Living waste, living on waste: A bioeconomy of urban cows in Delhi

Abstract

The economic implications of biopolitics – or the administration, regulation, and control of life – have received significant attention in recent geographical and cognate scholarship. An emerging theme of inquiry, largely focused on the Global North, makes contributions to specifying ‘lively capital’, defined here as bodily value in motion – predicated on accumulation from other‐than‐human life. In this paper, we argue that the biopolitical process of bringing life into the ambit of capital works in cultural, political, and economic registers and not just through singular logics of the economic, as extant accounts have implied. The rendition of life into capital through modes of biopower is not a universal process. It has diverging trajectories that, in postcolonial contexts, involve hybrids between biopolitical and vernacular practices. This argument is made through an account of bovine biopolitics in urban Delhi with specific reference to the city's ‘cattle problem’ involving ‘surplus’ animals. It unfolds in four distinct parts. First, drawing on archival work, we trace colonial histories of cattle improvement to reveal how the category of ‘surplus’ was invented. Second, we deploy more‐than‐human ethnographies of free‐ranging animals in Delhi to foreground how ‘surplus’ cattle – which we conceptualise as ‘living waste’ – are driven to feed on waste as a result of gentrification and the enclosure of erstwhile grazing grounds. Third, we turn to gaushalas (cow shelters) in Delhi to show how ‘surplus’ cattle from the city's streets are rehomed and managed. Fourth, we examine the uneven practices of care afforded to different bovines based on logics associated with right‐wing Hindutva nationalism. Our account provincialises lively capital by opening up more nuanced and situated understandings of the relations between biopolitics and capitalism, attentive to divergences from models situated in Western modernity.

Going with the Flow: Moving Cells and Changing Values in Biomedical Practice

“…However, classifying things as gifts, commodities, or assets is more difficult than it seems in contemporary (bio)economic life. Recent cultural economic analyses show that when living things such as seeds (Braun 2021), soybeans (Delvenne 2021), fish (Dobeson 2021), or cows (Turnbull and Barua 2023) are exchanged and valued, the analytical distinction between commodities, gifts, and assets, while clearly established in economic sociology or STS theory, is far from obvious in practice. This empirical statement opens the way to an original approach that does not focus solely on one or the other form of exchange or pit them against each other, as the abovementioned literature often tends to do.…”

Theme issue introduction: The species turn in Indian identity politics

“…Nonhuman animals have been positioned as cultural symbols and as resources to be equitably managed but have very rarely been addressed as beings with their own interests and experiences. Some exceptions include Narayanan's (2023Narayanan's ( , 2021a centering of buffaloes and cows as political subjects in India's cow protectionism, or probing the implications for pigs weaponised to craft polarised ideas of Dravida and Tamil nationalisms in Tamil Nadu (also, see Srinivasan 2013Srinivasan , 2014Srinivasan , 2019Turnbull & Barua 2022;Barua & Sinha 2019;Parikh & Miller 2019;Deckha 2020. ) Similarly, in her work on animal activist politics in India, Naisargi Dave's (2014) argues that witnessing animal suffering, against the landscape of Hindu nationalism, divisive cultural politics, and infrastructural development, serves to meld humanity and animality together but also reinforces human exceptionalism in authorising the human to 'speak for' the animal.…”

The invisible city: The unglamorous biogeographies of urban microbial ecologies

“…(Baura and Sinha, 2022, 15). Specifically, I focus on microbial ecologies involved in productive contributions to urban reproduction, those interfering with these processes, and microbial ecosystems 1 Turnbull and Barua (2023) discuss the role of cows as informal waste workers. The metabolic lives of cows are rooted in bacterial symbionts resident in their rumen.…”