“She was trying to propitiate the serpent lord, you see,” said Kicha, “so that he would remove the curse from our family. Now, how did a cow know this? Who knows? But it worked. The next month, your great grandmother got pregnant and delivered a bonny baby boy. If the cow hadn’t done what she did, we would all not be here. I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
Now that I am back in India, I decide to accompany my parents on their annual visit to our native village. On the way there, I tell my dad my idea of donating a cow in honor of his upcoming birthday. His reaction is much like Ram’s father’s—fine, if that’s what we want to do. We have met our relatives, eaten lunch, taken a siesta, and are at the Panchali Amman temple for the evening darshan (viewing). The priest at the temple has that polite, focused aggressiveness that is sometimes common amongst touts. He probably gets a commission every time he snags a donation. My parents tell him that we are considering donating a cow.
“You know how children are. They want to do the best for us,” says my dad, suddenly chuffed with pride. “They are insisting on a cow in honor of my eightieth birthday.”
“And why not?” asks the priest. “That is the duty of children—to do what is best for the parents, the family, and the lineage. You have raised them well.”
Compliments out of the way, we get down to brass tacks.
There are two options, says the priest. Poor people choose the partial donation. For fifteen hundred rupees, or about twenty-five dollars, we can buy a “share” in the temple cow and participate in all the Hindu rituals involved with cow donation. The temple cow, naturally, is returned to the temple. In effect, it is a recycled cow.
The other option is to purchase the “full package,” where we can actually buy a cow and its calf, and donate them to a poor Brahmin family. We would cap the cow’s horns with silver bells, buy a colorful cloth to put over its back, and then walk it to a village where we would ceremoniously donate it to the family. We would be responsible for all the feed (the cow’s, not the family’s) for a year and the family would have the asset—both the capital in the form of the cow and the dividends in the form of its milk—for its lifetime. The approximate cost: sixteen hundred dollars.
“Buying a share of the temple cow is far less expensive but you won’t get the complete spiritual benefit,” says the priest, gauging our reactions with a keen eye to see which way we are leaning.
While it is true that my advancing the money for Sarala to buy a cow is not the same as donating the cow to her, I decide that it’s a trivial difference. I assume that Sarala’s request is proof that the universe is conspiring with the events that are happening in our family. By squaring this away in my head as an act of charity, I know that I won’t get too sad if Sarala doesn’t return my money. Ram agrees. Even though they make light of it, we know that both our fathers will feel happy about the cow donation, which as it turns out has come to us serendipitously through Sarala. Why not do it?
There is only one more snag. The cow has to be donated to a Brahmin. Hindu literature is quite firm about that. The Garuda Purana, in which Lord Vishnu turns into an eagle named Garuda and narrates an eight-hundred-page tome that covers things as varied as the “cosmogeny of hell and other regions; modes of spiritual initiation; a brief discourse on yoga; installation of divine images; discourses on royal strategies to appease the gods presiding deities of the different planets and constellation of stars; situations of yoginis on the different days of the fortnight; description of gems and their uses.”
The Garuda Purana is categorical about how to donate a cow: “Gifts of cows, proprietary rights in lands, food grains and gold, should be given to a Brahmin, who is in every way worthy of receiving the same. A Brahmin who has neither erudition nor is a seeker of spiritual knowledge has no right to accept any gifts; and degrades the giver as well as his own soul by accepting any.”
All roads, it seems, point to Brahmins.
The priest agrees vehemently with the tome. “It isn’t an act of charity unless you donate said cow to a Brahmin,” he says.
Sarala, I know, is no Brahmin. She belongs to the Naidu caste.
Caste is one of India’s enduring contradictions. For some, it is a marker of identity, one that they have inherited through birth and family. You are born into one of four castes: Brahmin (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishya (merchants), or Shudra (sweepers). Within these broad divisions is a dizzying array of sub-castes. Plus, their names vary regionally. Naidus are one sub-caste of the merchant caste.
