‘Life itself is kinship’: Care and disgust in more-than-human worlds

Shaunak Sen’s powerful documentary All That Breathes (2022) tells the story of two brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohamed Saud, and their assistant Salik, who have devoted their lives to saving black kites that have been dropping from the skies of Delhi in alarming numbers for over a decade. They work tirelessly in the makeshift hospital in their cramped basement, taking care of these regal creatures. This article argues that Sen’s documentary provides an example of planetary care via the portrayal of the wildlife rescue work done by the brothers. It analyzes the film’s depiction of entangled interspecies relations via a triangulation of the brothers, the kites and the material environment, arguing that the brothers’ enactment of a sense of obligation, care and commitment contrasts starkly with the abject conditions in which they live and work. In proposing a profound ethic of multispecies care, I argue that the film also subtly critiques India’s right-wing Hindu majoritarianism and the state-endorsed violence against Muslims, which provides the film’s backdrop. It does so by engaging with a discourse of disgust that is often invoked against the Muslim by majoritarian groups in India when calls are made to rid the imagined Hindu nation space of the Muslim Other. Furthermore, the tender moments of care become themselves moments for the production of an aesthetics of disgust. By intermingling depictions of care with representations of disgust, the film critiques the national politics of alterity and exclusion while urgently calling for interrelational webs of care. However, I argue that despite Sen’s attempts to humanize the Muslim Other for a majoritarian audience, the film ultimately remains somewhat circumscribed within a liberal sensibility, thereby missing the opportunity for an even more nuanced representation of human–animal entanglements and an intimate understanding of the Muslim Other.