“Some people, if they hear words like ‘gaay’ (cow) and ‘Om’, they get an electric shock, their hair stands on end.”
∼ Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mathura, September 2019
I was simply sitting in a coffee shop, sipping my latte and minding my own libtard business, when I overheard a conversation and within it the word ‘cow’. A shiver, no, a bolt of electricity, shot down my spine and my mind wandered towards those long-forgotten days in Palia, three years ago – looking for tigers in sugarcane farmlands by day, and recording stories of bovine terror in my diary by night. This article is an honest, but abbreviated, account of the events that punctuated my time in Palia and forever changed what the word ‘cow’ means to me.
For those who don’t already know, the town of Palia is the thriving, dusty heart of Uttar Pradesh’s sugarcane-growing Kheri district. It’s the main trading centre for farmers in the area. It’s also where all the doctors with expertise in unheard-of fields of medicine have set up shop, where a total of four ATMs compete every day to see who runs out of money first, and where Punjab Sweets dishes up a mean plate of aloo tikki alongside a cup of chai.
All in all, for the intrepid wildlife biologist emerging from the jungles of Dudwa tiger reserve, Palia is a veritable oasis of pleasures. I spent close to a year living in Palia in 2015-16, completing my PhD dissertation fieldwork. I had set out to understand how tigers, deer and other wildlife use sugarcane farmlands in the area and how this use impacts farmers.
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By some measures, a year is a long time to live in a place. If you are like me, it is long enough to desire – in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way – becoming a domiciled Palia resident. It is also more than enough time to acquaint oneself with the many nooks and crannies of the town, and also develop a keen sense of the perils one must navigate in order to survive.
One such source of peril was the lame bull I had come to call ‘Gussa’ (anger in Hindi). He usually lay ruminating right at the intersection of the main town road and the road that peels off towards Dudhwa national park. He had bloodshot eyes, a large blackish hump on a mostly white body and a demeanour very reminiscent of Marlon Brando from Apocalypse Now. If you haven’t seen the movie, think dark, hulking menace.
One evening, at the end of a long day of work, we drove back into town and right at the intersection, there was Gussa, all raging bull, running, nay limping, full tilt after another bull (a far lesser creature though). As our car careened wildly to avoid this unfolding turf war, for a moment there I imagined, this is it, this is how it all ends for me – as an unmarried, unpublished smear on the road in Palia. Everyone in this story, thankfully, survived the evening.
Another enticing feature of life in Palia was the weekly market or bazaar. I loved it, I lived for it. Every Wednesday evening after fieldwork, I would wind my way through narrow alleyways fringed by tailor shops and provision stores, to get to the even narrower alleys fringed by heaps of cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes and a smorgasbord of other vegetables. In these alleys, packed like sardines, hundreds of townspeople and a few dozen vendors would engage in economic theory defying transactions. What little manoeuvring room was left in these allies would be taken up by motorcyclists and the more adventure-loving cycle rickshaws.
It is this chaos that the grass-eating marauders of Palia exploited every once in a while. When everyone was at their most distracted, they would arrive, pointy ends first, not caring who they poked, or who their bloated bellies sent flying into the drains. In the ensuing minutes, all haggling would end, and people would press against each other, giving way to the cows. Path cleared, the cows would walk on, snagging a cabbage here, a bunch of spinach there. The pointy end cleared the way, the smelly end planted slippery minefields that made chasing the thieves impossible. Only the wave of curses emanating from the vendors’ mouths would keep up with the herd.
In their wake, the mass of humanity would unglue itself from each other, gather their wits and resume bargaining. On one such Wednesday, having freed myself from the crowds’ embrace, I looked down at my throbbing foot to inspect the hoof shaped bruise that was a little red and mostly slimy green. It is one thing to step in dung, and a whole different thing to have it literally stamped into your foot, trust me.
My fieldwork often took me to the marginal forest and grassland patches that occur along the Sharada river, which flows by Palia. Within these patches, I would look for tiger and deer signs. On one such walk, I was accompanied by a burly farmer called Harpreet, who claimed to know just where to look for wildlife. As we ambled along through those amiable woodlands, we heard a sound, like approaching thunder. Just as we exchanged enquiring glances, the herd was upon us. Fifty or so cattle including large bulls, cows and calves came to a dead halt not far from us. We stared at the herd, incredulous, wondering where the herder was.
Also read: In Other Lands a Cow Is Prized For its Milk, in Ours it Is Meant For Clashes
Harpreet conjectured that this was part of the large herd that was abandoned in the forest by a local baba who ran a cow shelter, among other things. His eyes shone with opportunism. Where I saw a scraggly herd of spent cattle, he saw the carriers of Jersey and Holstein genes. Where I saw feral freedom, he saw in those untrusting eyes, the longing to be herded back home. Even as I sized up this situation, Harpreet approached the herd. The antsy calves kicked their hind legs in the air and ran the other way. The cows stood around looking dumbstruck and the bulls took many resolute steps towards us, once again pointy ends first, heads shaking violently and eyes glowering. Harpreet gave up on his cattle conquest plans and retreated. I took few steps back, shaken. We yielded the path to them, and they continued their thunderous run towards wherever, kicking up dust and may questions for an ecologist.
My last story is from the village of Chedui, a few kilometres south of Palia. As usual, I had gone to this particular village to look for wildlife and record what the villagers had to say about wildlife impacts on their farms. I consulted with one villager about a good place to station a camera trap, so I could get pictures of wildlife. He in turn got a group of villagers together and after some muted conversations, had me follow them down a village road. The road led to a crocodile-infested river that formed the boundary of the village.
Quite close to where the road ended, one of the villagers pointed to a tree and said that I would have good luck getting pictures if I stationed the camera trap there. He said that all the animals worth worrying about in the village arrive in the cover of darkness, from across the river. I thanked them and fixed the trap on the tree they pointed to and left. When I returned a week later, the villagers gathered together and followed me to the trap and waited with baited breath to see the images on my computer. As I opened the folder with the camera-trap images, the crowd let out a collective gasp.
There, image after image rendered true, the shape and form of many different cows and bulls that the villagers had only vaguely imagined, through the dense fog that blanketed the many winter nights through which they sat out and protected their crops. In that cattle lineup, the villagers identified repeat offenders, juvenile delinquents and bovines with unsettling fetishes and appetites. I had gone looking for wild beasts, instead I found that the gods themselves had turned on the good people of Chedui!
These are but a curated list of stories from my time in Palia, there are far more harrowing stories to tell. Someday, when I am more inured to the word ‘cow’ and maybe even the word ‘Om”, I will muster the courage to recount them all.
Rekha Warrier is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Colorado State University.