Book review |Beings and Beasts: Human–Animal Relations At The Margin

 The editors’ Introduction stakes two claims with refreshing clarity: animal studies in India needs not only “decolonising” but also “de-brahmanizing”, because caste sorts animals into hierarchies that map onto human hierarchies, privileging “sacred” creatures while stigmatizing the people who live and work with “impure” ones. The volume promises to center Dalit and tribal worlds, showing human–animal life as conjoint, affective, and political rather than purely symbolic. It proposes reading “beings and beasts” expansively—animals, people, birds, even spirits—precisely to make visible how marginality clarifies when a “being” becomes a “beast”. This framing is both agenda and method for the essays that follow. 

Purnachandra Naik’s reading of Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry tracks two motifs: the pig and the black sparrow. The pig, yoked to “impure” labour and public humiliation, is the film’s ethical pressure point; the black sparrow figures longing and belonging otherwise denied by caste society. Naik shows how animal imagery is not garnish but the very grammar of the film’s politics—where love, aspiration, and rage get articulated in scenes of forced pig-catching versus the sparrow’s fragile freedom. The chapter is exemplary of the book’s method: animal life as the medium of anti-caste critique.  

Focusing on Pariyerum Perumal (2018) and Asuran (2019), R. Samuel Gnanaraj traces how pain and personhood are co-authored by animals—dogs and cattle as companions, witnesses, and flashpoints for caste violence. His key move is to resist the easy allegory (“animal = victim”) and instead show relational identity: humans become legible as human through animal ties that caste tries to police. This aligns neatly with the editors’ anti-anthropocentric brief.  

Akshay Sawant pushes further into how disgust, stigma, and “untouchability” travel via animals on screen. He demonstrates that the same animal can be produced as pollutant or companion depending on who touches/keeps it, and that cinema can either entrench or unsettle these codes. The comparative arc across Marathi and Tamil contexts sharpens the book’s cross-regional ambition. 

Shibangi Dash shows how an owl, a Hindu omen in some registers, gets re-tooled in Dharman’s novel into a lens on surveillance, rumour, and caste oppression. The analysis is precise on imagery: the owl’s call, eyes, and nocturnal presence become indices of village power and of a counter-aesthetic emerging from Pallar/Devendrakula Vellalar lives. The chapter is also a lesson in reading “low” creatures against “high” iconographies.   

Through Ratan Kumar Sambharia’s stories, Deepak maps how animals scaffold humiliation and resistance—think scarecrows, knives, and street dogs as props through which Dalit men and women navigate daily hostility. What’s strong here is the attention to craft (motif, voice) alongside politics; the result is a poetics of caste told via small creatures and sharp objects.  

Greeshma Mohan’s essay is one of the book’s conceptual anchors. She tracks how “cow” and “meat” circulate differently across communities: the cow as juridico-theological fetish; meat as the sticky matter of care, conviviality, and caste policing. Reading food as ecology, not just diet, lets her show how affective communities form around what is eaten, with violence triggered when these ecologies are criminalized or shamed.  

Rachan Daimary documents pig-human life among Bodos: everyday care, ritual sacrifice (Bwisagu), and the thick moral economy in which pigs are kin and capital. He is blunt on politics: meat is stigmatized in dominant discourse even as right-leaning projects claim cultural supremacy. The chapter’s strength is ethnographic specificity, when a fowl or pig is necessary, who decides, and how that decision narrates Bodo identity. 

In Khriengunuo Mepfhuo and Mihir Sarkar’s standout field chapter, Yaks and the Brokpa appear as labour, wealth, salt-road mobility, and milk, but also as teachers of pace and place. Following Brokpa herders between Tawang and West Kameng, the authors trace butter, churpi, and hybrid animals (dzo/dzomo), while noting border regimes and COVID-era restrictions that compress seasonal movement. The argument is gentle but firm: care and livelihood are inseparable in multispecies pastoralism.  

Abhishruti Sarma reads mithun (gayal) as theology and economy. Bridewealth, ritual obligation, and forest cosmologies sit uneasily with new aesthetics for tourism, state schemes, and enclosure. The chapter shows how sacrality can be both buffer and alibi: it protects mithun from pure commodification yet can also mask extractive redesigns of human–animal relations.  

