This powerful lamentation follows the death of Karuppi, the beloved pet dog of the eponymous protagonist in the 2018 movie Pariyerum Perumal BA BL. The dog is a crossbreed of Chippiparai, a local breed in Tamil Nadu famous as a hunting dog. In a chilling scene, Karuppi (the black one) is tied to the railway tracks by men from a higher caste, and the protagonist runs to rescue her from being run over by the train but does not reach her in time. Her death inaugurates a series of violent encounters that progressively dehumanises the Dalit protagonist until the lives of dog and human become comparable. In this sense, the dismemberment of Karuppi's body establishes, beyond doubt, the inhuman treatment of the Dalit community at the hands of the upper castes.

For millennia, Dalits have been marginalised and oppressed in Indian society through an association of negative attributes which also include animality. The deployment of the ‘animal’ as a trope makes sense in a caste-structured narrative but it is a troubling metaphor because of the intimacy in life and death the animal shares with the human protagonist. This chapter centralises this two-pronged trope of animality that may signify the intimate relationship, the intimate knowledge that Dalits have of actual animals, and how this very association or affiliation is used to symbolically and materially dehumanise them.