Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  Masala chai is usually made with black tea from Assam in northeast India, a region famous for its strong black tea. But in Kashmir, masala chai is made with green tea. The spices used to make the drink vary and can include black pepper, star anise, mace, chili, and nutmeg, as well as the ones mentioned in this classic Pushpesh Pant recipe from Gujarat. Note that some of the spice quantities here are given for the whole spice, which must be freshly ground. A coffee grinder does this well.

  6–8 cloves, ground

  8 green cardamom pods, ground

  1 cinnamon stick, 1 inch long, broken into pieces

  1 teaspoon ground ginger

  1 teaspoon ground fennel [seeds]

  6 teaspoons [black] tea leaves

  5 cups milk

  ¾ cup sugar, or to taste

  Bring 6 ¼ cups water to the boil in a large, heavy-based pan. Add all the spices and boil for about two minutes over medium heat. Add the tea leaves and boil for further 1 minute, then reduce the heat and simmer for another 5 minutes. Pour in the milk and return to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for further 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar. Strain through a fine sieve (strainer) into cups or mugs and serve hot.

  Indians are tea drinkers. Only in the southern state of Tamil Nadu are the people predominantly coffee drinkers; drinking the local style of coffee and milk, which they call “filtered coffee.” They use their own version of a double-decker coffee brewer, and after the coffee has dripped through the grinds to the lower section, they add boiling milk. By tradition, the milk is not homogenized, and as the boiling milk is poured into the coffee, the coffee maker skims off the top to use for making butter.

  Milk punch is another milk drink that comes from the British. But punch itself is a a two-thousand-year-old Indian drink. The word “punch” is derived from the Sanskrit for “five,” so called because it had five ingredients: alcohol (usually arrack, distilled from fermented palm sap), sugar, citrus juice, water, and spices. Some versions contained tea and no alcohol. Punch became extremely popular in seventeenth-century India among the many Europeans there—the British, Portuguese, and French—all of whom took their own variations back to their home country and other colonies. The British East India Company brought punch to England, and in the early eighteenth century, a punch made with milk, which resembled the possets that were popular at the time, came into fashion. It remained popular for only about fifty years, but a poem to “the West Indian posset” was written. Unverified rumor had it that it was penned by Alexander Pope, but if so, it was not among his best works:

  From far Barbadoes on the Western main

  Fetch sugar, ounces four, fetch sack [sherry] from Spain,

  One pint, and from the East Indian Coast,

  Nutmeg; the glory of the Northern Toast,

  On flaming coals let them together heat

  Till the all-conquering sac dissolve the sweet.

  On such another fire put eggs, just ten

  (New-born from tread of cock, and rump of hen),

  Stir them with steady hand, and conscience pricking

  To see the end of ten fine chicken.

  From shining shelf, take down the brazen skillet,

  A quart of milk from gentle cow and fill it.

  When boiled and cold, put milk to sack and eggs,

  Unite them firmly, like the triple league,

  And on the fire let them together dwell.

  During the British Raj (1858–1947), as the time when the British ruled India is known, milk was supplied by a gow-wallah, a cow keeper, or sometimes a middleman. The cows were mostly local breeds called desi cows. Desi is a Sanskrit word that denotes native to the subcontinent. Desi cows are well adapted to the subtropical climate but do not produce as European breeds do. The yield from milking a desi cow might be a pint or even less.

  In order to have an adequate supply of milk, the cow keepers tried to maintain huge herds of hundreds of cows. This is not unusual today, but in the days of hand milking, it was rare and extremely labor-intensive. The cow keepers also supplemented, often secretly, their cow’s-milk supply with milk from whatever animals were available—goats, sheep, buffalo, camels, horses, and, according to some reports, pigs, though that was problematic in a country with a large Muslim population. The main substitute used was, and still is, buffalo’s milk, even though Indians have always insisted that buffalo’s milk impairs digestion.

  But buffalo’s milk has much to recommend it. Unlike cows, buffalos do not carry tuberculosis. Although it has reversed with modern methods, in the days of the Raj, a buffalo yielded more milk than a cow. Buffalo’s milk also has the enviable quality of being lower in cholesterol even while higher in fat. It also keeps without spoiling for longer than cow’s milk, a considerable advantage in a hot country without refrigeration. Also, buffalos are productive for up to twenty years, which is more than twice as long as cows.

  Today, India is the largest producer of buffalo’s milk in the world, producing more buffalo’s milk than cow’s milk even while professing to love cow’s milk more. Numerous Asian and Middle Eastern countries, and a few African ones, produce buffalo milk, too. Small amounts are also produced in other places, such as the Campania region of Italy, where it is used to make mozzarella. Italy does not have indigenous buffalo—they were brought in Roman times, probably as draft animals. In the Philippines, buffalo’s milk is used for making a cheese called kesong puti.

  Water buffalo

  Buffalo’s milk has long been a staple in India. In the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta, the wandering Muslim, wrote while in India, “The buffalo here is in great abundance,” and praised a porridge made with the milk.