Ashwini Labde’s portrait of Dhangar pastoralists, dogs and goats in tow, tracks seasonal movement into city edges like Mumbai, where legality, policing, and veterinary infrastructures rub against drought, schooling, and marriage choices. Dogs aren’t props; they’re co-workers, fighters, and friends shaping routes and risks. The essay captures how “companion” collapses the pet-labour divide at the margins.  

Saravanan Velusamy revisits the 2017 Jallikattu protests to argue that a context-blind welfarism misread what bulls are to their keepers: not disposable instruments but honoured participants whose care infrastructures exceed spectacle day. He neither romanticizes cruelty nor parrots ban-logic; instead, he insists on situated ethics attentive to caste, region, and rural youth politics that mobilized at Marina Beach.  

Susan Haris reads the death of Karuppi in Pariyerum Perumal as a powerful entry point into the entanglement of caste and animality. The animal here is not just a metaphor for Dalit suffering; it marks a shared terrain where the dehumanisation of Dalits and the expendability of animal life converge. Animality thus operates as a double trope, signifying both Dalit communities’ intimate ecological relations with animals and their historical degradation through such associations. This creates a core tension: in a context where “animal” is already caste-coded, the language of animal rights cannot be taken at face value. Haris argues that dominant environmental and animal rights discourses, often shaped by Savarna sensibilities, remain caste-blind and risk reinforcing hierarchies they claim to oppose. Against this, she proposes a Dalit-centred, multispecies ethics that takes seriously both the material lives of animals and the lived realities of caste, moving beyond metaphor toward a more grounded vision of justice.  

Gautam Vegda’s chapter turns to poetry as an archive of Dalit environmental memory. Drawing on autobiographical reflections and his own poems, he shows how animals such as vultures, pigs, dogs and crows are embedded in the lived histories of Dalit communities whose caste-imposed occupations involved scavenging and disposing of carcasses. In this context, animals are not distant symbols but intimate presences, both competitors and companions in survival. The recurring image of the vulture becomes a powerful metaphor for Dalit environmental history, recalling shared spaces of labour and deprivation created by caste hierarchies. By contrasting the mythical vulture Jatayu of the Ramayana with the real vultures of Dalit life, Vegda challenges romanticised religious imagery and foregrounds experiential knowledge. His poems, invoking figures such as vultures, porcupines and hyenas, transform these memories into a language of resistance, constructing what may be read as a poetic archive of Dalit survival and dignity. 

Editorial architecture and contribution 

The book’s four-part scaffold (cinema; textual/literary images; Northeast ethnographies; companions/ethics) is not a mere filing system, it stages a conversation that keeps doubling back on the introduction’s provocation. The cinema essays show how screens train the eye to see animals as caste does; the literary pieces re-iconize stigmatized creatures (owl, pig, street dog); the Northeast chapters deliver grounded accounts of multispecies care and mobility; the “companions” section forces ethics to get local, whether in Dhangar dog-work or Jallikattu bulls. The editors explicitly present the collection as building a new scholarship that ties caste to animal life as a core analytic, not an aside. On its own terms, that promise is met.  

Where it excels—and where it opens questions 

Three strengths stand out. First, methodological pluralism: close reading, visual analysis, and ethnography sit together without smoothing their differences. Second, lexical honesty: chapters name disgust, stigma, and violence without euphemism, yet keep space for affection and care. Third, regional reach: by including Bodo pigs, Brokpa yaks, and mithun, the book refuses a metro-centric animal studies. 

If there’s a productive gap, it’s comparative policy analysis. Several essays gesture to law, policing, and NGO activism; a cross-chapter synthesis on how welfare, conservation, and food regulation jointly reproduce caste hierarchies would have been valuable. That said, the volume already flags the environmental-political paradox it targets grassroots romanticism often ignores the marginal’s view of animals, labour, and meat.  

Beings and Beasts is a significant intervention: sharp in argument, grounded in material worlds, and consistent about its anti-caste commitments. It doesn’t ask readers merely to “include” marginal animals and peoples; it asks them to (re)learn how animals signify, work, feast, protest, and accompany at the margins. That makes it essential for animal studies, Dalit studies, and environmental humanities alike.  

Dr. Neeraj Bunkar is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, Woxsen University, Hyderabad.