I was born a Brahmin. In today’s India, however, caste is in flux. Most of my friends have “inter-caste” marriages where, say, a Brahmin has married a Vaishya. Some marry across religions—Christians and Muslims marrying Hindus. My driver, for instance, is a Hindu. His wife is Christian. He asks for days off on both Christmas and Diwali.
“Why must I donate a cow only to a Brahmin?” I ask the priest.
“It is tradition,” he replies. “Brahmins took care of cows, used the milk and other offerings in their rituals.”
I consider arguing with him. Actually, I want to say, the dairy farmers of India belong to a variety of castes, not just Brahmin. Plus, the people who take care of cows across my street are Naidus.
But I know it is futile. I cannot fight a thousand years of tradition by espousing a different point of view, however well thought out it may be.
What to do? I consider asking the Brahmins in my community if they will receive the cow from me before passing it on to Sarala. But it won’t work. Even if I can legally prove that I have donated the cow to a Brahmin, the Gods will know that Sarala is the end user. But do Hindu gods embrace the caste system that I disagree with?
As a nominal Hindu, I have many quarrels with the religion I was raised with. For one, it is patriarchal. Which the feminist in me resents. A lot of the mantras aren’t supposed to be recited by women. The priests are all men. Only men are honored with milestone events celebrated with great pomp. Witness the grand birthday celebrations that we are putting together for our fathers. Most Hindu women don’t celebrate their eightieth birthday with three days of rituals involving a dozen priests and the donation of food, clothing, cows, and cash. After mulling over all this, I decide that the key word in this hoary Hindu prescription is “deserving,” not “Brahmin.”
That, Sarala is.
14
Cause and Collateral
Hindus didn’t always venerate cows. In fact, they ate beef, even the ancient pious Hindus who gave us the Vedas and Upanishads. The first time I mentioned this, I almost got thrown out of a family wedding.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said an elderly uncle. “The cow has been sacred in India for thousands of years.”
“I told you that you shouldn’t send your daughter to America,” an aunt accused my mother. “Look at all these crazy, half-baked ideas that she has come up with.”
The truth is that while Sanskritists and environmentalists both acknowledge the importance of the native cow, they aren’t all in agreement about how Vedic Indians treated this animal. The Vedas speak fondly of the cow in many passages. One passage says that the cow is considered inviolable, aghnya, or “not to be slain.” And yet most scholars concur that Vedic Indians ate animal flesh, including beef. Something my elderly uncle and aunt could not reconcile when I suggested as much. But ancient Indians differentiated between a sterile cow that could be sacrificed and a milch cow that could not be touched. Milch cows were the mothers of gods; described as “the mother of the Rudras, the daughter of the Vasus, the sister of the Adityas, and the center of nectar.”
“Read the Shatapatha Brahmana,” says my family’s priest. “It will tell you all about why the cow is important.”
Written during the Iron Age, between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, the Shatapatha Brahmana is a text that gives a long line of injunctions about how to perform fire rituals and sacrifices, how to prepare an altar, how to sit, how to smoke the fire, what to eat, and even how to breathe. Two
passages instruct people not to eat the flesh of a cow or an ox, because “verily the cow and the ox support everything here.” Other ancient books like the Apasthamba Dharmasutra lay a “general embargo on the eating of cow’s flesh,” to quote an essay by B. R. Ambedkar, the man who was the principal architect of the Indian constitution.
Yet many of these sacred books are full of confusing and occasionally contradictory messages. There are passages exhorting people not to kill or eat cows and oxen. Yet there is a controversial section in the Shatapatha Brahmana in which the sage Yajnavalkya, the main priest for the Vedic Indians, says, “I for one eat it (beef), provided it is tender.” There are scholars who believe that the Sanskrit translation is wrong; that the word amsala used to denote flesh actually means “nourishing flesh” rather than “tender flesh.” Still, there seems to be a broad agreement that Vedic Indians ate meat.
