Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India

India's cow protectionism, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred, contradicts its leading position in the beef, leather, and milk industries. Yamini Narayanan's book explores the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying and the exploitation of labor to obscure such violence. She argues that the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics and speculates on the possibility of a post-dairy society.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 424 pages
Publication date: 14 February 2023
Publisher: Stanford University Press

Based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred, India enforces severe criminal penalties for cow slaughter, including life imprisonment in some states. However, India is one of the world's top beef, leather, and milk producers, sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is the reason for this apparent contradiction? What do bovines, considered holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan explores and answers these questions, introducing cows and buffaloes as key subjects in India's cow protectionism, rather than their treatment as mere objects of political analysis.

Narayanan emphasizes human-animal hierarchical relations, arguing that the Hindu framing of the cow as mother is one of human domination, where bovine motherhood is simultaneously capitalized for dairy production and weaponized by right-wing Hindu nationalists to violently oppress Muslims and Dalits. Using ethnographic and empirical data gathered across India, this book reveals the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying, and the exploitation required of the diverse, racialized labor throughout India's dairy production continuum to obscure such violence. Ultimately, Narayanan traces how the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics, speculating on the real possibility of a post-dairy society, based on vegan agricultural policies for livelihoods and food security.

Weight: 638g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781503634374