This talk will explore how contemporary Hindu supremacist movements in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand argue that their politics is fueled by the energy of more-than-human beings such as rivers, mountains, and cows. While tracing the more-than-human turn in Hindu supremacy, this talk asks what it might mean to hold on to skepticism and critique when confronted with an ecopolitics that rationalizes violence against others as part of the natural  order of a more-than-human world. 

Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington. She works across the fields of environmental humanities, gender, women and sexuality studies, the anthropology of religion, South Asian and Himalayan Studies, and political anthropology. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press, 2018)