The cat, it has to be said, had slightly different registers in European and Indian modernity. Some time in the nineteenth century, it seems, the cat became, in Europe, a figure for social polish and bourgeois artifice. Since social polish was associated, in England, almost exclusively with the French, the cat became a symbol for Gallic pretentiousness and self-absorption. The cat is not quite of Nature, as we have seen; and, in the nineteenth century, the dichotomy of Nature and Culture was rewritten, in the cat, in terms of Anglo-Saxon directness and roughness, on the one hand, and French polish and obliqueness, on the other, the cat coming to be synonymous with the latter; and becoming involved, then, in its subterranean way, in both a national debate and an aesthetic one.
     Thus, Baudelaire, devoted flaneur and dandy, the first poet whose inspirations came almost entirely from the artificial world of the city, rather than from the ‘natural’ universe, dedicates a poem to his muse, the harbinger of artifice: 'A fine strong gentle cat is prowling/ As in his bedroom, in my brain' (Roy Campbell’s translation). Many years later, Ted Hughes would revise these lines in his early poem The Thought-Fox, replacing the French cat with the English fox, and, in doing so, enter the familiar Nature/artifice debate: '…with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox/ It enters the dark hole of the head.'
     With this, the first poem in his first book of poems, Hughes would position himself as a poet of landscape rather than of the city, and inaugurate a visionary career in which he would set the rough, Northern, Anglo-Saxon consonant against the soft, cat-like padding of the French and Southern English vowel, the 'sudden sharp hot stink' of English against the 'sweet perfume' ('So sweet a perfume seems to swim/ Out of his fur both brown and bright') of France. Hughes’s ‘Englishness’, thus, is an altogether more combative and embattled affair than, for instance, the English identity that the feline Eliot would embrace - Eliot, who began as a Francophile, a French poet, and aimed not for Wordsworth’s 'real language of men', but a fastidious diction 'nether pedantic nor vulgar'. There is a cat-like distaste for Anglo-Saxon directness in Eliot; and his homage to artifice would come, even as he was composing the high moral sequence of Four Quartets, in a slim book of ‘light’ verse about cats.
     In India, the line dividing Nature from Culture isn’t always clear. In contrast to Europe, the cat, in India, is neither entirely a domestic nor a wild animal; there is an intermediary space in our society, occupied by scavengers and parasites, and it’s this semi-official, parallel space that the cat inhabits. It’s also a space inhabited, in India, by certain paradoxical figures of authority, who are at once appeased for their power and reviled in private: the Brahmin priest, for example, and, increasingly, a certain type of politician. Western modernity is all about doing away with this intermediary parasitic space; its elimination, however, is accompanied by an anxiety about whether the socialization which comes with modernity is a good or a bad thing, and the cat is often at the centre of this anxiety.

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