Indifference: On the praxis of interspecies being By Naisargi  Davé. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 208 pp.

At the heart of Naisargi Davé’s latest book, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being, lies a simple question—can an ethics of indifference offer a kind of relationality different from what is commonly invoked in multispecies anthropology today? Davé argues early in the introduction that curiosity and entanglement, as evidenced in the work of Donna Haraway, have always been dear to anthropology in understanding the other—the animal other, the cultural other, the human other—and that these attitudinal stances variously involve transparency, conquest, and ingestion. The book prescribes an immanent ethics that at crucial points turns to the idioms of Deleuze (“difference,” “plane of immanence”), though this notion is reminiscent of Derrida (1991) in “Eating Well,” where he famously resists championing animal activism or prescribing veganism by emphasizing the symbolic violence that accompanies even the most well-meaning position with regard to animals. Indifference is suspicious of neat ethical propositions, but it is not marked by that Derridean kind of ambivalence. This is a moving meditation on animal ethics in contemporary India, where “indifference” is theorized as an interspecies relational ethic of mutual regard or as a form of mutually existing-in-difference rather than seeking to grasp and master the other. The text is loosely structured and intermittently adopts a memoiristic tone, extending a narrative initiated in her debut work Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. In Indifference, Davé continues to trace her family's lineage, from her position as the eldest daughter of Gujarati Brahmins in America to her queer becoming, exploring its intersections with an immanent ethics of action that can transcend context and framework. There is a rippling tension in Davé’s focus on animal activism in India. Even as the reader understands Davé’s theoretical point about surrendering to the call of the animal without invasive curiosity, readers are presented with the ethos of passionate immersion evinced by animal activists, or “animalists,” as she refers to them. Therefore, “indifference” emerges as a concept so capacious that it indicates a radical praxis of interspecies being, as evidenced in her invocation of Édouard Glissant's right to opacity. “Indifference,” however, cannot entirely preclude an anthropocentric ethics of care, as upheld by the true protagonists of Indifference—the animal activists (not animals). The tension likely originates from disciplinary factors, as multispecies ethnography often displays a notable ambivalence toward animal ethics (as noted by commentators such as Gillespie [2019] and Kopnina [2017]). This ambiguity emerges partly from entrenched anthropocentrism and partly from a desire to depict human-animal relations as entangled, resulting in a reluctance to adopt clear-cut ethical positions for fear that they are too simplistic or reductive. To this conundrum, Davé appends additional postcolonial challenges: the animal welfare movement in India is perceived as neocolonial and disregards marginalized communities’ culinary and ritualistic traditions. For instance, cow protectionism, in particular, is driven by fascism against Muslims and Dalits. Davé navigates this dilemma in two ways: first, by illustrating how a praxis of animal ethics can be radical and nonanthropocentric, and second, by politicizing animal ethics through discussions of caste, class, and religion. The book consists of eight chapters, and in the first chapter, Davé discusses how witnessing serves as an important trope for volunteers in animal shelters and how it molds their indifference to species boundaries. Chapter 2 is on the moral biographies of three women, Savitri Devi Mukherji, Crystal Rogers, and Rukmini Devi Arundale, to discuss the moral and theoretical problems surrounding animal care in India. It argues that contemporary animal politics can be categorized into three main strands: the Aryo-Hindutva perspective, the liberal Judeo-Christian viewpoint, and the Theosophical tradition. Chapter 3 discusses immanent ethics through an ethnographic vignette that is restaged later in the book as a way to get past what Davé calls “contradiction thinking,” which is constantly employed to undermine activism—if you believe in this, why did you do this (or why didn't you do this)? Chapter 4 discusses animal resistance through the Spivakean question whether the subaltern can speak to argue that animals are neither voiceless nor innocent, even though they are framed as such even by activists. Chapter 5, titled “Interlude: Take a Walk with Me,” stands out as the book's strongest. Here, Davé engages in an ambulatory ethnography, following an animalist through the city as he ministers to animals, cleaning maggot wounds. In the next chapter, Davé continues her exploration of the corporeal-sensorial through a discussion of creaturely touch and its inescapable connections to the impure touch that has characterized the ideas and institutions of caste in India. Chapter 7 (coauthored with Alok Gupta) and chapter 8 cover two issues central to a discussion of animal care in post-independence India today—cow protection and slaughter, outlining liberal India's alliances with Hindu anthropatriarchy and carnality. Occasionally, Davé resorts to certain generalizations that are misleading, such as when she claims that the word animalist is used in India to distinguish an animal activist from a cow protectionist. ⁠⁠Additionally, Davé’s use of Manichean terminology sometimes compromises the motif of the immanence of indifference, as exemplified by her contrasting the “odious” Savitri Devi (a Nazi sympathizer) with the “luminous” Rukmini Devi Arundale. One might also question the target audience of Indifference—is it aimed at Global North academics familiar with a reference to Demi Moore's sexual encounter with Patrick Swayze in Ghost? There is also a question that looms over the text spectrally: When does indifference become inaction? Despite these minor concerns, Indifference stands as a significant contribution to ordinary ethics and critical animal studies. In contemporary South Asian studies, in which animals are largely overlooked, Davé adeptly demonstrates how ethnography can provoke essential ethical inquiries. Indifference will be of interest to any anthropologist concerned with the study of animal ethics, anthropology of ethics, multispecies studies, activism, and animal politics in India. The book's peripatetic nature, both conceptually and geographically, offers a compelling initiation into the layered complexities surrounding the theorization and practice of interspecies ethics in postcolonial India. Best read alongside Ethical Life in South Asia (Pandian & Ali, 2010), Davé’s book complements a rising tide of literature on human-animal relations in India (Barua, 2023; Govindrajan, 2018; Narayanan, 2023). It is eye-opening because it demonstrates the intractability of the questions she poses and the perspicacity of personal modes, the ethnography of which generates its own kind of immanent ethics. Ultimately, Davé asks, how can we talk about animals and ethics in India without being bound by frames of sociological inquiry like gender, power, and class? How can we understand the nature of animal activism in a socially moored society like India, never disconnected from colonial politics and colonial frames of care?