South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20
Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking Religion,
Law and Ethics
Cassie Adcock & Radhika Govindrajan
To cite this article: Cassie Adcock & Radhika Govindrajan (2019) Bovine Politics in South
Asia: Rethinking Religion, Law and Ethics , South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42:6,
1095-1107, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2019.1681726
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1681726
Published online: 25 Nov 2019.
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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
2019, VOL. 42, NO. 6, 1095–1107
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1681726
INTRODUCTION
Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking Religion, Law
and Ethics
Cassie Adcocka and Radhika Govindrajanb
a
Department of History, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA; bDepartment of
Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
This introduction outlines how the essays in this special section
contribute to scholarship on cow protection in India. It argues
that they disrupt three powerful framing binaries—religion/economy, legality/illegality and cow-lover/cow-killer—that have tended
to dominate the literature on cow protection. Making tangible
the analytical limits of these categories, the essays find new critical leverage in the everyday situated relationships between
humans, bovines and the state. The essays are distinguished by
their attention to bovines as creative and productive forces that
are not mere symbols for human politics, but materially embodied and agentive beings that play a significant role in shaping the
social and political worlds which emerge around them.
Cow protection; ethics;
Hindu nationalism;
human–animal relations;
legality; materiality; sacred
cow; secularism
Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, India
has seen a surge in violence perpetrated by Hindu vigilantes in the name of protecting
the cow. From the killings of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, in
September 2015 and Rakbar Khan in rural Rajasthan in July 2018 to the brutal assault
on a Dalit family in Una, Gujarat, in July 2016, self-styled gaurakshaks, ‘protectors of
the cow’ or cow vigilantes, have launched murderous attacks against minorities in what
has been described as an ‘epidemic’ of mob lynching.1 The surge in violence has come
side-by-side with strengthened legislation in many states that criminalises the slaughter
of cattle or the sale or possession of beef, and with efforts by the central government to
regulate the cattle trade and prohibit the sale of cattle for slaughter.2 Given the 2019
election results in India, these trends seem unlikely to change soon. This special section
CONTACT Cassie Adcock
cadcock@wustl.edu; Radhika Govindrajan
rgovind@uw.edu
1. For summary accounts of this violence, see The Wire Staff, ‘Story Map: Documenting Lynchings in India’, The
Wire (13 July 2017) [https://thewire.in/153091/storymap-lynchings-india-cow-slaughter-beef-ban-gau-rakshak,
accessed 12 Mar. 2018]; and Alison Saldanha, ‘Cow-Related Hate Crimes Peaked in 2017, 86% of Those Killed
Muslim’, The Wire (8 Dec. 2017) [https://thewire.in/203103/cow-vigilantism-violence-2017-muslims-hate-crime/,
accessed 12 Mar. 2018].
2. ‘The States Where Cattle Slaughter Is Legal in India’, The Indian Express (8 Oct. 2015) [http://indianexpress.com/
article/explained/explained-no-beef-nation/, accessed 12 Mar. 2018]; and ‘India’s Supreme Court Suspends Ban
on Sale of Cows for Slaughter’, The New York Times (11 July 2017) [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/world/
asia/india-cows-slaughter-beef-leather-hindu-supreme-court-ban.html, accessed 12 Mar. 2018].
ß 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
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C. ADCOCK AND R. GOVINDRAJAN
takes the resurgence of militant cow protection as an incitement to re-examine the
material, symbolic and affective work that bovine bodies do, and have done, in
South Asia.
Media commentary on the contemporary politics of cow protection centres on the
religious significance of the Hindu ‘sacred cow’ and its manipulation by Hindu nationalists for political purposes. It is clear that Hindu nationalists conceive of India as a
nation defined by a Hindu essence, even as they portray the Hindu religious and
cultural majority as under threat from religious minorities, and from Muslims in
particular.3 Through coercive laws and by deploying the threat of violence, Hindu
nationalist gaurakshaks are demanding that all Indians show deference to ‘gaumata’,
the cow mother of the Hindu nation, or risk being branded anti-national. Thus, cow
protection seemingly rests on a politics of religious difference.
Yet the contours of contemporary opposition to cow protection exceed the terms
of religious conflict, pointing to a more nuanced story. Dalits in Gujarat employed
in carcass removal have gone on strike, denouncing caste-Hindu violence with the
slogan, ‘your mother, you take care of it’; meat traders in Goa have done the same.4
Farmers in numerous states, including Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, are engaged in
ongoing protest against the damage inflicted by cow protection on rural livelihoods
rooted in livestock-keeping and, by extension, slaughter.5 And through lawsuits, protests in university mess halls and ‘beef-eating festivals’, Dalits and Muslims have
joined hands with Christians and Hindus of diverse castes and classes to assert their
right to eat beef as a matter of cultural difference and nutritional requirement.6 The
politics of cow protection is evidently entangled with practices of caste labour, with
farming economies, dietary cultures and situated human–animal relationships. With
this in mind, the essays in this collection share an interest in troubling the notion
that the politics of bovine bodies in India is primarily about ‘religious belief’ or
‘Hindu sentiment’.
Instead, they direct our attention to the materialities of bovine–human interactions.
