Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the everyday lives of abandoned bovines in a Himalayan marketplace of India, framing them as moral and political agents whose survival challenges their rendering as waste, and provokes rethinking of human-animal labour relations, ethics, and bovine politics in contemporary India.

Presentation long abstract

In this paper I examine the everyday mobilities of ‘unproductive’ cows and oxen abandoned on the streets of a small Himalayan marketplace in Uttarakhand, India. I rethink these unwanted bovines as moral and political subjects whose embodied practices of survival and persistence constitute forms of claim-making on shared more-than-human spaces and resources. Through ethnographic attention to their everyday movements, experiences, and representations, I explore the vital agencies of these political beings which resist and limit the rendering of their lives as wasted or disposable within local agrarian and dairy economies. My analyses show how the presence and interactions of old, disabled, and infertile bovines in the marketplace unsettled local people’s moral worlds, provoking reflections on shared interspecies vulnerabilities, kinship, and responsibility. These multispecies encounters also redirected shared gaze towards shifting social relations shaped by economic and cultural transformations in the region. My empirical insights in this paper problematise predominant scholarly, popular, and policy framings of abandoned street bovines in India as either passive ‘victims’ of capitalist commodification or mere ‘nuisances’, living on and creating waste in public spaces. By situating the ethico-political claims of these animals within the broader context of rural capitalism and cow protection politics, I draw out the implications that the political agencies of these wasted or wastable animals have for helping reorient the contours of human-animal relations and bovine politics in contemporary India (and beyond), opening pathways towards more just multispecies futures.