‘The cow’s status doesn’t protect her,’ says Yamini Narayanan

Yamini Narayanan, a senior lecturer at Deakin University, exposes the exploitation of cows to promote casteism and communalism in India.

A senior lecturer at Deakin University in Australia, Yamini Narayanan exposes how the cow has been exploited to promote casteism and communalism. In an interview, she responds to questions that emerge from her ground-breaking book Mother Cow, Mother India. Edited excerpts.

India is overwhelmingly and emphatically a non-vegetarian country, and cow vigilantes are not to be confused with animal activism whose overarching priority is usually veganism, a rejection of the consumption of all animal-derived products, including dairy and eggs, which are part of a vegetarian diet. Cow vigilantism is a mode of remaking the cow as a ‘Hindu’ body, and more specifically, as representing a Hindu state. And it is precisely the sacrality imposed on the cow that makes her vulnerable to being a ‘dairy’ or a ‘milch’ cow.

The need is to understand the politics of cow protectionism differently when we place the lived realities of cows and their infants at the centre. Cows are bred for dairying in India, but the extreme and unfathomable violence inherent in dairying is linked with slaughter. Cows who are infertile, diseased, male etc. must be necessarily sent to slaughter.

The public meta-narrative is that cows are either abandoned on the road or sent to gaushalas, but the cold reality of dairy economics is animals bred and exploited for dairy must be eventually slaughtered when no longer producing lactate. This happens underground in India. However, framing the cow as ‘mother’ or ‘goddess’ is basically a gaslighting tactic that blurs the cold reality that the cow is a milk-producing resource and economics demands that the unproductive resources be treated — and disposed of — as such. In masking this reality, the cow’s sacred status intensifies her vulnerability to being used for dairy — it does not protect her or her calf.

In India, cows have been made a ‘Hindu animal’ — and as ostensibly representing a Hindu state. Cows are of course, not naturally Hindu (or of any other religion), which are anthropocentric identifiers of the human self and human others. However, making cows Hindu and banning their slaughter as protection for ‘Hindu animals’, serves a divisive purpose in an aspirational Hindu state. My book, however, exposes the inherent contradiction — and impossibility — of banning cow slaughter in a state that heavily promotes and subsidises dairying. Dairy is a slaughter industry so a cow slaughter ban is a plain economic impossibility.

Animal slaughter in any country is usually undertaken by some of the poorest, and most socially vulnerable communities. In India, it is some of the poorest engaging in slaughter, usually of the Dalit and Muslim communities, and who are at enormous risk of getting lynched, raped and killed, for essentially supporting the dairy industry which is both state-supported, and indeed, constitutive of the Hindu identity itself. No Hindu ritual is conducted without milk, ghee and butter, which all require cow slaughter.

Absolutely this parallel can and must be drawn. What both the Ganga and the cow demonstrate, is the harm that has been done to both, in the name of their sacralisation. Sacralisation is a form of objectification, and any objectification that is non-consensual, is profoundly harmful to the one being sacralised. The Ganga and the cow have both been harmed — precisely in the name of being sacred — quite literally to their deaths.