Derived from the French phrase meaning “monkey trick,” Singerie (pronounced san-zhuh-ree) is a satirical genre of visual art in which monkeys are dressed in fashionable human clothing and depicted behaving like people. Popular since the 17th century, these whimsical works gently mocked human vanity, pretension, and social pomposity.

Centuries later, the great Urdu satirist Akbar Allahabadi captured the same irony in a couplet:

Ya, Illahi ye kaise bandar hain,
Irtiqa par bhi aadmi na hue.

“Lord, how strange these monkeys are; despite evolution, they never became human.”

Monkeys have always fascinated us because they are so much like us. They are intelligent, curious, and remarkably social. They solve problems, form close family bonds, and share a significant portion of their genetic makeup with humans. Across cultures, they have been admired, feared, worshipped, and immortalised in folklore.

Baby monkeys, in particular, are bundles of boundless energy and mischief, much like human toddlers. During my visits to Tughlaqabad in South Delhi, I often watched them invent games out of whatever they could find. On one occasion, a group of young monkeys turned discarded polythene bags into their favourite toys. Their playful antics were delightful to watch, but the sight carried an unsettling irony.

The very plastic that entertained them also posed a deadly threat. Carelessly discarded polythene bags can cause suffocation, choking, or intestinal blockage if swallowed. What looked like innocent play was, in reality, a reminder of how human negligence endangers wildlife.

Perhaps Akbar Allahabadi’s monkeys had it right. Maybe they watched the direction humanity was taking and wisely decided that evolving into humans was not progress after all. Looking at these little ones playing with our litter, it seems that the real question is not why monkeys never became human, but why humans so often fail to behave better than monkeys.

Photos and text by Prerna Jain.