Opinion Cow-hug Day: What cow ‘protectors’ and mocking elites both don’t get

Ethnographic accounts highlight that people in rural India form deep bonds with their cows. 'Protectors' like the image of a cow but rarely engage with the creature. And those for whom hugging a cow was laughable, failed to see that one person’s pest could be another’s pet

Those who laughed at the many resulting memes of cows, lipsticked or otherwise, also patronise and disrespect those millions of genuine cow stewards. And their giggles lack irony, given they think nothing of hugging their dogs or cats (or spending small fortunes on them).

Mukulika Banerjee

February 20, 2023 09:00 AM IST First published on: Feb 20, 2023 at 07:00 AM IST

The laughter about the government urging the celebration of Cow Hug Day instead of Valentine’s Day has died down now, and the subject of our embarrassment has moved on to the more worrying tax raid on the BBC. But I wish to return briefly to cows, as both the government with its posturing, and those who mocked in response, failed to understand the deep relationship which hundreds of millions of Indians have with their cows.

These citizens of rural and semi-urban lands routinely share their domestic space with cows. Their relationship is one of “animal intimacies”, as the anthropologist Radhika Govindarajan has characterised it. In a marvellous chapter on the cow (other chapters cover goats, monkeys, pigs and bears), she outlines the ways in which people relate to the two main types of cows in Uttarakhand, the Pahari cow and the artificially-inseminated Jersey cow. The locals talk of their different characters and gaits: The Pahari cows are irritable while Jerseys are gentle; the Pahari walk with a lachak lachak, the Jerseys more of a matak matak. Both live in owners’ homes, but Pahari cows are kept for the urine and dung used for purificatory and medicinal purposes, whereas the Jersey cow is bred through artificial insemination (sarkari sui) mainly for its prodigious milk production. Like a wife and a mistress, one is kept for the home, the other for business, as some men put it.

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Such ethnographic accounts highlight that people form deep bonds with their cows and know their every mood and idiosyncrasy. In my own field site in rural West Bengal, my friend Meher, a Muslim, would refuse to travel away for more than one night because, she insisted, her herd was fussy and would only eat their food if she prepared it, for only she knew exactly how short their stalks of hay should be cut. Meher had been abandoned by her husband, and she lavished her attention on her daughter, mother and cows with equal intensity. Bhrigupati Singh, whose anthropological research was in Rajasthan, tells a moving story in his book of how, when a mother cow went missing, both the calf and the woman who tended them in the household cried and refused to eat until the mother was found: “How can I eat when he hasn’t?” the woman said. A friend who grew up in Haryana told me that their buffalo loved to have her forehead scratched between the eyes, and so that was how he greeted her each day when he came home from school. These are profound bonds of intimacy and love.

What I have never seen, heard, or read of, is such Indians ever attempting to hug their cows, precisely because they are sensitive to cows’ nature and well aware that the creatures would be unlikely to welcome this. By urging people to do so, to “bring emotional richness [to] increase our individual and collective happiness”, the so-called protectors of Gau Mata made cynical and farcical political use of the symbol of the cow, revealing once more their indifference to the true values of Indian life and culture — just as they have previously shown their indifference to the welfare of the cow by making so many wander forlornly in the margins of our towns, surviving on plastic and perceived increasingly as pests by urban residents. Such “protectors” may love the image of a cow on a poster but rarely engage with the creatures themselves. By urging the foreign gesture of a “hug” as an expression of love, the government reinforced the “western” values they criticise, brought contempt on these gentle creatures they pretend to hold sacred, and insulted the millions who do indeed treat them so fondly and respectfully.

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Yet, those who laughed at the many resulting memes of cows, lipsticked or otherwise, also patronise and disrespect those millions of genuine cow stewards. And their giggles lack irony, given they think nothing of hugging their dogs or cats (or spending small fortunes on them). Those for whom hugging a cow was laughable, failed to see that one person’s pest could be another’s pet and pride.

So, while this latest sorry incident passed through the news cycle quickly enough, it sadly revealed again the schisms between our cynical, religiously chauvinist government, our smirking, secularist elites, and the mass of long-suffering people.

The writer is the author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India