Gray Langurs Visiting Our Home

 A troop of Gray Langurs visit our neighbourhood in Powai, Mumbai every few months. It is a large community of more than 15 adults and several infants and adolescents. They feast on all the fruits they can find at that time- from sapota to coconuts, guavas and the bananas we enjoy giving them sometimes. They live around the Sanjay Gandhi National Park which is not very far away and occasionally, in search of food most probably, visiting these concrete jungles. I also read newspaper articles about people from Powai and Chandivali complaining about the monkey problems. And what strikes me is the very language we use to describe these acts. The use of the word 'straying into a human settlement by a monkey', has a lot of value judgements in it. Notions of human-wildlife separation, and urban-wildlife conflicts are so ingrained in our language. Who is straying? 

Can we still say 'we didn't know?'

 An excerpt from Bruno Latour's We have never been modern-

“After seeing the best intentions go doubly awry, we moderns from the Western world seem to have lost some of our self-confidence. Should we not have tried to put an end to man’s exploitation of man? Should we not have tried to become nature’s masters and owners? Our noblest virtues were enlisted in the service of these twin missions, one in the political arena and the other in the domain of science and technology. Yet we are prepared to look back on our enthusiastic and right-thinking youth as young Germans look to their greying parents and ask: “what criminal orders did we follow?” “will we say that we didn’t know?”

In his meditation to the solve the impasse between the scientific realists and the post-modernists, Latour's diagnosis that main cause of conflict is the very metaphysical premise of modernity- the distinction between human and nonhuman, between nature and culture was an abnormality is a very strong idea. Is our inaction in spite the diagnosis and the realisation then justified? Can we still say 'we didn't know?' today, in 2023.