We use the term ‘materiality’ deliberately to signal the essays’ commitment to thinking
about bovines not just as meaningful symbols, but as materially productive and
3. Cf. the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill of 2016, which would realise the
BJP campaign promise of making India a homeland for ‘persecuted Hindus’. ‘If India Wants to Remain Secular,
the New Citizenship Bill Isn’t the Way to Go’, The Wire (21 Sept. 2016) [https://thewire.in/67272/citizenshipamendment-bill-2016/, accessed 12 Mar. 2018]. See also Mohammad Imran, ‘Impact of “Cow Politics” on Muslim
Community: A Case Study of Ghosi Community of North India’, in Prabuddha: Journal of Social Equality, Vol. 2,
no. 1 (2018), pp. 59–74.
4. ‘“Your Mother, You Take Care of It”: Meet the Dalits behind Gujarat’s Stirring Cow Carcass Protests’, Scroll.in
(12 July 2016) [https://scroll.in/article/812329/your-mother-you-take-care-of-it-meet-the-dalits-behind-gujaratsstirring-cow-carcass-protests, accessed 12 Mar. 2018]; and ‘Beef Traders in Goa Call Off Strike to Protest
Harassment by Cow Vigilante Groups’, Firstpost (10 Jan. 2018) [http://www.firstpost.com/india/beef-traders-ingoa-call-off-strike-to-protest-harassment-by-cow-vigilante-groups-4295909.html, accessed 12 Mar. 2018].
5. ‘At Farmers’ Protest in Rajasthan, Anger at Modi Government Policies and State Indifference’, The Wire [https://
thewire.in/agriculture/farmers-protest-sikar-rajasthan, accessed 12 Mar. 2018].
6. Sambaiah Gundimeda and V.S. Ashwin, ‘Cow Protection in India: From Secularising to Legitimating Debates’, in
South Asia Research, Vol. 38, no. 2 (2018), pp. 156–76; and Sambaiah Gundimeda, ‘Democratisation of the Public
Sphere: The Beef Stall Case in Hyderabad’s Sukoon Festival’, in South Asia Research, Vol. 29, no. 2 (2009),
pp. 1–27. For a discussion of the intersection between cow protection and caste violence in the republic of
India before 2015, see Surinder S. Jodhka and Murli Dhar, ‘Cow, Caste, and Communal Violence: Dalit Killings in
Jhajjar’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 38, no. 3 (18–24 Jan. 2003), pp. 174–6.
SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
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disruptive beings that co-produce social worlds with humans.7 In keeping with recent
scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, the essays not only trace how
humans and bovines emerge as meaningful embodied subjects in relation to one
another, but also probe the multiplicity of ways in which the cultural, political and religious symbolism of bovines in India draws on and is constrained by the creative
materiality of animals who labour with and nourish humans.8 The result is a rich,
multilayered account of bovine politics and poetics in India that moves beyond hegemonic, upper-caste Hindu narratives, and challenges many established understandings
of the politics of cow protection. As the following sections detail, the essays in this collection disrupt three powerful framing binaries that dominate the literature on cow
protection, past and present: religion and economy; legality and illegality; and cowkiller and cow-lover.
Beyond the ‘sacred cow’: Rethinking religion or economy
Existing scholarship has approached cow protection largely as a problem of political
religion. Studies of cow protection during the colonial period have centred on the religious sentiments elicited by Hindu political actors’ instrumental use of the gendered
symbol of the sacred cow.9 Describing the cow as a ‘sacred symbol’, Freitag attributed
the first public campaign in nineteenth-century India to Hindu reaction against the
Allahabad High Court’s ruling, in 1888, that the cow did not qualify as a protected
‘sacred object’ under law.10 Historians have explored how a religious appeal for cow
protection could galvanise Hindu opposition to the ‘beef-eating’ British,11 and how it
7. The essays in this special section are mostly engaged with living bovines and (the consumption of) their flesh.
However, as Shivani Kapoor notes, bovine carcasses can also act as powerful semiotic and material forces with
the ability to shape and transform politics. See Shivani Kapoor, ‘“Your Mother, You Bury Her”: Caste, Carcass
and Politics in Contemporary India’, in Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 3, no. 1 (2018), pp. 5–30.
8. For key statements on this approach, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016); S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, in
Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 25, no. 4 (2010), pp. 545–76; Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an
Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Harriet Ritvo, ‘Animal Planet’, in
Environmental History, Vol. 9, no. 2 (2004), pp. 204–20; Harriet Ritvo, ‘On the Animal Turn’, in Daedalus, Vol. 136,
no. 4 (2007), pp. 118–22; and Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Some exemplars of this work include Erica
Fudge, Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2018); Radhika Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central
Himalayas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018); James L. Hevia, Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics, and Environment in
~as, Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in
the Sundarbans (Delhi: Routledge India, 2011); Juno Parren
Orangutan Rehabilitation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Animals with Rich
Histories: The Case of the Lions of Gir Forest, Gujarat, India’, in History and Theory, Vol. 52, no. 4 (Dec. 2013),
pp. 109–27; and Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2015).
9. On the gendered nature of Hindu nationalism and cow protection in particular, see Charu Gupta, ‘The Icon of
Mother in Late Colonial North India’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 36, no. 45 (2001), pp. 4291–9.
10. Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Sacred Symbol as Mobilizing Ideology: The North Indian Search for a “Hindu” Community’, in
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 22, no. 4 (1980), pp. 597–625; and Sandria B. Freitag, Collective
Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989).
