Introduction:
In the following paper, I explore human-bovine relationalities and biopolitics through a decolonial more-than-human reading of the current stray cattle crisis, which many North Indian states have been facing over the last few years, and which have only become more severe in recent months. The crisis is reported to be largely attributed to livestock farming becoming increasingly unfeasible economically, causing farmers to abandon unproductive or aging animals in the countryside. Now, these vast cow numbers pose an economic and existential threat to the Indian rural economy, and adversely impact human-cow relationalities and the ecological balance. Recent work in political and social animal geographies have been particularly interested in understanding “animals’ role in the social construction of culture and individual human subjects, the nature of animal subjectivity, and agency itself.” (Emel et al., 2002) In this regard, cows in India offer a fascinating example of nonhuman agency and interconnectedness with human lifeworlds. They traverse multiple geographies, and are deeply entangled with the diverse social, political and mythic narratives that constitute India. While livestock agriculture plays an integral part of India’s agricultural economy, cows are also ubiquitous to the Indian landscape, found everywhere from cities to rural areas and even semi-rural wilderness landscapes.
Radhika Govindrajan’s animal ethnographies in the Himalayas reveal interconnected lifeworlds and lived materialities of humans and nonhuman others, which create relationships of care and intimacy that recognize an ‘ethical relatedness’, expressed through rituals, stories and embodied practices. Govindrajan observes that notions of animal ethics as put forward by Hindu cow welfare activists fail to consider the lived realities of these relationships, and the enactment of stringent anti-slaughter laws by Hindu Nationalist governments in recent years have disrupted age-old practices founded on notions of care and interdependence between dairy farmers, cows and the landscape. (Govindrajan, 2019)
I take this idea forward to suggest that the complex of interdependencies and intimacies between farmers, cows, and the land, constitute a ‘resistant’ multi-agential assemblage. When totalizing narratives seek to undermine the relational logics and economies of exchange that support this assemblage – the assemblage as a whole resists, wherein dairy farmers, cows and the land display various kinds of political agency that challenge the Hindutva ‘cow protection’ narrative.
Fleshy Materialities
In early 2019, as the winter harvest season approached, farmers across Uttar Pradesh state in northern India reportedly began herding stray cattle into school buildings. In Aligarh, more than 800 cattle were locked up in schools and a hospital. (Jaiswal, 2019) Such incidents were reported all over the state. In recent years, the stray cattle population had been steadily growing, and now they roamed the country side in large herds that frequently entered farmer’s fields and caused extensive crop damage. Rising anger amongst farmers at the government’s inaction on the issue caused them to take matters into their own hands. But cows were not just a problem in the rural hinterlands. Reports also emerged of cows attacking passers-by in various cities and towns in North India, while carcasses of cows that had died of hunger and exhaustion became a common sight all over the state of Rajasthan.
Of course, stray cattle have always been a common sight across India. However, what was unprecedented this time were the sheer numbers. The cattle census in 2012 counted about 5.2 million stray cattle in the country, and the number has shot up dramatically after a number of states enacted stringent cow protection laws. As these laws began to be enforced, the informal cow slaughter economy came to a grinding halt, as most illegal abattoirs were shut down. Additionally, incidents of violence by ‘cow protection’ vigilantes increased. Farmers who would earlier sell unproductive cows to cattle traders could no longer do so, and the bottom fell out of the livestock market. India had already been suffering from a severe agrarian crisis, with increasing costs of fertilizers and feed making farming a difficult proposition. Faced with a precarious existence, cattle owners began abandoning their cattle in droves. (Katiyar & Layak, 2019)
As crop damage from stray cattle herds became a recurring problem, farmers began to employ guards to patrol the fields at night and drive away cows. These stray cattle, chased away from field to field, eventually ended up on highways and roads where they caused numerous traffic accidents. In cities and towns, incidents of cows attacking pedestrians also increased dramatically. In a rather ironic twist, laws that were put in place to safeguard the sacred cow, protector and nourisher of Hindu people, had in fact turned the cow into a disruptor and menace.
