulation of the urban to claim final words, it is worth reflecting on what the urban becomes in a minor reading. Urbanicity is reworked as a formation that is not only relational but also alive. Living cities have variegated space-­ times. They are meshworks of interdependencies where the social, political, and economic agency of a retinue of beings can no longer be ignored. Cities played in a minor key are not bounded, territorial formations but ecological ones. Conjunctural and contingent, threaded by human and other-­than-­human forces and potentials, they bind and unbind in all sorts of ways, constantly forging new spaces and entering new spatial combinations. Furthermore, the minor invokes a politics of inhabitation rather than a politics of plan. The form and shape such a politics takes is situational, but what is common to most iterations is that they entail forms of action from within. What the minor means for urban theory should not be reified into prescriptions or rushed into a manifesto. It is important to bear in mind that the minor is not oppositional to what have been powerful, often lucid modes of urban inquiry, whether they stem from political economy, arise from postcolonial concerns with the subaltern, or work with urban public culture broadly put. Its significance and purchase lie in the fact that the minor alters the terrain of major thought without leaving that terrain. It does so by introducing variations and making it reel otherwise. The minor is a renunciation of mastery and a means of paying attention to urban marginality. At the same time, it summons strange interlocutors who refuse to be swept under the carpet, even though their

Conclusion  291

ways of being alive do not fit an accepted mode of understanding and ordering the world. The minor is not a heroic theory, but neither should it be a synonym for quietism, for it decries that which is patently intolerable. To write the urban in a minor key is not to lament, for the minor gives us the greatest arsenal of all: the power of thinking and acting otherwise.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people who made writing this book easier, and there are others without whom writing this book would have been much easier. For reasons of brevity, I will focus on the former. I am indebted to all my interlocutors in Delhi and London, who shared their stories and insights on urban living. Although they have been anonymized, this work has been deeply enriched by the generosity that only those enmeshed in the thickness of life can show. At the outset, I would like to thank three individuals who have been sources of support and inspiration. Sarah Whatmore has been an intellectual beacon and has encouraged me to think in innovative rather than established ways. Anindya “Rana” Sinha has been a friend and collaborator on a mutual journey of understanding animal lifeworlds. Our long conversations and heated debates have been immensely generative; if only all academic endeavors were so much fun! Sushrut Jadhav has been a friend, mentor, and guide at times when I have needed all three. A European Research Council Horizon 2020 Starting Grant for the project “Urban Ecologies: Rethinking Nonhuman Life in Global Cities” (uEcologies grant 759239), on which I am the principal investigator, allowed me to conduct research and write this book. A previous Wellcome Trust Seed Award in Humanities and Social Sciences (award 205766/Z/16/Z) helped me carry out scoping work in Delhi. I am particularly grateful to Gunjesh Kumar, Priyanka Justa, and Urvi Gupta, 293

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who were part of the Wellcome project team and with whom I was able to conduct some of my fieldwork. The chapters on cattle and macaques draw from their insights and material, for which I am grateful. I have been invited to present aspects of this work at various departments, workshops, and conferences, including at Ashoka University, New Delhi; the British Academy U.K.; ETH Zurich; the Institute of Ethnology and Institute of Sociology (Czech Academy of Sciences) and CEFRES, Prague; the Institute of Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt; Kings College, London; the Ludwig-­Maximilians-­Universität, Munich; the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru; the Rachel Carson Centre, Munich; the Technische Universität Berlin; the University of Manchester; the University of Oxford; the University of Zurich; the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania; the Association of Social Anthropologists annual conference at Oxford; the “Difficult Doings” workshop at Clare College, Cambridge; the European Association of Social Anthropologists at Stockholm; the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial-­und Kulturanthropologie, Bremen; the Neue Kulturgeographien Conference at Bonn; and the RC21 conference in New Delhi. I am grateful for all the comments and critiques. My work has relied on several libraries and archives, including the Central Secretariat Library, New Delhi; the Delhi State Archives, National Archives of India, New Delhi; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; and the Centre of South Asian Studies Library, University of Cambridge. Barbara Roe helped track down references from the South Asian studies collection. I also benefited from the online Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Bharat Ek Khoj and Public Library of India resources on Archive.org (https://archive.org/). I would like to thank Jason Weidemann, editorial director at the University of Minnesota Press, for making this book happen. His encouragement and patience have been exemplary. I am also grateful to Zenyse Miller, editorial assistant at the Press. Dinesh Wadiwel has been a perceptive reviewer, providing vital insights and helping make the arguments more nuanced and salient. AbdouMaliq Simone and Ash Amin offered generous and invaluable insights on the book as a whole. Their engagement with the text, as well as their thinking on urban theory more widely, has significantly

Acknowledgments  295

informed this work. I also thank Ash for his continuous support during my time in Cambridge. Conversations with a number of people have enriched my thinking, including Raúl Acosta, Nikhil Anand, Suresh Babu, Andrew Barry, Mitul Baruah, Amita Baviskar, Uli Beisel, Dorothee Brantz, Ludek Broz, Thomas Cousins, Ayona Datta, Gail Davies, Clemens Driessen, Marion Ernwein, Josh Fisher, Rob Francis, Franklin Ginn, David Goldberg, Barbara Harris-­White, César Giraldo Herrera, Steve Hinchliffe, Tim Ingold, Sandra Jasper, Nanda Kishore Kannuri, Lisa Krieg, Thomas Lemke, Roland Littlewood, Jamie Lorimer, Jonathan Metzger, Ursula Münster, Michelle Pentecost, Mahesh Rangarajan, Nida Rehman, Mathilda Rosengren. Arupjyoti Saikia, Awadhendra Sharan, Avi Sharma, Narayan Sharma, Sujit Sivasundaram, Ravi Sundaram, Carol Upadhya, Binoy V.V., Thom van Dooren, Tom White, and Helen Wilson. Nathalie Mahieu and Ralph Hancock provided many insights on London’s recombinant ecologies. At my department in Cambridge, I benefited from several discussions with Matthew Gandy, as well as David Nally and Philip Howell. I would like to thank my colleagues Bill Adams, Neil Arnold, Alex Cullen, Somaiyeh Falahat, Mia Gray, Christine Lane, Emma Mawdsley, Clive Oppenheimer, Olga Petri, Richard Powell, and Tom Spencer. Thanks also to my PhD student Michael Overton, other graduate students Ben Platt, Adam Searle, and Jonathon Turnbull, and visiting scholar Lauren Van Patter for being part of many conversations on urban ecologies. Jonathon shared many insights and provided helpful feedback on two chapters. At the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Oxford, where I was based until 2018, I am grateful to Patricia Daly, Beth Greenhough, Richard Grenyer, Paul Jepson, Yadvinder Malhi, Derek McCormack, Linda McDowell, and Rob Whittaker. The Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development at Somerville College provided avenues for hosting seminars on urbanization, and I would like to thank Alfred Gathorne-­Hardy and Sara Kalim for their support. The ERC Urban Ecologies team deserves special mention: postdoctoral scholars Catherine Oliver and Tom Fry; PhD students Anmol Choudhury, Sneha Gutgutia, Shruti Ragavan, and Shubhangi Srivastava; and research associates Kaustabh Moni Baruah and Aditya Ranjan Pathak.

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I am particularly grateful to Shaunak Sen, a friend and collaborator, whose “Vertovian” film making style never ceases to amaze me. They have all been part of this wider endeavor of looking at cities beyond the human. A position as adjunct faculty at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru provided an ideal home for the Urban Ecologies project in India. I am grateful to Sailesh Nayak and P. Srinivasa Aithal for their support. Smita and Shubhankar Sen were wonderful hosts in Delhi; my sadness at Uncle Shubhankar’s sudden demise has been heartfelt. I spent many months in Rana and Monisha (Ben) Behal’s home, and I remain forever indebted to their warmth and generosity. In Delhi, I would like to thank Abhijit Bhawal, Amar Kanwar, Suvrita Khatri and Prabhu Mohapatra, Nishant Kumar, Aman Mann, Mohammad Saud, Nadeem Shehzad, and Dilip Simeon. In Bangalore, Kakoli Mukhopadhyay and Tapan and Dolly Senapati have been generous hosts. In London, I am grateful to Mallika Sekhar and Leela Jadhav for all their kindness and support over the years. My immense gratitude to Taz (Riyaz Akhtar) Ahmed, Carlo Ferri, and Ian Klinke, for their encouragement. Numerous friends have been part of conversations over the years: Akanksha Awal, Annelie Bernhart, Lydia Cole, Kate Fayers-­Kerr, Emanuele Ferragina, Joe Gerlach, Adam Gilbertson, Sumon Gowala, Thomas Jellis, Jack Loveridge, Shubhra Nayar, James Palmer, Helge Peters, Bablu Saikia, Tarsh Thekaekara, Jessica Thorn, Thomas Turnbull, and John Zablocki. Monoranjan, Namita and Nimisha Thakur, Rojita Borpujari, Ayon and Anuj Kapil, Sujoy Hazarika, Rajan Dowerah, Padmakshi and Pratik Patowary, Raj Baruah, and Sanjeeb (Babu) Das—­all have been there when I needed them. Tilman and Geli Achtnich have been kind hosts, in whose home I completed a chapter on parakeets. A big thank-­you to Marthe Achtnich for her support and encouragement, and for tolerating someone so cocooned in his own thoughts. My parents, Moromi Goswami and Achintya Kumar (Manju) Barua, have always been unrelenting in their kindness. It is to them that this book is dedicated.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Simone and Pieterse, New Urban Worlds, 2. 2. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 3. 3. See, e.g., Amin and Thrift, Cities; Amin and Thrift, Seeing Like a City; Simone, Improvised Lives; Gandy and Jasper, Botanical City; and more recently, Gandy, Natura Urbana. 4. On the meshwork, see Ingold, Being Alive. 5. Also see Simone and Pieterse, New Urban Worlds. 6. See Ingold, Making. 7. See, e.g., Appel, Anand, and Gupta, Promise of Infrastructure; Tonkiss, Cities by Design; Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities. 8. The literature is too vast to summarize here. Relevant work includes: Wolch, “Zoöpolis”; Palmer, “Colonization, Urbanization, and Animals”; Hovorka, “Trans-­ species Urban Theory”; Narayanan, “Street Dogs”; Baviskar, “Cows, Cars and Cycle-­Rickshaws”; Nadal, Rabies in the Streets. 9. Kelsi Nagy, “Plastics Saturate Us, Inside Out,” Feral Atlas, accessed March 10, 2021, https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/poster/plastics-saturate-us-in side-and-outside-our-bodies; van Dooren and Rose, “Storied-­Places in a Multi�species City”; Baynes-­Rock, “Life and Death.” 10. See, e.g., Amin and Thrift, “Cultural-­Economy and Cities”; Barnes, “Culture: Economy”; Crang, “Introduction.” 11. See, e.g., Harvey, Rebel Cities. 12. Again, this is a vast field. Exemplary work includes, among others: Swyngedouw and Kaika, “Urban Political Ecology”; Loftus, Everyday Environmentalism; Smith, Uneven Development. 297

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13. For an early intervention in this arena, see Bakker and Bridge, “Mate� rial Worlds?” 14. See, e.g., Brantz, “Animal Bodies”; Howell, At Home and Astray; Sharan, In the City, Out of Place. 15. See, e.g., Srinivasan, “Biopolitics of Animal Being”; Chrulew and Wadi� wel, Foucault and Animals; Biermann and Mansfield, “Biodiversity.” 16. Foucault, History of Sexuality. 17. See, e.g., Rose, Politics of Life Itself; Cooper, Life as Surplus. 18. Latour, Re-­assembling the Social. 19. See Thrift and Dewsbury, “Dead Geographies”; Hinchliffe and What� more, “Living Cities.” 20. For an exemplary set of arguments on this theme, see Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, In the Nature of Cities. 21. See, e.g., Barua, “Animating Capital.” 22. See, e.g., Simone and Pieterse, New Urban Worlds; Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities. 23. Ward, “Towards a Relational Comparative Approach.” 24. Ernstson and Sörlin, Grounding Urban Natures. 25. Stengers, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” 49. 26. Robinson, “Cities in a World of Cities.” 27. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism. 28. Sharan, In the City, Out of Place. 29. Barua and Sinha, “Animating the Urban.” 30. Choy, Ecologies of Comparison; Robinson, “Cities in a World of Cities”; Ward, “Towards a Relational Comparative Approach.” 31. Robinson, “Comparative Urbanism,” 188. 32. Stengers, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern.” 33. Simone and Pieterse, New Urban Worlds. 34. For a classic iteration of this thesis, see Smith, “Nature as Accumula� tion Strategy.” 35. Simone and Pieterse, New Urban Worlds, 5. 36. Büscher, “Nonhuman Turn.” 37. Ong, “Introduction,” 3–­4. 38. Ong, “Introduction.” 39. For example, Appadurai, “Deep Democracy.” 40. See, e.g., Roy, “Urban Informality.” 41. See, e.g., Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics. 42. See, e.g., Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? 43. Roy, “Who’s Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?,” 200.