11. Anand A. Yang, ‘Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the “Anti-Cow
Killing” Riot of 1893’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 22, no. 4 (1980), pp. 576–96; and Peter
van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
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contributed to an exclusionary nationalism that alienated Muslims from the Indian
National Congress.12 Historians’ debates have largely concerned the degree to which a
pan-Hindu identity pre-existed cow protectionists’ appeals to Hindus to save the cow,
and how stable that unity was or remained after outbreaks of cow protectionist violence.13 Rather than assume ideological unity among those counted as Hindus, historians have given careful attention to the complex reasons for low-caste participation in
the movement, while also documenting how cow protection stigmatised Muslims and
Dalits.14 Countering colonial accounts of perennial conflict between Hindus and
Muslims in India, historians have asked how colonial jurisprudence itself generated an
oppositional politics of religious rights.15
The social breadth and historical depth of appeals to the Hindu ‘sacred cow’ have
been subjected to sustained critical scrutiny, but the presumed basis of such appeals in
a powerful religious symbol has remained relatively intact. Scholars have described cow
protectionist campaigns since Independence, too, as the political ‘exploitation’ of a
Hindu religious ‘symbol’.16 They have condemned anti-slaughter laws in post-colonial
India as an imposition of Brahmanical religious taboos on lower-caste Hindu and nonHindu citizens that violates India’s professed secular ideals,17 or runs contrary to basic
economic principles.18 While deeply indebted to accounts of how the symbol of the
12. John R. McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977);
William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004); Christopher Pinney, ‘The Nation (Un)pictured? Chromolithography and “Popular” Politics
in India, 1878–1995’, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, no. 4 (1997), pp. 834–67; and Christopher Pinney, Photos of the
Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004).
13. Anthony Parel, ‘The Political Symbolism of the Cow in India’, in Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, Vol.
7, no. 3 (1969), pp. 179–203; Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United
Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Rallying around
the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpur Region, c. 1888–1917’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings
on South Asian History and Society, Vol. 2 (Delhi/New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 60–129; Peter
Robb, ‘Officials and Non-Officials as Leaders in Popular Agitations: Shahabad 1917 and Other Conspiracies’, in
B.N. Pandey (ed.), Leadership in South Asia (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), pp. 179–210; and
Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008).
14. In North India, colonial officials joined Hindu elites in stigmatising Chamars as cow-killers, alleging that
members of this Dalit community habitually used poison to increase their share of hides from fallen cattle. In
making this charge, they disregarded the fact that by far the majority of Chamars were employed as
agricultural labourers, and not in the skin trade at all. See Ramnarayan S. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability:
Chamars and Dalit History in North India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
15. Tejani points to Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858, which introduced a political language of ‘religious
tradition and its violation’ that gave low-caste groups in late nineteenth-century Maharashtra an incentive to
join in the religion-inflected causes of Hindu elites, including cow protection. See Tejani, Indian Secularism,
pp. 73–4. Also stressing the role of colonial jurisprudence, Groves claims that Muslims pursued cow sacrifice
more insistently in the wake of the 1888 Allahabad High Court ruling that it was a ‘religious right’. Matthew
Groves, ‘Law, Religion and Public Order in Colonial India: Contextualising the 1887 Allahabad High Court Case
on “Sacred” Cows’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 33, no. 1 (2010), pp. 87–121.
16. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),
pp. 204, 209–10.
17. Shraddha Chigateri, ‘Negotiating the “Sacred” Cow: Cow Slaughter and the Regulation of Difference in India’, in
Monica Mookherjee (ed.), Democracy, Religious Pluralism and the Liberal Dilemma of Accommodation, ‘Studies in
Global Justice’, Vol. 7 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), pp. 137–59; Ian Copland, ‘Cows, Congress and the
Constitution: Jawaharlal Nehru and the Making of Article 48’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol.
40, no. 4 (2017), pp. 723–43; Ian Copland, ‘History in Flux: Indira Gandhi and the “Great All-Party Campaign” for
the Protection of the Cow, 1966–8’, in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 49, no. 2 (2014), pp. 410–39; and
Donald Eugene Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).
18. Stanley A. Freed and Ruth S. Freed, ‘Sacred Cows and Water Buffalo in India: The Uses of Ethnography’, in
Current Anthropology, Vol. 22, no. 5 (Oct. 1981), pp. 483–90; and Frederick J. Simoons, ‘Questions in the Sacred
Cow Controversy’, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 20, no. 3 (1979), pp. 467–76.
SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
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cow has been used to demarcate social boundaries, this collection demonstrates the
value of attending to the situated relationships that emerge among humans and bovines
that exceed the confines of ‘religion’.19
Evidence suggests that overemphasis on the ‘religious’ in cow protection may come
with unexpected political and intellectual costs. To be sure, efforts to expose cow protection as religious bigotry, or as a deeply impractical, spiritual predilection, have been
central to political opposition.20 But such efforts can be stretched too far. To take one
example, scholars and critics have condemned the Indian Supreme Court’s 1958 judgement regarding anti-slaughter laws for failing to protect the religious rights of the
Muslim minority. Yet, as Rohit De teaches us, the plaintiffs to the case did not invoke
their religious rights. Whereas commentators have followed the judges of the Supreme
Court in treating the plaintiffs as ‘Muslims first’—perceiving them through the lens of
religious difference—‘for the petitioners it was their Qureshi identity and their profession [in slaughter-related trades] that were most significant’.21 Even critics’ assessment
of the Supreme Court’s ruling as a ‘loss’ for the plaintiffs must be reassessed: not only
did the Qureshis appeal to their economic rights, but they did so successfully, gaining
the economic protections and consideration they sought.
