Courts of the Living

Our lives are intimately and intensely entangled with animals around us.

Deep in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan's extraordinary ethnographic work invites us into a world where the boundaries between human and animal are far less certain than we imagine. Through stories of ritual sacrifice, the politics of cow protection, and unsettling tales of bears who desire human women, she reveals how relationships across species are shaped by affection as much as conflict, and by difference as much as a profound sense of kinship.

At its heart, we discuss, what might we discover about ourselves, and the lives of other animals, if we began to take seriously the relationships we have shared?

There's a whole world under our feet - insects, fungi, vegetal life, animals and so much more! In fact, soil has more to say to us each day than we are capable of receiving and finding words for, and it needs all the friends it can get, friends who practice the art of soil watching.

If you've ever touched soil around you and found yourself enjoy that feeling of rich fertile soil, be a littel afraid of insects in it, and curious about all the small things in it that you don't quite know, then this episode is for you.

This week we speak to Aditi and Vivian of Living Soil Asia, Singapore. Aditi Punj Sood serves as the Curriculum Cultivator and Education Lead at Living Soil Asia, while Vivian Lee is the Culture Shaper in the same organisation. We speak to them about the richness of soil and the lifeworlds it builds, the socio-historical context of Singapore within which Living Soil Asia works, their journeys to working on soil and land, and so much more!

References

Food forest destroyed to make way for Hi-Tech farm- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4n-apMd27c&feature=youtu.be
Nature, disappeared: anti-environmental values in Singapore’s history textbooks, 1984–2015
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2021.1968350

Living Soil Asia - https://livingsoil.asia

"लोगों के अनुसार, तेंदुआ एक बार आया था जब उसने उनकी बकरी को मार डाला था... लेकिन कैमरा ट्रैप कुछ और ही कहानी बयां करते हैं। कैमरा ट्रैप से पता चलता है कि तेंदुआ हमेशा वहीं रहता है। जिस एक बार इंसानों ने उसे देखा, उसके अलावा तेंदुआ वास्तव में कई बार और आ चुका था। उसने हर बार हमला नहीं किया। यही तेंदुए की सबसे बड़ी योजना है। कि भले ही वह हमेशा वहीं मौजूद रहता है, लेकिन इंसानों की नजरों में वह बहुत कम ही दिखाई देता है।" ["According to Mangar Bani's people, the leopard visited once and killed their goat... but camera traps tell a different story. Camera traps reveal that the leopard is always there. Besides the one time humans spotted it, it has actually visited many, many other times. It didn't attack each time. This is the leopard's ultimate strategy: that even though it's always there, it's rarely visible to humans."]

इस सप्ताह हमने सुनील और नितेश (Sunil Harsana Nitesh Kaushik) से अरावली पर्वतमाला में उनके अद्भुत कार्य के बारे में बात की, जो दुनिया की सबसे प्राचीन पर्वतमालाओं में से एक है। सुनील और नितेश दिल्ली-हरियाणा सीमा पर स्थित मंगर गांव के पास एक पवित्र पहाड़ी वन, मंगर बानी में काम करते हैं। हमने संरक्षण, शहरीकरण, क्षेत्र के युवाओं और बच्चों को क्षेत्र की देखभाल में शामिल करने और क्षेत्र में पाए जाने वाले तेंदुओं के बारे में चर्चा की। [This week we had the opportunity to speak to Sunil Harsana⁠ ⁠and Nitesh Kaushik⁠ about their fantastic work in the Aravalli Range, one of the world's most ancient mountain ranges. Sunil and Nitesh work in Mangar Bani, a sacred hill forest near Mangar village on the Delhi-Haryana border. We discussed conservation, urbanization, involving the youth and children of the region in caring for the area, and the leopards found in the region.]

