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"Animals Like Us: Interspecies Relationships in the Sanskritic Literary Imagination in Early India"
Animals Like Us offers an account of animality and human-animal relationality by analyzing classic story collections, courtly poems, and religious narratives composed in Sanskrit between the fourth and the sixth centuries CE. Although modern scholars have analyzed these texts, they have rarely engaged with the animal characters as animals, frequently interpreting them metaphorically as stand-ins for humans. By engaging in close readings of animal appearance, behavior, experience, and inner worlds in the aforesaid Sanskrit narratives, I contend that in early India, the realm of imaginative fiction allowed for animals to be seen as active participants in human worlds, as intimately entangled in their lives and as engendering and sharing a host of affects–from mirth to pain, and affection to disgust. My ecological reading of old classics offers a critical perspective to religious and literary discourses on animals through the lenses of affect, entanglement, intimacy, and kinship.
Jahnabi Chanchani is a Ph.D. Candidate in Asian Languages & Cultures.