Undue attention to a presumed ‘religious’ motive behind cow protection has led historians to underestimate the importance of ‘economic’ arguments in cow protectionist
politics. Modern debates over bovine slaughter have been characterised by a logical
opposition between ‘religion’ and ‘economy’ since the 1880s. During the colonial
period, debates were structured by the politics of religious toleration and religious
rights; since Independence, the new constitutional order has given extra weight to
‘economic interests’.22 But although an opposition between religion and economy has
been central to bovine politics in India, past and present, we should be leery of supposing the same binary organises human–bovine relations. Even cow protectionist concern
seems to exceed its terms. The essays in this special section demonstrate how relationships between the state, people and bovines engage fundamental issues of labour, ethics, diet and science in ways that muddle and dissolve this framing binary. We
conclude that analytical focus on religion may obscure key facets of cow protectionist
politics, even as it distracts us from the constitutive features of everyday life.
Indeed, excessive focus on ‘religion’ may feed the politics of cow protection in unexpected ways. Over-attention to the ‘sacred cow’ has meant under-attention to the
19. Historians have considered cattle and cattle-breeding pastoralists in colonial India outside the lens of religion,
but without regard for the politics of cow protection. Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Pastoralists in a Colonial World’, in
David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha (eds), Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of
South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 49–85; Brian P. Caton, ‘The Imperial Ambition of Science
and Its Discontents: Animal Breeding in Nineteenth-Century Punjab’, in Mahesh Rangarajan and K.
Sivaramakrishnan (eds), Shifting Ground: People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 132–54; David Gilmartin, ‘Cattle, Crime and Colonialism: Property as
Negotiation in North India’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 40, no. 33 (2003), pp. 33–56;
Saurabh Mishra, Beastly Encounters of the Raj: Livelihoods, Livestock and Veterinary Health in North India,
1790–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); and Laxman Satya, Ecology, Colonialism, and Cattle:
Central India in the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
20. Kancha Ilaiah, Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism (Kolkata: Samya Press, 2004).
21. Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2018), p. 148.
22. Ibid., p. 134; and C.S. Adcock, ‘Sacred Cows and Secular History: Cow Protection Debates in Colonial North
India’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 30, no. 2 (2010), pp. 297–311.
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buffalo, on which dairy production in India largely depends. But more is at stake than
balanced coverage. As Kathryn Hardy remarks, social science scholarship has been
marked by an imputed contrast between ‘sacred’ cow and ‘merely economic’ buffalo.23
This contrast reproduces a caste distinction that figures Brahmans as paradigmatic religious actors and proper Hindus, and dairy-keeping OBC (Other Backward Class)
Yadavs as ‘not-quite-Hindus’ whose actions are dominated solely by economic considerations. Hardy details the material and ritual importance of buffalo—not cows—for
Yadav dairying families, challenging the notion that the economic and ritual are ‘neatly
separable’, and the idea that, among Hindus, buffalo symbolise only the ‘demonic’.
Following different kinds of bovines, and the different ways in which people live in
relation with them, Hardy shows how Varanasi’s celebrated cow-centred piety depends
on the devalued labour of the Yadavs, who produce the cows and bulls that roam the
city. The imputed contrast between ‘sacred cow’ and ‘economic buffalo’ is complicit in
eliding the complexities of this bovine politics and poetics, as it relegates the Yadavs to
some imagined ‘margin’.
James Staples’ essay also unsettles any easy opposition between sacred and economic
by grappling with the thorny problem of the cattle slaughter trade in India.24 In domestic and international media, gauraksha is widely portrayed as rooted in the religious
difference between cow-revering Hindus and cow-killing, beef-eating Muslims and
Christians.25 The same picture of Manichaean conflict also drives vigilante violence.
Yet, as Staples notes, this ‘dominant assumption’ elides the active participation of
Hindus in the beef trade, sometimes as consumers, more often as sellers of cattle. In a
way, the active participation of Hindus in India’s slaughter economy has long been recognised. British colonial observers dubbed this Hindu ‘hypocrisy’—and some Hindus
followed suit.26 Yet the idea that the participation of caste Hindus in the cattle slaughter trade can only be understood as ‘hypocrisy’ is rooted in the (false) certainty that it
is a fundamental principle of Hindu religion to avoid or actively prevent the killing of
cattle. Staples provides a new perspective on the apparent paradox. Drawing on the
anthropology of ignorance, he demonstrates that ‘strategic acts of not knowing’ make it
possible for many Indians, non-Hindus as well as Hindus across castes, to sell bovine
animals they have cared for, when their slaughter must be a likely consequence.
As Cassie Adcock’s essay demonstrates, the binary between sacred and economic is
too simplistic to describe even the politics of cow protection, which has long been concerned with the material qualities of bovine bodies—and the economics of cow
saving—as much as with the ‘symbol’ of the sacred cow or its violation.27 Professedly
economic approaches to cow protection have often presented themselves as an
23. Kathryn C. Hardy, ‘Provincialising the Cow: Buffalo–Human Relationships’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian
Studies, in this issue, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2019.1680484.
