Abstract
Yamini Narayanan. 2023. Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India. New Delhi: Navayana. vii + 411 pp. Notes, figures, bibliography, index. ₹599 (paperback—ISBN: 9788195838530)
During fieldwork with an American, vegan, English-speaking colleague in a village in Uttarakhand, as I explained why she would not take milk in her tea, our host remarked to their brother, ‘We just worship cows, she really respects them’. I don’t think I ever fully understood the value of this statement until I read Yamini Narayanan’s (2023) meticulously researched and emphatic book that brings out how in India the ‘economic value of the cow’s milk and her symbolic religiopolitical value is in a dangerous tension. Dairy production depends on slaughtering the cow once she is no longer productive; politically fetishizing the cow demands no slaughter’ (p. 62). Through eight chapters that engage with historical religious texts, the white revolution, the international meat industry and interventions of science, vivid and painful descriptions of bovines in shelters, temples, slaughterhouses and dairy farms that allow for contemporary formations of caste, labour and nationalism, we see the emergence of two cows—‘mother cow’ and the ‘dairy cow’. These two cows, while intimately connected, are a result of the production of practices that successfully separate the religious symbolism of the cow (and milk) as highly valued, from the material conditions of bovine life that reduce it to a commodity that serves only extraction for economic ends.
By arguing that bovines are political rights-bearing subjects that are not just good to think with and eat, but also live with, the book demonstrates Anna Tsing’s suggestion that ‘Human nature is an interspecies relationship’ (2012: 144). I want to extend Tsing’s statement in responding to the book, by trying to make sense of Narayanan’s animal activist friend who encourages her to engage with bovines, stating, ‘The cow has become so political that the animal has been lost … Even we as activists do not know how to respond to this’ (p. 29). To do so, I rely on Aniket Jaawre’s (2001) influential understanding of caste as a social practice that centrally premises the body and, importantly, touch. Here, he nuances touch in explaining that the individual body moves within the domains of contaminating and un-contaminating (via touch) even within a caste, and that there are good, bad and instrumental touches (for instance, when the barber can touch an upper caste person’s hair). Caste, then, is the regulation of bodily behaviour which leads to the production of the realms of sacred and profane and not vice-versa. This understanding of caste persists under the capitalist mode of production (where there has not been a delinking of being and doing as proposed by Western rationalisation); as Jaawre (2001) argues, leather work is still assigned to certain castes. Market demand for milk, leather and meat (in Narayanan’s book) maintains bodily practices of caste, as Dalits (and religious minorities) touch dead animal products; it is through their touching of animal carcasses to manufacture commodities from these materials that other castes can avoid the ‘bad touch’ (Jaawre 2001: 266). Milk, too, cannot be produced without this ‘bad touch’; this is the central argument of the book. In other words, there is a containment of production as separate from those that consume, such that there is a covering up of the social conditions of production of the commodity and its circulation, or what allows for the emergence of ‘mother cow’ and ‘dairy cow’ as separate. This separation is made possible by nuancing the types of touch that are encoded in this form of interspecies relatedness. ‘Good touch’ can be placed in the consumption of milk from the living cow, while ‘bad touch’ would be the handling of the dead matter of the cow and especially its ingestion as food; these must be kept separate.
Jaawre (2001) locates Dalit poetry as a modern commodity produced by the market, wherein the very process of its consumption and circulation, encodes, that as a commodity it is eaten (or consumed), but does not encode eating with the Dalit (or those that produce it), thus retaining bodily practices that separate touch. Similarly, it is not surprising that the white revolution in India spearheaded by Verghese Kurien created a market for milk as an essential dietary component in the Indian public sphere as Narayanan brings out, but that the possibility of this market must encode the veiling of slaughter and consumption of meat, to retain the separation of bodies—human and more than human. Thus, Narayanan is right when she calls out liberal elites in showing solidarity with Dalits by consuming bovine meat. However, the erring in terms of a political act is not just the inability to view the bovine as a rights-bearing subject, but the very basis of institutionalisation of bodily practices that keep caste as a social practice alive, by separating touch. The point is not to consume the commodity after its production as a form of food, but to be part of the very production process that separates touch. An evocative example of this is Amitava Kumar’s (2014) book A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna, wherein Kumar details how a bureaucrat tried to encourage city restaurants to put rats on their menu with the aim to normalise what Musahars, a Dalit group, customarily ate; this did not go down well. The most telling part of the narrative is when an upper caste man tells Kumar that he ate rats when he was younger, but with age, he wised up and kept away from them. In line with Tsing (2012), human nature (here signifying caste) can then be understood as a more-than-human relatedness of bodily practices that define practices of touch. It is precisely for this reason that Narayanan’s proposal of a post-dairy future, in which just as with the white revolution, the market can create demand for veganism, seems a little farfetched in the Indian context. If ‘human nature is an interspecies relationship’ (Tsing 2012: 144), any possible change must transform how more-than-human bodily practices of touch are prescribed into what forms of living with bovines may emerge.