Despite the lack of media coverage today, the problem is persistent, and have added to the economic woes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the disruptions due to the ongoing farmers’ protests. The value of cows has fallen steeply, and several small dairy farmers have given up their livestock, as rural economies continue their downward spiral. The government’s only legitimate response so far has been proposing the setting up more gaushalas or cattle shelters. No aid has been extended to farmers who have incurred financial losses from crop damage, nor has there been assistance for the farmers who have to stay up to patrol their fields every night. However the cost of setting up new shelters and the costs of caring for all the cattle are unrealistically high and outside the budgetary capacities of individual states. As of today, there is still little hope of any real government action to address the problem.
Decolonizing Bovine Geographies:
The bovine entanglements at the heart of the stray cattle issue are multiple – but two dominant and contested narratives can be identified: the religious and political narrative of ‘cow protection’ that underlie the cattle slaughter laws and the gaushala system on the one hand, and the deeply embedded practices of livestock farmers, which are shaped by lived materialities and economic realities of animal care, on the other. A decolonizing reading of these narratives troubles the notion that animal protection movements are always motivated by ethical concerns or have emancipatory goals, or that human-cow relations in the context of livestock farming are necessarily exploitative or inherently violent. In fact, the opposite could be the case. A decolonizing reading offers another insight: relationalities that are borne out of intimate bovine entanglements and negotiations with the landscape, which recognize the political agency of animals and the land, give rise to resilient assemblages that resist attempts to be dismantled by politically motivated, anthropocentric narratives. I explore these two ideas in the following sections.
Hindutva biopolitics:
The ‘cow protection’ movement is caught between two distinct imaginaries of the cow: The cow in its symbolic role as the ‘mother of the Hindus’, and the material realities of the actual biological entity. This is perhaps best characterized by the movement’s attitude towards life and death. Yamini Narayanan, quoting Hemme and Otte, notes that “…Indian states provide incentives for breeding for dairy through artificial insemination schemes, while having no clear policy as to how the large numbers of ‘spent’ female and unproductive male cows should be sustained, especially by subsistence farmers” (Narayanan, 2019b), As she notes, this completely ignores the fact that the dairy industry “is a slaughter industry”. When farmers could no longer care for aging and unproductive cows, the animals would be sold to slaughterhouses, itself a vast, unregulated grey economy which has always existed side by side with cow protection policies. However, as illegal slaughterhouses began to shut down and incidents of cow vigilante violence increased, cow slaughter became completely unfeasible. What to do with the bodies of the cows once they die? The cow protectionist narrative offers no answer.
The gaushala, on the other hand, is less a cattle shelter than an expression of ideological intent, where notions of care are founded on ‘patriarchal’ and ‘anthropatriarchal’ ideological narratives that legitimize forms of exploitation of cows and their bodily capacities.(Narayanan, 2019a) By characterizing the cow’s milk as specifically meant for human nourishment, gaushalas commodify the bodily capacities of the cow, and justify certain forms of violence while rejecting others. Narratives of sacredness, Narayanan argues, do not necessarily translate into practices of care. “Where objects of worship are profitable or politically resonant, sacralisation can become complicit in other exploitative objectifications.”(Narayanan, 2018) Various news reports reveal that far from being places of care or shelter, gaushalas continue to inflict violence on cows in the name of cow protection. The majority of shelters are poorly run, with no regulatory mechanisms, and often prove lethal to the cows in them. There have been reports of hundreds of cows starving to death in both private and government-run gaushalas across the country. (Mishra, 2017) Narayanan concludes that “cow protectionism as it is legislatively and politically conceptualised in India is incompatible with actual ‘protection’ of the cow” (Narayanan, 2018)
Gaushalas also represent a distinct spatial biopolitics that seeks to appropriate and regulate the geographies of the cow. Through the deployment of the ‘cow protection’ narrative, the gaushala discounts the cow’s multiple spatial relationalities to humans and the larger ecosystem, and attempts to reterritorialize cow bodies as belonging in ‘protected spaces’, rather than as animals that belong in the land. In India, multispecies entanglements in both urban and natural landscapes are widespread, even a norm. Cows exhibit varied mobilities and are ubiquitous in both rural and urban landscapes. Humans and cows share diverse relationalities, ranging from that of care and worship, to indifference and violence. (Govindrajan, 2019) However, gaushalas delegitimize the cow’s capacities to inhabit a multispecies landscape and justify the capture and regulation of bovine bodies.