Notes to Introduction  299 44. See Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life; Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms.” 45. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 46. Klinke, “Vitalist Temptations.” 47. Lemke, “Alternative Model.” 48. Gandy and Jasper, “Geography, Materialism”; Braun, “New Material�isms”; Barua, “Animating Capital.” 49. See also Abrahamsson et al., “Living with Omega-­3.” 50. Ingold, “Materials against Materiality.” 51. Barry, Material Politics; Lemke, “New Materialisms.” 52. Critical interventions include, among others: Philo, “Animals, Geog� raphy, and the City”; Wolch and Emel, “Bringing the Animals Back In.” 53. Wolch, “Zoöpolis,” 29. 54. Wolch, “Anima Urbis,” 722. 55. Philo and Wilbert, Animal Spaces; Howell, “Flush and the Banditti.” 56. See, e.g., Srinivasan, “Biopolitics of Animal Being”; Palmer, “Coloni�zation, Urbanization, and Animals”; Van Patter and Hovorka, “‘Of Place’ or ‘of People’”; Howell, At Home and Astray. 57. See, e.g., Hovorka, “Trans-­species Urban Theory”; Blecha and Leitner, “Reimagining the Food System.” 58. See, e.g., Narayanan, “Cow Protectionism”; Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies; Reddy, “Of Holy Cows.” 59. Nadal, Rabies in the Streets. 60. Exemplary case studies from South Asian include: Gandhi, “Catch Me if You Can”; Solomon, “Interpellation and Affect”; Baviskar, “Cows, Cars and Cycle-­Rickshaws.” 61. The above are a select presentation of the literature, primarily alluding to work that looks at the postcolonial Indian context. There is a whole body of work on animals in urban settings worldwide. 62. Hinchliffe et al., “Urban Wild Things”; Hinchliffe and Whatmore, “Living Cities.” 63. Thrift, Non-­representational Theory. 64. Barua and Sinha, “Animating the Urban.” 65. Hinchliffe and Whatmore, “Living Cities,” 124; for exemplary schol�arship on this theme beyond cities, see Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene. 66. Kirksey and Helmreich, “Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography”; van Dooren and Rose, “Storied-­Places in a Multispecies City”; Baynes-­Rock, “Life and Death.” 67. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 68. Barua, “Animating Capital.”

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69. Haraway, “Value-­Added Dogs and Lively Capital.” 70. See, e.g., Nigam, “Molecular Economies”; Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 71. Simone, Improvised Lives. 72. Deleuze and Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?,” 16. 73. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 7. 74. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17. 75. Harvey, Rebel Cities; Castells, Rise of Network Society; Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.” 76. Tonkiss, Cities by Design; Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities; Roy, “Urban Informality.” 77. Lancione, “The City and ‘the Homeless.’” 78. Feigis, “Spaces Stretch Inward.” 79. Farías and Höhne, “Humans as Vectors.” 80. Amin and Thrift, Seeing Like a City. 81. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity. 82. See, e.g., Nigam, “Molecular Economies”; Benjamin, “Occupancy Urbanism.” 83. See, e.g., Datta, Illegal City; Gandhi, “Catch Me if You Can.” 84. Nigam, “Theatre of the Urban”; Taneja, “Saintly Animals.” 85. Simone, “Sociability and Endurance in Jakarta,” 224. 86. Frichot, Gabrielsson, and Metzger, introduction to Deleuze and the City. 87. Jellis and Gerlach, “Micropolitics and the Minor”; Gerlach, “Editing Worlds.” 88. Jellis and Gerlach, “Micropolitics and the Minor,” 564. 89. See, e.g., Roy, “Slumdog Cities”; Arnold, “Subaltern Streets.” 90. Simone, “Sociability and Endurance in Jakarta,” 237. 91. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 51. 92. Simone and Pieterse, New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, 1. 93. Lancione, “Micropolitical Entanglements,” 577. 94. On the building perspective, see Ingold, Perception of the Environment. 95. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 223. 96. Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 97. See, e.g., Hartsock, “Feminist Standpoint”; Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode”; Sylvia Federici, “Precarious Labor and Reproductive Work,” excerpt from “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint,” 2006 lecture, Caring Labor: An Archive, July 29, 2010, https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/07/ 29/silvia-federici-precarious-labor-and-reproductive-work/. 98. Marx, Capital, vol. 2. 99. Stengers, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” 62.

Notes to Chapter 1  301 100. Guattari, Three Ecologies. 101. Whatmore, “Hybrid Geographies.” 102. Kirksey and Helmreich, “Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” 563. 103. Kirksey, “Species.” 104. Ingold, “Anthropology beyond Humanity,” 19. 105. Ingold, “That’s Enough about Ethnography!,” 387. 106. On the “observant participant,” see Thrift, “Afterwords,” 252. 107. On collaborative writing from this work, see Barua et al., “Mental Health Ecologies.” 108. Cf. Castells, Rise of Network Society. 109. Atkins, “London’s Intra-­urban Milk Supply.” 110. Gururani and Dasgupta, “Frontier Urbanism.” 111. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.”

1. A Minor Ecology of Infrastructure 1. Amin and Thrift, Seeing Like a City, 64. 2. See Simone, “People as Infrastructure.” 3. Amin and Thrift, Seeing Like a City. 4. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics,” 329. 5. Appel, Anand, and Gupta, “Temporality, Politics,” 4. 6. Anand, Hydraulic City. 7. Criqui, “Delhi.” 8. Harvey and Knox, “Enchantments of Infrastructure.” 9. Barry, Material Politics. 10. Appel, Anand, and Gupta, “Temporality, Politics,” 25. 11. Lemke, “New Materialisms.” 12. Appel, Anand, and Gupta, “Temporality, Politics,” 11. 13. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics,” 328. 14. Simone, “Splintering, Specificity, Unsettlement,” 82. 15. “Monkey Tangle Trips Electricity Supply,” Indian Express (New Delhi), June 26, 2011. 16. “Power Trips as Monkey Gets Electrocuted,” Times of India (New Delhi), June 25, 2011, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Power -trips-as-monkey-gets-electrocuted/articleshow/8992465.cms. 17. “Power Supply Hit as Monkey Dies in Substation,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), June 26, 2011, https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/power -supply-hit-as-monkey-dies-in-substation/story-gTrkWDtpQSweQYYEn4 MMKO.html.

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18. “Monkey Tangle Trips Electricity Supply.” 19. Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale. 20. Smriti Singh and Abhinav Garg, “Don’t Feed Monkeys at Tis Hazari Courts,” Times of India (New Delhi), October 11, 2012, https://timesofindia .indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Dont-feed-monkeys-at-Tis-Hazari-courts/article show/16759761.cms. 21. “Free Wi-­Fi in Modi’s Varanasi Suffers from Power Cuts, Congestion and Monkeys,” India Today (New Delhi), April 2, 2015. 22. Simone, “Splintering, Specificity, Unsettlement.” 23. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16. 24. Ingold, Being Alive. 25. Ingold, “Evolution in the Minor Key,” 115. 26. For another iteration of these themes, see Wilson, “Seabirds in the City.” 27. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 71. 28. The video is available on Twitter (https://twitter.com/i/status/11569 90787445383168). 29. Gibson, Ecological Approach, 120. 30. Sinha, “Not in Their Genes,” 61. 31. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics,” 335. 32. Bourdieu, Outline. 33. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 103. 34. Tonkiss, Cities by Design; Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan, Ecologies of Urbanism. 35. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics,” 334. 36. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 106. 37. Gandy, “Unintentional Landscapes,” 434. 38. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 223. 39. Sohail Hashmi, “Overhead Wires in Delhi—­A Brief History of the Unholy Mess,” Wire, March 16, 2019, https://thewire.in/urban/delhi-the-wires -overhead. 40. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 41. Gandy, “Urban Political Ecology.” 42. Coleman, Moral Technology. 43. Criqui, “Delhi.” 44. Criqui, “Delhi.” 45. Cited in Criqui, “Delhi,” 97. 46. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 47. Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities,” 81. 48. Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities,” 84.

Notes to Chapter 1  303 49. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 7. 50. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 225. 51. Flusser, Shape of Things. 52. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 97–­98. 53. Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa, dir., Katiyabaaz (Electricity thief ), film, 84 minutes, released under English title Powerless (New Delhi: Globalistan Films and ITVS, 2013). 54. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 98, 106. 55. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 53. 56. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 66. 57. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 120. 58. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 29–­30. 59. “Police Needs to Do More to Curb Power Theft: Delhi H.C. Opines,” Economic Times (New Delhi), December 7, 2017, https://economictimes.india times.com/news/politics-and-nation/police-needs-to-do-more-to-curb-power -theft-delhi-hc-opines/articleshow/61966053.cms. 60. Kakkar and Mustafa, “Katiyabaaz.” 61. Appel, Anand, and Gupta, “Temporality, Politics.” 62. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 63. Hinchliffe, review of Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 398. 64. “‘Monkey Man’ Fears Rampant in New Delhi,” CNN World, May 16, 2001, https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/south/05/16/india .monkeyman/. 65. Verma and Srivastava, “Study on Mass Hysteria.” 66. Nigam, “Theatre of the Urban.” 67. Sethi, Free Man, 36. 68. I am grateful to Dilip Simeon for this observation. 69. “‘Monkey Man’ Fears Rampant.” 70. “Hoax-­Callers Thrive on Monkeyman Myth,” Times of India (New Delhi), May 21, 2001. 71. “Reward Offered for ‘Monkey Man’ Capture,” CNN World, May 17, 2001, https://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/south/05/17/india.mon keyman/index.html. 72. “Description of Monkeyman Still Elusive,” Times of India (New Delhi), May 18, 2001. 73. “Monkey-­Man Menace Mends Human Values,” Hindu (New Delhi), May 20, 2001. 74. Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms”; Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 75. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 31.

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76. Scott, “Infrapolitics and Mobilizations,” 113. 77. Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities”; Tonkiss, Cities by Design. 78. Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms”; Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 79. Amin and Thrift, Seeing Like a City, 64. 80. This vignette, and others that follow, are based on collaborative field� work conducted with Gunjesh Kumar, Urvi Gupta and Priyanka Justa. 81. Simone, “People as Infrastructure,” 407, 410. 82. Simone, “People as Infrastructure,” 410. 83. Barua, “Animating Capital.” 84. Latour, Pandora’s Hope. 85. For an extensive critique, see Ingold, “Anthropology beyond Humanity.” 86. Sinha, “Not in Their Genes,” 57. 87. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 263. 88. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 367. 89. Sinha, “Not in Their Genes,” 51, 57. 90. Deshpande, Gupta, and Sinha, “Intentional and Multimodal Communication.” 91. Kortlandt, “Use of Stone Tools.” 92. Deleuze, Spinoza, 126. 93. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. 94. Also see Van Patter, Turnbull and Dodsworth, “More-­Than-­human Collaborations.” 95. Simone, “People as Infrastructure,” 410. 96. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 284. 97. Tonkiss, Cities by Design. 98. Kaur, “Innovative Indian.” 99. Amin and Thrift, “Cultural-­Economy and Cities.” 100. Kaburu et al., “Rates of Human–­Macaque Interactions.” 101. Brotcorne et al., “Intergroup Variation,” 506. 102. Von Uexküll, “Theory of Meaning.” 103. Brotcorne et al., “Intergroup Variation,” 513. 104. Despret, “Body We Care For.” 105. Simone, “People as Infrastructure.” 106. Kaur, “Innovative Indian,” 314. 107. Jauregui, “Provisional Agency,” 80. 108. Jeffrey and Young, “Jugād.” 109. Barua, “Animating Capital.” 110. Roy, “Slumdog Cities,” 228.

Notes to Chapter 2  305 111. Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, 63. 112. Appel, Anand, and Gupta, Promise of Infrastructure; Larkin, “Politics and Poetics.” 113. Roy, “Slumdog Cities”; Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities. 114. Benjamin, “Occupancy Urbanism.” 115. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity. 116. Roy, “Urban Informality.” 117. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 96. 118. Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms.” 119. Cf. Simone, “People as Infrastructure.” 120. Barua, “Animating Capital.” 121. Scott, “Infrapolitics and Mobilizations.” 122. Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis. 123. Roy, “Slumdog Cities” 227. 124. Roy, “Slumdog Cities.”

2. The Politics of Commensality 1. Kumar, “New Friends Colony Residents.” 2. “Wildlife or Not? Delhi Government, Civic Bodies Spar over Mon� keys,” Times of India, March 6, 2019, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ city/delhi/wildlife-or-not-govt-civic-bodies-spar-over-monkeys/articleshow print/68294744.cms. 3. Webber, “Commensalism.” 4. “Dial Pays Langoors Handsomely to Shoo Away Monkeys from Igia,” Pioneer (India) (New Delhi), September 8, 2010. 5. Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics, 6–­7. 6. Braverman, Zooland; Biermann and Mansfield, “Biodiversity.” 7. Nadal, Rabies in the Streets; Gandhi, “Catch Me if You Can”; Solomon, “Interpellation and Affect”; Govindrajan, “Monkey Business.” 8. This vignette and some others surrounding commensality draws from joint fieldwork conducted with Gunjesh Kumar, Urvi Gupta, and Priyanka Justa in Delhi; also see Barua et al., “Mental Health Ecologies.” 9. Solomon, “Interpellation and Affect.” 10. Abhinav Rajput, “Hardlook—­Man vs. Monkey: Born to Be Wild,” Indian Express, July 9, 2018, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/ hardlook-man-vs-monkey-born-to-be-wild-delhi-forest-department-5251 406/.

