Dear All,

We are delighted to invite you to the third talk of the Environmental Studies Colloquium Series Monsoon 2026.

Date & Time: 29 October, 6:30 p.m. (Online)

Topic: The Cow Conundrum: Navigating ‘The Bovine Multiple’ in Delhi’s Urban Villages

Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/96141884561?pwd=BgkZweRwejScW2ecm6nP5gcdlFzvYb.1

Abstract: India has over 5 million straying cattle, of which 80,000 free-roam the capital city of Delhi. Belonging to small-scale dairies dotting Delhi’s urban villages, bovines are critical to the informal supply of milk in the city. While colonial and postcolonial planning regimes have attempted to remove ‘agrarian’ ecologies and entities from the urban limits of Delhi, bovines despite being designated an ‘illegal’ entity, continue to forge lives in the city. This is possible because the bovine inhabits and contains varied identities, imaginaries, and contradictions, for instance, as sacred mother, an unsanitary nuisance, and domestic animal—what I term ‘the cow conundrum.’

Historically traced to the 19th century in the symbolic emergence of the cow as a sacred, pious, and political animal, the cow conundrum in contemporary India is evidenced by how the state aggressively propagates cow protectionism, whilst simultaneously promoting capitalist expansion of dairy systems and carabeef exports. In the everyday, these contradictions are further heightened when interrogated within the ambiguous spatial formation of the ‘urban village’ in Delhi—where the urban and rural co-exist and collide, including bovine entities.

In perpetually treading multiple identities along the contours of legal-illegal, sacred-profane, formal-informal, human-nonhuman, and urban-agrarian, bovines weave together a distinct iteration of the urban through material-semiotic entanglements in the city. Rather than seeking an essentialist definition of the bovine figure, the study instead postulates how bovine realities are produced, negotiated, and sustained in the everyday—towards understanding the material and ontological politics of city-making and urbanicity. Drawing on STS perspectives, the research argues that the bovine is not a singular, stable being or object, but a multiple. In doing so, the attempt is to conceptually trace the contradictions that constitute ‘the cow conundrum’ through the bovine multiple.

Speaker: Shruti Ragavan is an independent researcher currently based in Delhi. As part of the ERC funded Urban Ecologies grant at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, her doctoral research, awarded in 2026, examines the naturecultures of bovines in Delhi and Guwahati through the notion of the cultivated. Situated at the intersection of southern urbanisms and more-than-human geography, the thesis interrogates the urban question by foregrounding bovine lifeworlds in the city across registers of the archival, ethnographic, sensorial, and comparative. Engaged in research along the nature-society interface in India over the past decade, Shruti’s interests broadly fall within the ambit of human-animal relations, agrarian-urbanisms, and sensory entanglements.

We look forward to having you join us for an engaging talk and discussion.

warm regards,

Envrionmental Studies Department