Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian. James Staples

Of Cows and Buffaloes

      Cows and water buffaloes—the two key sources of goddu mānsam (beef, in Telugu, the first language of most of my informants)—are clearly different beasts. Indigenous zebu cows have played a role in Hindu cosmology since the Vedic period (c. 1500 BCE), with the sacred cow concept established as early as 400 CE (Lodrick 2005, 61). Gandhi dubbed the zebu “a poem of piety” (1954, 3; cited in Korom 2000, 188), revered, in everyday discourse, as a symbol of motherhood. The water buffalo, by contrast, has sometimes been represented in contradistinction to the cow: as the Dalit is to the Brahmin, so, in scripture and in common practice, the buffalo is to the cow (Narayanan 2018, 335–36). While the consumption of the buffalo is taboo because it is considered impure, eating the flesh of the cow is proscribed because of the animal’s elevated symbolic status.

      Even among cows, some are more holy than others. Shankar Lal, president of the Akhil Bharatiya Gau Sewa—an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamesevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist organization that spawned the ruling BJP—reportedly suggested, in 2015, that Indians should only drink milk from what he described as “virtuous breeds.”³⁶ In particular, he warned that the milk of Jersey cows—a breed of cattle brought into India under British colonial rule, so ripe for symbolic appropriation as “other”—might even lead those who drank it into criminal activity. In an article reporting on the RSS’s plans to construct cattle shelters across the country, Lal was quoted as saying, “For a crime-free Bharat [India], it is necessary that our children drink only Indian cow’s milk because it makes them saatvik (virtuous). By drinking the milk of Jersey cows and buffaloes, their minds get harmful ideas, which make them criminals.”³⁷ Lal’s provocative sound bite resonates with more nuanced distinctions drawn by central Himalayan mountain dwellers. For them, while Jersey and hybrid cows have style (style-wal goru), their milk—despite being more plentiful—is thinner and less nutritious, and their dung and urine more watery. Their local pahari cows, by contrast, are associated with moral, physical, and spiritual strength (Govindrajan 2018, 72–77).

      What at first appears to be a clear separation between cows and buffaloes, and a hierarchy of breeds within the former category, is not quite so straightforward, however. My own interlocutors did distinguish, at least some of the time, between eddu mānsam (buffalo meat) and āvu mānsam (cow meat) when they were discussing their preferences. Some Madigas, for example, by virtue of their birth-ascribed status as leatherworkers (even if they never entered the trade), claimed a particular affinity to the buffalo, arguing that its meat was particularly well suited to their constitutions, but did not eat the flesh of the cow. Muslim informants, by contrast, tended to prefer āvu mānsam, in part because of eddu mānsam’s tainted association with low-caste impurity.³⁸ Christians, if they (or their recent ancestors) were converts, retained a preference for buffalo if they were from Dalit castes (as the majority of them were); others, like a Hyderabad Roman Catholic family I knew well who had grown up in a Muslim part of the city, expressed surprise that anyone would eat anything other than āvu mānsam. The reality, though, was that all the butchers I met, whichever populations they served, sold the meat of whichever animals they could source most easily and at the most competitive rates; for the most part, during my fieldwork, this seemed to be buffalo. When people purchased beef, they never, in my experience, questioned the butcher about the provenance of the animal; if they asked for the meat by name at all—hardly necessary, since the sellers sold only one product—they used the generic goddu mānsam, in Telugu.

      As in Telugu, in Hyderabadi Hindi there were also different terms—gaa’ay ka gosht and bhains ke gosht—to distinguish between cow and buffalo meat, respectively, but it was far more common, in Hyderabad, for customers simply to ask the seller for gosht (meat).³⁹ Although this enabled customers to assume that the meat came from where they expected or wanted it to come from, it also signaled an awareness, among some of those I worked with, that sellers might also mix buffalo, cow, and ox meat together. Once the skin was drawn back from the animal, despite my informants’ claims to be able to tell the difference, by appearance and by taste, it was difficult to discern with certainty which meat came from which animal. There were reports in October 2017, for example, suggesting a sharp rise in shipments of cow meat being passed off as buffalo through southern Indian ports, where enforcement of legislation on the export of beef from cows was seen as less stringent. The provenance of the meat—as had been the case with the meat found in the fridge of the Muslim man beaten to death in Dadri—was impossible to confirm without laboratory tests.⁴⁰ This potential confusion between the two sources of beef worked both ways. As a Hyderabadi butcher who had had two consignments of meat violently seized by protestors as they were transported to his shop from the slaughterhouse told me, the vigilantes had not stopped to ask what kind of meat it was before they contaminated it with phenyl and thrashed the truck drivers.

      I raise these examples simply to flag the uncertainties in trying to draw a distinction between the meat of cows and buffaloes, particularly when state legislation often restricted the slaughter of both kinds of animal. It was also the case that castes and other groups who did not eat beef, even when they ate other kinds of meat, treated buffalo and cow beef as one and the same thing. Consequently, and reflecting the fact that my interlocutors were likewise often hazy about what animal the meat they purchased, cooked, and ate had come from, unless a specific distinction is called for, in this book I use the term “beef,” or its vernacular equivalents, to refer to the flesh of buffaloes, cows, and oxen.