306 

Notes to Chapter 2

11. “Trying to Ward Off Monkey Attack, Man Falls to Death in Gurgaon,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), December 19, 2016, https://www.hindu stantimes.com/gurgaon/trying-to-ward-off-monkey-attack-man-falls-to-death -in-gurgaon/story-oLRqhRxnlP4eMi84hdMheI.html. 12. Smeeta Mishra Pandey, “TB Under Control in Delhi Zoo Now, but Big Challenges Ahead,” Times of India (New Delhi), July 15, 2000. 13. “Uttarakhand Monkeys May Have TB, Could Be Threat to Humans: Experts,” Hindustan Times, January 13, 2016. 14. Sinha, “Not in Their Genes.” 15. Gellner, review of Caterina Guenzi, Le discours du destin; Guenzi, “Allotted Share.” 16. Guenzi, “Allotted Share,” 41. 17. Jenkins, Bananas. 18. Guenzi, “Allotted Share.” 19. Foucault, History of Sexuality. 20. Chrulew and Wadiwel, Foucault and Animals; Biermann and Mansfield, “Biodiversity.” 21. Richard, Goldstein, and Dewar, “Weed Macaques.” 22. Huffman and Sinha, “Nature and Culture.” 23. Jacob B. Israel, “The Monkey Menace,” Times of India, October 18, 1928, 7. 24. G. N. Bhuleskar, “Monkey Menace,” Times of India (New Delhi), September 29, 1951, 4. 25. “Anti-­Monkey Operation,” Times of India, November 21, 1953, 5. 26. “Delhi Diary,” Times of India, May 2, 1948, 8. 27. “India’s Export of Monkeys: Figures Given,” Times of India, May 8, 1953; “More Monkeys Available: ‘Not in This House,’” Times of India, December 7, 1954. 28. Mohnot, “On the Primate Resources of India,” 965. 29. Barua, “Animating Capital.” 30. “Thyroid Gland Trade. Export of Monkeys from India,” Manchester Guardian, April 18, 1925, 11. 31. Cousins and Cousins, We Two Together, 541–­42. 32. “Monkeys for America,” Times of India, August 11, 1931, 6. 33. Second Session of the Fourth Legislative Assembly, 1931, 703–­4. 34. “Current Topics: Monkeys at Sea,” Times of India, September 7, 1931, 8. 35. “Ban on Export of Monkeys: ‘Inhuman Treatment,’” Times of India, April 6, 1955, 11. 36. “Export of Monkeys,” Times of India, March 11, 1955, 3.

Notes to Chapter 2  307 37. Tansukh Rai Jain, “Export of Monkeys: To the Editor,” Times of India, April 4, 1955, 6. 38. “Exports of Monkeys,” Times of India, September 14, 1955, 11. 39. Southwick, Beg, and Siddiqi, “Population Survey,” 707–­8. 40. “Ridding Delhi of Monkey Pest,” Indian Social Reformer, September 26, 1931, 59. 41. “Monkey Business,” Times of India, December 16, 1949, 6. 42. “Measures to Check Destruction of Crops by Animals and Monkeys,” Local Government/Chief Commissioner/File No. 1(58), 1953, Delhi State Archives, New Delhi (hereafter DSA-­ND). 43. “Anti-­Monkey Operation,” 5. 44. “Monkeys Enter MPs’ Room,” Times of India, March 11, 1955. 45. “Monkeys Put NDMC to the Worse,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), November 19, 1960. 46. Southwick and Siddiqi, “Population Trends,” 203. 47. Southwick and Siddiqi, “Population Trends,” 203. 48. Ugrasen Kashyap, “Monkey Menace (a Letter),” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), October 26, 1960. 49. “New Approach to Monkey Business,” Statesman (New Delhi), October 27, 1960. 50. Mohnot, “On the Primate Resources of India.” 51. “The Two Sides of Monkey Export,” Times of India, November 24, 1973, 9. 52. “Ban on Monkey Export Urged,” Times of India, October 13, 1963, 11. 53. “Two Sides of Monkey Export,” 9. 54. “Centre Tightening Curbs on Export of Monkeys,” Times of India, September 8, 1975, 11. 55. “Appalling Cruelty,” Times of India, November 9, 1977, 8. 56. “India Bans Export of Rhesus Monkeys,” 3; also see Sinha, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” 57. “India Bans Export of Rhesus Monkeys,” 3. 58. “Desai against Export of Animals,” Statesman (Calcutta), November 15, 1977, 2. 59. “Export Ban on Frog Legs Opposed,” Times of India, December 22, 1977, 10. 60. “No Relaxation of Ban on Export of Monkeys,” Times of India, June 18, 1978, 9. 61. “U.S. Govt. Trying Hard to Make India Export Monkeys Again,” Times of India, May 27, 1978, 15.

308 

Notes to Chapter 2

62. Southwick, Siddiqi, and Oppenheimer, “Twenty-­Year Changes”; South�wick and Siddiqi, “Population Status.” 63. Southwick and Siddiqi, “Primate Commensalism,” 224. 64. Southwick and Siddiqi, “Primate Commensalism.” 65. Malik, “Population Growth.” 66. Southwick and Siddiqi, “Primate Commensalism,” 228. 67. Southwick and Siddiqi, “Population Status,” 57. 68. Lutgendorf, “My Hanuman Is Bigger Than Yours.” 69. Kalpana Jain, “It’s Monkeys vs. Mandarins in Delhi’s Corridors of Power,” Times of India, December 27, 1998, 7. 70. “Monkeys Attack Delhi Politician,” BBC News, October 21, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7055625.stm. 71. Kumar, “New Friends Colony Residents.” 72. Malik and Johnson, “Trapping and Conservation”; Imam, Malik, and Yahya, “Translocation of Rhesus Macaques.” 73. “Ridding Delhi of Monkey Pest.” 74. Malik and Johnson, “Trapping and Conservation,” 63. 75. Malik and Johnson, “Control of Man–­Monkey Conflicts.” 76. Malik and Johnson, “Commensal Rhesus in India,” 241. 77. Govindrajan, “Monkey Business.” 78. Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics, 15. 79. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 112. 80. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 112. 81. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 112. 82. “MCD’S Monkey Business Runs into Hard Times,” Hindustan Times, August 9, 2007. 83. K. Choudhury, “MCD Has Yet to Get to Grips with City’s Monkey Menace,” Hindustan Times, October 21, 2007. 84. “South Corporation in a Fix over Monkey Business,” Times of India, January 10, 2015. 85. For a fascinating ethnographic account of trapping macaques in the city, see Gandhi, “Catch Me if You Can.” 86. “Monkey Population Falls in Capital,” Hindustan Times, May 15, 2008. 87. “We Don’t Have Enough Monkey Catchers: MCD,” Hindustan Times, September 9, 2010. 88. Malik, Seth, and Southwick, “Population Growth of Free-­Ranging Rhesus Monkeys.” 89. Malik and Johnson, “Control of Man–­Monkey Conflicts.” 90. Malik and Johnson, “Control of Man–­Monkey Conflicts.”

Notes to Chapter 2  309 91. “R.S. Seeks Advice through Ad to Deal with Monkey Menace in VIP Zone,” Pioneer (India) (New Delhi), April 15, 2016. 92. Utkarsh Anand, “Conceding Defeat to Monkeys, MCD Says Can’t Catch Them,” Indian Express (New Delhi), March 15, 2012. 93. Jasjeev Gandhiok and Paras Singh, “Delhi: Simians Wreak Havoc; Forest Department, Corporations Pass Buck,” Times of India, January 19, 2019, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/delhi-simians-wreak-havoc -forest-department-corporations-pass-buck/articleshow/67595697.cms. 94. “Wildlife or Not?” 95. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 103. 96. Rajput, “Hardlook—­Man vs. Monkey: Born to Be Wild.” 97. Whatmore et al., “Vernacular Ecologies.” 98. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 38. 99. See also Gandhi, “Catch Me if You Can.” 100. “Animal Work: Metabolic, Ecological, Affective,” Cultural Anthro� pology website, 2018, accessed 16/11/2018, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ 1504-animal-work-metabolic-ecological-affective. 101. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 283. 102. “Monkey Business,” MINT, March 10, 2017. 103. “38 Langoors to Scare Monkeys Away,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), September 26, 2010. 104. “Monkeys Teaming Up to Beat Back Langurs,” Times of India (New Delhi), August 8, 2011. 105. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 33. 106. Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, “Langurs Gone, Monkeys on a Roll—­Raisina Hills under Simian Siege after Sundown,” Telegraph (New Delhi), January 22, 2013, https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/langurs-gone-monkeys-on-a-roll -raisina-hills-under-simian-siege-after-sundown/cid/342045. 107. Shyam Bhagat Negi, “Illegal Hiring of Langurs for the Security of Official Buildings—­Reg,” advisory memo, October 15, 2012, http://wccb.gov .in/WriteReadData/userfiles/file/Advisories/Hiring%20of%20Langurs.pdf. 108. Sumi Sukanya, “‘Langur’ Trick to Make Monkey of Monkey,” Telegraph (New Delhi), August 1, 2014, https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/ langur-trick-to-make-monkey-of-monkey/cid/318846. 109. News Express, “40 Men in Ape Suits to Scare Monkeys Away from Parliament,” YouTube, August 2, 2014, video, 3:28, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=_wIMtX3pGUI. 110. Fortunati, “Immaterial Labor.” 111. Foucault, Power, 147–­48, 361. 112. Ingold, Perception of the Environment.

310 

Notes to Chapter 2

113. Latour, Pandora’s Hope. 114. For a discussion of relocation of macaques from Delhi, see also Gov�indrajan, “Monkey Business”; Nadal, Rabies in the Streets. 115. Engels, Housing Question, 71. 116. Engels, Housing Question, 71. 117. Joydeep Thakur and Vibha Sharma, “Sterilisation and Not Reloca�tion Solution to Contain Monkeys in Delhi, Say Experts,” Hindustan Times, August 5, 2017, http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/sterilisation-and -not-relocation-solution-to-contain-monkeys-in-delhi-say-experts/story-I8xlJ Bqc3qzdlIqJEeCeDL.html. 118. Praveen Jose, “Bitten by Monkey, Lack of Rabies Vaccine Adds to Woe,” Times of India (New Delhi), May 22, 2014, https://timesofindia.india times.com/city/gurgaon/Bitten-by-monkey-lack-of-rabies-vaccine-adds-to -woe/articleshow/35456888.cms. 119. Avishek Dastidar, “Cows Chew on Monkey Feed,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), April 10, 2008. 120. Aneesha Mathur, “A Sanctuary for Monkeys,” Indian Express (New Delhi), October 7, 2012, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/a-sanc tuary-for-monkeys/. 121. “R 3 Crore Going to the Monkeys in Delhi,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), October 15, 2013. 122. “Govt. Fails to Foot Rs. 1-­Cr Bill, Monkeys at Asola Sanctuary Go Hungry,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), December 6, 2014. 123. “High Court Slaps Notices on Govt. as Monkeys Remain Hungry in Asola,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), December 24, 2014. 124. “No Full Stops to Monkey Menace,” Times of India (New Delhi), February 15, 2013. 125. Southwick and Siddiqi, “Primate Commensalism,” 229. 126. Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics. 127. Baviskar, Uncivil City. 128. Engels, Housing Question. 129. Gandy, Habitat and Living in Plural Cities; Gandhi, “Catch Me if You Can.” 130. Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities.” 131. Shankar, “Vernacular.” 132. Whatmore, “Earthly Powers”; Whatmore et al., “Vernacular Ecologies.” 133. Gerlach, “Lines, Contours and Legends.” 134. Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics. 135. Biermann and Mansfield, “Biodiversity”; Braverman, Zooland.

Notes to Chapter 3  311 136. This genealogy is by no means singular. Cities in the so-­called Global South were sites for racializing space, just as they became, in the late nineteenth century, logistical hubs and centers of administration for resource frontiers; see Simone, “Cities of the Global South”; Legg, Spaces of Colonialism. Such sites were also important in the development of the Western biopolitical project; see Breckenridge, Biometric State. Hence my emphasis on hybrids of biopolitical, aesthetic, and vernacular practices, rather than couching the regulation of other-­ than-­human life as a mode of biopolitics alone.

3. Lively Capital and Recombinant Urbanisms 1. British Ornithologists Union, “British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee,” 441. 2. Heald et al., “Understanding the Origins.” 3. Harry Mount, “Should We Cull the Squawking Parakeets? 50,000 of Them Are Threatening British Birds, Gobbling Crops—­And They Are Breeding Like Crazy,” Daily Mail, updated August 30, 2016, https://www.dailymail .co.uk/news/article-3764383/Should-cull-squawking-parakeets-50-000-threat ening-British-birds-gobbling-crops-breeding-like-crazy.html. 4. Castells, “European Cities”; Castells, Rise of Network Society. 5. Varma, Postcolonial City, 31. 6. Gilroy, “London Sumting Dis,” 57. 7. Haraway, “Value-­Added Dogs and Lively Capital.” 8. Barua, “Animating Capital.” 9. Meurk, “Recombinant Ecology”; Rotherham, Recombinant Ecology. 10. Norton, “Feral Cities.” 11. Harvey, “Feral Capitalism.” 12. Simone, “City of Potentialities,” 7. 13. Probyn-­Rapsey, “Five Propositions on Feral,” 18; Van Patter and Hovorka, “‘Of Place’ or ‘of People’”; Wadiwel and Taylor, “Conversation on the Feral.” 14. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 105. 15. Sandilands, “Some ‘F’ Words”; Montford and Taylor, “Feral Theory.” 16. Belcourt, “Poltergeist Manifesto.” 17. Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals” and “Ecco Homo,” 42. 18. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 472. 19. Power, Ornithological Notes, 55. 20. “Parakeets Are Now to Be Seen . . . ,” Middlesex County Times (London), April 23, 1932. 21. Morgan, “Feral Rose-­Ringed Parakeets in Britain.”

312 

Notes to Chapter 3

22. Bedford, Parrots and Parrot-­like Birds, 120. 23. William North, “Out of Doors,” Weekly Telegraph (London), June 30, 1917, 9. 24. Amin, Land of Strangers, 86–­88. 25. Hewlett, Breeding Birds of the London Area. 26. Self, Birds of London, 245. 27. Hudson, “Feral Parakeets near London,” 33. 28. Amin, Land of Strangers. 29. England, “Feral Populations of Parakeets,” 394. 30. Tozer, “Feral Parrakeets.” 31. Knox, “Order or Chaos?” 32. Holmes et al., “British List,” 2. 33. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus. 34. Ferguson-­Lees and Sharrock, “Feral Populations,” 300. 35. Chew and Hamilton, “Rise and Fall,” 38. 36. Clancey, “Review of Some Recent Researches.” 37. Campbell, “How Wild Is Our Wildlife?,” 37. 38. Campbell, “How Wild Is Our Wildlife?,” 40. 39. Chew and Hamilton, “Rise and Fall,” 40. 40. Simberloff, “Charles Elton.” 41. Elton, Ecology of Invasions, 18. 42. Elton, Ecology of Invasions, 15. 43. “Exotic Birds in Britain,” Middlesex County Times, August 20, 1976. 44. Union, “British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee: Eleventh Report (December 1983),” 441. 45. Goodwin, “Introduced and Re-­introduced Birds,” 235. 46. Pithon and Dytham, “Census.” 47. Vinicombe, Marchant, and Knox, “Review of Status and Categorisa�tion,” 611. 48. Holmes et al., “British List,” 4. 49. Holmes and Stroud, “Naturalised Birds,” 8. 50. Pithon and Dytham, “Distribution and Population Development,” 115. 51. Butler et al., “Breeding Biology.” 52. Collard and Dempsey, “Life for Sale?”; Barua, “Nonhuman Labour”; Haraway, When Species Meet. 53. McCarthy, “Political Ecology/Economy.” 54. Appadurai, “Introduction.” 55. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 118. 56. Marx, Capital, vol. 2.