"Instead of having laws and legislation, the missing piece in our relationship with wild animals is actually compassion.  Humans think that we are the masters here, that we can control everything. I think what's lacking here is better and more creative ways of engaging people to make them understand these values, and I think that will go much further in trying to have a more compassionate society. (We need to ask) do the judges have these values in them? Like when they are forced to give a verdict on a case where a snake is abused and killed, how are they going to view it?" - Kalai (ACRES)

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In this episode of Courts of the Living, I had the chance to speak to Jasvic Lye, Campaigns Manager of Our Wild Neighbours, and  Kalaivanan Balakrishnan, Co-CEO of Animal Concerns Research & Education Society in Singapore. Our conversation focussed on coexistence issues between humans and more-than-human life in Singapore, the legal landscape in Singapore, and what is needed to ensure that coexistence is practical and peaceful in the country, and perhaps the region. 

References: 

Our Wild Neighbours - https://www.ourwildneighbours.sg/our-wild-neighbours

Animal Concerns Research & Education Society - https://acres.org.sg 

This week we speak with Dr. Yamini Narayanan, author of Mother Cow Mother India, to explore the uneasy intersections of animal exploitation, cultural symbolism, and state power in India. Our conversation moves through the hidden violence of dairy practices, the gendered and colonial roots of animalization, and the figure of the cow as sacred, feminine, and hyper-visible—yet relentlessly exploited. From constitutional promises and nationalist myth-making to factory farms, breeding regimes, and everyday neglect, this episode asks what a more honest, compassionate politics might look like—one that confronts suffering directly and imagines new spaces of protection and solidarity across movements.

References:

Visakha Society for Protection and Care of Animals, information available here - https://vspca.org/ ; Donation page - https://vspca.org/donate/Yamini Narayanan, Mother Cow Mother India, available here - https://www.amazon.in/Mother-Cow-India-Multispecies-Politics-ebook/dp/B0BS47ZVNPYamini Narayanan, Rolling-stone multispecies ethnography: Intuition, intimacy, and violence in illegal animal production, available here - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398217561_Rolling-stone_multispecies_ethnography_Intuition_intimacy_and_violence_in_illegal_animal_production?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7InBhZ2UiOiJzY2llbnRpZmljQ29udHJpYnV0aW9ucyIsInByZXZpb3VzUGFnZSI6bnVsbH19Kathryn Gillespie, The Cow with Ear Tag 1389, available here - https://www.amazon.in/Cow-Ear-Tag-1389/dp/022658285XKathryn Gillespie, The Sound of Feathers: Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves, available here - https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-sound-of-feathersYamini Narayanan, Animal Suffering in Global Development and Antipoverty Praxis: Enforced Animal Labor in the Peripheral Capitalism of Indian Brick Kilns, available here - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2024.2369595 

In this episode we follow Malavika on a journey from human-centred disciplines into the alterity of fungi, asking what shifts when we learn from lives that thread through soil, wood, and air. We explore how fungal relations complicate simple ideas of balance and cooperation, offering instead a vision of reciprocity that includes tension, decay, and renewal. Malavika discusses who counts in our shared world, and how recognising the agency and capacities of microbes and mycelia could change how communities make decisions and share responsibilities. They sketch a future rooted in fungal ethics in India and discuss what lessons fungal worlds offer systems of justice.

A tick can wait years, suspended in a state of potentiality, until the right environmental triggers are present. Dr. Wadiwel asks, in specific ways, isn’t a human similar to a tick? With this question, Dr. Dinesh Wadiwel talks to us about capital, animals, labour and the war we are constantly waging against animals. He talks about his books, and about the many ways we mete out unnecessary suffering on more-than-human beings, without possibly considering their rich lives. Dr. Wadiwel talks about sovereignty, companionship, conflict, and the many ways in which animals resist.

What happens when a forest becomes a plantation?

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Sophie Chao, whose extraordinary ethnography In the Shadow of the Palms: More-than-Human Becomings in West Papua traces the worlds of the Marind people—for whom plants and animals are not resources, but ancestors, siblings, and kin.

As oil palm plantations spread across their lands, Dr. Chao’s work illuminates how colonial and capitalist logics uproot not just forests, but entire cosmologies of care. We speak about multispecies justice, hunger, and the haunting question of what it means to live ethically in a world where growth often means loss.

