ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the possibilities in the ‘othering’ of the human by non-human actors in the narrative universe of the Mahābhārata. The epic’s descriptions of seemingly impossible intelligent piscine, reptilian and avian agents admonishing humans on critical ethical issues is an attempt to adopt a normative and scientific yet involved look on the human moral agent through a ‘trans-species point of view.’ The author relates such evaluation of human community through what can be imagined to be a ‘shared non-human subjectivity’ to the larger question of the entitlement of moral human agency. Inhabiting the environs of ancient Hindu and modern Western philosophy and reviewing the ‘different registers of moral semiotics, virtue-ethics, and amoral politics’, the essay refers to the ethical transgression of speciesism while also reminding us of the ‘moral considerability’ of the non-human because of our indebtedness to them. The author finds that ‘reflective human agency’ can only be developed within a wider moral imagination that recognizes the similarity of suffering across corporeal difference. This implies that an ethical subjectivity framed within civilizational norms is intrinsically limited and that ethical agency is fully realisable only through the acknowledgment of the plurality of racial, cultural and historical experience.
