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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Ruskin Bond’s select children’s short stories reconfigure interspecies relationality and offer fresh critical avenues to address animal subjectivity, animal rights and ethical coexistence of life forms.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how select children’s short stories of Ruskin Bond assert a re-estimation of animal subjectivity and interspecies relationships. By foregrounding animals as sentient beings rather than mere symbols, “The Banyan Tree,” “Tiger Tiger Burning Bright,” and “Panther’s Moon” disrupt anthropocentric hierarchies and open an interspecies dialogue that resonates with contemporary debates in animal studies and posthumanist ethics. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming animal,’ centred on ‘alliance’ and ‘transversal communication,’ provides a productive framework to read these texts and dismantle speciesist boundaries. Here, humans encounter animals, at different levels, as ‘co-participants’ in a shared continuum of life, destabilising the human-animal binary. This resonates with Cary Wolfe’s posthumanist emphasis on the emotional exchange between humans and animals that signifies the irreducible subjectivity of non-human life. Further, Martha Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities theory’ can be seen in the way Bond’s narratives extend ethical imagination toward animals’ intrinsic needs and capabilities. Complementing this, Peter Singer’s anti-speciesist ‘utilitarian’ framework underscores the imperative to minimise suffering across species, a principle tacitly reflected in Bond’s refusal to reduce animals to mere narrative utility. Similarly, Tom Regan’s assertion of animals as ‘subjects-of-a-life’ with inherent moral value finds resonance in Bond’s insistence on the sanctity of animal existence. At this juncture, this paper explores how these theoretical perspectives enable a fresh reading of Bond’s select children’s texts as a critical site for reimagining interspecies justice and asserts the issues of animal ethics, animal rights, animal subjectivity, and the ethical coexistence of life forms.