Mother Cow, Mother India

Shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award 2024

Violence against cows in India conceals a dark truth as white as milk.

 What is the role of milk in cow slaughter? How is the cow commodified for dairy production and also deified as a mother and goddess?

India is home to the largest dairy herd in the world. It is a global leader in milk production. India also deploys a rampant cow-protection discourse against beef consumption and cow slaughter. Shifting the focus away from this contradictory zeal to the reality of the maltreatment of bovines, Mother Cow, Mother India shows us how their brutalization is integral to the functioning of the dairy industry. The calf is dumped aside, never allowed to suckle, while the mother fuels the wheels of profit. Industrialized violence against the “holy” cow is now a norm that sustains society, and like all norms it remains invisible.

Yamini Narayanan’s multispecies ethnography frames animals as key political subjects than as mere objects of analysis. This book illuminates new ways in which anthropocentrism, casteism, communalism, and fascism operate together, in India and elsewhere.

Yamini Narayanan is Senior Lecturer in International and Community Development at Deakin University, Australia.

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In the Media:

‘Commendable exposé of the cruelty entrenched within the industrialised capitalist Indian dairy’—The Wire

‘Forces us to confront our complicity in perpetuating systems of oppression’—Scroll

‘With sharp arguments on the politics of dairy, Mother Cow, Mother India is guaranteed to lead us to view cows as key political subjects’—Mint

‘The cow’s sacred status intensifies her vulnerability to being used for dairy—it does not protect her or her calf’—an interview with Yamini Narayanan, in The Hindu

‘Animals are born into caste in the Hindu imagination … they are fully embroiled in lifeworlds shaped by caste’—an interview with Yamini Narayanan, in Hindustan Times

‘Brahmin, anti-caste, caring for cows—a writer walks on eggshells of Hindutva & Ambedkar’—a report in The Print on an event organised by Indian Animal Studies Collective and Animal Left.

Yamini Narayanan won the 2024 ASAA Mid Career Researcher Book Prize for Mother Cow, Mother India.

Watch this interview with Yamini about the nexus between cow protectionism and dairy capitalism:

Here is a video review of Mother Cow, Mother India on the anuradhasays Youtube Channel: