Sandhar, Review of Walther Disorderly Theory Jason Sandhar Review of: Sundhya Walther, Multispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature. Environmental Humanities. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2021. x + 270 pp. CA$85.00 (hb). Jason Sandhar is Assistant Professor of Global and Eighteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. Email: jason.sandhar@uwo.ca Book Review In the two decades since Philip Armstrong urged postcolonial and animal studies scholars to find common ground against “that notion of the human that centers upon a rational individ- ual self or ego”,1 a small but robust body of theory and literary criticism has demonstrated how we cannot analyse colonial history without taking interspecies entanglements into account. A welcome contribution to postcolonial animal studies, Sundhya Walther’s Mul- tispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature explores animals in Indian fiction, journalism, film, and autobiography across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Over five chapters, the book argues that human–animal encounters in Indian literary and cultural texts can signal “disorderly” forms of multispecies living that challenge “orderly” narratives of Indian modernity and nation- hood (12). While Walther draws on myriad theoretical approaches following the animal turn in humanities scholarship (in both postco- lonial criticism and beyond), her core argument concerns how an- imals can be understood as subalterns: marginalized populations excluded from political power in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Using examples from literature and the visual arts, Walther posits that interspecies subalternity suggests alliances between people and animals that disrupt concepts of modernity inherited from En- lightenment thought. The book demonstrates evidence of expan- sive research, and Walther’s theorization of interspecies alliances is intriguing. However, more could have been done to demonstrate how the book’s call for “alliances” between species follows from the subaltern condition, as there are moments here when the ar- gument seems to take for granted one’s “otherness to the sover- eign human” as sufficient grounds for interspecies solidarity. Addi- tionally, the analysis feels disjointed at times, as Walther draws on an expansive range of theorists and methodologies to make broad claims about ideology and the postcolonial state that sometimes seem misaligned with a given chapter’s literary examples. Expanding on classic texts by Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the introductory chapter theorizes the subaltern as a multispecies 1 Philip Armstrong, “The Postcolonial Animal”, Society and Animals 10, no. 4 (2002): 413–19. Copyright © 2023 Jason Sandhar This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 419–428. Doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.15839 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.15839 Sandhar, Review of Walther | 421 Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) construct. Walther focuses first on Spivak’s “epistemic fracture”, the way subaltern representation by a society’s elites repeatedly stages that representation’s failure, rendering human subalterns and main- stream society unknowable to one another. Extending Spivak’s for- mulation to the mutual incomprehension between animals and hu- mans (16), Walther posits that the “other side of difference” — the unbridgeable gulf between mainstream society and the subal- tern — might also include other unknowable beings like non-human animals (15). Anticipating pushback from postcolonial scholars aller- gic to human–animal comparisons, Walther emphasizes that she does not want to draw parallels between subaltern species. Rather, she reads “the other side of difference” as a phrase that positions animals and subaltern humans as distinct groups that share the ex- perience of exclusion from mainstream Indian society. Walther then turns to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s programmatic theori- zation of “subaltern histories” to compensate for Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern cannot speak (Chakrabarty devised multiple or- ders of history, or what Walther calls “Narrative 2s”, to account for unofficial narratives that can trouble official history or “Narrative 1s” — again, Walther’s term). Arguably, Chakrabarty reproduces subal- tern silence, as Spivak’s critique rests on the premise that the inclu- sion of the disenfranchised into mainstream discourse in any con- text (university curricula, the professional sphere, or mainstream publishing, for instance) will always exclude some people at the bot- tom. By this logic, Chakrabarty’s “subaltern” history is a misnomer, as hegemonic discourse would ultimately absorb Narrative 2s into a hierarchical structure predicated on the ongoing exclusion of op- pressed histories beyond a given Narrative 2’s ambit. Walther’s workaround for subaltern exclusion is not entirely clear, and at this juncture the overall argument for alliances and interspe- cies subalternity also starts to feel