The Anti-Posthuman Order: Colonial Anthropocentrism and the Making of Animal Degradation in India

This essay examines how colonial legacies of classification, domesticity, and racial purity continue to shape human-dog relations in postcolonial India.While contemporary legal frameworks such as the Animal Birth Control (Dogs) Rules, though biopolitical in nature, seek to institutionalise coexistence through sterilisation and vaccination, they operate alongside widespread social aversion toward dogs, revealing the persistence of colonial hierarchies in multispecies life.Drawing on fieldwork in the National Capital Region between 2023 and 2025, the essay analyses two sites: the Supreme Court's August 2025 directive to remove all street dogs from Delhi-NCR, and the proliferation of pedigree breeds in an Economically Weaker Section (EWS) housing colony in Delhi.Together, these cases demonstrate how the colonial process of "domestication of affection", wherein animal love was legitimised only within property-bound relationsrendered free-roaming animals as degraded forms of life.In the postcolonial present, this degradation is reproduced through the valorisation of pedigree dogs as "surplus value" and the simultaneous reduction of street dogs to a "surplus population".Yet, the continued presence of street dogs destabilise this order, compelling the city to renegotiate coexistence and opening up possibilities for rethinking posthuman citizenship, albeit within the limits of anthropocentric law.