Later Vedic rituals and mantras followed the same pattern. Beef-eating was both practiced and censured. Different bovines were sacrificed for different gods: a dwarf cow for Vishnu; a droopy horned ox with a white smear on its forehead for Indra; a red cow for Rudra. All of which suggests that Vedic Indians treated the cow both as a utilitarian animal and as a sacramental object that they used and killed for sacrifices to appease the gods. It was during this time that scores of cows, oxen, goats, and sheep were slain and eaten both as a matter of course and a matter of ritual.
Take a simple custom like welcoming honored guests into your home. There are voluminous texts called sutras, which according to D. R. Bhandarkar, an authority on Indian thought, refers to “manuals of conduct in domestic and social relations.” In other words, etiquette books that touch upon, among other things, how to treat honored guests. The Vedic Indians offered madhuparka (a mixture of honey and yogurt). Okay, not necessarily my thing, but nice enough.
Then, as Bhandarkar writes in his book, Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Culture, a live cow was brought out for the guest who mumbled, “Hato ma papma; papma me hatah,” or “Destroyed be my sin; my sin be destroyed.” After which the honored guest could ask that the cow be slain and the flesh be shared or he could choose that the cow be released in which case the host had to produce another animal for the killing.
Another word for honored guest in Sanskrit is goghna, which, as Bhandarkar points out, comes from a combination of “to kill” and “a cow.” A guest is someone for whom you kill a cow. Sterile cows were killed during weddings and death ceremonies. Bulls were speared and killed; cows were cut with a sword or axe.
So when did they stop killing cows? I guess when they figured out that cows were more useful alive than dead. In her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger cites a story that suggests how this change happened. In Hindu mythology, a king called Prithu chases Mother Earth, called Prithvi, so that she will provide nourishment for his people. Prithvi assumes the form of a speckled cow and runs away. When the king chases her down, she begs for mercy, and says that she will allow him to milk her for all her products—that she will provide nourishment to his people. And then the earth cow turns into the wishing cow (Kamadhenu: she who grants all wishes, not just food but every earthly sustenance possible).
One day Sarala invites me to see Senthil’s shop. Though he hasn’t given up the bottled-water venture, her eldest son is now into a new business. It’s called Grace Fancy Dress Rental. It is on the first floor of a busy street, about half an hour from my home. Sarala walks into the cramped shop, which has less space than a New York City dry cleaner, and smiles genially at the shop assistant. The sides of the shop are stuffed with black witch hats, purple angel wings, pink tiaras, rhinestone-studded dresses, and khaki uniforms—all child-size. These are costumes that Bangalore schools rent for their annual shows and concerts. There are wigs of all colors and lengths, orange tiger costumes, stitched purple saris, a bunch of neon-green peasant skirts of the kind that my daughter and her classmates wear for their folk dances, in which they pretend to be Bavarians. There are Nehru caps, Gandhi glasses, and Indian flags.
“If your daughters’ school needs costumes for their school plays or concerts, you let me know. I’ll get you a good rate from my son,” says Sarala. Like I said, she can’t help trying. We chat for a few minutes with the shop assistant. Senthil, we are told, is out delivering bottled water.
There is a reason Sarala has taken me to her son’s shop. It is her collateral. She wants me to know that she can make good on her promise that she will return my money. Her son can sell fancy dresses and Halloween costumes to repay me for the cow that I am going to buy for her.
Ram and I have debated whether to tell her that we are donating a cow to her, not loaning her money. We have decided to keep her in the dark about this mind-shift for now. If she knows that we plan to give her a cow, maybe she will deliberately choose a more expensive breed. That is my reason for caution, anyway. So for now, I keep quiet.
