The central claim of 'Mother Cow, Mother India' is that the framing of the cow as a mother obscures her commodification for dairy production and simultaneously weaponizes her in the bid to create a Hindu state. In asking whether it is possible to sustain dairy without slaughtering the 'useless' males, and the females beyond the milk-producing age, a seemingly 'blind spot' in the discourse of India’s cow, the book shows how the contradictions of 'sacredness' attached to cows exist comfortably with the violence against them in India's society.
AMBIKA AIYADURAI: In India, it is not rare to see the veneration of the cow on one street corner, and the same animals feeding on trash at the next. The contradictions of “sacredness” attached to cows exist comfortably with the violence against them in our society. Yamini Narayanan’s ‘Mother Cow, Mother India’ asks crucial questions to help us understand this paradox.
Narayanan is well known for her research in animal studies and multispecies research, and she brings her fascinating work to bear in this book on cows, dairies and their linkages to nationalism and capitalism. This is challenging research and not an easy book to write, considering the sensitive nature of the themes embedded in issues of caste and religion in contemporary national politics. Her book is rooted in field-based research on cow protectionism and the multiple perspectives of the politics of milk production, while focusing on the lived realities of bovines and humans who are part of the dairy industry.
Narayanan’s central claim is that the framing of the cow as a mother obscures her commodification for dairy production and simultaneously weaponises her in the bid to create a Hindu state. Through eight brilliant chapters, she unveils the complex politics of identity, religion and caste in India, the world’s largest milk producer. She asks whether it is possible to sustain dairying without slaughtering the “useless” males, and the females beyond the milk-producing age. Narayanan calls this “a blind spot” in the discourse of India’s cow protectionism. The cow, the book shows, is more than an economic resource. The animals become sacred and political, often entering the debates on competing nationalisms which link cow protection to India’s protection.
Unlike the commodification of meat, which requires the killing of animals, consuming products like milk is considered benign and non-violent because it is from living animals that produce milk naturally. She demolishes this claim with powerful ethnographic details of her visits to numerous gaushalas (shelters for old and abandoned cows) and interviews with animal activists, dairy farmers, political workers, government representatives and Dalit students in universities by sensitively acknowledging how the lives of humans and non-humans are entangled in the politics and violence of sustaining milk production. This book is the result of seven years of fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Gujarat and other sites across the country, which makes it a rare and compelling one…
This highly readable book reveals how the cow becomes the “living material landscape” for dangerous, volatile discourses, and the lives of individual animals are lost in the larger contestations about nation-building and development. While the book is about bovine politics, she also reminds us frequently about people from marginalised communities whose lives are impacted by violent forms of cow protection. This is a profoundly self-reflexive account of a researcher sensitive to the way Dalits and Muslims are treated in a non-humanised way in dairy farms and slaughterhouses…
Towards the end of the book, she dwells on the envisioning of post-dairy futures. Narayanan offers a provocative alternative—embracing animal rights as a core and fundamental part of progressive politics. She asks if either the majority or the minority communities can provide any ethical justification for their treatment of animals. She suggests veganism as a way of living yet struggles to convince us that this is a viable alternative. By invoking collective planetary and individual responsibilities, and the Constitution, she reminds us of our fundamental duties to protect nature and have compassion for other living creatures. SOURCE…
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