ABSTRACT
Animals have gained increasing attention in discussions surrounding caste, as the ‘scared’ cow has frequently been mobilised by the dominant castes to commit violence against Dalits. This chapter attends to animal figures whose entanglements in the caste system have received somewhat lesser attention—pigs, sheep, and the Black Sparrow—through the lens of two Marathi films—Khwada (2014) and Fandry (2013). Although these films differ considerably in their content, aesthetics, and politics, they converge in their attention to the embroiling of the animal in the perpetration and resistance of everyday caste violence. By analysing the spatial and verbal configurations in these films through frameworks offered by queer and feminist scholars, this chapter argues that even as both films highlight the interdependency of the mechanisms through which the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are constituted in a caste society, they also lay the terrain to imagine ‘interspecies alliances’ against caste by re-imagining the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’.
