Date: 7 July 2021

In this talk, I attempt to examine the mechanism for governing life, with an emphasis on more-than-human life, by evaluating the discourse of “spy” pigeons in contemporary South Asia. I focus on multiple roles of pigeons in pre-colonial and colonial South Asia as well as their strategic deployment in secretive missions in Europe during WWI and WWII. This examination leads me to argue that colonial and postcolonial systems impose an ambivalent position to pigeons that simultaneously render them rational and instinctive, cunning and docile, agents and nature, free and domesticated. I further analyze this ambivalence through Naiyer Masud’s short story “Taoos Chaman Ki Myna” and contend that the government of more-than-human life develops on a general disregard for hybridity, and seeks to maintain control by re-organizing dissident subjects.