“Forced Renegades”: Interspecies Relationalities, Historiographic Violence, and Zoopolitical Realism in Mahasweta Devi’s “The Death of Jagamohan”

Abstract

In May 2020, a pregnant elephant died from serious injuries, starvation, and respiratory failure while standing knee-deep in a river in the Palakkad district of the state of Kerala in India. The incident took place after she consumed a pineapple stuffed with firecrackers which exploded in her mouth. The elephant, posthumously named Soumya, had strayed into a village from the nearby Silent Valley National Park in search of food, and unknowingly consumed one of the pineapple bomb snares used by local farmers to prevent verminous species like wild boars from destroying agricultural crops. Even though the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (1960) of the Indian Constitution applies to animal1 species across different taxonomic categories, the legal immunity granted to farmers who have the rights to destroy disruptive, commercially unpropitious animals categorized as “vermin,” and the severe measures adopted by the farmers to control them in...