  Diluted milk from unscrupulous merchants was a common problem. To prevent it from happening, the wealthy had the gow-wallah bring the cows to their homes and milk them in front of them. Even so, there were stories of gow-wallahs having a little watered-down milk in the bucket before they started milking, and one story of a gow-wallah who kept a goatskin of water in his sleeve to squirt into the milk. Congee, or rice water, which is white, was often used to dilute milk as well. These practices led the British to keep their own private cow or cows at home, and many Indians did the same.

  The town of Anand became famous in the final years of the Raj because its local dairy farmers rose up against a huge private dairy company called Polson. Based in Bombay (now Mumbai), Polson had established such a complete monopoly in Anand that the farmers there had no other buyer to which to sell their dairy products. Processing capacity had greatly increased, and the demand for milk was up, but the British had arranged for all of this new profit to go to Polson. The Patidar, a large peasant caste in the Anand region, many of whom were militant nationalists, were angry and ready to rebel, which made them easy to organize.

  Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a Gujarat lawyer and one of the leaders of the Indian National Congress that was fighting for Indian independence and later created the modern Indian state, saw the political potential of this fight. He organized a boycott, and the farmers refused to supply Polson with milk. Then he arranged for a cooperative to collect the farmers’ milk and ship it by rail to Bombay. In taking these actions, he was following the lead of Mahatma Gandhi, who had organized a 241-mile march across India in 1930 to protest the British salt monopoly.

  The management both of salt and of milk went to the heart of the problem in pre-Independence India: the British were running the Indian economy so that the British profited while the Indians were plagued by famines. Millions were dying while the British stood by. Since independence, there has not been a single famine in India.

  Called the Iron Man of India, Patel differed sharply with Gandhi on certain issues. He believed that Gandhi’s ideas about agriculture were too romantic, and that for an independent India to succeed, it had to develop technical and marketing skills for its agro industry. One way to do this, he thought, was to establish cooperatives, and in Anand, he saw an opportunity to demonstrate this
idea.

  In 1946, with no farmers providing milk to Polson, the British government was forced to end its milk monopoly in Anand. It was one of the defeats that made the British realize that they would have to leave India. And Patel’s dairy cooperative was given the hopelessly unmusical name KDCMPU, which stood for Kheda District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union. It was India’s first dairy cooperative, and, understanding the importance of marketing, they gave it a more digestible brand name, Amul, for Anand Milk Union Limited.

  Patel went on to be the first deputy prime minister of India and the minister of home affairs, but he died in 1950 and never saw how successful his cooperative movement became. After independence, the new India, charged with the task of economic development, made building dairy cooperatives one of its priorities. To that end, European breeds that did not do well in hot climates but had large milk yields were brought in and crossbred with the desi breeds.

  Cultural attitudes also needed to change. In rural areas, working in the milk trade was often considered to be a very lowly activity. Milk was for the family, and someone who sold milk either lacked a family or was depriving them of their due. Milk products such as yogurt and ghee could be traded without such condemnation, however.

  In 1949, Patel’s dairy cooperative, now known simply as Amul, hired an American-trained engineer, Verghese Kurien, to manage its operation. Kurien was later dubbed the Father of the White Revolution—the movement that turned India into a major dairy power.

  Using the model of Amul, the new Indian government established dairy cooperatives throughout the country as a means of efficiently producing and marketing milk. In 1970 the cooperatives received international support from the United Nations and the European Economic Community (forerunner of the European Union).

  Since in India, as in many countries, cows were milked largely by women, it was initially assumed that many of the cooperative members would be women. But it soon became clear that while the cows were usually worked by women, they were almost always owned by men. The Indian government, realizing women’s potential to expand the dairy industry still more, then developed women’s dairy cooperatives. The first one was established in Anand, now known as India’s dairy capital.

  The government taught the cooperative women the newest techniques in breeding, feeding, milking, and general cattle care. They also selected some village women to be trained as managers and accountants. At first, men were used in these positions—and there were incidents of men stealing from the cooperatives—but as the women became trained, they took over and the cooperatives became completely women-run.

  The women learned to reject the old belief that a cow should be starved during pregnancy because a well-fed cow could not carry a calf. In very poor communities, where people had trouble feeding their children, many hadn’t understood the wisdom of feeding animals well. But the women in the cooperatives gained a different perspective and began growing not only food for their families, but also feed for their cows, including corn, sun hemp, and African guinea grasses, which prospered in parts of India. Some state governments, such as Tamil Nadu in the south, also helped the co-ops finance the purchase of European-Indian crossbreed cows.

  The women did not love everything about the new cooperative life. Before, they had been ghee makers. A by-product of ghee making is buttermilk, and the women missed their once steady buttermilk supply.

  The World Bank, which was helping to finance dairy expansion in India, favored European breeds. A crossbred cow, though short-lived, could yield four times as much milk per day as a native cow. The crossbreeds cost much more to maintain but were much less expensive to purchase. The cooperatives decided on crossbred cows.