underdeveloped. She suggests that “alliances between History or Narrative 2s” can enable us to lo- cate “forms of subaltern speaking that, though they require our at- tention, do not necessarily need to be entirely accessible to History or Narrative 1s to be effective as ways of speaking” (18, emphasis in Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 422 | Sandhar, Review of Walther original). In other words, subaltern speech can be understood as something we infer but can never know. Alliances, in turn, suggest a form of multispecies subaltern “speech” that rumbles beneath mainstream history. While Walther reframes Chakrabarty’s Narra- tive 2 from a knowable historical category to an awareness of our epistemological limits, she leaves unanswered how or why precar- ity between species implies affinities between them. Granted, in- terspecies alliances can complicate the glut of scholarship on in- terspecies conflict in the postcolony. Yet Walther’s justification for interspecies alliances seems circular insofar as she takes margin- alization as its premise. That is, it seems reasonable to conclude that clashes between precarious people and animals come about from competition for limited resources. If this is the case, then hu- man–animal alliances would have to preempt, or at the very least account for, the scarcity problem. Walther, however, does not ex- plore this conundrum. Additionally, Walther’s call for interspecies alliances does not clearly address how the subaltern speech problem might apply to animals. Spivak argues that subaltern humans do, in fact, speak — the issue at stake is that subaltern speech is unintelligible to non-subalterns because we relegate the subaltern to a state of abjection that dwells in an ontological void. In other words, it is not that subalterns can- not speak so much as we choose not to hear them — the subaltern always and already represents an excluded social and philosoph- ical excess, the negative category against which we circumscribe the structures we inhabit. To make a claim about animal subalterns, Walther would have to first justify why we would map the problem of human subaltern speech upon beings who literally do not speak. Even if we imagined a speaking animal, the category of “animal sub- altern” would oblige us to assume that we do not understand the speaking animal on the same terms that we do not understand the speaking human subaltern (this is not to deny that humans oppress animals — rather, the terms upon which we oppress them are not necessarily reducible to how we oppress other humans). Walther states that she is not conflating humans and animals when she evokes Spivak’s epistemic fracture (15–16), but the epistemic fracture Sandhar, Review of Walther | 423 Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) does not strike me as a limit point of understanding through which we can assume multiple expressions of incommensurability; rather, it seems to suggest the condition upon which the human subaltern speaks and is not understood. While Walther could have done more to demonstrate how inter- species subalternity lends itself to alliances between marginalized people and animals, the remainder of the introduction admirably troubles animal representation in visual art and literature. To some degree, Walther reminds us, we cannot escape our assumptions about animals. To connect with other creatures, we must assimi- late what we believe to be their lived experiences into human sensi- bilities, all while remaining mindful of how the assumptions that un- dergird our beliefs about an animal’s perspective preclude our ability to know the animal at all. Only then might we consider different an- imal representations in the literary and cultural texts under analy- sis. While some writers want to know what the animal feels, finds Walther, others use the figure of the animal as a device to defamil- iarize human experience. Walther concludes that the point is about neither knowing nor using animals, but about how Indian writing and visual art can disrupt popular assumptions about animals and people in Indian modernity. The first chapter interrogates mainstream conservation discourses, reading Jim Corbett’s 1944 collection of hunting tales, Man-Eat- ers of Kumaon, against Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. Walther finds that conservation biologists during the colonial and post-In- dependence eras have managed ecological space by dividing peo- ple, animals, and plants into discrete zones determined by com- mercial interests (33–34). She then explores how Corbett and Ghosh’s texts feature conservationists who violate the bounda- ries that divide these zones. For Walther, the conservationist’s priv- ileged status between civilization and the wilderness represents an ideological excess, or exception to the rules of conservation that, paradoxically, holds those rules in place. Walther is a wonderful close reader, and her analysis of Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon, in particular, is excellent. Focusing on how Corbett frames the tiger Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 424 | Sandhar, Review of Walther as both an object of desire and an autobiographical tool, Walther considers how the text leaves undecidable colonial power’s “at- tachment to boundaries and the compulsion to transgress those boundaries, between orderly division and disorderly encounter” (39). The tiger in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, meanwhile, operates as a ghost of sorts. Here, Walther advances a double critique. She ar- gues that Ghosh’s tiger, at the text’s manifest level, signals West- ern conservation’s failure to segregate species spatially and con- ceptually. Yet the tiger’s ineffability also escapes the novel’s explicit valorization of “subaltern spirituality” as an antidote to conserva- tion (60). Walther then considers how the novel’s narrative struc- ture duplicates conservation’s spatial and conceptual boundaries even as its content challenges how conservationists organize peo- ple, animals, and environments. Walther’s second chapter uses Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiog- raphy: My Experiments with Truth and Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain to explore questions of eating animals and In- dian nationalism across three big historical moments: the 1857 Re- bellion, Independence struggles by elite Hindus during the 1930 and 1940s, and the contemporary Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) embrace of religious orthodoxy. Bucking scholarship that down- plays Gandhi’s preoccupations with diet, Walther demonstrates how My Experiments with Truth grounds the abstract political prin- ciple of ahimsa (which roughly translates to non-violence) in the vegetarian body. While Gandhian ahimsa ostensibly proposes a radically egalitarian politics, Walther contends that the conserva- tive BJP has used ahimsa and vegetarianism to exclude Indian Mus- lims from the contemporary national imaginary. She then turns to Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, which focuses on the 1857 Rebellion, to demonstrate how popular perceptions of Indian na- tionalism have long relied on the exclusion of Muslims. While the chapter provides good insights into how some conservative Hindu movements have used vegetarianism and non-violence to exclude Muslims, it feels incomplete without a discussion of caste or Gan- dhi’s fraught relationship with Dalits (erstwhile “untouchables” ex- cluded from India’s fourfold caste hierarchy). Indeed, Dalit writers Sandhar, Review of Walther | 425 Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and activists have long deployed art and literature to contest Gan- dhian ahimsa and caste Hinduism’s vegetarian ethic. Engagement with texts about cattle slaughter and meat eating — such as Om- prakash Valmiki’s “The Killing of a Cow”; Amitabh’s “The Cull”; or Chandramohan Sathyanathan’s “Beef Poem” — would have both substantiated the book’s interest in subaltern life and challenged recent scholarship that rushes to celebrate Gandhi while turning a blind eye to the controversies that surrounded him. Chapter three pivots to companionate relationships, offering a fresh perspective on postcolonial criticism’s longstanding concerns with “home” and “nation”. Analysing domestic space in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and R. K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi, Walther considers how these texts complicate elite Partition-era narratives of nationhood. While both novels explore interpersonal relation- ships through material and conceptual partitions, Walther suggests that animals’ indifference to human boundaries complicate exist- ing scholarship on Clear Light of Day which has, thus far, largely limited itself to human interactions. Chakrabarty’s subaltern his- tory frames Walther’s reading of Desai, which investigates how do- mestic space in the novel represents both exclusion and sanctuary from the public realm. Whereas animals, women, and the disabled have been excluded from elite Independence narratives, the house in Clear Light of Day signals a counter-discursive space that ena- bles free movement and engagement between people and animals. Walther extends her considerations of counternarratives, national- ism, and animals in Desai’s text to taxidermy in Narayan’s The Man- Eater of Malgudi. Here, Walther considers how Narayan turns “the nation” into a taxidermized object. If taxidermy, like text, repeatedly fails to contain the thing it claims to represent (by virtue of the fact that the representation of a thing is not the thing-in-itself), Walther asks how “nationhood”, as a representation of a people, similarly escapes narrative containment. The connection here feels some- what forced, however, as Walther does not demonstrate how the difference between representation and object, in the contexts of taxidermy and text, scale up to a critique of nationhood-as-rep- resentation in The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 426 | Sandhar, Review of Walther While nationalized industries and big government defined post-Par- tition India under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, the late twen- tieth century witnessed the