THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

Yamini Narayanan's Mother Cow, Mother India’ demolishes the notion of milk consumption being benign non-violent

- 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.