24. James Staples, ‘Blurring Bovine Boundaries: Cow Politics and the Everyday in South India’, in South Asia: Journal
of South Asian Studies, in this issue, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2019.1669951.
25. This view also informs US religious freedom advocacy; for a critique, see Cassie Adcock, ‘Cow Protection and
Minority Rights in India: Reassessing Religious Freedom’, in Asian Affairs, Vol. 49, no. 2 (2018), pp. 340–54.
26. For a contemporary example, see Aijaz Ashraf, ‘Hindus are 100% Responsible for “Cow Slaughter”: A Sanyasi
Freedom Fighter’s Claim Still Holds True’, Scroll.in (2 July 2017) [https://scroll.in/article/840763/hindus-are-100responsible-for-cow-slaughter-a-sanyasi-freedom-fighters-claim-still-holds-true, accessed 16 July 2019].
27. Cassie Adcock, ‘“Preserving and Improving the Breeds”: Cow Protection’s Animal-Husbandry Connection’, in
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, in this issue, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2019.1681680.
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alternative to anti-Muslim violence. In the aftermath of the 1917 violence in Shahabad,
Bihar, Mahatma Gandhi enjoined Hindus to acknowledge their own culpability in cow
slaughter, rather than direct hate or violence toward Indian Muslims.28 Describing his
approach to cow protection before a Hindu audience in 1925, Gandhi remarked, ‘we
have to realize that we have not so much to save the cow from the butcher’s knife as
from our own. And, for that purpose, we shall have to grasp the economics of the
thing’.29 Among other proposals, Gandhi urged gaushalas (cattle shelters) to work to
‘improve the breed’ of cattle.30 Adcock demonstrates that cow protectionists’ concern
to produce a more economic, ‘improved’ cow was not limited to Gandhi or Gandhians.
Nor can it be identified with a ‘non-violent’ strand of cow protectionist politics, for a
mandate to improve cattle breeds lies behind today’s anti-slaughter laws, and the vigilante violence that accompanies them. This mandate tethers cow protection to claims
about India’s material or economic development that are separable, if not always separate, from appeals to Hindus’ reverence for the cow.
What’s the law got to do with it? On the state and (il)legality
Amidst the growing force of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in
Indian politics and the accompanying surge in cow protectionist violence, it is tempting to conclude that the Indian state today has identified itself with cow protection.
State governments, primarily but not only in BJP-led states, have enacted stringent
laws to criminalise and punish bovine slaughter and beef possession, and to control the
movement of cattle. The professed aim of law-makers is to put a stop to cattle slaughter
within India, and even beyond its borders, as illustrated by recent court judgements
aimed at curbing the movement of cattle to Nepal and Bangladesh.31 Critical commentary on these laws has rightly emphasised the symbolic and material violence they
authorise against Muslims, Dalits and Christians in particular, and against farmers and
pastoralists more broadly. However, such critiques can overstate the power of the law
to create the worlds it seeks to call into being.
The essays in this collection prompt us to understand India’s anti-slaughter laws differently. They ask how official legality is (re)produced, contested and transformed in
28. Gandhi addressed a meeting of the Gaurakshini Sabha in Champaran district, Bihar, in 1925. Mohandas K.
Gandhi, ‘Speech on Cow Protection, Bettiah’, c. 9 Oct. 1917, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14
(Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1965), pp. 2–4.
29. Mohandas K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at All-India Cow-Protection Conference, Bombay’, 28 April 1925, in The Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 26 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1965), p. 557.
30. Gandhi, ‘Speech on Cow Protection, Bettiah’; Mohandas K. Gandhi, ‘Save the Cow’, Young India (8 July 1921), in
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1965), p. 193; and Mohandas K.
Gandhi, ‘Draft Constitution of All-India Cow-Protection Sabha’, 24 Jan. 1925, in The Collected Works of Mahatma
Gandhi, Vol. 26 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1967), p. 36. Today, too, Hindu nationalist proponents of cow protection from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the BJP tacitly acknowledge the fact that even Hindus must
sell uneconomic cattle. As a solution, they advocate upgrading the local cattle breeds of Uttarakhand by crossing them with the more prolific milk-producing Jersey cows. See Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies, pp. 64–5, 72–3
et passim. Also see Laura Murray, ‘To Protect and Improve: Developing the “Sacred Cow” in India’, in
Anthropology Now, Vol. 10, no. 1 (2018), pp. 13–24.
31. For example, in 2016, in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by People For Animals, the Supreme
Court asked the central government to frame rules to stop the ‘illegal transportation of animals’ to Nepal. See
‘Cattle Trafficking: Supreme Court Asks Centre to Frame Rules in 3 Months’, The Economic Times (21 July 2016)
[https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/cattle-trafficking-supreme-court-asks-centre-to-framerules-in-3-months/articleshow/53177219.cms, accessed 27 June 2019).
