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By tracing specific moments in the history of the more‐than‐human landscape constituting the food geography of western Avadh, a long settled agricultural heartland in the Indo‐Gangetic plains, this paper challenges the neat formulations of the Anthropocene laying out decisive global impacts of humans on the environment. Building upon the concept of the 'patchy Anthropocene', we show how outcomes are shaped by an imbrication of humans and non‐humans—where powerful human actors seek to coerce people and corral the environment into their projects of remaking the landscape, but also where recalcitrant ecologies and resistant people thwart these intentions, especially during the colonial encounter. Contestations across power hierarchies and unintended outcomes litter the wake of the Anthropocene — as we show, efforts to save the non‐human cow in the last decade have intensified processes associated with the Great Acceleration. Instead of treating the trajectory of food geographies like western Avadh as outliers and marginal to the normative process of defining change, we argue for treating it as constitutive of the norm. Only through such a process of decolonisation, by 'provincialising the Anthropocene', can we hope to push for epistemic justice, ecological sustainability and a more equitable world. By tracing the history of the more‐than‐human landscape constituting the food geography of western Avadh, a long settled agricultural heartland in the Indo‐Gangetic plains, this paper challenges the neat Anthropocene formulations of decisive global impacts of humans on the environment. We show how powerful human actors seek to coerce people and corral the environment into their landscape remaking projects, but also how recalcitrant ecologies and resistant people thwart these intentions. We also describe unintended outcomes – efforts to save the nonhuman cow in the last decade have intensified processes associated with the Great Acceleration. Only through decolonisation and 'provincialising the Anthropocene', can we hope to push for epistemic justice, ecological sustainability and a more equitable world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's rapid urbanisation and biodiversity decline together have critical global implications in the Anthropocene. However, the complex socio-religious dimensions of urban biodiversity are overlooked in current planning. This paper casts animals as vital components of urban societies in India to argue for species-inclusive zoöpolises as viable cities of the future. It proposes 'posthuman cosmopolitanism' as a planning ethic that extends pluralism to multispecies in the Anthropocene, cognisant of the socio-cultural and religious frames in which animals are enmeshed in India. These narratives have significant implications in the Kali Yuga or the apocalyptic cosmological epoch, which Hindus believe is currently underway. Akin to the Anthropocene, human action bears an exceptional significance in the events of the Kali Yuga, which is believed to be a precursor to human, ecological, and even planetary annihilation. The paper examines human-snake conflict, one of the most widespread human-animal encounters in Indian cities. Snakes play vital roles in urban ecologies and religio-cultural narratives in India. Simultaneously, religious and social perceptions of serpents contribute to a fear of snakes. Fundamental to snake preservation in the Indian urban Anthropocene is an expansion of diversity to 'multinatural diversity', and a reconfiguration of human-snake relations in socio-cultural frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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