Sarala’s son Selva is surlier than Senthil. Usually clad in a blue blazer and trousers, he is silent as he works with his mother. But he knows his cows. He milks them every morning, and carries the milk pail to the culvert. Sarala takes over the customer service from there. On the odd day when Sarala is not present, Selva stands behind the large milk can, gruffly asking customers if they want one liter or two. We all miss Sarala’s smiles and inquiries.
These days, however, I find myself talking to Selva a lot. Sarala trusts her son’s opinion when it comes to buying cows and she has gotten him involved in our discussions. He is her cow whisperer, the son who chose a life with these animals in spite of every injunction otherwise.
“Why don’t we go look for a suitable cow?” I say. “If we find the right cow at the right price, I will buy it. If it costs more than one thousand dollars, though, what will you do?” I have already told Sarala I will not advance her more than that.
Selva nods airily in the direction of the bank nearby. He will arrange something, he says. He has told a couple of friends about his need for a new cow. They have promised to supplement my loan. He wants to finish the deal in two days. This surprises me.
“It is a large sum,” I hedge. I feel like a venture capitalist asking a hundred questions before an investment. These questions have no meaning for Selva, caught up as he is in the daily grind of milking, feeding, cleaning, and walking his cows.
Buying a cow is serious business and I had assumed that Selva would engage in the exercise with much deliberation. Yet, here he is, wanting to transact in a mere two days. Is this lack of judgment, lack of time, fear that I will back out of the deal, or confidence that comes from expertise? The speed of this operation scares me. I had envisaged spending a week searching for the right cow, going from village to village, talking to prospective sellers.
Later that week, Sarala tries to calm me down and help make sense of Selva’s haste. Selva cannot take off that kind of time, she says. And I realize that cows—live cows—can’t be put on hold while he is off gallivanting around villages. This isn’t a call center that can be shut down for a week. Every day that he doesn’t clean the cowshed has a cost to their family. He has to hire someone to take care of his animals. Selva plans to look for a cow one day and bring it home the next. Two days are all he has. That’s it.
We discuss the nitty-gritty. Do we scout out villages for potential cows? Selva has friends who are auto-drivers, he says, and they will take us around. If we show up in my car, the price of the cow will go up.
I offer to pay the rickshaw charges as well. I want to write about cows for the paper I work for I tell them. I explain the journalistic process to them. I’ll follow them around, I say. I may take photographs, quote them in my article. Selva interrupts me.
“Write whatever you want,” he says. They don’t care.
Later that week, a photographer from the English-language newspaper I work for comes and takes pictures of Sarala, Selva, Naidu, and their cows. And when the series of eight articles has been published, I walk across the street and show all thr
ee of them all of the newspapers. They look at the photographs but cannot read the words. I translate and explain. They are intrigued but unimpressed. At first, I am a bit hurt by their lack of obvious interest. It occurs to me, though, that for Sarala being featured in an English-language newspaper is about as distant as having a planet named after me (which actually happened for a young Indian girl who was also featured in the paper). I thought, “How cool,” but it really wasn’t relevant to my life.
The next month, a man from Delhi writes to me and offers to contribute to Sarala’s cows. He keeps his word. I take the businessman from Delhi to meet Sarala and pass on the twenty-five thousand rupees that he gives her for cow feed.
It will take another four years for Sarala’s story to become a book. When I tell her about my publishing contract, Sarala nods encouragingly. “See how your fortune has changed after you became associated with my cows?” she asks. “That is what is called a cow’s blessing, Madam. Show your thanks to these animals by giving them bananas every week.”
15
To Market, to Market, to Buy a Fat Cow
We set out in a rickshaw—Sarala, Selva, and I. Sarala would like us to make this trip on an auspicious day, preferably Tuesday or Thursday, but at this point, she doesn’t want to add an astrological complication into an already volatile situation.
Selva and I have been bickering for days because he suggests trips first thing in the morning. “Shall we go today?” he asks as I collect milk. I need notice, I say. I can’t drop everything to go cow shopping.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 13