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the course of everyday encounters between the state, as represented by the police, judiciary, municipal officials and the military; activists; and the ordinary people who rear,
move and kill bovines. The essays demonstrate that the social and political life of the
law in India is in constant flux, creating room for bodies (both bovine and human) categorised as ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ to move between and out of these categories.32
Essays by Sahana Ghosh and James Staples illustrate the fluid nature of legality on
the hoof. Ghosh describes how, at the site of the India–Bangladesh border that is often
singled out in Right-wing discourse as a hotbed of cattle smuggling, officers of India’s
Border Security Force (BSF) create their own fluid order of licit and illicit cattle movements through two key practices: offering ‘permissions’ to cows they recognise as
belonging to ‘agrarian households’ and bargaining with village panchayats over the
acceptable number of ‘sacrificial’ cattle during Eid.33 Ghosh not only details the prolonged negotiations between villagers and BSF guards that ‘permitted’ the movement
of cattle from ‘illegal’ to ‘legal’ and vice versa, but also notes that the vital personhood
of cattle, who had ‘sound, motion and will of their own’, frustrated the fixing of their
flesh by the law. The borderlands, she suggests, are a site where the boundaries between
legality and illegality are rendered fuzzy in the course of everyday acts of gendered
labour in the service of bovines—that of separating smuggled cows from household
cows for the BSF, that of raising animals for local women, and that of smuggling cows
for local men.
Like Ghosh, Staples takes human–bovine relationships as the starting point to
understand how the legal and illegal, state and society, licit and illicit come to be
entangled through everyday practices of smuggling, slaughter and dining in South
India. There too, Staples finds, police and municipal officials play a key role in helping
to create licit spaces for the beef trade to flourish; as he remarks, ‘the act of making
something illegal help[s] to determine the parameters within which it continue[s] to
happen’. Anti-slaughter laws, Staples argues, do not work simply to prevent cattle
slaughter, and the Indian state appears as a fractured and heterogeneous collection of
actors, rather than a monolithic machine.34
But although official leniency with respect to anti-slaughter laws is sometimes celebrated, the non-enforcement of anti-slaughter laws is also held up as a driving force in
cow protectionist politics, as Cassie Adcock reminds us. The tendency of today’s
increasingly stringent legislation, if not to effect ever greater state control over cattle
killing, may be no less nefarious: broadcasting the continued failure or circumvention
of ever stricter laws may provoke gaurakshaks to violent action. Adcock offers an historical perspective on contemporary politics. Whereas Ghosh and Staples challenge
assumptions of the contemporary state’s marriage to cow protection, Adcock challenges assumptions that the colonial state remained aloof from it. The colonial government formed an alliance with cow protectionists in the name of breed improvement,
32. Cf. Malini Sur, ‘Through Metal Fences: Material Mobility and the Politics of Transnationality at Borders’, in
Mobilities, Vol. 8, no. 1 (2013), pp. 70–89; and Yamini Narayanan, ‘Jugaad and Informality as Markers of India’s
Cow Slaughter Economy’, in Environment and Planning A: Society and Space, Vol. 51, no. 7 (2019).
33. Sahana Ghosh, ‘Chor, Police and Cattle: The Political Economies of Bovine Value in the India–Bangladesh
Borderlands’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, in this issue, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2019.1672926.
34. On what is commonly described as police ‘corruption’, see Beatrice Jauregui, Provisional Authority: Police, Order,
and Security in India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
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Adcock argues, that lent an enduring stamp of legitimacy to cow protectionists’ claims
to act for the material benefit of all Indians.
While recognising the indeterminacy of the state in everyday social and political
practice, the essays also remind us that there are often chasms between the law and
social life that are too deep to bridge in these quotidian encounters. Aarti Sethi’s essay
on Pola festivals in Maharashtra speaks to the power the state holds to render certain
ritual and social practices ‘illegal’ and out of time.35 Sethi argues that popular protests
in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to ban festivals like Jalikattu and Pola
highlighted deep tensions between what she terms ‘social’ and ‘legal’ understandings of
the personhood of bulls.36 The Supreme Court’s 2014 decision was the result of public
interest litigation filed by a prominent animal rights group, which objected to the festivals’ jousts between men and bulls. Sethi details how the court’s recognition of bulls as
legal rights-bearing subjects whose rights were infringed by violence was at odds with
local Dalit-Bahujan understandings of bulls as social persons who were ‘co-participants
in a shared semiotic and socio-productive world’ that was indelibly marked by violence
toward both human and non-human animals. Sethi’s essay thus reminds us that what
is at stake in ongoing contestations over bovine bodies in India is not whether bovines
are persons entitled to recognition, but whose definitions of bovine personhood
will prevail.
Cow-lover, cow-killer: On ethics and violence
Gauraksha, as we have noted throughout this Introduction, is a complex social phenomenon that cannot be adequately described in terms of Hindu concern for the
sacred cow. The politics of cow protection claims to be motivated not only by economic concerns, but also by ethical ones. Gaurakshaks often describe their efforts as
driven not by ‘politics’, but by an ethical commitment to cows; here they often find
common ground with animal rights activists.37 By the same token, cow protectionists
describe their adversaries as incapable of feeling for the cow. To this end, gaurakshaks
(and some animal rights activists) traffic in images and language that represent those
who smuggle and slaughter cows as cruel and depraved. Ethical concerns for otherthan-humans are thus claimed as the sole preserve of caste Hindus, and are pitted
against the rights of Muslims and Dalits to life and livelihood.38
35. In recent years, the Supreme Court and several state high courts have played an increasingly active role
in curtailing or banning ritual practices involving animals, such as animal sacrifice. See, for example,
this newspaper article on the High Court of Himachal Pradesh’s decision to ban sacrifice: ‘Himachal Pradesh HC
Bans Animal Sacrifice as “Barbaric”’, Livemint (2 Sept. 2014) [https://www.livemint.com/Politics/
VtcpRTbXHAYZYPsRQ2oqdI/Himachal-Pradesh-HC-bans-animal-sacrifices-as-barbaric.html, accessed 6 Oct. 2019].