Anna Pratha and Multispecies assemblages:
I would like to argue that the cow protection narrative’s failure to acknowledge the biological realities of life and death, and its attempt to colonize and regulate the mobilities and agential capacities of the cow, amount to forms of epistemic violence that ignore indigenous and embodied forms of relations that have always existed between small-scale dairy farmers, their animals, and the landscapes which have historically nurtured these relationships. Dairy farmers and other agriculturalists in India, irrespective of religious beliefs, often narrate worldviews that espouse notions of co-existence, and attribute sentience or forms of agency to non-human companions and nature. These relationalities between man, cows and the landscape are deeply interwoven and have emerged through embodied practices, knowledge of the land, and economies of exchange and co-existence. Together, they constitute a multispecies more-than-human assemblage, where all its constituents exhibit agential capacity in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem as a whole.
These entangled relationalities have given rise to distinct relational practices, such as Anna Pratha, where farmers release cows into the land when they can no longer be cared for. Anna Pratha is common in many areas, and is seen as a worrying socio-economic trend that essentially amounts to animal abandonment. However, accounts of the practice suggest that it was not restricted to setting free only old or unproductive cows. One common story relates to the practice of releasing young female cows, expecting that the cow will be taken care of by the land, find a mate, and return to the farmer when pregnant. Anna Pratha also seems to be connected with another old practice, which is described in L.L Sundara Ram’s ‘Cow protection in India’, one of the earliest contemporary books on the subject. The author describes the practice of letting loose a consecrated bull in the event of a person’s death and points out that “the freedom and privileges of the Brahmani bull are inviolate, and even destructive work done by the bull cannot, under ordinary circumstances, be taken into account.” (Sundara Ram, 1927) This extraordinary agency enjoyed the bull also had a practical aspect. These bulls, generally of good breeds, roamed the landscape and were allowed to mate with any female cows they might encounter. In the absence of scientific breeding methods, this became the best way to develop better cattle strains. Indian farmers in the past, in essence, relied on the land as an intrinsic element of their breeding practice, acknowledging non-human agency in shaping the cow’s reproductive capabilities.
This suggests an embodied, relational practice rooted in indigenous notions of nonhuman agency and the ecological capacities of land, rather than simply abandonment borne out of economic necessity. While these notions may no longer be as well understood or relevant among farmers today, I suggest that this reading of the practice can help us map out the terrain of the human-cow-landscape assemblage, and the various relationalities that it constitutes. Understanding Anna Pratha as ‘letting loose’ rather than ‘abandoning’ is significant. Inherent in letting an animal loose is the belief that the land will nurture and attend to the needs of the cow. It reinforces the notion of the cow as ‘also’ belonging to the land, while the language of abandonment conversely implies a relationality of exclusive ownership – you cannot abandon anything unless it ‘belongs’ to you. Anna Pratha troubles this anthropocentric notion of ownership, and acknowledges that the more-than-human landscape also plays a significant role in supporting bovine lives. It also recognizes the mobilities and reproductive agencies of cattle. Rather than being subjected to breeding regimens, farmers simply allowed the contingencies of the land and biology to do its work, revealing that care and trust in the land were crucial in engendering these relationalities and then maintaining them. The belief among famers that their female cows would return when pregnant, suggest forms of intimacy beyond simply ownership or economic use-value.