  Typically, a Holstein or a Jersey was bred with a Zebu. The large, humped, wrinkle-necked Zebu was an Asian breed that had been brought to India thousands of years before; it was the cow featured on the ancient seal of the Indus Valley. Zebus are unusually well suited for the tropics and have become popular in other hot countries such as Brazil.

  By the twenty-first century, the cooperatives were so successful that private dairies started to reappear to challenge them. In 2017, the Indian Express predicted that soon private dairies would produce more milk than the cooperatives.

  Zebu

  Meanwhile, people continue to keep a cow or two in the city, even though many metropolises ban this practice. Only cows that are associated with a religious site such as a temple are officially allowed. To feed their cows, people sometimes tether them in a park or public space. Nearby they place a tray of balls of fodder. The balls are for sale and a passerby can buy one, feed it to the cow, and then pull its tail for a blessing. In this way the owner is getting paid to have his cow fed.

  The Indians also have many cow festivals. In Tamil Nadu, they celebrate Pongal, a winter harvest festival in which thanks is given to the sun. Cows are painted and their horns decorated. Indians love to add color.

  And cows have remained a powerful symbol in India. In the late 1960s when Indira Gandhi formed a breakaway political party her symbol was a calf nursing a cow.

  Some argue that the cow best suited for India is a Zebu crossbred with other high-yield local breeds. European stock is not suitable for the subcontinent, they say, as it requires too much medical care, the drugs used to cure it gets into its milk, and it still doesn’t live very long. India is home to thirty-seven breeds of big-humped native cattle, all descendants of Zebus. But these breeds are dying out, while the population of the Jersey-Zebu crossbreds has increased 20 percent in this century.

  Most observers also decry the many laws forbidding the slaughter of cows. Such interdictions have an ancient history. In the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta wrote of a Muslim uprising against a Hindu ruler because he would not allow slaughtering. Then came centuries when there was no ban on slaughter. The issue began to reemerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, with the rise of Hindu nationalism. To favor a ban was to express anti-British sentiment. After independence, at the 1948 conference establishing the laws of the new Indian state, the issue of animal rights, and specifically cow protection, was raised. Was India to become the first country in the world to guarantee animal rights in its constitution? Many were enthusiastic advocates of the idea, but those focused on economic development opposed the move. Eventually a compromise was reached: The decision would be left up to the states.

  The White Revolution progressed unimpeded by states. The economic development model of nationalism was more popular than Hindu nationalism. On November 7, 1966, there was a large march in New Delhi calling for a ban on cow slaughter. It was the first large demonstration against the Indian National Congress, the founding independence political party. The demonstration turned into a riot in which eight people died. Each year in Delhi, there is a march commemorating the event.

  But the slaughtering of cows, strongly disapproved by some, continued. Since the 1980s, there has been a rise in support for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which endorses a kind of Hindu nationalism, a revival of Hindu culture and religion, and the rejection of what it terms European secularism. While not surprisingly very unpopular among Muslim Indians, it has strong support among Hindus. The BJP won control of a number of state governments, and in 2014 its candidate, Narendra Modi, was elected prime minister. Those states with BJP-controlled governments instated bans on the slaughter of cows, and today, only eight of India’s twenty-nine states have no restrictions on cow slaughter. Restrictions vary from state to state. Some states allow some slaughter but bar the selling of the meat outside the state. Export of beef from India is illegal. And the laws are not always obeyed. In April 2016, the Times of India reported that although slaughter was forbidden in the state of Uttar Pradesh, 126 slaughterhouses were operating there.

  In a modern commercial dairy, which must carefully balance expenses against profits, a ban on slaughter poses serious problems. Cows, like humans and other mammals, do not remain fertile their entire lives and therefore cann
ot lactate for a lifetime. A cow, if well cared for, can live for many years after she stops lactating. For a large dairy, this could mean maintaining two herds, the first productive and the second completely unproductive. Maintaining a nonproductive herd represents a substantial financial loss. In other parts of the world, most dairy farmers ship cows that are no longer producing to a slaughterhouse. But in most Indian states, this is no longer allowed, creating a major problem, sometimes a crisis.

  Some states, such as Rajasthan, have set up camps called gaushalas as homes for unwanted cows. Tens of thousands of cows are crowded into the gaushalas, where they are fed and cared for until they die. Such camps have existed since the seventeenth century, especially in Maharashtra, when they were used as a temporary relief system during periods of drought.

  But there is more at issue here politically than simply animal rights versus the rights of farmers, a conflict that exists in many countries. The ruling BJP is seen by both Muslims and more progressive Hindus as anti-Muslim, and the laws restricting slaughter as anti-Muslim as well. Beef is the cheapest meat, and Muslims, India’s poorest religious group, depend on it. Buddhists, Christians, and Sikhs also eat beef. In the fall of 2015 a mob dragged a fifty-year-old Muslim, Muhammad Akhlaq, from his home and beat him to death because he supposedly had beef at home, though his family said it was mutton. Such incidents of lynchings and beatings have continued. The press has labeled the perpetrators “cow vigilantes.”