Notes to Chapter 3  313 57. Marx, Capital, 2:153. 58. Marx, Capital, 2:110. 59. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 215. 60. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 73. 61. Haraway, When Species Meet. 62. Bedford, “Breeding of the Blue Ringneck,” 144. 63. Hume, “High Price to Pay.” 64. West, “Notes on the Cyanistic Phase.” 65. Boosey, “Blue Ringneck Parakeets.” 66. Cummings, “My Swan Song,” 28. 67. Barua, “Affective Economies.” 68. Ezra, “Nesting Notes,” 123. 69. Bedford, “Breeding of the Blue Ringneck,” 143. 70. “Psittacula krameri,” AnAge: The Animal Ageing and Longevity Database, July 14, 2017, https://genomics.senescence.info/species/entry.php?species =Psittacula_krameri. 71. Anderson, “Indian Ring-­Necked Parakeet Trivia.” 72. Morgan, “Feral Rose-­Ringed Parakeets in Britain,” 561. 73. “Birds Outnumber Dogs and Cats,” Daily Herald (London), October 4, 1961, 3. 74. Engebretson, “Welfare and Suitability.” 75. Barua, “Affective Economies.” 76. Fletcher and Askew, Review of the Status. 77. Fletcher and Askew, Review of the Status. 78. Tim Inskipp, “The Indian Bird Trade,” in The Bird Business: A Study of the Commercial Cage Bird Trade, ed. Greta Nilsson (Washington, D.C.: The Animal Welfare Institute, 1981). 79. Inskipp, “The Indian Bird Trade.” 80. Inskipp, “The Indian Bird Trade.” 81. Campbell, “Kula in Vakuta,” 202–­3. 82. Appadurai, “Introduction,” 17. 83. Barua, “Affective Economies.” 84. Munn, “Gawan Kula.” 85. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line. 86. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 72. 87. Collard, “Putting Animals Back Together.” 88. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 77. 89. Arnold, Woodward, and Smith, “Parrots in the London Area,” 2. 90. Heald et al., “Understanding the Origins.” 91. Ramsay, “Psittacosis Outbreak.”

314 

Notes to Chapter 3

92. “Parakeets Are Now to Be Seen,” 12. 93. “Parrots Drowned in Their Cages,” Nottingham Evening Post, April 18, 1932, 6. 94. “Parrot Disease Suspected,” Biggleswade Chronicle and Bedfordshire Gazette, December 12, 1952. 95. “300 Pet Store Birds Destroyed,” Shields Daily News, December 20, 1952; “Stop Imports of Danger Parrots Urges Jury,” Daily Herald, December 19, 1952. 96. C. Selly, “Parrot Disease in Ducks,” Daily Herald, January 10, 1953. 97. “140 Cage Birds Lost in Gale,” Western Mail and South Wales News, March 28, 1955. 98. Mitchell, “Feral Parrakeets.” 99. “Parakeet Caught,” Birmingham Daily Post, March 3, 1965. 100. Fletcher and Askew, Review of the Status. 101. England, “Further Review,” 179–­80, emphasis removed. 102. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 69–­70. 103. Smith, “Some Observations on Ringnecked Parrakeet,” 132. 104. England, “Feral Populations of Parakeets,” 393. 105. Smith, “Some Observations on Ringnecked Parrakeet,” 132. 106. England, “Feral Populations of Parakeets,” 393–­94. 107. Munn, “Gawan Kula,” 301. 108. Collard and Dempsey, “Capitalist Natures.” 109. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 71. 110. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 86. 111. Collard, Animal Traffic. 112. Avise, Phylogeography. 113. Groombridge et al., “Molecular Phylogeny.” 114. Le Gros et al., “Rapid Morphological Changes.” 115. Ingold, Perception of the Environment; Ingold, Being Alive. 116. Ingold, Being Alive, 163. 117. Jackson et al., “Ancestral Origins,” 4277. 118. Fletcher and Askew, Review of the Status. 119. Jackson et al., “Ancestral Origins.” 120. Ingold, Lines, 118; Bergson, Creative Evolution. 121. Le Gros et al., “Rapid Morphological Changes.” 122. Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town. 123. Le Gros et al., “Rapid Morphological Changes,” 1595. 124. Le Gros et al., “Rapid Morphological Changes.” 125. Castells, Rise of Network Society. 126. Latour, Re-­assembling the Social.

Notes to Chapter 3  315 127. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 21, 33. 128. Pithon and Dytham, “Census,” 114. 129. Goodwin, “On Feral Rose-­Ringed Parakeets,” 85. 130. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, 45. 131. Rotherham, Recombinant Ecology. 132. Meurk, “Recombinant Ecology,” 198. 133. Gandy, “Entropy by Design”; Jasper, “Sonic Refugia.” 134. Flusser, Shape of Things. 135. Guattari, Chaosmosis. 136. Metzger, “Cultivating Torment.” 137. Deleuze, Spinoza, 125. 138. Pithon and Dytham, “Distribution and Population Development.” 139. Clergeau and Vergnes, “Bird Feeders May Sustain.” 140. Butler, “Feral Parrots.” 141. Le Gros et al., “Rapid Morphological Changes.” 142. Ali and Ripley, Compact Handbook, 222; as well as personal observations. 143. Pithon and Dytham, “Determination of the Origin.” 144. Gandy and Jasper, Botanical City. 145. Rotherham, Recombinant Ecology. 146. Arnold, Woodward, and Smith, “Parrots in the London Area.” 147. Pithon and Dytham, “Distribution and Population Development,” 342. 148. Goodwin, “On Feral Rose-­Ringed Parakeets.” 149. Gandy, “Fly that Tried.” 150. Pithon and Dytham, “Breeding Performance.” 151. Butler, “Population Biology.” 152. Grandi, Menchetti, and Mori, “Vertical Segregation.” 153. England, “Feral Populations of Parakeets”; Fletcher and Askew, Review of the Status. 154. Carrete and Tella, “Wildlife Trade.” 155. Pithon and Dytham, “Census,” 114. 156. John Hamilton, “Pesky Polly,” Guardian (London), March 2, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/mar/03/environment.environment. 157. Hancock and Martin, “Predation of Rose-­Ringed Parakeets.” 158. Johnson and Corley, “Peregrine Falcons Nesting.” 159. Drewitt, Urban Peregrines. 160. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 109. 161. Hinchliffe and Whatmore, “Living Cities.” 162. Castells, “European Cities”; Castells, Rise of Network Society.

316 

Notes to Chapter 3

163. Varma, Postcolonial City. 164. Cf. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. 165. Bubandt and Tsing, “Feral Dynamics”; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “On Anthropogenic Landscapes” (2020), reprint, Biodesigned, May 2021, https:// www.biodesigned.org/anna-tsing/on-anthropogenic-landscapes. 166. Castells, “European Cities”; Castells, Rise of Network Society. 167. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies. 168. Büscher, “Nonhuman Turn.” 169. Appadurai, “Introduction.” 170. Harvey, “Feral Capitalism.” 171. Simone, Improvised Lives. 172. Bubandt and Tsing, “Feral Dynamics”; Bubandt and Tsing, “Ethno� ecology for the Anthropocene.” 173. Guattari, Chaosmosis.

4. The Micropolitics of Ferality 1. Gilroy, “London Sumting Dis,” 59. 2. Fieldsports Channel, “Decoying Parakeets—­Airheads, Episode 24,” YouTube, November 20, 2014, video, 13:38, https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=LHvTKQpy2Mo&t=136s. 3. Amin, Land of Strangers. 4. Candea and Da Col, “Return to Hospitality”; Dikeç, Clark, and Bar� nett, “Extending Hospitality”; Still, Derrida and Hospitality. 5. Dikeç, Clark, and Barnett, “Extending Hospitality.” 6. Amin, Land of Strangers, 96. 7. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 237. 8. Odling-­Smee, Laland, and Feldman, Niche Construction, 3. 9. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus. 10. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. 11. Sarah Sands, “If I’d Wanted Parakeets I’d Have Gone to Brazil,” Independent (London), October 4, 2009. 12. Mount, “Should We Cull the Squawking Parakeets?” 13. Orros and Fellowes, “Wild Bird Feeding.” 14. PFMA (Pet Food Manufacturers Association), “PFMA’s Pet Data Report, 2018,” PFMA.org, https://www.pfma.org.uk/_assets/docs/annual-re ports/PFMA-Pet-Data-Report-2018.pdf. 15. Jones, Birds at My Table. 16. T. C. Williams, “The Birds,” London Daily News (London), December 30, 1890, 3.

Notes to Chapter 4  317 17. Jones, Birds at My Table, 47. 18. Hiesemann, How to Attract and Protect Wild Birds, 64. 19. Hiesemann, How to Attract and Protect Wild Birds, 65. 20. I am grateful to Dorothea Brantz for drawing my attention to this necropolitical aspect of von Berlepsch’s experiments. 21. Cited in Moss, Bird in the Bush. 22. Baynes, Wild Bird Guests, viii–­ix. 23. Baynes, Wild Bird Guests, x. 24. “Feeding the Birds,” Nelson Leader, November 4, 1983, 14. 25. “The ‘U-­Neek’ Bird Feeder,” Mid Sussex Times, March 15, 1932, 1. 26. “Bird Feeders,” Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, February 10, 1939, 9. 27. Kloppenberg, First the Seed. 28. “Swoop Wild Bird Food,” Mansfield and Sutton Recorder, January 29, 1981, 12. 29. Callahan, History of Birdwatching. 30. Soper, Bird Table Book, 9. 31. Peter Killham, “Bird Feeder,” United States Patent D278166, January 25, 1983, 1–­4. 32. Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene”; Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life. 33. Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, In the Nature of Cities; Smith, Uneven Development. 34. Davis et al., “Anthropocene.” 35. Stephen Moss, “Survival of the Fattest: Why the Country Birds Are Coming to Town,” Guardian (London), May 25, 2019, https://www.theguard ian.com/environment/2019/may/25/bird-feeders-are-changing-the-view -from-our-windows. 36. Baicich, Barker, and Henderson, Feeding Wild Birds. 37. Jones, Birds at My Table, 59. 38. For a critique of new materialism’s omission of how and why materials are produced, see Abrahamsson et al., “Living with Omega-­3.” 39. Kannuri and Jadhav, “Generating Toxic Landscapes.” 40. Castells, “European Cities,” 254. 41. Jones, Birds at My Table, 63. 42. “When to Feed Garden Birds,” RSPB (Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds), accessed July 29, 2020, https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wild life/advice/how-you-can-help-birds/feeding-birds/when-to-feed-garden-birds/. 43. Moss, “Survival of the Fattest.” 44. Guattari, Chaosmosis, 14. 45. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I.

318 

Notes to Chapter 4

46. Peck, “Investigating Ecological Impacts”; Peck et al., “Experimental Evidence.” 47. Peck et al., “Experimental Evidence.” 48. Peck, “Investigating Ecological Impacts”; Peck et al., “Experimental Evidence.” 49. Peck et al., “Experimental Evidence.” 50. Peck et al., “Experimental Evidence,” 587. 51. Peck et al., “Experimental Evidence.” 52. Despret, Habiter en oiseau, 80. 53. Peck et al., “Experimental Evidence.” 54. Hanmer, Thomas, and Fellowes, “Introduced Grey Squirrels.” 55. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 34. 56. Peck et al., “Experimental Evidence,” 588. 57. Rosenberger, Callous Objects. 58. “Guildford Developers Netting Trees ‘to Prevent Birds Nesting,’” BBC News, March 12, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-47537 122. 59. Rosenberger, Callous Objects. 60. Fieldsports Channel, “Decoying Parakeets—­Airheads, Episode 24.” 61. Fieldsports Channel, “Decoying Parakeets—­Airheads, Episode 24.” 62. FieldsportsChannel TV, “Shooting Parakeets in London,” Flikr, November 19, 2014, https://www.flickr.com/photos/fieldsportschannel/1582 3347551/in/photostream/. 63. Hughes, Animal Kingdoms; Barua, “Nonhuman Labour.” 64. Sramek, “Face Him Like a Briton.” 65. Amin, Land of Strangers, 90. 66. Anne Naylor, “Unusual Foreign Encounters with Parakeets: Letters to the Editor,” Daily Telegraph (London), October 7, 2013, 23. 67. Glen Keogh, “Trigger-­Happy Hunter Sparks Fury with Film Showing How to Lure and Kill Parakeets in Gardens,” Mirror (London), December 3, 2014. 68. Fieldsports Channel, “Airheads—­Parakeets 2—­This Time It’s Personal,” YouTube, December 4, 2014, video, 11:46, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =M5sao9h2kLQ&t=355s. 69. Fieldsports Channel, “Airheads—­Parakeets 2—­This Time It’s Personal.” 70. Melanie Hall, “Hunter Criticised for Video Guide Showing How to Kill Parakeets in Back Garden,” Telegraph (London), December 2, 2014. 71. Amin, Land of Strangers. 72. Biermann and Mansfield, “Biodiversity”; Braverman, Zooland; Chrulew and Wadiwel, Foucault and Animals.

