Animal lovers

Book wise, the last six months have been very lucky for me. I have constantly discovered new authors and wonderful books. 

First, I found the mystery crime thriller writer, Sujata Massey. Her stories are situated in the Bombay of the 1920s.

Then I found that extraordinary book on the Great Indian Hedge by Roy Moxham. He found that British customs had planted a 2,300 mile-long hedge to prevent the smuggling of salt between British India and Indian India, that is, the princely states.

And last month I chanced upon a book by Radhika Govindarajan, a young anthropologist who teaches in the US. Its title, Animal Intimacies, is what drew my attention.  It is about the sociological aspects of the relationship between humans and animals in India and is absolutely fascinating, aside from being well written. 

Indeed, it reminds me of another book that I came across in a library in Korea in 2013 by the Princeton anthropologist, Marvin Harris. It was called Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches.

Mr Harris had argued in that book that people always do something for rational reasons that are grounded in the socio-economic context. Ms Govindrajan, however, doesn’t refer to this book. But she does mention a paper by Mr Harris in the bibliography. 

Nit-picking aside, this is a seriously good book which all Indians who know English should read. After all, under the new dispensation, animals have acquired a new halo — we are being asked to do things vis-a-vis animals for political reasons as well. Ms Govindarajan discusses this in her chapter on cows. 

The other chapters are on monkeys, goats, bears and pigs. It seems each of these animals has a special place in the overall scheme of things.

Swadeshi versus foreign cows

The people of Uttarakhand, at least where Mr Govinndarajan carried out her studies, seem to believe that the Indian pahari cow is superior to the imported Jersey one, even though the latter yields more milk and is generally stronger. The pahari cow, however, is endowed with divine shakti such that it is to be always preferred to the foreign one. 

That said, when it comes to slaughter, neither is to be offered up because a cow is a cow and woe be to the nation that allows them to be slaughtered. These are such deep-rooted beliefs that Ms Govindarajan can find no rational explanation for it. She dismisses Marvin Harris’s explanation about what economists call value-in-use. It has to be something more she says but is unable to tell us precisely what that something more is except that the pahari people and the pahari cows have a special relationship.

All that she is able to find out is that there is a bias in favour of the pahari cow such that even the cows from the plains are not seen as being comparable. So the prejudice is not just Indian versus Foreign but also pahari versus non-pahari.  

There’s something else I learnt: Upper caste people in Uttarakhand who would not sell pahari cow milk to the Dalits, had no problem selling them Jersey cow milk.

Bear truths

The chapter on bears is a real zinger. It seems women in Uttarakhand’s villages tell stories how bears make off with women and “do to them what men do to women”. 

If this sounds outlandish, Ms Govindarajan says similar stories can be found in the West also. Indeed, she quotes a man called Edward Topsell who wrote about this inter-species lovemaking in detail. Bears, he said, were of “lustful disposition” and did it like men.

But once again, as with the cows, this kind of relationship between humans and animals seems to have no comprehensible explanation. What’s more, these stories are all mostly in the female domain. The men know about them, of course, but it is the women who talk about bears, sometimes to shame men into doing to them what the bear will do to them. The bears, of course, are better endowed.

One woman told Ms Govindarajan the following about what her grandmother had told her: “She (the grandmother) said they were doing it for an hour. She saw the whole thing. The sounds!... She said the bears don’t get tired. They keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it.”

Another woman told her: “Just think what if they were to do that to one of us. I would die of exhaustion if he were on top of me for three days”. 

Anyone would, I guess.