Date: 19 November 2021

In this talk, I ask what does it mean for a bird to come from abroad? How do values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a pigeon, as an invited guest or an uninvited spy, arrives in a foreign land? Developing on such questions, I explore the rooted, albeit waning, South Asian value of hospitality, usually summarized through a Punjabi phrase, gee aya nu (welcome, or yes to all arrivals) and consider its co-existence with hostility, or an attitude of inhospitablility to the more-than-human visitor at home. I critically develop on Jacques Derrida’s (2000) assertion that hospitality and hostility exist together, in a power imbalance between the host and the guest, and shape our understanding of home and the question of the stranger. However, rather than drawing a linear distinction between hospitality and hostility, I ask for a different ontological interpretation and suggest that an understanding of hospitality through reciprocity help us unknot the contradiction between a friend and a stranger, welcome and unwelcome, hospitality and inhospitality, inclusion and exclusion, or duty and pleasure. To conceptually support my stance, I select Waris Shah, a Punjabi poet famous for writing the romantic account of Heer-Ranjha (c. 1760), who describes the value of hospitality as similar to, and completely different from, hostility, jealousy, opposition, enmity, hatred, revenge, and deception. The critical evaluation of Waris Shah’s writing on hospitality and hostility, I suggest, lead us to inquire how these two modes of relating to others influence and shape multispecies worlding in Punjab.