Nayanika Mathur, Professor at University of Oxford, Discusses Writing the Anthropocene

April 24, 2023

South Asian Studies Council was pleased to welcome Nayanika Mathur, Professor of
Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, on Thursday, April 6 for a
South Asia Colloquium Spring 2023 talk on “Writing the Anthropocene from the Indian
Himalaya.” The lecture related to the subject matter of Mathur’s recently published Crooked
Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene, which “retells the story of big cats that make prey
of humans in India through a centering of the climate crisis.”

Mathur began her colloquium with an overview of the Anthropocene and the ways in which the
climate crisis has manifested in North India, discussing in detail the example of the “divine
disaster,” a major flood event in North India that took place in 2013. Mathur then explained her
region of focus, the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and moved from the Anthropocene’s climatic
events into the relationship between the Anthropocene and her work on human-animal conflict.
Mathur discussed the ways in which large cats in Uttarakhand are seen as either siidha-saada
(straight), meaning they behave as animals should, or tedha (crooked), meaning they prey on
humans. Human-animal conflicts interact with Anthropocene narratives and play into
conspiratorial narratives of state persecution of the hill communities of Uttarakhand, where
popular theories hold that tedha cats are released by the authorities to eat ordinary people.
Mathur argued that the politicization of tedha big cats’ presence in Uttarakhand is a reflection of
the crisis caused by anthropogenic climate change and an example of the fundamentally
destabilizing effect of the Anthropocene.

Mathur concluded her talk with a discussion of what anthropology and ethnology in the
Anthropocene could look like. She first referred to historical understandings of ethnology by
citing Argonauts of the Western Pacific, a 1922 classic of anthropology by Bronislaw
Malinowski. She then asked how anthropology could speak with the authority of climate science
without being subsumed under the hierarchy of knowledge systems. Mathur argued that one way
is sharper and innovative communication. But she also emphasized that anthropology must
broadly reconsider itself and its purpose in the context of the Anthropocene.

Byline: Daevan Mangalmurt