country’s transition to global capital. The contemporary Indian city became a global metropolis, and in chapter four Walther highlights urban interspecies encounters in Ar- avind Adiga’s The White Tiger and a series of headline-making leop- ard attacks in Mumbai. Aligning herself with more-than-human ge- ographers who advocate for urban spaces that accommodate all types of creatures (not just humans and companion species), Walther complicates Sue Donaldson and Wil Kymlicka’s formulation of the animal denizen, urban creatures who are not quite domesticated nor wild (171). Whereas Donaldson and Kymlicka define denizens as precarious “outsiders” who inhabit urban spaces (migrant workers, for example, or urban wildlife like foxes or raccoons in the case of non-humans), Walther argues that literary works can imagine forms of interspecies “ungovernability” that complicate the denizen’s lim- inal status (172). The chapter attends, first, to animal metaphors in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. While the literary analysis is cogent, it feels disconnected from the chapter’s argument about ungovern- ability, the metropolis, wildlife, and denizens: Walther emphasizes instead how the novel hints at multispecies alliances when its pro- tagonist, Balram, encounters the eponymous tiger at a zoo, only to undermine such a possibility after Balram uses his transforma- tive encounter with the tiger to murder his employer and launch his own startup. The chapter then turns to Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai. Analysing newspaper accounts about leopards who attacked an informal settlement at the park’s boundaries, Walther considers how Indian media excludes wild animals and the urban poor from contemporary ideas about Mumbai as a world-class city. Walther argues that if urban developers, journalists and the middle class are serious about the democratic values that undergird mo- dernity, then they must help dismantle the social and interspecies hierarchies that marginalize Mumbai’s animals and the poor. In between these chapters are three “provocations”, short discus- sions of Indian visual artists Sakshi Gupta, Sujatro Ghosh, and Ja- gannath Pand. Presenting elephant sculptures made from scrap Sandhar, Review of Walther | 427 Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) materials, photographs of women wearing cow masks, and collages with hyenas and pigeons in urban spaces, Walther states that these intermezzos “are not intended as fully realized analyses; rather, they set up little spaces for reflection that keep open the questions of the previous chapter while unfolding toward the ideas of the next” (27– 28). While enjoyable and engaging, more could have been done to demonstrate how each provocation expands upon and segues into the chapters surrounding it. Finally, in a short postscript, Walther cites a 2014 incident in which a man entered a tiger enclosure at the National Zoological Park in Delhi. The media used grisly videos from onlookers to sensation- alize the encounter. Walther suggests that the media narrative ab- solved the zoo of any culpability, imposing sole responsibility upon the man for alcoholism or mental illness. To provide an alterna- tive reading of the incident, Walther cites John Berger’s critique of the way zoos transform animals into “simulacra of themselves” (212). She asks how the man’s actions might be read as a violation of spatial and conceptual boundaries that are, themselves, predi- cated on the violent appropriation of animal lives for human con- sumption. Walther then considers whether literary representations of animals recreate the zoo’s logic. She concludes that any interpre- tation of nonhuman animals appropriates the animal, yet that ap- propriation can also urge us to imagine more equitable (or less in- equitable) forms of interspecies communion. While it could have delved deeper into subaltern alliances, Multi- species Modernity ably synthesizes critical animal studies with post- colonial criticism to provide fresh and provocative close readings of human–animal encounters in Indian literature. The book could have moved beyond texts by middle-class and elite authors to ground the animal subaltern in literature by and about the subcon- tinent’s marginalized groups. Indeed, greater engagement with his- torically excluded communities such as Adivasis and Dalits would have strengthened Walther’s claims about interspecies subalter- nity. The book also tends to focus on charismatic animals like ti- gers, dolphins, and cows. More texts that feature insects, fish, or Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 428 | Sandhar, Review of Walther strays — which have not received as much critical attention in post- colonial animal studies — could have generated reflection on how and why we value some animals more than others (the chapter on Desai and Narayan, which features lizards, birds, and a housecat, starts moving toward a more complex understanding of how we think about quotidian creatures). All told, however, Multispecies Mo- dernity makes a valuable and learned contribution to postcolonial animal studies.