Precarious Denizens: The Dogs of War and Conflict

This paper studies two texts about animals in conflict zones: Sadat Hasan Manto’s ‘The Dog of Titwal’ and its graphic adaptation by Arif Ayaz Parrey and Wasim Helal’s ‘Tamasha-e-Tetwal’, in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Partition collection, This Side That Side. In Manto, the deterritorialized dog creates an animal heterotopia. The dog is also significant in that its precarious life between two territories transforms the political organization of space into what Stuart Elden terms ‘terrain’. Such an organization’s biopolitics involves fauna and flora as well.