Template for drongo politics!

Even a novice Indian birder can recognise a drongo. You can spot them on power lines, in bushes, or circling beehives. Nine species live in India, and many of them inhabit Bengal and the nation’s northeast. The black drongo (Dicrurus macrocercus) is a small bird, about the length of a standard ruler, with a broad chest, a short, sharp beak, and an unusual split tail. Its relative, the greater racket-tailed drongo (Dicrurus macrocercus), is even more recognisable, blessed with a theatrical crest and its namesake rackets, that is, square shapes at the bottom of their split tail feathers.

Drongos have learned that life is better in flocks. In fact, many drongos forage best in mixed-species flocks. They are useful companions too, as drongos are adept at driving off predators. Drongos have surprised naturalists by sabotaging leopards’ hunts by shadowing the cats like a child with a loudspeaker. When gangly hornbills attempt to swallow up drongos, drongos practise mobbing to drive them off.

Over the last two decades, naturalists’ interest in drongos has intensified due to their vocal range. They are among the 15 percent or so of birds gifted with mimicry. What is really interesting is that drongos can beckon other avian species towards them by mimicking their calls, or drive birds away by copying their alarm calls. (Perhaps that’s the reason drongos are tricksters in the folktales of the Garo or Karbi peoples!).

‘Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being against the Capitalocene’ is a new work by Milinda Banerjee and Jelle Wouters that brings together anthropology and history to praise and protect interspecies collectives of all kinds. It is a small book or substantial pamphlet, depending on your view. Banerjee and Wouters use “collective” in the broadest sense to analytically capture not just flocks of birds, but also herds of yaks, indigenous elders, spirits, and so many others. We live in a “multi being demos”, say Banerjee and Wouters, where, like the drongo and their foraging kin, beings speak across divides (for talking animals see p92-93). And, if interspecies communication or animal democracy interests you, then that is reason enough to get a copy of ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’.

As Banerjee and Wouters tell it, the great threat to all multispecies relations is the insatiable force of capitalism, the Capitalocene of the pamphlet’s title. It is not a pamphlet against eating meat or, say, old hunting practices, but against the excesses of property and sovereignty. The Angamis Nagas of Kohima used to catch drongos with lime traps and take their tails. But they would wait for them to regrow and then return the birds to the wild. We can learn from the Angami, admire nature, and even take from it, but we must set some limits. In their central mantra, Banerjee and Wouters state: “Being is what makes being beings” (p3). This is contrasted with “Unbeing” the destruction wrought by greed. Drongo-like, the authors take up many voices, slipping from prose to poetry, flouting the conventions of non-fiction. This will not be to everyone’s taste.

Academic books thick with references and terse pamphlets are two different things. As far as reviewing conventions go, focusing on the supposed omissions of a pamphlet would miss the point. Recalling a quote attributed to the ancient Greek poet Callimachus, the type of thinker haunts this pamphlet, “a big book is a great evil”. Instead, it is better to try to read a pamphlet on its own terms and forage among its ideas. In ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’, a single paragraph might contain insights from biologists, Indologists, and indigenous elders. This polyphony also makes the pamphlet impossible to review in a traditional sense, as few, if any, scholars are experts in all the disciplines cited and are therefore equipped to evaluate any given claim. Nevertheless, despite the breadth, certain themes do stand out. The pamphlet is filled with reflections on the nature of sovereigns, indigenous thought from upland South Asia, and ancient texts. Illustrations, courtesy of a fellow academic, Senganglu Thaimei, tie the work together.

Some readers will be familiar with the Subaltern Studies collective. Nevertheless, it is worth fleshing out the bare bones of this intellectual movement in order to understand what ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’ might entail. Launched by the historian Ranajit Guha in the 1980s, the movement brought together many of the best anthropologists and historians of a generation, particularly from Bengal. Their position went something like this: scholars should look to notions of community within India’s peasant and tribal communities to resist capitalism and colonialism, a healthy dose of Marxism and structuralism was also advised. Subaltern Studies, as it came to be known, sent shock waves first through history and then the wider social sciences. The academe can be fickle, and what was once a movement shot through with vitalism is now taught to undergraduates as one of the numerous turns of the historiography of South Asia. Banerjee and Wouters want to revive this movement that showed so much promise. On the way, they stop to rebuke Subaltern Studies’ detractors (p34-35).

