Book Reviews

Islam. Lambert-Hurley in fact often cites authors working on non-Muslim

South Asian texts that show similar patterns. Why, then, reinforce the
South Asian view—so pernicious in India today—that Muslims are properly
understood only in relation to Muslims elsewhere? How different are these
texts from those of non-Muslim South Asian women? What new questions,
generalizations, and differences, would these comparisons yield? Who do
writers compare themselves to (if they do)?
Parda in these texts is typically presented in terms of early restrictions
that are then overcome, a trope represented, for example, by one writer
whose words begin and end the book. Parda often serves to structure a
heroic narrative characteristic of much life writing and, in this case, also
plays to audience expectations. But is this particular version of restrictions
on women enough to justify a separate Muslim category? As for parda/
seclusion of feelings, are Muslim women more “elusive” than anyone else
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in what they reveal and conceal as they write? The “unveiling” of intimacy,
personal feelings, and so forth characteristic of Muslim writers is surely true
of more recent writing generally.
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Given that Muslim women are in fact the subject of this stimulating
book, and that what defines them above all is a story of achievement, would
it not have been better to drop the implicit stereotype of the title and replace
“Elusive” with something like Accomplished Lives?

University of California, Davis Barbara Metcalf

ANIMAL INTIMACIES: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central

Himalayas. By Radhika Govindrajan. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2018. xiii, 220 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.50, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-
55998-8.

Animal Intimacies is an evocative monograph on the entanglements between

animals and rural residents of the Central Himalayas. Govindrajan’s
scholarship brings attention to the more-than-human relationships that
exist in everyday life in Kumaon, and contributes to feminist scholarship
on kinship and relatedness. Consistent with the orientation of multispecies
ethnography, this work treats animals as subjects with agency and emotion,
while adding a critical dimension to its engagement with particular, individual
animals, instead of only engaging with them as part of a collective or abstract
category of animal. In doing so, Govindrajan engages with animal subjects
just as she does with human subjects, while always keeping a careful eye on
the ontological differences and power differentials between the two kinds
of subjects.
On the sacrificial goat in chapter 2, for instance, Govindrajan highlights
how paharis wrestle with the liberal, “modern,” and often distant view on

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animal sacrifice as barbaric in its religiosity, in which goats are offered to the
devi in lieu of first-born sons. Their relationship with goats, however, entails
everyday intercorporeal practices of care in their raising, which leads to
genuine feelings of loss and grief upon their sacrifice, emphasizing labour,
love, and death as components of kinship.
In chapter 3, Govindrajan continues to draw on the fractures between
distant policy, this time, from the Hindu nationalists’ violent, casteist
insistence on cow protection, and the actual embodied and emotional
relationship between people and the animals they care for in a multispecies
rural economy that hinges on “collaborative survival” (drawing from Anna
Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist
Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). The difference in the
relatedness people share with a Jersey cow as opposed to a pahari cow, is
further seen in the distinction between insider and city monkeys, made in
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chapter 4. The arrival of bahar ke bandar (outsider monkeys) create a space

for paharis to articulate anxieties around state neglect, land commodification
in the mountains, the decline of agriculture, and uneven geographies of
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development. But for paharis, these animals are not just metaphors (89),
but actors who condition the material lives of humans in specific ways. City
monkeys are aggressive and dangerous enough to destroy native flora and
fauna, cause significant losses of potential harvests to farmers, and discourage
cultivation. That courts and activists consider the translocation of monkeys
to other sites a humane solution of controlling their population reveals
inattention not only to the material effects on paharis, but also the tendency
of rhesus monkeys to settle near humans, and the breakage of the monkeys’
own social bonds in this method of conservation.
In addition to emphasizing this role of institutions in mediating
conservation, the narrative about and around the runaway pig in chapter 5
illuminates the colonial logic inherent in upholding distinctions between
the wild and the domestic, the natural and the human, and the animal
and the human, as if there is a nature out there that is ever unmediated by
human activity. The most fascinating demonstration of the co-constitution
of human and animal subjectivities comes from the pahari women’s tellings
of and speculation around sexual relationships with bears in chapter 6. In
these narratives, women are able to articulate sexual desire, resistance to
patriarchy in their everyday lives, and the gendered dimensions of relating
to animals through labour.
One of Govindrajan’s key ethnographic interventions is in immersing
herself in the lives of animals, spending time, observing, and tracing their
individual lives much as an ethnographer would with human subjects.
Indeed, the most poignant moment in the book involves Govindrajan seeing
“something” in the gaze of a female juvenile loner monkey, and recognizing
in it, a reciprocal connection the monkey shared with a human—one that
she is bold enough to call “love” (118). The boldness, however, never once

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feels heavy-handed, and instead remains suggestive, even vulnerable in its

emotive capacity. Govindrajan is fuelled by “the latent possibility” of other
worlds (123) and imagination in her open-ended theorizing that succeeds
in drawing in the reader while never attempting to tie happy or neat bows.
That may be the book’s biggest accomplishment.
Govindrajan’s success with evoking place emerges partly from her
willingness to make herself visible in the narrative. In her note on method,
she acknowledges her own relatedness to her (human) informants, who let
her into their world, “as a friend, as a daughter, as a sister, and as a sister-
in-law” (28). One wishes that she had taken the chance to dwell on the
uneasiness of interrelatedness, insider-outsider dynamics, and the differences
and hierarchies inherent in connection, in the relationship between the
ethnographer and the research subject, much as she does between humans
and animals. If relatedness is always a “partial connection between beings
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who come to their relationship as unpredictable, unknowable, and unequal

entities” (25), more-than-human ethnographies like Govindrajan’s only
draw emphatic attention to the always-partial, incomplete translation of how
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subjects think, feel, and act. Therefore, aren’t all interlocutors, human and
nonhuman alike, “intimate strangers,” despite the ontological differences
between the two? Are there new radical possibilities that come to light
through the study of nonhumans, in acknowledging the unknowability of all
research subjects, in how we do ethnography itself? How might we reconcile
intimacy with unknowability and power relations in knowledge production?
Animal Intimacies raises these questions among many more.

The University of British Columbia, Vancouver Priti Narayan

FICTION AS HISTORY: The Novel and the City in Modern North India.
By Vasudha Dalmia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2019. xvi, 442 pp. (B&W
photos.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-7605-6.

Fiction as History is a carefully crafted book, in which Vasudha Dalmia

weaves together a social history of urban North India by bringing together
strands of knowledge located in diverse disciplinary practices. The book is
an extended commentary on eight major Hindi novels published between
the 1870s and the 1960s. By focusing on the cities of Lahore, Delhi, Agra,
Allahabad, Lucknow, and Varanasi, the book traces the emergence of Hindu
middle classes and their negotiations with colonial and nationalist forces. The
discourse concerns aspirational middle-class Hindu youth and their struggle
with colonial urban modernity through notions of love and friendship,
perceptions of privacy, attitudes to women’s work, and relationships within
households. Dalmia argues that “the radical social transformations associated
with post-1857 urban restructuring, and the political flux resulting from social

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