Anuj Kumar brings together ecological vulnerability, multispecies care, and relational health in his reading of Shaunak Sen’s film All That Breathes.
One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes. Trees, fungus, or vegetation, natural and supernatural words were mixed for her [mother].
Saud, All That Breathes
Every winter, Delhi becomes one of the most polluted cities on Earth. The deterioration of its air has made respiration a shared burden across species. Rising Air Quality Index (AQI) levels affect not only the human residents but also the fauna inhabiting the same urban environment. In this atmosphere of mutual distress, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022), set in late 2020 and early 2021, follows the work of brothers Nadeem and Saud, along with their apprentice Salik. Set in the industrial outskirts and residential pockets of East Delhi, the documentary unfolds against the backdrop of political unrest, rising pollution, and ecological exhaustion. The trio runs a makeshift clinic dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating black kites that routinely fall from the toxic sky. The falling birds, the dense haze, and the strained breathing permeate the city, pointing toward an expanded medical hermeneutic in which human and nonhuman vulnerabilities converge.
This essay positions All That Breathes at the intersection of medical humanities and environmental humanities, arguing for a posthumanist intervention in the former. While medical humanities has traditionally emphasised human illness narratives, clinical encounters, and doctor–patient dynamics, the contemporary environmental conditions of Delhi necessitate a reconsideration of these boundaries. An interpretive framework attentive to multispecies entanglements is required in a city where birds collapse mid-flight and respiratory distress is shared across bodies. Sen’s documentary demonstrates how organisms inhabiting the same toxic space are bound by a shared atmospheric exposure, making health a relational condition shaped by ecological and infrastructural forces rather than a strictly human-centred phenomenon.
The Toxic City: Shared Respiratory Distress
The World Health Organisation’s One Health initiative, adopted by India, promotes a unified framework in which human, animal, and ecosystem health are mutually constitutive. The Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India’s website describes the mission as one where “Human and animal pandemic preparedness is a key pillar of the One Health Mission, which relies on effective surveillance strategies, developing early warning systems, boosting research, innovation and manufacturing, infrastructure, community engagement and data integration across sectors”. However, the slow rise in pollution and its gradual affliction on humans/nonhumans does not constitute a state of emergency. Instead, the falling black kites in Sen’s film highlight Delhi’s broader, long-term environmental instability through their respiratory injuries, damaged wings, and frequent collisions.
Over the years, the brothers have observed that the birds are born with anomalies, including blindness, inability to stand upright, with mutated beaks and wings. Birds, however, have started to adapt to the changing urban environment around them. Kites for example have begun lining their nests with cigarette butts to deter parasites. When the brothers note that AQI levels had crossed 700 during filming, the film makes explicit that environmental thresholds have collapsed for all who inhabit the city.
Though India’s ‘One Health Mission’ emphasise pandemic preparedness, the makeshift clinic in the brothers’ basement transforms One Health into a more holistic and everyday practice of care. Saud and Nadeem’s initiative began when they learnt that black kites were refused treatment in local veterinary facilities because they were considered predatory; an exclusion that reveals how species hierarchies shape clinical decisions. In response to institutional neglect, the brothers converted their workshop, which had been used to produce soap dispensers, into a rehabilitation centre. Their previous interest in bodybuilding unexpectedly gave them an understanding of muscles and tendons, enabling them to become caregivers to the birds. The clinic thus emerges as a pragmatic response to environmental injury, ethical obligation, and material scarcity.
The Improvised Clinic: Institutional Neglect to Reciprocal Care
Within this small space, scenes of care illuminate the city’s ecological and social tensions. Salik’s recollection that feeding kites earns sawab (religious merit in Islam) shows how religious idioms blend with environmental responsibility. The brothers remark that birds do not discriminate, acting on instinct rather than on the social divisions that structure human life. This observation subtly contrasts with the communal tensions taking place outside their clinic. The brothers recognise that humans depend on kites as much as the birds rely on humans. Kites help offload organic waste from Delhi’s overflowing dumping grounds, positioning their caregiving within a reciprocal multispecies economy. Their labour thus appears not as charity toward helpless animals but as mutual adjustment within a damaged ecosystem.
Shaunak Sen’s documentary resonates with Rob Nixon’s theorisation of slow violence as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” (Nixon 2011, 2). The omnipresent haze, the understated spectacle of falling birds, and the brothers’ fatigued daily routine make visible this long-term environmental degradation that resists conventional modes of representation. Breathing itself emerges as a form of slow violence, gradually deteriorating the bodies of humans and birds alike. The film’s sustained attention to respiration as strained, laboured, and constantly tested anchors its medical and ecological sensibilities. Nadeem’s son, Nannu, whose persistent coughing is woven into domestic scenes, brings a human register to the documentary, a shared crisis in this sacrifice zone. Nannu’s symptoms unfold, the sound of his cough is absorbed into the household’s ordinary rhythms, where the makeshift clinic runs. Respiratory distress becomes a background condition of life in Delhi.