Notes to Chapter 4  319 73. Foucault, History of Sexuality. 74. Ferguson-­Lees and Sharrock, “Feral Populations,” 300. 75. Mason, “Assessing Population Trends,” 303. 76. Lack, Atlas of Wintering Birds. 77. Pithon and Dytham, “Distribution and Population Development.” 78. Pithon and Dytham, “Distribution and Population Development,” 113. 79. Butler, “Population Biology.” 80. Tayleur, “Comparison,” 1. 81. Deleuze, Foucault, 29–­30. 82. Fletcher and Askew, Review of the Status, 1. 83. Deleuze, Foucault, 37. 84. Feare, “Rose-­Ringed Parakeet,” 108. 85. Butler, “Population Biology.” 86. FERA, WM0104: Rose-­Ringed Parakeets in England, 19. 87. Deleuze, Foucault, 50. 88. Strubbe and Matthysen, “Experimental Evidence,” 1592. 89. Chris Gourlay, “Polly Non Grata: Parakeet Joins ‘Pest’ List,” Sunday Times (London), December 20, 2009, 18. 90. Newson et al., “Evaluating the Population-­Level Impact,” 509. 91. Despret, Habiter en oiseau, 38–­39. 92. Newson et al., “Evaluating the Population-­Level Impact,” 515. 93. Amin, “Surviving the Turbulent Future.” 94. Fletcher and Askew, Review of the Status, 1–­2. 95. Amin, “Surviving the Turbulent Future.” 96. Elton, Ecology of Invasions. 97. Fletcher and Askew, Review of the Status, 23. 98. Natural England, Consultation, emphasis in original. 99. DEFRA, Request for Information. 100. Crowley, Hinchliffe, and McDonald, “Parakeet Protectors.” 101. DEFRA, Request for Information. 102. Damian Carrington, “Sick as a Parrot: Monk Parakeets Face Final Flight,” Guardian (London), September 25, 2014, 19. 103. Karoline Edwards, “Against the Potential Cull of the Wild Ringneck Parakeets in London,” Change.org, 2017, https://www.change.org/p/theresa -may-mp-against-the-potential-cull-the-wild-ringneck-parakeets-in-london. 104. Bill Gardner and Helena Horton, “Exclusive: Parakeets May Be Shot by the Government after Spreading Like ‘Grey Squirrels of the Sky,’” Telegraph (London), January 1, 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/01/ exclusive-parakeets-may-shot-government-spreading-like-grey/.

320 

Notes to Chapter 4

105. Reiss Tigwell, “Defra Is Not Planning Ring-­Necked Parakeet Cull,” S.W. Londoner (London), March 11, 2021, https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/ news/11032021-defra-is-not-planning-ring-necked-parakeet-cull. 106. Odling-­Smee, Laland, and Feldman, Niche Construction, 41. 107. Odling-­Smee, Laland, and Feldman, Niche Construction, 2. 108. Lewontin, “Gene, Organism and Environment,” 280. 109. For a discussion of hylomorphism in these disciplines, see Ingold, Making; Ingold, Perception of the Environment; as well as the arguments made in the introduction. 110. Odling-­Smee, Laland, and Feldman, Niche Construction. 111. Amin, Land of Strangers, 36. 112. Hudson, Birds in London. 113. H. V. Morton, “The Romance of the London Parks (7): Kensington Gardens,” Daily Herald (London), August 10, 1937. 114. Bedford, Parrots and Parrot-­like Birds, 120. 115. Self, Birds of London. 116. Guattari, Chaosmosis, 18. 117. Lewontin, “Gene, Organism and Environment,” 281. 118. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I. 119. Deleuze, Foucault, 37. 120. Charlie Lawrence-­Jones, “The Secret Area of One of London’s Most Popular Parks Where You Can Get Up Close with Wild Parakeets,” MyLondon, April 24, 2021, https://www.mylondon.news/whats-on/secret-area-one-lon dons-most-17630629. 121. Tigwell, “Defra Is Not Planning Ring-­Necked Parakeet Cull.” 122. Amin, Land of Strangers. 123. McLeod, Postcolonial London; Varma, Postcolonial City; Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. 124. Amin, “Surviving the Turbulent Future.” 125. Elton, Ecology of Invasions. 126. Amin, Land of Strangers. 127. Guattari, Chaosmosis. 128. Hinchliffe et al., “Urban Wild Things.” 129. Latimer, “Being Alongside.” 130. Davis et al., “Don’t Judge Species.” 131. Lewontin, “Gene, Organism and Environment,” 281.

5. Pastoral Formations

1. Sen, “Unintended City.” 2. Government of India, 20th Indian Livestock Census (2019).

Notes to Chapter 5  321 3. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.” 4. Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 174. 5. Gururani and Dasgupta, “Frontier Urbanism,” 42. 6. Gandy, “Urban Political Ecology.” 7. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization,” 99. 8. Gururani and Dasgupta, “Frontier Urbanism,” 42. 9. Atkins, “London’s Intra-­urban Milk Supply.” 10. Philo, “Animals, Geography, and the City,” 670. 11. Brantz, “Animal Bodies.” 12. Exemplary work includes Narayanan, “Jugaad and Informality”; Narayanan, “Cow Protectionism”; Adcock and Govindrajan, “Bovine Politics”; Nadal, Rabies in the Streets; Nagy, “Plastics Saturate Us”; Dave, “Something, Everything, Nothing.” 13. See, e.g., Narayanan “Cow Protectionism”; Adcock and Govindrajan “Bovine Politics.” 14. For an account of urban enclosure and relations mediating them, see Gururani, “Cities in a World of Villages.” 15. Baviskar, “Cows, Cars and Cycle-­Rickshaws.” 16. Gururani and Dasgupta, “Frontier Urbanism,” 44. 17. For a discussion and history of the concept of the ecumene and other-­ than-­human worlds, notably by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, see Barua, “Ratzel’s Biogeography.” This usage differs from Ratzel’s invocation of the ecumene. 18. Philo and Wilbert, introduction to Animal Spaces, 6, 13. 19. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus. 20. India, 20th Indian Livestock Census—­2019: All India Report. 21. Baviskar, Uncivil City, 114. 22. The term “multispecies ethnography” was introduced by Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich and has gained immense traction since, deployed to index a number of different methodological approaches; see Kirksey and Helmreich, “Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” 23. For a distinction between ethnography, the act of writing up, and par�ticipant observation, see Ingold, “That’s Enough about Ethnography!” 24. Nagy, “Plastics Saturate Us.” 25. Sahu, Parganiha, and Pati, “Spatiotemporal Variability.” 26. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 543. 27. Von Uexküll, “Stroll through the Worlds.” 28. Baviskar, Uncivil City. 29. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 527. 30. Arya et al., “Circadian Variations.”

322 

Notes to Chapter 5

31. Sahu, Parganiha, and Pati, “Spatiotemporal Variability.” 32. I take this evocative expression from Gooch, “Feet Following Hooves,” 67. 33. For another exemplary account of provisioning urban cattle, see Nagy, “Plastics Saturate Us.” 34. Baviskar, Uncivil City, 114. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 132. 36. For a discussion, see Sharan, In the City, Out of Place; Ahmad, Delhi’s Meatscapes. 37. For an exemplary discussion of the Delhi Masterplan, see Sundaram, Pirate Modernity. 38. Delhi Development Authority, Master Plan for Delhi (1962), i. 39. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization,” 104. 40. “Imposition of a Tax on Milch Cows Held within the Wall City of Delhi,” Deputy Commissioner/File No. 49 (1890), DSA-­ND. 41. “Imposition of a Tax on Milch Cows.” 42. “Notification Directing that Section 26 of the Cattle Trespass Act Should in the Notified Area Delhi Apply to Cattle Generally,” Education/Chief Commissioner/File No. 276 (1913), DSA-­ND. 43. “Establishment of a Cattle Pound in the Civil Station of Delhi,” Financial/Chief Commissioner/File No. 19 (1913), DSA-­ND. 44. “Increase of the Fees Levied within Cattle Pounds in the Rural Area of the Delhi Province,” Home/Chief Commissioner/File No. 236 (1920), DSA-­ND. 45. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism, 82. 46. “Introduction of Sections 2 and 3 of the Cattle Trespass Amendment Act 1921 in Delhi and Enhancement of the Fines in the Notified Civil Station Delhi and Imperial Delhi,” Home/Chief Commissioner/File No. 116 (1925), DSA-­ND. 47. “Byelaws to Regulate the Grazing of Cattle in New Cantonments, Delhi,” Deputy Commissioner/File No. 4-­39 (1925), DSA-­ND. 48. “Impounding of Cattle in New Cantonment, Delhi,” Home/Chief Commissioner/File No. 63 (1929), DSA-­ND. 49. “Establishment of a Moveable Cattle Pound for Use on the Ridge and in the Timarpur Colony,” Education/Chief Commissioner/File No. 4-­187 (1936), DSA-­ND. 50. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism, 90. 51. “Proposal to Tax Milch Cattle Maintained within the Limits of the Delhi Municipal Committee,” Education/Chief Commissioner/File No. 4-­65 (1934), DSA-­ND.

Notes to Chapter 5  323 52. “Cattle Census, 1940,” Local Government/Chief Commissioner/File No. 14-­108 (1940), DSA-­ND. 53. “Proposal to Tax Milch Cattle.” 54. “Measures to Prevent Insanitation in New Delhi Journey to the Lack of Stabling for Animals and Safe Guarding of the New Delhi Milk Supply,” Education/Chief Commissioner/File No. 6-­24 (1931), DSA-­ND. 55. “Measures to Prevent Insanitation.” 56. “Establishment of a Moveable Cattle Pound.” 57. “Question in the Legislative Assembly Regarding Fly and Mosquito Nuisance as a Result of the Existence of Cattle Byres in New Delhi,” Local Government/Chief Commissioner/File No. 1372 (1938), DSA-­ND. 58. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism, 158, 91. 59. “Establishment of a Moveable Cattle Pound.” 60. Gell, “Vogel’s Net,” 27. 61. Gell, “Vogel’s Net,” 27. 62. “Establishment of a Moveable Cattle Pound.” 63. “Establishment of a Moveable Cattle Pound.” 64. Gell, “Vogel’s Net,” 28. 65. “Proposed Establishment of a Movable Cattle Pound by the New Delhi Municipal Committee,” Local Government/Chief Commissioner/File No. 3-­41 (1940), DSA-­ND. 66. “Cattle Census, 1940.” 67. “Proposed Establishment of a Movable Cattle Pound.” 68. “Cattle Nuisance in Delhi and Seizing Stray Cattle,” Deputy Com�missioner/File No. 39 (1948), DSA-­ND. 69. “Cattle Nuisance in Delhi and Seizing Stray Cattle.” 70. “Damage to Food Crops: Stray Cattle,” Local Government/Deputy Commissioner/File No. 359 (1949), DSA-­ND. 71. “Cattle Nuisance in Delhi and Seizing Stray Cattle.” 72. “Damage to Food Crops: Stray Cattle.” 73. “Damage to Food Crops: Stray Cattle.” 74. “Cattle Nuisance in Delhi and Seizing Stray Cattle.” 75. “Cattle Nuisance in Delhi and Seizing Stray Cattle.” 76. “Proposal to Amend Section 14 of the Cattle Trespass Act 1871,” Local Government/Chief Commissioner/File No. 5-­76 (1948), DSA-­ND. 77. “Proposal to Amend Section 14.” 78. “Proposal to Amend Section 14.” 79. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism. 80. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 34, 37.

324 

Notes to Chapter 5

81. Delving into the rich political history of the Delhi Masterplan is beyond the scope of this chapter, but for a rich analytical account, see Sundaram, Pirate Modernity. 82. Cited in Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 43. 83. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 30–­31. 84. Le Corbusier, City of To-­morrow, 5–­7. 85. Le Corbusier, City of To-­morrow, 123, emphasis in original. 86. Le Corbusier, City of To-­morrow, 12. 87. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 45–­46. 88. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity. 89. “Stray Cattle,” Deputy Commissioner/File No. 1 (1950), DSA-­ND. 90. “Cattle Nuisance in Delhi,” Local Government/Chief Commissioner/ File No. 11(36), DSA-­ND. 91. “Stray Cattle.” 92. “Damage to Food Crops: Stray Cattle.” 93. “Canadian Aid to the Scheme for Removal of Cattle from the Urban Area and Supply of Milk in Delhi,” Planning and Development/Chief Commissioner/File No. 5(14) (1954), DSA-­ND. 94. “Cattle Nuisance in Delhi.” 95. Government of India, Report of the Expert Committee, 37. 96. Delhi Development Authority, Master Plan for Delhi 1957, 19. 97. Delhi Development Authority, Work Studies, 296. 98. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 53. 99. Samaj, Slums of Old Delhi, 32. 100. Samaj, Slums of Old Delhi, 217. 101. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 40. 102. Deleuze, Foucault, 61. 103. Authority, Master Plan for Delhi 1957, Volume 1, 1, 19, 31, 240. 104. Authority, Master Plan for Delhi, 27. 105. Deleuze, Foucault, 61. 106. Sharan, “In the City, Out of Place,” 4909–­10. Awadhendra Sharan’s insights on the trope of rurality in urban planning is exemplary. 107. Mayer, Pilot Project, India, 258–­59. 108. Authority, Work Studies Relating to the Preparation of the Master Plan for Delhi, Volume 1, 1, 179. 109. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 48. 110. Deleuze, Foucault, 37. 111. “Civic Reports from States: Stray Cattle Menace.” 112. MCD, Annual Administration Report for the Year 1961–­62. 113. Central Council of Gosamvardhana, Annual Report, 1961, 12.

