Hospitality and Hostility: Arrival and Intrusion of Foreign Pigeons in Pakistan and India

Building on a long-term ethnographic engagement with Pakistani pigeon flyers, in this talk, I discuss the arrival of European racing pigeons in Pakistan and the capture of Pakistani “spy pigeons” at the India-Pakistan border. By examining the moral values created through culturally enshrined values of welcome and refusal, I ask what it means for a more-than-human Others “to come from abroad” in politically and geographically transforming circumstances in South Asia and how mutually shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a pigeon arrives in a foreign land as an invited guest or an uninvited intruder. Building on Jacques Derrida’s (2000) account of hospitality and hostility and Punjabi Sufi poet-philosopher Waris Shah’s analysis of badal (reciprocity), I argue that in contemporary South Asia, reciprocal exchanges continue to produce and sustain cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic bonds that provide a reflective space to critically re-think deconstruction of the home as a sovereign space.