Jatikaran: Caste, Rats, and the control of space at the Karni Mata Mandir

Abstract

This paper explores how multispecies relationships with a range of nonhuman actors shape and are shaped by the politics of caste and religion in the multi-caste-species spaces of the Karni Mata Mandir, a popular pilgrimage and tourist site in Deshnoke, Rajasthan that has become sensationally renowned as India's “rat temple.” However, to members of the dominant-caste Charan community, who administer and work in the Karni Mata Temple, the twenty thousand inhabitants of the temple are entirely different from rats—they are kaba, the reincarnated descendants of Charans from the lineage of Karni Mata and they are considered and cared for as kin by members of the Charan community. Charans differentiate kaba from rats through a variety of discursive and material means such as the surveillance and control of the temple's boundaries, discourses of health and hygiene, concepts of transmigration, and practices of consumption and touch. These ways of differentiating rats and kaba intersect with those mobilized by Charans in practices of caste and the exclusion of local Dalit communities from the inner temple, particularly Valmikis, who comprise the second largest population of workers employed by the temple. Drawing upon ethnographic research and insights from multispecies studies, Dalit studies, and critical race studies, this article examines interdependent, relational processes of jatikaran, or processes through which human and nonhuman bodies become reified along caste, species, and other classificatory lines at the Karni Mata Mandir.