Anna Pratha thus helps us to envision a multispecies assemblage which recognizes the multi-agential capacities of the human and nonhuman actors that constitute them. I additionally suggest that this assemblage has political agency. By attempting to capture and regulate cow bodies, the cow protectionism narrative threatens to dismantle these relationalities, and yet, the other actors in this assemblage, namely the farmers and the land itself, actively resist this capture. In the face of mounting economic and biological pressure, farmers turned to the land for help. However, the capacities of the land today are significantly reduced, as the pasture lands, fields and other public lands that traditionally supported stray cattle populations have increasingly given way to roadways, farms and settlements. This colonization of the land for human use, driven by anthropocentric ‘development’ ideas and unplanned growth, significantly ignores the multiple nonhuman geographies of the land. Multispecies landscapes defined by co-existence and care have become increasingly hostile to nonhuman species.
The stray cattle problem thus emerges as both a symptom of and a challenge to the biopolitics of cow protectionism. The combined effects of the massive stray cattle populations and the reduced capacities of the land to support them, accelerated the problem and the transgressive mobilities of cows on the land quickly became ‘invasive’. Although cows have always been a sight in Indian cities, they usually exist in the margins of human environments as liminal animals, often found huddled in street corners and rummaging through rubbish. But as they begin to invade human spaces in large numbers, they are becoming impossible to ignore. The symbolic ‘cow mother’ narrative collides uncomfortably with the fleshy materialities of cow bodies taking over the landscape. Relations of care become troubled, as cows take on additional capacities for disrupting human activities. Resources such as crops become contested, urban spaces become points where inter-species conflicts are heightened.
As cow carcasses began piling up on the roads across the country, the realities of life and death became apparent. The visibility of death transforms the affective relationships of human beings with cow bodies and with the landscape. As one contends with economic and ecological impacts of destroyed crops, threatened livelihoods and dead cows littering the countryside, the sacred mother narrative becomes hard to sustain. Affective encounters and the emotional dimensions that are contained in people’s encounters with cows, forges new kinds of relationalities – care and symbolic worship turn to fear, disgust and anger. The cow protection narrative, and Hindutva ideology in general, once largely supported by Hindu majority voters in these states, is becoming increasingly untenable. The cow has effectively become a political actor that challenges the Hindutva narratives through heightened material presence in the landscape, forcing us to contend with the biological reality of death, and also resisting the spatial subjugation and regulation of their geographic and biological capacities. The land itself, demonstrates the material and economic repercussions of ignoring its role in sustaining both human and nonhuman life, by allowing bovine bodies to reclaim spaces that once supported this multispecies assemblage.
Conclusion:
The notion of the multispecies assemblage can help us conceive of political agency as not exclusive to a particular species, but as a co-constituted and multi-agential enactment. In other words, while human beings have the agency to transform their relationalities with other species, nonhumans and even the land exhibit their own capacities to resist and transform. This gives us the framework to imagine a multispecies political theory, where ‘agency’ is not conceived as exclusive to either man, cows or the landscape, but as shared, and actualized through their interdependencies and capacities.
A decolonial perspective allows us to recognize that indigenous worldviews are already always co-existent and offer a challenge to anthropocentric worldviews that seek to dominate and redefine these relationalities. Anna Pratha, an embodied cultural practice, is then reconstituted as an act of resistance against this dominant rhetoric. The stray cattle problem is a symptom, but also a lesson, the result of failing to recognize “the unruly nature of human and nonhuman animals inhabiting geographies that overlap and intersect and are themselves unruly.” (Govindrajan, 2015)
However, in introducing multispecies political theory and more-than-human animal geographies in the Indian context, several key questions emerge which demand further exploration and discussion. Firstly, the notion of embodied resistance, to describe a multi-agential enactment where ‘agency’ cannot be attributed to any particular actor, but to the assemblage as a whole, raises valid questions. As Alice J. Hovorka points out in her decolonizing multispecies study of African cities, to what extent can we attribute actual agency to animals in human-animal relationships, when they are still imbricated within a “hierarchical, anthropomorphic system of control”? (Hovorka, 2008) Secondly, in the context of multispecies assemblages, how does we begin to articulate an emancipatory politics? In other words, how do we define our ‘human’ responsibilities in maintaining these more-than-human relationships? These questions can be taken forward to more fully articulate the potential dimensions of political animal geography and multispecies relationalities in India.
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