The Cow and All Humans- Great & Small

My encounter with cows started when very young. The first phase saw repeating mindlessly the nursery rhyme.

Hey Diddle Diddle, The cat and the fiddle

The Cow Jumped Over the Moon

The little dog laughed, To see such a sport.

Grew up a little and the English teacher asked us to write an essay on the cow which inevitably read, The Cow is a domestic animal. It has two horns, four legs and one tail. The cow gives us milk. When the Hindi teacher would ask us to write a nibandh, the joke was, “Gaye hamari Mata hai; Aagey kuchh nahin aata hai.” Of course the teacher’s response would be, “Bhains hamara baap hai; Number dena paap hai!” which literally translated into English reads, “The Cow is our Mother; Beyond this don’t know a line. The Bull is our Father; Giving you any marks will be a Crime.”

Then came the historic General Elections of 1977 and the Congress Party had their famous symbol of the Cow and a Calf. So going to rally after rally, we collected the plastic and tin badges of the Cow in dozens. The cow was thereafter seen grazing on Manjit Bawa’s canvas, the cow’s dung was used as Gobar Gas to light up rural kitchens while the political parties fought over Mandal and the Mandir.

So far it was so good till suddenly the cow came to the front pages of the newspapers and headlines of news channels for all the wrong reasons. Here’s taking a leaf from the pages of history and literature on the Holy Cow in two different places and phases.

It was July 1857 during the First War of Independence. Sepoys of the British East India Company had revolted against the British Goras and had rushed to Delhi from all parts of northern India. An old, weak and reluctant man was propped up as the Emperor of India, Bahadur Shah Zafar, from the House of Taimur and lineage of Babur and Akbar, The Great. His writ ran no further than the Red Fort and someone had once exaggeratingly quipped:

Kingdom of Shah Alam,

Runs from Delhi to Palam.

The revolting sepoys were also joined by the riff raff and fanatics who took upon the situation as jihad and a religious war to take to arms and liberate the Muslim empire of the firangis. The feast of Bakri Eid was approaching, the jihadis went out of their way to offend the Hindu feelings by declaring that they would kill a cow in front of Jama Masjid on the day of the Eid as against the normal practice of sacrificing a goat or a sheep. They went on to say that if Hindus offered any opposition to this, they will kill them first and then settle accounts with the firangis. The situation was aggravated when some Hindu sepoys cut the throats of the five Muslim butchers they accused of cow killing.

A full scale crisis was in the offing as the city was divided equally between the Hindu and Muslim population. This was something Zafar had always dreaded. Zafar who had a Hindu mother and had always followed many Hindu customs understood that he could not rule a city without the consent and blessings of half of his subjects. For once the Last Mughal rose to the occasion. On the day the butchers were killed, Zafar banned the butchery of cows, forbade the eating of beef and issued a diktat that anyone found killing a cow would be punished by being blown from a cannon.

Zafar next issued an order saying that all the cows in the town should be registered with the chaukidars and the sweepers of various mohallas were to report to the police all cow owning Muslim households. The police were to make a list of such households and send the same to the Royal Palace. On the 30^th of July, the Kotwal Mubarak Shah was instructed to proclaim loudly throughout the town that anyone even harbouring thoughts of defiance of government orders would be given severe punishment.

The next order followed promptly commanded that all registered cows should be given shelter in the city’s central police station. But for want of space this order was dropped instead bonds were taken from the cow owners that they would not permit the sacrifice of their cattle. Finally, Zafar sent out the most respected Muslim intellectual and a friend of Mirza Ghalib, Mufti Sadruddin Azurda, to mediate with the mujahedin. Azurda was able to successfully persuade the mujahedin to forgo the pleasure of slaughtering cows and eating beef on Eid.

Zafar, the Emperor of Delhi, for once acted and acted decisively. Eid passed peacefully on the 1^st of August. The British, who had spies in the city and aware of the growing communal strife, were eagerly awaiting a communal riot but were bitterly disappointed.

My next stop on the cow after the Medieval Indian History is from the brilliantly captured life of a veterinarian in Yorkshire County, James Herriot, before World War II when modern medicines and instruments were not yet known and the countryside was a huge challenge for a city bred and trained doctor. In one such instance, he had to do some inspections of cows in the farms for TB. He drove down to the first farmer in his rickety car, got delayed and was greeted by a farmer with a scowl.

“This isn’t one o’clock, Maister!” he snapped. “My cows have been in all afternoon and look at the bloody mess they’ve made. Ah’ll never get the place clean again!”

I had to agree with him when I saw the muck piled-up behind the cows; it was one of the snags about housing the animals in grass time. And the farmer’s expression grew blacker as most of them cocked their tails as though in welcome and added further layers to the heaps.

As the vet goes onto another farm, he encounters a thin rangy cow with a narrow red and white face. “I had barely touched her udder when she lashed out with the speed of light and caught me above the knee cap. I hopped round the byre on one leg, groaning and swearing in my agony. It was sometime before I was able to limp back to have another try and this time I scratched her back and cush-cushed her in a wheeling tone before sliding my hand gingerly between her legs. The same thing happened again only this time the sharp edged cloven foot smacked slightly higher up my leg....Switching her back end round quickly to cut off my way of escape, she began to kick me systematically from head to foot. Since then I have been kicked by an endless variety of cows in all sorts of situations but never such an expert as this one. This cow measured me up before each blow and her judgement of distance was beautiful....I am convinced she hated the human race.” 

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

Last Word: Caught between the three worlds of Decisive Zafar, a Riotous Herriot and a Confused Me, I feel that it would be better to let the cow live its life grazing, dirtying and making itself comfortable in the middle of the roads as we honk and sweat behind the wheels. The Emperors of Modern India should go out and stand at the ramparts of the Red Fort as Zafar did 160 years ago and issue a fatwa to blow up with cannon all those people found playing with sentiments and raising religious rant in the name of the cow. This Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or commonly known as the Mad Cow Disease that is affecting the brains of many of my countrymen must be arrested with the strongest of actions.

Source:

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

SS