References:
🪴 More Than Human Matters → https://www.morethanhumanworlds.com/mthm-archive

📚 The Promise of Multispecies Justice → https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-promise-of-multispecies-justice

🌿 In the Shadow of the Palms → https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-shadow-of-the-palms

🍃 Land of Famished Beings → https://www.dukeupress.edu/land-of-famished-beings

📖 “Introduction: Multispecies Justice” → https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article/19/1/1/352091

⚖️ What does it mean to be a legal being beyond the spectrum of property to personhood?

In this conversation, Professor Maneesha Deckha, author of Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders, speaks to me about the urgent need to move beyond the property–personhood binary that has long structured law’s relationship with animals.

Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and critical legal thought, she invites us to imagine legal beingness—a framework that refuses hierarchy and embraces kinship, care, and coexistence.

Professor Deckha concludes with a haunting image of farmed animals, and speaks briefly about the politics of milk, about the multispecies economies of dairy in India, and about what it would take for law to recognise animals not as commodities.

🐄✨ Listen to this conversation on Courts of the Living, wherever you get your podcasts.

🎙️Season 1 Episode 7: 'Beingness'

References:

About Professor Maneesha Deckha: https://www.uvic.ca/law/faculty-and-research/our-faculty/profiles/deckha-maneesha.php

Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders: https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487525873

Animals, Colonialism, and the Rule of Law: https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A13%3A23401885/detailv2?sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Ascholar&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A187877960&crl=c&link_origin=scholar.google.ca

A Deeper Kindness: Animal Law & Youth Activism:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg6QcF9rWk0; https://www.uvic.ca/law/asri/index.php

Towards a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies by Greta Gaard : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265807927_Toward_a_Feminist_Postcolonial_Milk_Studies

Mother Cow Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India by Yamini Narayanan: https://www.amazon.in/Mother-Cow-India-Multispecies-Politics-ebook/dp/B0BS47ZVNP

"Women (respondents) in many of the villages would even voice their opinions around dog motherhood for example, and would say things like dogs also have the right to experience motherhood at least once in their lifetime."

At a time when our legal system views dogs as 'menace' on the one hand, and animal welfare organisations think about welfare as sterilisation and neutering of dogs on the other, Rashmi Singh Rana, PhD candidate at University of Technology Sydney & Nature Conservation Foundation India spoke to me about the vibrant personalities of the dogs she met for her research work. As dogs are sterilised as a form of protection, Rashmi asks crucial questions - who is really being protected, and under what circumstances.

References:

Donna Haraway's book titled 'The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness' (2003): https://www.amazon.in/Companion-Species-Manifesto-Significant-Otherness/dp/0971757585#:~:text=%22The%20Companion%20Species%20Manifesto%22%20is,here%20just%20to%20think%20with.

Krithika Srinivasan's article/paper titled 'The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the UK and India' (2013): https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/74826410/27674774._Srinivasan.pdf  

Natasha Fijn's article/book chapter titled ' DOG EARS AND TAILS: Different Relational Ways of Being with Canines in Aboriginal Australia and Mongolia', in the book titled Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations (2018): https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2500/chapter-abstract/1216210/Dog-Ears-and-TailsDifferent-Relational-Ways-of?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Robert B Ekvall's article titled 'Role of the Dog in Tibetan Nomadic Society', published in 1963 in the Central Asiatic Journal: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41926578

Don Messerschmidt's book titled 'Big dogs of Tibet and the Himalayas' (2010): https://www.amazon.in/Big-Dogs-Tibet-Himalayas-Messerschmidt/dp/974524130X

Himalayan Guardian Dogs: Unsung Sentinels of the Shepherds of the Himalayas: https://roundglasssustain.com/wild-vault/himalayan-guardian-dogs

Supreme Court Order in WP (Civil) No. 5 of 2025: https://api.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2025/41706/41706_2025_9_802_62686_Order_28-Jul-2025.pdf

Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023: https://awbi.gov.in/uploads/regulations/167956418266ABC%20Rule%202023.pdf

Wanted: Menacing Dogs for TV Thumbnails: Wanted: Menacing dogs for TV thumbnails https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/13/wanted-menacing-dogs-for-tv-thumbnails