1 Authoritarian Populism, Bovines, and State Contradictions in Modi’s India
In March 2016, two Muslim cattle herders were brutally murdered in Balumath in Latehar district in the Indian state of Jharkhand. The deceased were Mazlum Ansari, aged 35, and Imteyaz Khan, aged 12. The two had been herding their last batch of eight oxen to a Friday cattle fair in Chatra district in Jharkhand, where they planned to sell them. Earlier, Mazlum and Imteyaz had reportedly been threatened several times by so-called “cow protection” activists affiliated with a Hindu nationalist right-wing group who had come to Mazlum’s house, warning him to stop trading cattle. If he did not, they would kill him. Fearful of his life and business, Mazlum therefore now planned to sell off his last animals and venture into another business. But Mazlum and Imteyaz never made it to the cattle fair. Having set off before sunrise, they were soon intercepted and attacked by a group of cow protection vigilantes in the early hours of the morning. Mazlum and Imteyaz had been forcibly taken to a nearby forest, where they were brutally beaten to death and subsequently hanged from a tree, their hands tied behind their backs, and their eyes covered by cloth. Their bodies were badly bruised, with wounds and injuries inflicted by long, hard, blunt rod-like objects. Imteyaz’s father, Azad, had gotten word of the attack and had set out on his motorbike to look for his son. Finding Mazlum’s oxen wandering unattended near the road, Azad had heard his son screaming for help from the forest nearby. As he moved towards the forest, Azad had seen the lynch mob and witnessed the attack, but fearing for his own life, he had remained hidden in the bushes: “If I stepped out, they would have killed me too. My son was screaming for help, but I was so scared”, he said later (Anwar 2018; HRW 2019).
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Fifteen months later, in June 2017, Allanasons Pvt. Ltd., India’s largest exporter of buffalo meat, received what one commentator called “a remarkable official recognition of the firm’s performance”, namely a government award for outstanding export performance. Allanasons was one of only two firms that won a so-called diamond trophy, awarded by India’s Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), the
Authoritarian Populism, Bovines, and State Contradictions
Commerce Ministry’s apex body for agricultural exports. According to an APEDA press release, Allanasons received the award for “outstanding export performance and overall contribution in the food sector” for the years 2014–2015 and 2015–2016. Rita Teotia, the Commerce Secretary in the Narendra Modi-led Hindu nationalist government, observed at the awards function that India was the seventh largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, adding that her ministry was taking steps for “furthering outward shipments”. When receiving the award, the Director of Allanasons said that in both years the company had exported buffalo meat at a total value of INR 10,000 crore, amounting to more than one-third of all of India’s buffalo meat exports (Dhara 2017). At the same award function, the Aligarh-based Al-Hamd Agro Foods Products Pvt. Ltd. – another major actor exporting halal fresh and frozen buffalo boneless meat and other meat products – was awarded a Golden Trophy for their performance in buffalo meat exports. *
As the anthropologist James Staples (2020: 7) has recently argued, “beef and the animals from which it comes … tell us something about what is going on in Indian society in more explicit ways than might otherwise be obvious”. In this book, we take inspiration from Staples’ argument as we use beef and bovine bodies as our entry point for analysing the political economy of “Modi’s India” (Jaffrelot 2021). In this regard, our opening vignettes illustrate two defining and intertwined features or “moments” of what we in this book conceptualise as Modi’s authoritarian populism. In the political sphere, we see an aggressively advancing Hindu nationalist cultural politics centred on Hindu pride and unity. This cultural politics seeks (so far with remarkable success) to incorporate significant proportions of India’s poor and working classes across the lines of class and caste, in antagonistic opposition to a threatening Muslim “Other” (Jaffrelot 2019, 2021). Bovine bodies are crucial to advancing this agenda, as seen in the way in which Hindu nationalist vigilante groups operate with an increasingly free hand to violently enforce their brand of cow protectionism to punish individuals (and Muslims, in particular) who do not respect the rules of Hindu cow veneration that are upheld as the ultimate indicator of true patriotism (Patel 2018). These groups operate with the tacit approval of the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government that has, additionally, presided over the introduction of ever-stricter legal restrictions on the consumption of cow meat and the transportation of cattle for slaughter since it came to power in 2014.