Notes to Chapter 5  325 114. Central Council of Gosamvardhana, Annual Report, 1966, 14. 115. “Civic Reports from States: Stray Cattle in Capital.” 116. “Civic Reports from States: Stray Cattle in Capital,” 41. 117. “Civic Reports from States: Stray Cattle Menace,” 47. 118. “Civic Reports from States: Stray Cattle in Capital,” 40. 119. MCD, Annual Administration Report for the Year 1973–­74. 120. MCD, Annual Administration Report for the Year 1975–­76; “Current Topics,” Times of India (New Delhi), March 3, 1976; MCD, Annual Administration Report for the Year 1973–­74. 121. MCD, Annual Administration Report for the Year 1973–­74, 38. 122. MCD, Annual Administration Report for the Year 1978–­79, 95. 123. Delhi Planning Department, Sixth Five Year Plan, 31. 124. MCD, Annual Administration Report for the Year 1978–­79, 95. 125. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.” 126. Delhi Planning Department, Eighth Five Year Plan, 157. 127. John Stackhouse, “Sacred Cows Favoured by Hinduism and Eco� nomics,” Globe and Mail (Canada), October 2, 1992. 128. John Stackhouse, “Urban Cowboy Milks Profits on Small Spread,” Globe and Mail (Canada), February 2, 1994. 129. “No More Road Rights for Cattle in Delhi,” Xinhua News Agency, September 1, 1994. 130. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 526. 131. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 141. 132. “Stray Cattle Causing Traffic Problem in Delhi,” Xinhua News Agency, March 4, 1995. 133. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, 141. 134. “Judges Order Delhi to Get Sacred Cows Off the Street,” Observer (London), September 21, 2008. 135. Le Corbusier, City of To-­morrow, 123. 136. For a discussion on the politics of aesthetics and elite configurations of Delhi, see Ghertner, Rule by Aesthetics; Baviskar, “Cows, Cars and Cycle-­ Rickshaws.” 137. Singh, “Common Cause (Redg Society).” 138. Singh, “Common Cause (Redg Society).” 139. For a rich historical account of gaushalas and their role in cattle-­ breeding and welfare, see Adcock, “Preserving and Improving the Breeds.” 140. Singh, Gaushalas and Pinjrapoles. 141. Delhi Planning Department, Appraisal of Ninth Five Year Plan, 101. 142. “30,000 Cows Rounded Up in New Delhi Cattle Crackdown,” Agence France Presse, August 22, 1997; “No More Road Rights for Cattle in Delhi.”

326 

Notes to Chapter 5

143. Sara Adhikari, “Shelters Where Cows Can Come for Rest,” Times of India (New Delhi), January 9, 1995, 9. 144. Catherine Philp, “Delhi Drives Sacred Cows from Streets,” Times (London), October 6, 2003, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/delhi-drives -sacred-cows-from-streets-jm7c0s9wmfw. 145. “Who’s Going to Rein in Delhi’s Cows?,” Indo-­Asian News Service, February 26, 2005. 146. Jeremy Kahn, “Urban Cowboys Take On Delhi’s Sacred Cows; City Struggles to Rid Streets of Cattle,” International Herald Tribune, October 22, 2008. 147. Thakur and Aggarwal, “Common Cause.” 148. Anon., “World: Judges Order Delhi to Get Sacred Cows Off the Street.” The Observer, September 21, 2008. 149. “Delhi Residents Can Keep Cattle at Home, Face Jail if They Stray,” Times of India (New Delhi), February 26, 2009. 150. “Dairy Colony Proposed in North Delhi,” Times of India (New Delhi), August 31, 2004. 151. “Microchip to Tackle Stray Cattle Menace in New Delhi,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), May 27, 2005. 152. Thakur and Aggarwal, “Common Cause.” 153. “Oppn. Wants Stray Cattle Out of Delhi,” Times of India (New Delhi), March 25, 2011. 154. Maria Akram, “East Delhi Municipal Corporation Cracks Down on Illegal Dairies,” Times of India (New Delhi), June 16, 2012. 155. Sharma, “Sh. Sandeep Kumar Sharma.” 156. “Cows Being Neglected in Delhi,” Sunday Guardian (India), February 27, 2016. 157. Abhinav Rajput, “Made to Relocate, Dairy Farmers at Ghoga Dairy Rue Lack of Milk Buyers and Facilities,” Indian Express (New Delhi), January 22, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/made-to-relocate-farm ers-at-ghoga-dairy-rue-lack-of-milk-buyers-and-facilities-5549210/. 158. “Land Meant for Relocation of Delhi’s Dairy Farmers Has a Problem: Homes Are Coming Up There,” Indian Express (New Delhi), January 31, 2019. 159. See, e.g., Jauregui, “Provisional Agency”; Craig Jeffrey and Stephen Young, “Jugād: Youth and Enterprise in India,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, no. 1 (2014); Kaur, “Innovative Indian.” 160. For instance, Narayanan provides an exemplary account of jugaad and cattle slaughter; see Narayanan, “Jugaad and Informality.” 161. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 535. 162. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 539, 43.

Notes to Chapter 6  327 163. For an account of cattle and urban infrastructure in Delhi, see “Com�moning Infrastructure,” Ecologizing Infrastructure: Infrastructural Ecologies, Society & Space, 2020, accessed November 30, 2020, https://www.societyand space.org/articles/commoning-infrastructures. 164. Rosenberger, Callous Objects. 165. Roy, “Twenty-­First Century Metropolis,” 820. 166. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 528. 167. Sen, “Unintended City.” 168. Sen, “Unintended City.” 169. Gururani, “Cities in a World of Villages.” 170. Robinson, “Cities in a World of Cities.” 171. Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology.” 172. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization,” 105. 173. On the urban as an agrarian question, see the exemplary Gururani and Dasgupta, “Frontier Urbanism.” 174. Also see Nagy, “Plastics Saturate Us.” 175. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 423. 176. See, e.g., Arnold, “Subaltern Streets.” 177. On frictions around mobility in the city, see Baviskar, Uncivil City. 178. An argument made by neo-­Lefebvrian planetary urbanization; see Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.” 179. See, e.g., Rosenberger, Callous Objects. 180. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization,” 91. 181. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization,” 91.

6. Surplus Ecologies 1. Nigam, “Molecular Economies.” 2. Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 3. See, e.g., Harvey, Rebel Cities. 4. See, e.g., Tonkiss, Cities by Design; Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities. 5. See, e.g., Harvey, Rebel Cities; Smith, Uneven Development; Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, In the Nature of Cities; Swyngedouw and Kaika, “Urban Political Ecology.” 6. For a discussion, see Crang, “Introduction.” 7. This is symptomatic of the literature on planetary urbanization; see, e.g., Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.” 8. See, e.g., Nair, “Is There an ‘Indian’ Urbanism?” 9. Calls for situated accounts of urban events and crises include: Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities; Roy, “Who’s Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?”

328 

Notes to Chapter 6

10. Amin and Thrift, “Cultural-­Economy and Cities,” 145; Amin and Thrift, Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader. 11. For a discussion regarding the co-­constitution of ecology and economy, see Barua, “Animating Capital.” Recent writing on Delhi’s cattle and gaushalas also develops some of these themes; see Turnbull and Barua, “Living Waste, Living on Waste.” 12. The “embedded” perspective is espoused by many political ecologists; see, e.g., McCarthy, “Political Ecology/Economy.” 13. See, e.g., Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities”; Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities. 14. For variegated accounts of capital, see, e.g., Inverardi-­Ferri, “Enclosure of ‘Waste Land.’” 15. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.” 16. Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology,” 161. 17. For a discussion, see Gururani and Dasgupta, “Frontier Urbanism.” 18. Nigam, “Molecular Economies.” 19. McCormack, “Molecular Affects,” 360. 20. A view propounded by neo-­Lefebvrian planetary urbanization; cf. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.” 21. On cattle, western industrial farming, and political economy, see Gil�lespie, “Sexualized Violence.” 22. See, e.g., Stackhouse, “Urban Cowboy.” 23. Nigam, “Molecular Economies,” 487. 24. This constitutes a form of reterritorialization; see Nigam, “Molecular Economies”; Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus. 25. For an exemplary account, see Inverardi-­Ferri, “Enclosure of ‘Waste Land.’” 26. This is notable in the views of Marx and Engels; see Marx and Engels, German Ideology; Engels, “Part Played by Labour.” 27. Marx, Capital, 1:285–­88. 28. Here I refer to the skilled and corporeal activities of other than humans as work rather than labor. The latter, in the Marxist tradition, has a specific connotation of being an activity of performing work in exchange for wages, a relation that animals are not embroiled in. 29. Haraway, When Species Meet. 30. On this distinction, see Barua, “Animating Capital”; “Animal Work: Metabolic, Ecological, Affective,” Cultural Anthropology website, 2018, accessed November 16, 2018, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1504-animal-work-meta bolic-ecological-affective. 31. Laca, “Spatial Memory.”

Notes to Chapter 6  329 32. See Nagy, “Plastics Saturate Us.” 33. Nigam, “Molecular Economies,” 487. 34. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, 109. 35. Narayanan, “Jugaad and Informality,” 1516–­17. 36. “Nobody’s Problem: Delhi Has No Time for Its Cows,” Hindustan Times, August 11, 2016. 37. Nigam, “Molecular Economies,” 487. 38. See, e.g., Adcock, “Preserving and Improving the Breeds”; Adcock, “Sacred Cows.” 39. Mishra, “Cattle, Dearth, and the Colonial State,” 994. 40. Voelcker, Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture, 199–­200. 41. Otter, Diet for a Large Planet. 42. Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, Report, 237. 43. Adcock, “Preserving and Improving the Breeds.” 44. Royal Commission on Agriculture in India, Report, 182, 238. 45. “Plan for Improving Cattle-­Breeding to Be Put in Operation in Delhi Province,” Hindustan Times (Delhi), May 6, 1936; “Presentation of Stud Bulls by H. E. Lord Linlithgow for the Delhi Mofussil,” Revenue and Agriculture/ Chief Commissioner/File No. 98 (1936), DSA-­ND. 46. “Cattle Conference—­Agenda,” Department of Education and Health/ Agriculture/File No. F-­227(37A), (1937), National Archives of India, New Delhi. 47. Foucault, History of Sexuality. 48. See, e.g., Legg, Spaces of Colonialism. 49. Nigam’s argument is exemplary in this regard, although not concerned with biocapital or lively capital; see Nigam, “Molecular Economies.” 50. “Waifs and Strays,” Englishman’s Overland Mail, August 4, 1927, 4. 51. “Stray Bulls Danger: Delhi Police Granted Free Hand,” Englishman’s Overland Mail, May 19, 1927. 52. “Byelaws Framed by the District Board Delhi to Regulate the Letting Loose of Bulls,” Education/Chief Commissioner/File No. 4-­75 (1931), DSA-­ND. 53. Wright, Report. 54. “Improvement of Milch Cattle,” Revenue and Agriculture/Chief Commissioner/File No. 102 (1937), DSA-­ND. 55. “Improvement of Milch Cattle.” 56. Adcock, “Preserving and Improving the Breeds.” 57. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism, 158. 58. “Improvement of Milch Cattle.” 59. Burns, Technological Possibilities.

330 

Notes to Chapter 6

60. Agricultural Production Team, Report on India’s Food Crisis, 228–­29. 61. See Adcock, “Preserving and Improving the Breeds.” 62. Government of India, Report of the Expert Committee, 2. 63. Central Council of Gosamvardhana, Report of the Committee on Preserving High-­Yielding Cattle, 12. 64. Central Council of Gosamvardhana, Annual Report, 1966. 65. Central Council of Gosamvardhana, Annual Report, 1965, 19. 66. A phrase used in the popular press: Ashok Thapar, “The Cow of the Future: But When Will There Be Enough Milk?,” Times of India (New Delhi), December 7, 1970. 67. Central Council of Gosamvardhana, Report of the Cross Breeding Committee, 4. 68. For a discussion, see Basu, “Success and Failure.” 69. Thapar, “The Cow of the Future.” 70. Scholten, India’s White Revolution. 71. Government of India, 19th Indian Livestock Census (2012). 72. Government of India, 20th Indian Livestock Census (2019). 73. Journalist Palagummi Sainath has written extensively on this issue; see Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought. 74. Basu, “Success and Failure.” 75. Simoons et al., “Questions in the Sacred-­Cow Controversy.” 76. Harris, “Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle.” 77. Misra, “Surplus Cattle in India,” 301. 78. Simoons et al., “Questions in the Sacred-­Cow Controversy,” 471–­72. 79. Simoons et al., “Questions in the Sacred-­Cow Controversy,” 472, 476. 80. For Misra’s critique, see Simoons et al., “Questions in the Sacred-­Cow Controversy,” 484–­85. 81. Cf. Nigam, “Molecular Economies.” 82. Simoons et al., “Questions in the Sacred-­Cow Controversy,” 475. 83. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 240. Also see Nigam, “Molecular Economies.” 84. Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Report of the National Commission on Cattle, 82, 104. 85. For exemplary work on the political economy of waste in Delhi, see Gidwani, “Work of Waste.” 86. Gidwani and Reddy, “Afterlives of ‘Waste,’” 1637. 87. Bakhru, “Delhi Waste Management Limited.” 88. Gidwani and Reddy, “Afterlives of ‘Waste,’” 1625. 89. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line. 90. Inverardi-­Ferri, “Enclosure of ‘Waste Land.’”

