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ID:
168819
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the spatial politics of situating slaughterhouses at the margins of Mumbai city enacted by the sanitary civic state and the caste labour of the butcher community. While the sanitary state mobilises colonial discourses of sanitation that deem animal slaughter unhygienic and so needing to be located at the shifting periphery of the city, an ethnography of the Muslim sub-castes of mutton and beef butchers suggests that animal slaughter is a form of caste labour that involves cultivating hereditary skills of working with flesh, bone and blood, which the Mumbai butchers refer to as ‘karigari’ (artisanship). Their caste labour is resisting the reconfiguration of the meat trade, which they view as fragmenting the community’s control over their labour. By bringing theories of urban space, state and caste among urban Muslims into the conversation, the article describes the ways in which scientific and communal ideas of sanitation are consolidated along a continuum. It also describes the ways in which caste and religion condense along an axis to form analogous structures that are deployed by the beef and mutton butchers to resist these spatial shifts.
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| 2 |
ID:
159755
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| Summary/Abstract |
Cow protection, a potent tool in the hands of cow vigilantes for atrocities against Muslims and Dalits, has become a heavily politicised issue in contemporary India. Its roots, connecting the themes of caste-Hindu religious sentiment, communalism and economic reasoning, can be traced to the late nineteenth century, though basic problems over the intriguingly complex use of cattle are clearly much older. This article relates contemporary cow protection debates specifically to Arya Samaj arguments against cow slaughter in the late nineteenth century and publication of a special issue of the journal Kalyan, titled Gau Ank, in 1945. The discussion shows how cow protection debates in the Constituent Assembly of India and in subsequent post-independence judicial verdicts were heavily influenced by these two earlier discourses. Analysing two landmark judicial decisions on cow slaughter, the article argues further that recent judicial endorsement of cow protection legitimises Hindu majoritarian sentiments in the law, while depriving millions of Indians, not just Muslims, of fundamental rights to food and livelihood. The conclusion attempts to consider some possible solutions to the current impasse.
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