ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the reading of Waryam Singh Sandhu’s “I am Feeling Fine Now” and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Lubdhak, originally written in Punjabi and Bangla, respectively. Set against periods of political violence, these stories of canine characters provoke us to think how an ethical recognition of animal pain can enable an intersubjective and trans-species engagement with precarity and vulnerability. In Sandhu’s story, which has the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement as its backdrop, humans need to kill their cohabitant dog in order to survive in the climate of terror. Bhattacharya’s novella presents terrified dogs and other animals that will soon be eradicated from the city of Kolkata. Notwithstanding certain humanist and anthropomorphizing gestures, the aural-scape of these narratives undoes the singular narrative of humanism. These texts, Sinha argues, urge us to listen to the dogs’ barking not as the other of human language; rather, only an ethico-political aural attunement to these dying and suffering dogs’ barking can potentially pave a way out of dehumanized anthropocentrism.