Notes to Chapter 6  331 91. Also see Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 92. On this concept, see Beldo, “Metabolic Labor Broiler Chickens”; Barua, “Animal Work.” 93. Gutgutia, “Pigs, Precarity and Infrastructure.” 94. See, e.g., Doherty, “Filthy Flourishing”; Kumar, Singh, and Harris-­ White, “Urban Waste.” 95. Cf. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 96. See, e.g., Moran and Doyle, Cow Talk. 97. Gidwani and Reddy, “Afterlives of ‘Waste,’” 1640. 98. “36 Cows Die at Shelter in Delhi’s Ghumanhera Village,” Hindustan Times (New Delhi), July 28, 2018. 99. “Delhi: 34 Cows Found Dead in Najafgarh Had 8 kg Plastic in Their Stomach, Final Autopsy Reveals,” Financial Express (New Delhi), October 16, 2018. 100. “Nobody’s Problem.” 101. See, e.g., “Nobody’s Problem”; Kunal Vohra, dir., The Plastic Cow, film, 34 minutes (India, 2012); Nagy, “Plastics Saturate Us.” 102. CPCB, Life Cycle Assessment. 103. Niharika Sharma, “India’s Plastic Waste Crisis Is Too Big, Even for Modi,” Quartz India, August 28, 2019, https://qz.com/india/1693117/indias -plastic-waste-crisis-is-too-big-even-for-modi/. 104. Shreeshan Venkatesh and Ishan Kukreti, “An Indian Consumes 11kg Plastic Every Year and an Average American 109kg,” Down to Earth, June 4, 2018, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/waste/an-indian-consumes-11-kg -plastic-every-year-and-an-average-american-109-kg-60745. 105. Moore, “Capitalocene.” 106. Katlam et al., “Trash on the Menu.” 107. For a discussion, see Priyanka and Dey, “Ruminal Impaction”; Nagy, “Plastics Saturate Us.” 108. Priyanka and Dey, “Ruminal Impaction.” 109. Adam Withnall, “Inside India’s Plastic Cows: How Sacred Animals Are Left to Line Their Stomachs with Polythene,” Independent (London), February 24, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-delhi -plastic-cows-shelters-bjp-modi-gaushala-a8794756.html. 110. Baviskar, “Cows, Cars and Cycle-­Rickshaws”; Baviskar, Uncivil City. 111. “No Space in Cow Shelters, Stray Cattle Problem May Worsen in Delhi,” Hindustan Times, June 21, 2017. 112. Gidwani, “Six Theses”; Gidwani and Baviskar, “Urban Commons.” 113. Ragavan and Srivastava, “Commoning Infrastructure.” 114. Baynes-­Rock, “Life and Death,” 210.

332 

Notes to Chapter 6

115. McFarlane and Desai, “Urban Metabolic Commons,” 145–­46. 116. McFarlane and Desai, “Urban Metabolic Commons,” 147. 117. Inverardi-­Ferri, “Enclosure of ‘Waste Land.’” 118. Gidwani, “Six Theses,” 781. 119. As formulated by Kalyan Sanyal, for instance; see Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 120. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 121. This is a critique made by Thomas Lemke, among others; see Lemke, “Alternative Model.” 122. An expression deployed by new materialists; cf. Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life. 123. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 124. McCarthy, “Political Ecology/Economy.” 125. Harvey, Rebel Cities. 126. Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities. 127. As neo-­Lefebvrian accounts sometimes claim; Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology.” 128. Nigam, “Molecular Economies.” 129. There is a long tradition of arguing in this vein; see Smith, “Nature as Accumulation Strategy”; Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 130. See, e.g., Shukin, Animal Capital. 131. See, e.g., Boyd and Watts, “Chicken Industry.” 132. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization.” 133. Massumi, “Virtual Ecology,” 362. 134. As also argued by Kalyan Sanyal; see Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 135. For an account of industrial agriculture and bovine life, see Gillespie, “Sexualized Violence.” 136. See, e.g., Narayanan, “Jugaad and Informality.” 137. For two very different accounts of the Indian context, see Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development; Amin, Finely Balanced. 138. Coulter, “Beyond Human to Humane”; Gillespie, “Sexualized Violence.”

Conclusion 1. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. 2. On improvisation, see Simone, Improvised Lives. 3. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus; Amin, Land of Strangers. 4. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus; Nigam, “Molecular Economies.”

Notes to Conclusion  333 5. See Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment. 6. Ingold, Being Alive. 7. Larkin, “Politics and Poetics,” 335. 8. See Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms.” 9. This is a crucial argument in Deleuze and Guattari’s treatise on nom� adology; see Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology. 10. See Barua and Sinha, “Cultivated, Feral, Wild.” 11. See, e.g., Angelo and Wachsmuth, “Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology.” 12. On this argument, see Gandy, “Urban Political Ecology.” 13. On the postcolonial facticity of London, see Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. 14. For an argument around interiority and dwelling in the city, see Barua et al., “Mental Health Ecologies.” 15. See, e.g., Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology.” 16. On this argument, see Wadiwel, “Chicken Harvesting Machine.” 17. Cf. McCarthy, “Political Ecology/Economy.” 18. Brenner, “Theses on Urbanization”; Brenner and Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology.” 19. Nigam, “Molecular Economies”; Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 20. I am grateful to AbdouMaliq Simone for this observation. 21. Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 22. See Ginn and Ascensão, “Autonomy, Erasure.” 23. This is an argument made by the Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, in the context of plantations; see Wynter, “Novel and History.” The question of the plot might be thought of in another register in contexts of urban dispossession. 24. See Federici, Re-­enchanting the World. 25. See Strunk and Richardson, “Cultivating Belonging”; Federici, Re-­ enchanting the World. 26. See Aaron Mondry, “Detroit’s Farmers Are Losing Patience with the City’s Outdated Livestock Laws,” Curbed, July 29, 2019, https://detroit.curbed .com/2019/7/29/8938044/detroit-urban-farming-animal-livestock-law. 27. See Howell, At Home and Astray. 28. On the latter, see Legg, Spaces of Colonialism. 29. Negri, Marx and Foucault. 30. Negri, Time for Revolution. 31. Shukin, Animal Capital, 16–­18.

334 

Notes to Conclusion

32. See U.N.-­Habitat, World Cities Report, 2016. 33. Kaika, “Don’t Call Me Resilient Again!,” 89. 34. Jaffe, “Cities and the Political Imagination,” 1098. 35. For an early important critique of authoritarian conservation, see Guha, “Authoritarian Biologist.” 36. Metzger, “More-­Than-­Human Approach”; Metzger, “Cultivating Tor�ment.” 37. I take this evocation from Isabelle Stengers, who is concerned with both human and other-­than-­human interlocutors that one needs to think and act “in the presence of ”; see Stengers, “Cosmopolitical Proposal.” 38. Guattari, Chaosmosis. 39. Metzger, “Cultivating Torment,” 593.

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INDEX

aesthetics, 10, 38; ethicoaesthetics, 133–37, 145, 159, 161, 162, 164, 182, 188–90, 288, 290; of nature, 37, 109, 153, 189; politics of, 39, 69, 103, 150, 173, 188, 214, 232, 246, 284; qualities, 116, 119; rule, 86–89, 91, 285, 286 affect, 20, 42–44, 53, 153, 219, 230; affected publics, 179; affective commons, 185, 187, 189, 289; affective economy, 51–52, 56–62, 64, 75, 158–60; affective ethologies, 134–38, 165–66; affective labor, 93–94; and biopolitics, 110–11, 177; encounters, 51, 52, 55, 71–72, 85, 87, 88, 91, 99, 120, 125, 133, 150, 158, 279. See also niche construction affordance, 35, 60, 228; of the built environment, 38, 134, 137; and design, 159, 167, 189 agency, 10, 241, 280

agrarian, 3, 195, 198, 206, 209, 213, 218–19, 222, 278; urban as agrarian question, 23, 193, 194, 231–32, 283, 327n. See also pastoral Agriculture, the Royal Commission on, 249–50, 253 anatomopolitics, 5, 78, 103, 250, 252, 286. See also biopolitics architecture, 3, 31, 35, 41, 137, 167, 181 assemblage, 13, 39, 138, 159; avian, 163–64, 166, 220, 237 astrology, 74–77 aviculture, 118–19 banana vendors, 50–51, 56–58, 61, 68, 71–72 Baviskar, Amita, 198–99, 201, 267 Benjamin, Walter, 232 Bergson, Henri, 129 bioeconomy, 5 biopolitics, 5, 103, 112, 173–80, 187, 273; and animals, 12, 298n, 365

366 

Index

299n; and capital, 78, 250, 257; and catastrophism, 188, 286; and colonialism, 7, 194, 206–7, 252; as provincial practice, 103, 222, 248, 271–72, 284–86, 311n; of race, 110–11, 150–51, 180, 285; and urban governance, 23, 69–70, 77, 93, 150–51, 188, 206–7, 251, 284 biopower. See biopolitics bird feeders, 105, 183, 188; and avian behavior, 134–35, 164–68; bird food industry, 155, 158–59, 162–64; design, 156–57, 159–62; Droll Yankees, 159; seed mixes, 159; as site of urban politics, 148–49, 151–54, 160–62, 169–73, 189; Swoop Bird Food, 158–60; tubular feeder, 159–62 bricoleur, 17, 42, 190, 223 British Birds, 111, 113, 161 British Ornithologists Union, 105 capital, 1, 22, 24, 44, 62, 86, 93, 96, 192, 257, 276; capitalist production of nature, 163; capitalist urbanization, 4–5, 7, 9, 12, 22, 40, 144, 192, 218, 230, 233, 237, 240, 271–72, 282; Capitalocene, 162, 265; circuits of, 117–24, 124–28, 143–44, 162, 258, 260–22, 268–70, 281; going feral, 107, 144; lively capital, 18, 22, 78–79, 103, 105–8, 115–28, 145, 155, 282; metamorphosis of, 18, 117, 240; noncapitalist relations and the outside of capital, 13, 24, 108, 195, 235–36, 238–41, 243, 248, 255, 271–73, 282–84; and ontology, 14; and phylogeography,

128–34; state–capital apparatus, 45; and subsumption, 285. See also biopolitics; commodity caste, 11, 61, 75–76, 77, 90, 195, 243, 263 cattle: bulls, 247, 248–54, 266, 272; Cattle Trespass Act (1871), 204, 209, 211; Central Council of Gosamvardhana, 253; cow protection, 249, 251, 253; gaushala (cattle shelter), 220, 225, 253, 256, 264, 267; improvement, 248–52, 254–55, 256, 272; indigenous breeds, 250, 254–55, 266; movement and mobility, 195–203, 205–7, 222–25; National Commission on, 257; pasture, 195, 199, 200, 201, 203, 209, 221, 223, 228, 230–32, 264, 277; plastic cow, 264; pound, 204–6, 208–12; scrub bulls, 248, 251; straying, 192, 205, 207, 209–11, 215, 220–21, 224–25, 227, 239, 248, 251, 260; surplus cattle, 221, 247–48, 252–57; theft, 246; tracks, 195, 198, 201, 203, 222–23. See also dairies; milk supply cladogram, 128–29, 131–32 collaboration, 51–52, 56–59, 60, 63, 90–91 commensality, 8, 21, 23, 24, 70–71, 74–77, 97, 100; commensal cities, 71–72; histories of, 78, 80, 82, 84–85; as infrastructure, 49–56, 62; politics of, 68–70, 77–78, 85, 87, 88–89, 101–2, 104; provisioning, 29–30, 52–53, 54, 57, 67, 71–72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 99,

Index  367 154–58, 162–64, 180, 195, 200–201, 230 commodity, 52, 59, 107, 119, 163; animal barter, 59–60; capital, 79, 122, 143, 162, 258; as an itinerary, 124, 127; lively commodity, 85, 116–21, 122, 124; petty commodity production, 269, 282; transaction, 155. See also capital commons, 3, 50, 263, 264, 267–68, 279; enclosure of, 100. See also affect; metabolism comparison, 7–9, 24, 104, 236; divergence, 8, 14 concepts, 17 consumption, 4, 59, 155, 162, 224, 281; animals as consumers of commodities, 50, 155, 259; consumer as economic cocreator, 164 cosmopolitan, 115, 153, 154, 172, 187, 189, 190; elites, 106; nature, 113, 130, 135, 136 cosmopolitics, 61, 150; of hospitality, 164, 168, 185, 189–90 cows. See cattle cultivated, 23, 190, 278; city, 283; ecologies, 21 dairies, 23, 192, 194, 203, 204, 217, 220–22, 223, 225–27, 232, 235, 239–46, 252, 255–59, 261, 266–67, 282; capitalist organization of, 200, 238–39; resettlement of, 215, 222, 224, 226–27, 257, 264, 269, 272, 273 DEFRA (Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), 169, 175, 178–80

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 31, 43, 196, 236 Delhi: Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, 85–86, 89, 96–100; Civil Lines, 81, 204, 205, 207, 208; Connaught Place, 25, 32, 38; Hanumān Temple, 32, 49–50, 52, 70–71, 74, 77; Old Delhi, 33, 38, 43, 209; the Ridge, 56, 71–73, 74, 204, 205, 207, 208; Timarpur, 205, 207; zoo, 73 Delhi Development Authority, 46, 196, 199, 219 Delhi High Court, 68, 85, 87, 89, 224 design, 3–4, 17, 28, 31–32, 34, 36–38, 42, 44, 156–59, 162, 167–68, 191, 230, 242, 276, 296; nondesign, 22, 133, 134–38, 277. See also hostile design deterritorialization/reterritorialization, 14, 62, 85, 124–25, 131, 144, 187, 209, 230, 236, 241, 246, 258, 261, 271, 281, 289, 328n Detroit, 283 diagram, 175–78, 185, 213–21, 228, 232 Duke of Bedford, 118, 120 dwelling, 2, 26, 73, 75, 77, 101–2, 145, 150, 181, 188, 190, 203, 214, 232, 275; inhabitation, 25–26, 37, 53, 86, 91, 102, 167, 180, 199, 232, 269, 276, 279, 295; wayfaring, 185, 200–201, 209, 230, 276 ecology: of affect, 136–38, 142, 165–66; of concern, 98, 102; cultural, 256; of infrastructure, 30–38; political, 4–5, 15, 96, 195,