36. Aarti Sethi, ‘Mahadev’s Gift: Men, Bullocks, and the Community of Cultivation in Central India’, in South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, in this issue, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2019.1684051.
37. Yamini Narayanan, ‘Cow Protection as “Casteised Speciesism”: Sacralisation, Commercialisation and Politicisation’,
in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 2 (2018), pp. 331–51; Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies;
and Naisargi Dave, ‘Something, Everything, Nothing: Or, Cows, Dogs and Maggots’, in Social Text, Vol. 35, no. 1
(2017), pp. 37–57.
38. On a related note, Benedicte Boisseron argues that ‘hegemonic systems’ in the Black Atlantic which pit
‘animality’ against ‘blackness’ continue to wield tremendous power, and make it difficult to map alternate
histories in which the exigencies of ‘black life’ and ‘animal life’ are not mutually exclusive, but connected—
connected but not comparable, in the sense that one can compare (and seamlessly equate) the subjection of
animals to the subjection and enslavement of black people. This distinction resonates deeply with the essays in
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There is risk in letting cow protectionists’ claims to an ethical high ground on animal rights go uncontested. The language of ahimsa or non-violence, as manifest in
vegetarianism and anti-slaughter campaigns, can authorise violence against those who
are deemed incapable of practising it.39 This is borne out in the frequent gaurakshak
refrain that Dalits and Muslims bring violence upon themselves by being violent to
cows in the first place. The conviction that participation in smuggling and slaughter is
entirely incompatible with care and kinship, a position shared by many animal rights
activists and cow protectionists alike, is dangerously narrow in its conception of what
ethical multispecies relationships look like.40
The essays collected here refuse the terms of this pernicious binary between cowlover and cow-killer, drawing on archival and ethnographic research to demonstrate
the range of complex ways in which people navigate the tricky terrain of living with
and killing bovines ethically. This does not mean romanticising the very real violence
that humans and non-humans who share social worlds confront on an everyday basis.
Instead, as Aarti Sethi argues, it means to explore the situated emergence and unfolding of ordinary ‘political and ethical question[s]’ which do not ‘disavow violence but
embed the symbolisation and practice of violence within ongoing protocols of
co-existence, within a dense web of familial, social and productive relations between
people’ and bovines.
Sethi’s essay painstakingly details a social world in which violence against bullocks
exists uneasily alongside the recognition of animals as co-constructors of an agrarian
world, ‘within the order of culture, able to receive speech in different registers … and
in this capacity as entitled to tokens, marks and symbols of social recognition’. Hardy’s
essay similarly grapples with how violence against animals is understood and engaged
with in everyday life. Hardy recounts the insistence of a Yadav dairy farmer that buffalo sacrifice should be understood as a sign of the ritual and social value of buffalo,
rather than a marker of their demeaned, demonic status as Mahishasur. While the
farmer’s claim might seem surprising given that Yadavs do not sacrifice buffalo
themselves, Hardy’s essay allows us to understand how and why sacrificial violence can
be affirmed by dairy farmers. The devaluation of buffalo by upper-caste Hindus, Hardy
argues, is perceived by Yadav dairy farmers as a violent rejection of the ritual significance that the buffalo they live with and care for hold for them.
This commitment to understanding the complex entanglement of ethics and violence is at the heart of Shaheed Tayob’s essay on slaughter, Qurbani (sacrifice) and disgust among middle-class Muslims in Mumbai.41 Tayob calls on us to reimagine the
this collection. While we are committed to connecting the violence that confronts bovines and the humans
(especially Muslims and Dalits) who care for, smuggle or kill them in India, we are uneasy with the idea of
treating this violence as ‘comparable’, for example by drawing an analogy between casteism and speciesism, as
Yamini Narayanan does in ‘Cow Protection as Casteised Speciesism’. See also Benedicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog:
Blackness and the Animal Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
39. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi describes how, during the pogrom of 2002 in Gujarat, the doctrine of ‘ahimsa, which
was initially deployed as an ethical critique of the violence of sacrifice, was transformed into an element of violent identification’ of Muslims, which incited the circulation of violence against them. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi,
‘Ahimsa, Identification, and Sacrifice in the Gujarat Pogrom’, in Social Anthropology, Vol. 18, no. 2 (May 2010),
pp. 155–75.
40. See Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies, for an expanded discussion of this point.
41. Shaheed Tayob, ‘Disgust as an Embodied Critique: Being Middle Class and Muslim in Mumbai’, in South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, in this issu, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2019.1663654.
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role that disgust might play in propelling the cultivation of ethical practices of slaughter
and sacrifice. He argues that Muslims who experience and express revulsion over the
conditions of slaughter enact a ‘politics of disgust’ that is creative and regenerative.
Caste Hindus’ expressions of disgust over Muslims’ practices of animal slaughter are a
key element in the dehumanisation of Muslims by Hindu nationalists. Middle-class
Muslims in Mumbai may also experience disgust, but as an ‘embodied critique’. For
them, Tayob argues, disgust simultaneously critiques the state and Hindu society for
their abjection and ghettoisation of Muslims and calls on Muslim butchers to be ethically accountable to the animals they kill by adhering to an ‘Islamic ethics of slaughter’.
