Book Launch
Talks
Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene
Nayanika Mathur
Big cats—tigers, leopards, and lions—that make prey of humans are commonly known as “man-eaters.”
This book reconceptualizes them as cats that have gone off the straight path to become “crooked.”
Join us for a talk by author Nayanika Mathur about her book ‘Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene’. Building upon fifteen years of research in India, this book moves beyond both colonial and conservationist accounts to place “crooked cats” at the centre of the question of how we are to comprehend a planet in crisis.
This programme is in conjunction with the exhibition The Many Lives of the Cat.
Bookings
Nayanika Mathur
Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford where she also directs the South Asian Studies centre. She is the author, most recently, of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene which was published by University of Chicago Press in 2021 and HarperCollins India in 2022. Crooked Cats retells a familiar story of the ‘man-eater’ in India in light of the climate crisis. This book was awarded an honourable mention for the Gregory Bateson Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology and was also longlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF book prize.