In the economic sphere, however, we find the Modi government heavily invested in neoliberalising the economy, opening up new spaces for capital accumulation by promoting corporate-led agricultural exports from India on a global scale, and extending official awards, recognition, and accolades to central actors in this field. Bovine bodies are crucial to advancing this agenda too as the slaughter of millions of bovines every year is required for key firms
3 in the corporate beef export industry to sell Indian beef meat worth several billion US dollars to markets in the Middle East and South and South-East Asia. These firms are based on corporate concentration around dominant class interests and have been key in establishing India as a world-leading exporter of beef, accounting for as much as 20 percent of global exports.
This scenario has sometimes been discussed in the media and elsewhere as India’s “bovine paradox”: How is it that India can rigorously “protect the cow” at home while simultaneously killing millions of bovines every year for global exports? While this may at one level seem paradoxical, it is our central contention in this book that India’s bovine paradox should be understood as exemplary of broader and acutely important political-economic dynamics and contradictions at play in Modi’s India. In schematic form, a central contradiction runs between a bovine politics that protects bovine bodies to further the project of “Hindutva ultranationalism” (Kumbamu 2020), and a bovine economics that slaughters bovines in the millions to facilitate the further integration of Indian agriculture into global markets and value chains; and between a political project that seeks legitimacy from and the incorporation of India’s poor and working classes, and an economic project that is hostile to the class interests of those same groups. In other words, it runs between the socio-cultural agenda of Hindu nationalist politics and the economic agenda of neoliberal restructuring, both of which are crucially intertwined moments of Modi’s authoritarian populism.
Understanding this contradiction and its political-economic dynamics is important in its own right. Indeed, while the unfolding political dynamics of Modi’s authoritarian populism have been the subject of incisive recent analyses (e.g. Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019; Hansen and Roy 2022; Jaffrelot 2021), the political economy of the Modi regime remains “secretive” (Jaffrelot 2021: 459) and underexplored. This book seeks to address this lacuna by bringing economic relations of production into central consideration to understand the form and direction of capital accumulation in Modi’s India. Drawing on Nicos Poulantzas’ notion of “state contractions”, which we return to below, a key aim in this book is therefore to illuminate and understand capitalist dynamics under Modi’s authoritarian populism, using India’s bovine paradox as our entry point and magnifying glass.
An important related aim is to understand the wider ramifications of these dynamics and contradictions as they unfold in the specific domain of bovines for the hundreds of millions of rural Indians who live precarious lives in the Indian countryside. This is a heterogeneous category that we in this book conceptualise as rural “classes of labour”, that is, “all those who share a position as members of directly and indirectly exploited classes” (Pattenden 2023: 6). India has the highest livestock population in the world, at more than half a billion animals. Of these, more than 300 million are bovines, making rural Indians the largest global owners of this species (Narayanan 2023: 15–16). Given the average size of a rural Indian household, coupled with the fact that
the mean “herd size” of bovines in rural India is just one or two animals, it is clear that the bovine economy is important to a very large number of rural Indians. Indeed, approximately two-thirds of all rural households report generating income from livestock (Mahapatra 2012). Already a decade ago, livestock surpassed crop production in terms of monetary contribution to the Indian economy (Mahapatra 2012), and more than a quarter of the total earnings in the category known as “agriculture and allied activities” now comes from livestock (Narayanan 2023: 11). These additionally act as an important “living bank” for rural households who increasingly have to manoeuvre a situation of agrarian distress and economic hardships. Changes to the bovine political economy, in other words, very directly and very immediately impact the lives and livelihoods of India’s classes of labour in rural but also “rurban” and urban areas, where bovines are important to the livelihoods of cattle traders, transporters, butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, craftsmen, and small retailers in the informal economy.
