Zooësis and ‘Becoming with’ in India: The ‘Figure’ of Elephant inSahyande Makan: The Elephant Project

Abstract

I analyseSahyande Makan: The Elephant Project(2008), a cross-cultural theatrical production in Malayalam and Japanese by the Kerala-based group Theatre Roots and Wings, as an instance of ‘zooësis’. The performance presents the state of an elephant in the space of a Kerala temple festival ritual,pooram. The elephant moves into a fantasy of the wild as it is under the physiological condition of musth. Approaching the question of the performing animal as intersectional, this performance challenges anthropocentrism and its assumed binary of human/animal, and draws a possible relation between domestic and wild, or the world of norms and freedom, both for elephants and for humans. I argue that by taking embodiment as the site of exploring discipline as well as imagining a freeing, and by positing an alternate way of ‘being worldly’ through affect and senses, the performance articulates what Donna Haraway has posited as the process of ‘becoming with’.