Animating caste: visceral geographies of pigs, caste, and violent nationalisms in Chennai city

Abstract

The paper introduces porcine bodies as landscapes upon which caste as wildness, primitive, or savage are inscribed and asserted in India, by the Hindu Right and the Dalit Right, to respectively advance parochial nationalisms. The general obscuration of the pig in violent nationalist discourses, is itself due to her inherent caste status as impure/polluting. Hindu Vedic scriptures endorse a civilizational rhetoric of the cows as Brahminical and divine, and the pigs as associated with filth and ferality. Caste advances or obstructs political and economic power, and is interlocked with market capitalism, which relies on nature–and casteised subhuman/nonhuman bodies–as both profitable (and venerable), and expendable (and despicable). The visceral socio-political contempt the pig evokes is intertwined with their use in performing economic labor as waste scavenger, and political labor as superfluous to a nation in which pigs, and people associated with pigs do not belong. Via empirical work in Chennai city, this paper focusses the pig, ecologically and sociologically wild, feral and promiscuous, as enmeshed in a long-enduring, constructed caste conflict around Brahmin/Dravida; Hindu/Tamil; civilized/primitive; and even, human/animal binaries. Finally, it specifies species as also core to identity politics, as part of a transformative praxis to a post-casteist society.