One of the first tasks Banerjee and Wouters set themselves was to diagnose the malaise in the social sciences (p35-41). Banerjee (trained as a historian) and Wouters (trained as an anthropologist) chide their colleagues for a collective lack of belief that their knowledge “can nourish contemporary revolution” (41). With so many critiques of university education coming from the authoritarian right, readers may find this leftist examination of academic failings refreshing. Elsewhere, Banerjee and Wouters targets are much more familiar. The left’s favourite targets are put to task: the CIA, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Facebook, GDP, the Global North, plantations, SUVs, and so on.

Banerjee and Wouters exhort readers to bring together plural, preferably decentralised, collectives of beings in order for us all to escape the shared fate of extinction (non-being). They try to show that revolutionary imaginations need not be built in a vacuum when there are tangible, stable, ecological, or sociological alternatives.

On a trip to the Naga hills earlier this year, I met fans of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, and Anglo-American masculinity enthusiast Andrew Tate. Perhaps due to my own liberal left hubris, I thought their bleak theories were the problem of my peers and I in the North Atlantic world. Clearly, Peterson and Tate have gone remarkably global.

One of the reasons Peterson’s ‘12 Rules For Life’ (2018) has become so popular is Peterson’s authority as a scientist. It allowed him to combine ethological data, most famously about brawling lobsters, but also about territorial songbirds, with reflections from the Buddha and the Bible. He offered a holistic account of life, telling readers to stand up straight or pet cats. He also told deep species histories, much like ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’. And like ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’, Peterson is an advocate for being with a capital B. Here the similarities end, as Banerjee and Wouters propose very different politics.

Animal studies, for Peterson, show that the natural world is full of dominance, hierarchy, and conflicts over mates and territories. The sooner we accept this, he argues, the better equipped we are for personal success. This was Peterson at his most optimistic, and since ‘12 Rules For Life’, his pessimism appears to have deepened, and hostility increased. Tate, on the other hand, simply supports masculine dominance. Does the world need more advocates of dominance? Surely not. Recent works on contemporary urban masculinity, such as Shannon Phillips’ study of striving 20 somethings in Delhi, reveal the desirability of lobster-like public performances. According to these men, one must act hard to thrive on the metro or at Connaught Place. ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’, with its poetry and gentle illustrations, points to another way. Banerjee and Wouters, however, do not avoid species’ histories of sexual competition. They discuss the castration of bulls in the ‘Rigveda’, and yaks in contemporary Bhutan. These acts are, in the pamphlet’s terms, the colonisation of animal politics. Humans play kingmaker by disabling intraspecies contestations, which, in turn, enable exploitative domestication (p99). These concerns for dominating competition, and indeed castration, inadvertently echo Freud’s theory of the primal horde (itself a frayed reading of Darwin). Freud thought civilization only began after bands of brothers defeated the dominant males, naturally figured as the father, who monopolised women (the guilt of the killing gave rise to the Oedipus complex).

Whether you are Darwin, Freud or Peterson, there is tremendous power in saying “I know the deep history of our species”. Banerjee and Wouters are bold enough to declare this too. And like Peterson and Freud, that traffic in both myth and new insights from the sciences. ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’, however, refuses to accept most forms of dominance as natural or inevitable. And, instead, readers are pushed to see examples of cooperation and democracy everywhere prior to the Capitalocene.

In the spirit of collectivity, the book concludes with comments from critical thinkers. These additions are dense in places. I regret that some arguments eluded me, though I am sure other readers will do better. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the most famous responder, joined by the field philosopher Thom van Dooren, the Andean anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, and the ever-rising star of Dalit studies, Suraj Yengde.

Yendge locates both lust and violence in how high castes have projected animality onto Dalits (p199-200). De la Cadena engages Ranajit Guha’s (the founder of Subaltern Studies) idea of the limit and puts it in conversation with Ecuadorian activists (p172-173). Spivak shares some of her hard-won Derridean insights (p168).

Van Dooren offers the steadying argument that as animals are “a diverse bunch”, they can be used to make “pretty much any kind of argument you like” (p182). For example, advocates of monogamy look to the avian world, while advocates of polygyny might look to tigers. Van Dooren caution applies to the plethora of examples in ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’, Peterson’s lobsters and wrens, as well as, obviously, my invocation of drongos.

If there is a sure sign of success for any theory book, it is that the theory goes somewhere, that it fits other data. By slotting my drongo musings alongside the albatrosses, cranes, geese, storks, and vultures of ‘Subaltern Studies 2.0’. I hope I have shown that their theories are as easily applicable as their politics are urgent.

The writer is a research scholar at the University of Cambridge. Views expressed are personal