This ecological positioning of breath is extended through the documentary’s sustained undercurrent of mortality. Nadeem’s passing remark about imagining his own death and wondering about the fate of the clinic in his absence emerges not as an abstract existential concern but as a sober recognition of fragility in an environment where the air itself threatens longevity. Similarly, Salik’s innocent question about whether the kites would consume their bodies if they were to die reveals an attempt to comprehend the ecological logic of scavenging in a city where species boundaries blur under atmospheric pressure. These exchanges highlight how respiration, mortality, and ecological interdependence are entwined, making each breath both a physiological necessity and a reminder of precarious continuity within a compromised ecology.
Veena Das’s text Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty provides a fitting interpretive frame for understanding how the film presents illness and injury as embedded in everyday life. Das shows how suffering in urban environments becomes woven into domestic and neighbourhood routines rather than confined to formal medical institutions. The documentary reflects this texture of ordinary affliction through its quiet portrayal of the brothers’ daily tasks: cleaning wounds, repairing wings on makeshift tables, and preparing food amid the soundscape of industrial tools. These actions unfold without narrational emphasis, reinforcing that the injuries encountered by the kites and the respiratory strain borne by the city’s residents have become part of Delhi’s atmospheric fabric. The brothers’ remark that “Delhi is a gaping wound, and we are putting only a band-aid on it” captures this condition, acknowledging both the scale of structural harm and the limited yet meaningful scope of their small interventions.
Ethics, Indifference and Narrative Medicine in a Multispecies Context
The understated labour of the brothers’ work offers a rich ground for theoretical engagement. Their interactions with the kites embody an ethic of indifference, as articulated by Naisargi Davé (2023). Davé reframes indifference not as neglect but as an ethic grounded in proximity, routine, and the refusal to rank beings according to hierarchies of value. The brothers conduct repairs, hold wings, and whisper assurances without demanding recognition from the birds. Their care does not rely on intimacy or special attachment. Instead, it emerges from what Davé describes as an “indifference to difference,” a willingness to act simply because a being is present and in need (Davé 2023). The brothers work side by side with the birds, sharing space with creatures who remain opaque to them, yet whose opacity does not obstruct the act of care. Their recollections of childhood stories from their mother involved ghosts and djinn that appeared as ‘cat-saint’, ‘vulture shrine’ as well as spirits that took the form of snakes and insects. This reveals a long-standing imaginative familiarity that avoids sentimental idealisation while maintaining a sense of co-presence. Even their occasional arguments, recognised as symptoms of the pressures under which they live and work, reinforce the sense that their clinic participates in an immanent ethic shaped by the contingencies of the environment rather than by a search for moral consistency or transcendental principles.
This sustained attention to suffering and recovery also expands the scope of narrative medicine. Rita Charon’s emphasis on attention, representation, and affiliation acquires new relevance in this multispecies context. The brothers’ careful observation of each injured bird constitutes a form of narrative attention; their recollections of the temperament, histories, and recovery of each injured bird function as acts of representation. Their ongoing commitment to helping these birds return to flight performs an act of affiliation. While narrative medicine emerged from human clinical encounters, the documentary demonstrates how narrative competence can and must extend beyond species boundaries. The birds’ recoveries and setbacks become legible through the brothers’ interpretive labour, showing how storytelling and attentive care form part of an ethical framework responsive to more-than-human suffering.
Conclusion
Seen together, the concepts of slow violence, ordinary affliction, interspecies indifference, and narrative medicine form an interpretive constellation through which the documentary acquires medical, ecological, and ethical significance. The brothers’ improvised clinic becomes a modest yet vital site where the consequences of environmental neglect are addressed in intimate ways. Their work gestures toward a medical humanities attentive to the entanglement of human and nonhuman health, where diagnosis cannot be restricted to individual bodies but must address the atmospheric and infrastructural conditions in which those bodies exist. All That Breathes demonstrates how shared vulnerabilities shape health in contemporary Delhi and highlights the need for approaches that consider the multispecies and ecological dimensions of medical experience. In doing so, the documentary offers a compelling case for expanding medical humanities into a field that recognises breath, injury, and survival as collective conditions shaped by the environments that all species inhabit.
About the author
Anuj Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi. He is a PhD candidate focusing on medical humanities and trauma studies, with a particular interest in autobiographical graphic narratives. Anuj holds an MPhil in English from the University of Delhi, where his research explored trauma narratives in autobiographical graphic texts, particularly the narrative complexities involved in constructing the self. His current doctoral work builds on this foundation within the emerging field of graphic medicine. His academic interests span graphic medicine, public health, trauma studies, visual culture, and critical theory. Email: anujado@gmail.com.
References
Charon, Rita. 2006. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford University Press.
Das, Veena. 2015. Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty. Fordham University Press.
Davé, Naisargi N. 2023. Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being. Duke University Press.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
One Health Mission. n.d. Accessed December 06, 2025. https://www.psa.gov.in/oneHealthMission.
#Sen, Shaunak. 2022. All That Breathes. Kiterabbit Films. https://www.allthatbreathes.com/.