368 

Index

236–37, 242, 266; surplus, 239. See also economy; recombinance ecology, urban, 18, 30, 41, 75, 134, 177, 188, 190, 252, 270, 275, 281 economy: and biopower, 5, 250; cultural, 4–5, 59, 116–17, 123–24, 164, 238, 243, 251, 256–57, 270–71, 275, 280–81; and ecology, 15, 50, 131, 237, 239, 245, 251, 270, 285–86; formal, 246, 247; informal, 51, 59; jugaad, 60–62; lively political, 64, 117–18, 143–44, 154–64; political, 4, 6, 10, 13, 15–16, 17–18, 107, 123, 233, 236–39, 241, 262, 269, 270–71, 272, 280–81, 290. See also affect; molecular ecumene, 195–96, 199–200, 201–3, 205, 213, 222, 227, 231, 243, 245, 260, 263, 321n; as spatial ontology of animal, 195–96. See also trap electricity, 25, 27, 39, 40, 48, 57, 63, 127, 230; connections, 40–42, 131; electrician, 42, 45, 127; purloining, 26, 42–43, 45; wires, 29, 42, 43–44 Elton, Charles, 114 Engels, Friedrich, 96–97, 100, 328n ethnography, 4, 14, 15, 27, 62, 64, 69, 101, 145, 201, 237, 239, 245, 280; more-than-human, 18–20, 198; multispecies, 12–13, 19, 198, 321n ethology, 18, 32, 52, 73, 88, 98, 164–65, 177, 245, 263; in a minor key, 52–56, 90; vernacular, 91, 95. See also affect

feral, 21, 22, 23, 105–8, 135, 142–46, 148–49, 150; and biopolitics, 173–74, 176–77, 178; as diagnostic concept, 22, 108; escaping capital, 124–27, 132–33; histories of, 109–15. See also micropolitics flaneur, animal as, 37, 62, 279 flows, city of, 22, 106–9, 115, 124, 127, 130, 142–45 Ford Foundation, 213, 252 Foucault, Michel, 5, 28, 250 gardens, urban, 97, 134, 148, 151–52, 153, 155, 158–62, 163–64, 166, 168, 172, 179, 283 Gibson, James, 35 goldfinch, 151, 152, 162–64, 167 habitus, 36, 55, 100 Hanumān, 30, 75; Hanumān worship, 51, 67, 71, 76–77, 84, 99. See also Delhi Haraway, Donna, 107, 118, 242 Henslow, John, 112 hobby (bird), 139, 140 hospitality, 8, 149, 150, 151–54, 157–59, 162, 164–68, 201, 243; versus hostility, 167, 169–73. See also cosmopolitics; hostile design hostile design, 167–68, 189–90, 230, 233 Housing Question, 96–97, 100 hylomorphism, 31–32, 36, 37, 42, 45, 48, 109n, 213, 232, 276; and ethology, 53, 245; and governance, 44, 86, 87–88, 277; and landscape, 181–82, 199–200;

Index  369 nonhylomorphic, 27, 89, 95, 133, 223, 276. See also materials improvement. See cattle improvisation, 1, 15, 40, 42–43, 50–51, 57, 58, 60, 144, 228, 275 Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 254 informality, urban, 3, 10, 15, 40–41, 49, 61, 63, 102, 231, 236, 258. See also economy informal settlement, 196–97, 201, 227, 262, 263, 287 infrapolitics, 27, 40, 45–49, 62, 64, 103, 126, 207, 210, 211, 232, 289 infrastructure, 1, 21, 41, 62–65, 141, 230; minor ecology of, 26–27, 30–38; and other-thanhuman mobility, 2, 6, 27–28, 44, 130, 228; relations as infrastructure, 49–52, 60–62 Ingold, Tim, 19–20, 129 invasive species, 114, 127, 139, 169, 177–78, 188, 286; invasion biology, 113–14, 165, 178, 188, 190 Kant, Immanuel, 19 kula and keda, 123–24, 127 landscape, 153, 192, 275; otherintentional, 133; unintentional, 37–38 langur, 90–96; langur-wallah, 90–96, 98, 102–3 Le Corbusier, 213–14, 224 lines, 17–18, 19, 38–39, 41, 43, 56, 63, 117–18, 276; detour, 126, 127, 132–33, 246; line of flight,

37, 124–28, 130–31, 132, 185, 258, 262; paths, pathways, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131, 198, 208, 214, 258, 270, 289; segments, 118, 126, 127, 143, 261; track, tracking, 48, 78, 122–24, 127, 129–30, 131, 132, 141, 142, 143, 155, 192, 195, 198–99, 201, 203, 206, 210, 214, 222–24, 276 lively capital. See capital lively commodity. See commodity London: Brixton, 109; Epping Forest, 109, 125; Heathrow, 126; Hyde Park, 131; Kensington Gardens, 105, 109, 115, 134, 139, 140, 147–48, 154, 180, 182, 183–84, 186, 187 macaque: barter, 59–60; ethology, 35, 52–56, 56–62; export, 79–80, 82, 83–84; and infrastructure, 25–26, 28–30, 32–39, 43–44, 46, 63; as infrastructure, 27, 51–52, 64; monkey-catcher, 81, 87, 88; monkey chaser, 93–96; monkey menace, 67, 77, 78–79, 81, 82, 85, 89, 90, 97; trade, 79–80, 82–84; urbanization of, 78–85; weed macaques, 78. See also commensality major: key, theory, 2, 4, 9, 13, 14–15, 17, 26, 28, 31–32, 35, 36, 41, 53, 55, 59, 69, 107, 275, 280, 288; macroeconomies, 237, 241, 245; macropolitics, 153, 241; majoritarian, 16, 28, 61, 64–65, 69, 77, 85–89, 91–92, 97, 102, 108, 129, 142, 149, 185, 191, 246, 289–90. See also minor; molar; molecular

370 

Index

Marx, Karl, 17–18, 56, 117–18, 120, 241, 328n, 332n master plan, 40, 213–22, 226, 227, 228, 240, 246, 288; Delhi Masterplan (1962), 40, 203, 213–15, 219–20, 224, 322n, 324n; Interim Masterplan (1956), 215, 217, 218, 219, 222 materials: material politics, 11–12, 13, 262, 269–70, 277, 280; materials and forces, 12, 42, 277; and variation, 43 matter. See materials Mayer, Albert, 213, 220 meshwork, 2, 6, 10, 13, 14, 16, 19, 37–39, 42–44, 57, 63, 127, 131, 133, 190, 235, 279, 290 metabolism, 11, 244, 269, 273; metabolism: metabolic commons, 269–70, 273, 289. See also work micropolitics, 16, 20–21, 87, 152, 177, 230, 276, 284; of race, 151, 153, 167, 173–74, 188–90, 285. See also minor; molecular migrant, 23, 110, 147, 150, 152, 185–86, 188, 190, 241, 259–60, 283; other than human as, 8, 22, 105, 149, 153–54, 189–90 milk supply, 217–18 minor, 14–18, 20–21, 30–32, 41–42, 43–44, 48–49, 61, 65, 103, 108, 190, 273, 275, 277, 279, 290–91; circuits of value, 257–63, 268–69, 271; ecology, 151, 190; and economy, 143, 144, 233, 259, 282–83; ethology, 52–56, 90, 91; politics, 69–70, 89, 211; as variation, 36, 88–89, 92. See also infrapolitics; micropolitics; molecular

models, 175–76 molar, 32, 118, 124, 127, 151, 173, 185, 241, 245–46, 261, 268–69, 289. See also major; molecular molecular, 16, 21, 94, 118, 120, 127, 151, 169, 176, 187, 189, 239, 240, 242, 245, 248, 257, 276, 282; economies, 61, 237–28, 241, 244, 245–47, 272–73, 284; pathways of waste, 258–61; proximities, 57–58, 62, 69, 75, 90. See also micropolitics; minor monkey. See macaque Monkeyman, 46–49 more-than-human ethnography. See ethnography Municipal Corporation (Delhi), 50, 61, 92, 98, 197, 223, 224, 246, 258–61, 265, 268 nativism, biotic, 109, 112–13, 115, 129, 143, 188 network, 6, 22, 37, 131. See also meshwork Newcastle disease, 122 new materialism, 10–11, 13, 41, 48, 144, 163, 262, 269–70, 277, 280, 317n, 332n niche construction, 151, 181; through affect, 151, 180–87, 190 Nigam, Aditya, 236, 240, 241, 247, 279 nonnative species, 178. See also invasive species ontology, 75, 90, 102, 164, 195, 209; and capital, 9; economic, 4, 52, 61, 63, 237–38, 270, 273;

Index  371 and infrastructure, 26, 44; urban, 2–4, 5–7, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 16, 69, 74, 190, 275, 280, 288 owl, tawny, 137, 139, 177 parakeet: cull, 109, 125, 153–54, 178–80; monk parakeet, 179; mutant, 115–16, 118–19, 120; origins, 105; as other-than-human migrant, 149, 153–54, 189–90; phylogeography, 129–32; population, 105–6, 109–11, 114–15, 129, 130; psittacosis, 109; trade, 106, 121–24, 126–27, 129; value-added, 118, 120, 121, 127, 144. See also bird feeders; feral; hospitality; lively capital participant observation, 20, 198, 321n pastoral: pastoralism, urban, 2, 23, 191–96, 203, 205–6, 211–13, 218–23, 226, 227–30, 230–33, 235–36, 249, 251, 263, 264, 271, 272; pastoralist, 193, 203, 205–6, 210, 211, 223, 240; pasture, 195, 196, 207, 200, 201, 203, 209, 221, 223, 228, 230, 231, 232, 264, 277 peregrine falcon, 138–42 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), 172–73 phylogeography, 128–32 pipes, 1, 25, 26, 27, 33, 35, 36, 37, 51 place: beastly places, 195–96; patchwork, 222, 223, 226, 227–32. See also space planning, 41, 191, 203–4, 213, 214–15, 218, 220, 223, 247, 276, 278, 288–89

plastic, 196, 245, 264–67, 268, 269. See also cattle political ecology. See ecology political economy. See economy postcolonial: city, 7, 101, 102–4, 106–7, 148, 149, 189, 194, 195, 220, 272, 273, 278–79, 281; governance, 213, 222; nature, 22, 23, 107–8, 122, 127, 133, 136, 142–46, 150, 187; planning, 215, 219, 220, 253; political economy, 13, 236; urban theory, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15–16, 63, 279, 290 posthumanism, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 22, 101, 144, 199, 281 rabies, 73; antirabies vaccine, 98 race, 11, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 129, 143, 144, 154, 187, 276. See also biopolitics; micropolitics recombinance, 22, 107, 108, 132–38, 139, 140–42, 145, 151, 165–66, 187, 190, 277 rhythms, 31, 32, 36, 56, 71, 133, 136, 141, 164, 182, 185, 195, 199–200, 205, 208, 242, 280 risk, 111, 169, 175–76, 178 RSPB (Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds), 154, 163, 172 rural, 35, 142, 193, 194, 218, 219–20, 224, 227, 278, 283. See also agrarian; pastoral Sinha, Anindya, 53, 55, 73 slum, 91, 95, 191, 192, 213, 215, 218, 224, 253, 262. See also informal settlement smooth/striated. See space space: animal spaces, 195–96; haptic, 43, 44, 183, 228; holey, 246;

372 

Index

smooth/striated, 44, 57, 196, 200, 205–6, 209–11, 213, 221–22, 228, 230, 236, 240, 257, 271, 284 sparrow hawk, 139 species, 18–19, 52, 53, 55, 95, 143; being, 52, 53, 55. See also invasive species; nonnative species stranger, 109, 149–50, 152–54, 169, 174, 180, 185–86, 188–90, 278, 285, 286 subaltern, 4, 15, 16–17, 32, 41, 47, 49, 64, 232, 252, 275, 290 sunflower, 162; nonseeds, 147, 151, 162, 182, 185 taxonomy, 108, 111, 129, 143 territory, territoriality, 33, 36, 37, 92, 93, 112, 115, 127, 144, 164–65, 166, 203, 278, 290. See also deterritorialization/reterritorialization track. See line trap, 87, 208–9, 211; as inverted ecumene, 207–9 tuberculosis (TB), 73 Umwelt, 199, 208;. See also ecumene; trap urban: as agrarian, 3, 23, 193–95, 198, 206, 209, 213, 218–19, 222, 231, 232, 278, 283, 327n; grammar, 15, 28, 31, 142, 275, 276; methodological cityism, 193, 278; nature, 4, 8–9, 37, 106, 107, 108, 122, 127, 132, 135, 142–44, 145, 148, 150, 158, 164, 166, 169, 172, 178, 189, 271, 281; planetary

urbanization, 23, 192–93, 195, 222, 230, 231–32, 233, 238, 282, 327n, 328n. See also capital; ecology; economy; informality value, 79, 103, 116–17, 120, 131, 239, 244, 254, 261, 265–66, 289; exchange, 79, 131, 163, 259, 261; minor circuits of, 257–63, 268–69, 271; realization of, 4, 59, 118, 127, 143, 155; surplus, 9, 13–14, 62, 118, 124, 237, 245, 257, 272–73, 284, 288; use, 235, 248, 255, 256, 261, 269, 271, 273, 283, 286, 289 vernacular, 42, 60, 69–70, 89–96, 102–3, 104, 142, 150, 158, 159, 169, 188, 248, 251, 285, 289–90. See also ethology vitalism. See new materialism Voelcker, John Augustus, 248–49 Von Berlepsch, Karl Rudolf, 156–57 Von Uexküll, Jacob, 60, 199 waste, 156, 196, 239, 257–71, 273; collection depot, 197–98, 240, 243, 257–60; garbage dump, 235, 258–59; landfill, 3, 258–59; workers, 240, 258–59, 260, 261, 268–69. See also commons; value work: animal, 90–91, 242, 243–45; metabolic, 119, 242, 261–62, 266, 273 world-making, 137–38, 150–51, 231, 243 xenophobia, 106, 153, 154

Maan Barua is university lecturer in human geography at the University of Cambridge.