Room 101, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
The talk will focus on the discourses on animals and circus, especially in the last few decades, which were triggered by a series of bans initiated in 1991 by the Environment Ministry of India. I hope to discuss various themes including animal rights, ethics, domestication and the complexities of human-animal relationships and address the popular binaries such as cruelty/benevolence and bondage/emancipation.
Dr Nisha P R is a historian and the author of Jumbos and Jumping Devils: A Social History of Indian Circus (Oxford University Press, 2020). She has been a Fulbright fellow at Yale University, Mellon-SSRC fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, and most recently a visiting fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University.