Tayob’s essay is a powerful reminder that the question of what it means to stand in
ethical relation to animals is a particularly weighty one for those who are stigmatised
as incapable of caring for animals. The claim that the slaughter or sacrifice of animals
is inherently unethical has a global resonance today that is being used by Hindu vigilantes to authorise egregious acts of violence against Indian Muslims and others
demonised as ‘cow-killers’. By attending closely to how ethical conundrums and
debates are materialised in disgust, Tayob’s essay does critical work to undermine the
dangerous binary between ‘cow-killer’ and ‘cow-lover’.
Conclusion
The essays in this collection contribute to scholarship on cow protection in modern
India. They add to and extend key insights concerning the falsity of cow protectionists’
claims to speak for all Hindus; the reliance of cow protection on pernicious stereotypes
of Muslims and OBC Hindus, among others; and the over-attention given to cows relative to other bovine kinds, in scholarship as in the Indian public sphere.
The essays also provide fodder for wider conversations. In challenging the framing
understanding of cow protection in terms of the Hindu ‘sacred cow’, the essays speak,
indirectly but productively, to critical reflections on religion and secularism. Drawing
on the work of Talal Asad, scholars in many disciplines have abandoned the notion
that ‘religion’ simply designates a sphere of human experience or social life. They have
come to appreciate the degree to which definitions of religion and religious identity are
historical products of modern secular governance. In consequence, they have come to
ask whether the ‘modern state and its political rationality’ do not make ‘religion more
rather than less salient to minority and majority identities’ by ‘transforming preexisting religious differences’ and ‘producing new forms of communal polarization’.42 To
be sure, these are familiar questions to scholars of South Asian history. By redescribing
bovine politics outside the framing binary of religion and economy, these essays make
clear how the designation of certain sentiments, dispositions or practices as ‘religious’
is intertwined with the demarcation of religious community and the assertion of religious difference. In so doing, they open space for a response to cow protection other
42. Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2016), p. 2; Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008); and Benjamin Schonthal, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic
Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
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than the politics of religious rights, which—however useful—may reinscribe religious
majority and minority as the most salient identities in Indian social and political life.
The essays also speak to a larger body of scholarship that has explored how the
meaning and effects of the distinction between legality and illegality are situated and
negotiated across time and place and by different sets of social actors.43 Through careful attention to the ways in which cows and bulls protected under anti-slaughter laws
‘circulate as fuzzy and ambivalent products, circumventing the label of illegality’ in
practice,44 the essays provide rich detail about how and when categories like legal and
illegal come to matter or fade into relative insignificance in the course of everyday
interactions between ordinary people and representatives of the state. While careful not
to reject the power of the law and the state to transform social life, the essays caution
against a flattened and homogenised understanding of the relationship between state
and society. Indeed, the essays reject the binary between state and society. Thus, for
example, police and Border Security Force officials simultaneously police the trade in
bovines and participate in and profit from it.
And in treating the question of ethics, the essays refuse transcendental understandings of ethics and insist instead on situated, close analyses of the multiplicity of ethical
positions which emerge in the course of people’s everyday relationships with actual
flesh and blood bovines. The essays investigate how people involved in the cattle trade
or in practices of animal sacrifice navigate—but never fully resolve—the ethical dilemmas that arise from participation in acts of violence against bovines. For these actors,
the question of what it means to live ethically with bovines—whom they understand as
sentient, social beings—is inextricably intertwined with the question of what it means
to live ethically with other humans. What emerges from these efforts to cultivate ethical
dispositions, the essays argue, are a kind of messy ethics that are never satisfactory
(and remain open to debate and question) and that are always grounded in lived relationships between people and bovines. In making these arguments, the essays draw
inspiration from and contribute to a growing body of literature that approaches ethics
as a set of dispositions and practices that emerge over the course of everyday life.45 The
essays demonstrate that it is through everyday human relationships with actual bovine
animals that ‘the life of the other’, both human and non-human, is ‘engaged’.46
In conclusion, the essays collected in this special section not only serve as a warning
against the tendency to accept hegemonic, upper-caste Hindu narratives of cow protection, but also challenge many established academic and popular understandings of the
43. Carolyn Nordstrom, ‘Shadows and Sovereigns’, in Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol. 17, no. 4 (Aug. 2000),
pp. 35–54; Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (eds), Law and Disorder in
the Postcolony (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Nicholas de Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality” and
Deportability in Everyday Life’, in Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 419–47; and Veena Das
and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research
Press, 2004).
44. Sur, ‘Through Metal Fences’.
45. Veena Das, ‘Ordinary Ethics’, in Didier Fassin (ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology (Malden, MA: John Wiley
& Sons, Inc., 2015), pp. 133–49; Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action
(Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010); and Webb Keane, Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
46. Veena Das, ‘Engaging the Life of the Other: Love and Everyday Life’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics:
Anthropology, Language, and Action (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010); see also Govindrajan,
Animal Intimacies.
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politics of cow protection. Through careful attention to the situated, multiple histories
of human–bovine interactions and the broader social and political worlds in which
they unfold, the essays remind us that cow protection cannot be contained within
Manichean oppositions between religion and economy, the ethical and the immoral,
legality and illegality—or Hindu and Muslim.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.