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This is extracted from the article "The metamorphosis of gods" by Rohit Gupta which appeared in the edition of BLink dated 06 August, 2016. The article can be viewed in its entirety here.
One of Darwin's contentious proponents was the biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel, who visited the colonial metropolis of Bombay in 1881: "A number of zoological surprises were awaiting me on the sandy shore of Mahim, which happened to be laid bare for a wide space by a very low tide. Enormous specimens lay stranded of a splendid blue Medusa -- a species of Crambessa -- more than a foot across, and there was a curious sea-urchin -- Diodon -- with a thorny coat and its laryngeal sack blown out to a large size. In the sand itself I found a great number of various bivalves and univalves, of characteristic Indian forms which I had hitherto met with only in museums: large Serpulae, numerous crustacea, notably the swift-footed sand-crabs that make pits in the sand and many fragments of the skeletons of fish mixed with skulls and other portions of human skeletons. These were the remains of Hindoos of the lowest class, who are not burnt but simply buried on the sandy shore."
Haeckel's diaries show that industrialisation had not yet wiped out fauna from our cities completely, and the eternal stratification of Hindu society into upper and lower castes. In this unequal division of labour and wealth, we can see a facist phantom of the insect world -- the queen bees and the worker drones. Like the ichneumon wasp, which lays its eggs inside its host and the larvae eat away the host's body from the inside, the British Empire showed us the second phantom -- that of paratism.
The entomologist Karl Kier has recently said, "Insects did just about everything first. They were the first to form social societies, farm, and sing -- just about anything you can imagine."
No matter how late in the day, humanity has somehow followed in their footsteps. Urbanisation is primarily an attempt to remove every trace of the insect world from our lives (perhaps because centipedes are not cute, like chihuahuas). We are confining ourselves inside high-rise honeycombs; all our senses chained like the arms of an octopus to a multitude of objects in dungeons of desire.
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