2026/05/26 by Shaheed Tayob · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Geographies of human-animal interactions #South Asian Cinema and Culture
paper · doi:10.1017/sas.2026.10053
openalex publication_date 2026/05/26 · openalex created_date 2026/05/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/27
Abstract In Mumbai, the live slaughter of meat by Muslim butchers is an intergenerational caste practice and a source of livelihood and labour, supplying ritually slaughtered halal meat for Muslims, and fresh quality meat for others in the city. Yet in the neoliberal Hindu Nationalist imagination, the very sights, smells, and sounds of butchering are a sign of Muslim abjection, a source of disgust to be eradicated from the “world-class” Hindu city. Muslim butchers are further subject to an intra-Muslim caste politics of disdain, in which their contact with blood is thought to render them impure (na-pak) and untrustworthy. At butcher stores and meat markets, economic development, urban sanitation, and ritual ideologies recruit the senses into a politics of disgust and disdain. These affects are reflexively embodied in ways that reveal the intimate relation between individualising forms of Islamic piety, Muslim infrastructural marginalisation, and the making of a sanitised neoliberal Hindu city.