“Do I Remove My Skin?”

In one of her prefatory notes to the selections in Because of India, Suniti Namjoshi observes how a male-centered humanist universe consigns every other creature to the position of the “other.” She converts this reductive exclusion to a positive alliance and accepts identification with “birds and beasts” and in effect with the rest of creation. However, the category of the beast, although less confining, lacks specificity: “All right, I was a beast, a creature. But what sort of beast was I?” ¹