Adieu, Elephant Mother

In June 2020, a pregnant elephant emerged from a region called “Silent Valley” in Kerala, India and died soon after consuming pineapple that had been filled with crackers by local farmers prepared to prevent elephants from entering their village. A wave of shock swept the nation, demanding that we reflect on speciesism: What is it to be human? What are non-human animals to humans? And as a friend articulated, to whom do the forests belong? As many mourned the death of the pregnant elephant mother, my thoughts took me to the dim rustle of disquiet for a pregnant Muslim student activist, Safoora Zargar, arrested for participating in the student led protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. The CAA amends to accept illegal migrants who are Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Buddhist and Christian from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan following the religious persecution. The bill excludes Muslims, Sri Lankan Tamils in India, Rohingyas from Myanmar and Tibetans refugees leaving them vulnerable to being declared outside citizenship registry. How do we account for the contrasting response to the two pregnant mothers? When studied together, the rules of speciesism devolve before our eyes. The elephant mother was a clear winner of our pain. It became clear to me that our heart did not sway the same way: it was easier for most to enter the scene of mourning for the elephant-mother while the incarcerated human-mother became a container of abjection.

The outrage experienced by my contemporaries reminded me of another instance. In 1926 in Pre-Independent India, the municipality of Ahmedabad had to address the problem of increasing numbers of rabid dogs in the city. Instead of killing the canines, they caught the strays and let them go outside the city limits. The dogs then became a concern for workers who worked and lived in those areas. Erikson, in Gandhi’s Truth, reflects on the moment in the Indian imaginary: “Considering arsenic cruel, they (the police) shot them. The cadavers were then loaded on carts which (for whatever reason) were pulled right through the old town – and this on a holiday. The Hindu populace was stunned, and many stores immediately closed in protest according to the ancient pattern of hartal – a storekeepers’ strike” (Erikson, 1969, p. 587).

Gandhi responded to the moment evaluating the spiritual and the pragmatic dimensions of the crisis. Noting that hospitals in Ahmedabad had treated more than two thousand persons with hydrophobia (symptoms of rabies) between 1925 and 1926, Gandhi wrote in a local paper, “In our ignorance, we must kill rabid dogs even as we might have to kill a man found in the act of killing people.” He engaged with what appeared to many as a sore contradiction of the principle of nonviolence. On further contemplation he added:

… It is a sin to feed stray dogs. It is a false sense of compassion. It is an insult to a starving dog to throw a crumb at him. Roving dogs do not indicate the civilization or compassion of the society; they betray on the contrary the ignorance and lethargy of its members. The lower animals are our brethren. I include among them the lion and the tiger. We do not know how to live with these carnivorous beasts and poisonous reptiles because of our ignorance. When man learns better, he will learn to befriend even these. Today he does not even know how to befriend a man of a different religion or from a different country. (Gandhi, 2008, p. 588)

In what might appear to be Gandhi’s blanket endorsement of the killing the dogs, he laid down a challenging proposition: an ethical choice that directly benefits not one’s own moral economy but the weakest or the poorest, a humanity that’s not split off from animality. In the rabidity of the canines, or the unrestraint emergence of the elephant, is the image of the human, or human apathy, as though the animal has been watching us, at our disavowal of hate and the implicit adherence to a nauseating normative-philosophical views of the human- nature relationship (Derrida, 2008; Moss et al., 2022, p. 20). Perhaps we may not be able to heal the splits and meet them as limits of our thinkability. There is, however, a possibility to hold tenderly a slow, intensely personal process of self-examination to be able to mourn the human for a biospheric egalitarianism, even if for a moment … before the next tree is felled for a road, an animal is thrown a bread, or an activist is captured as anti-national.