A key argument of this book is that the ways in which central contradictions in Modi’s authoritarian populism have played out in the domain of bovine politics and economics have had distinctly negative ramifications for India’s classes of labour. Specifically, we show how those groups among classes of labour in the countryside and cities across India whose livelihoods are dependent upon the livestock economy have, in various ways, experienced a “double victimisation”, being at the receiving end of destructive Hindu nationalist cow vigilantism and legal crackdowns, as well as at the losing end of an ongoing restructuring of the livestock economy that favours major actors backed and represented by dominant class interests. What our story shows, then, is that ongoing Hindu nationalist efforts at incorporating India’s poor and working classes in their political project notwithstanding, the bovine politics and economics of the Modi regime offer few benefits for India’s classes of labour. They are, rather, destructive of key parts of the livelihoods of these groups and overwhelmingly further accumulation among politically favoured classes of corporate capital. A final aim of this book is, therefore, to use this finding to reflect on the extent to which these political-economic dynamics constitute a potential challenge to the longer-term reproduction of Modi’s authoritarian populist regime. To what extent can the Modi regime sustain what Echeverri-Gent and colleagues (2021: 425) call the paradox of “remarkable political success amidst serious economic distress”? Leaning towards the optimism of the will rather than the pessimism of the intellect, this book uses the analysis of bovine political economy under Modi to explore openings or possibilities for political unravelling that may pave the way for novel forms of counter-hegemonic mobilisation from below.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we introduce the key themes and analytical concepts that run through the book. We start with a brief review of the literature on bovines and India’s bovine paradox, before situating our
Authoritarian Populism, Bovines, and State Contradictions 5 analysis in an emerging literature within critical agrarian studies scrutinising the relationship between authoritarian populism and the rural world. We then mobilise the idea of “state contradictions” to analyse the political economy of the Modi regime in general terms and elaborate on our argument about its key contradictions. We end with an overview of the chapters followed by a note on methodology.
The Bovine Paradox, Authoritarian Populism, and State Contradictions
India’s seeming bovine paradox has been the subject of discussions in the media from time to time, especially since the news broke in 2015 that India had by then emerged as the world’s leading exporter of beef meat in the form of carabeef, that is, meat from water buffaloes. Commentators taking a critical stance against Hindu nationalism have often pointed to this paradox, where the BJP and affiliated Hindu right-wing groups target beef and meat consumption at home while encouraging their exports abroad, as evidence of hypocrisy and the cynical readiness on the part of the government to discard the mask of Hindu piety and cow veneration in favour of export revenue.
The still relatively limited scholarly literature that has substantially engaged with this bovine paradox has, in contrast, sought to move beyond the often intensely polarising debates that “the hyper-politicization of beef” (Narayanan 2023: 9) can generate, to probe deeper complexities and nuances. Recent contributions from the anthropology of food, such as Staples’ (2020) Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India and Johan Fischer’s (2023) Vegetarianism, Meat and Modernity in India, illustrate convincingly the often marginal or contradictory effects that broader discourses on Hindu nationalism, cow protectionism, and “beef bans” have on people’s everyday foodways and culinary choices, foregrounding instead how the latter are shaped by a wider set of social and economic processes. Other scholars have approached the paradox from the standpoint of interspecies or multispecies ethnography and animal studies. Radhika Govindrajan’s Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (2018) provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of the limits to the Hindu nationalist project of cow protectionism by showing how its use of undifferentiated and abstract metaphors of the cow as mother of the Hindu nation is disrupted by “the distinct and lively materiality of the actual cows it [seeks] to represent” (Govindrajan 2018: 65, emphasis in original), and by people’s embodied everyday relationships with real bovines of flesh, blood, and emotion. From a comparable starting point, Adcock and Govindrajan’s (2019) collection “Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking Religion, Law and Ethics” similarly seeks to move the discussion of India’s bovines beyond questions of politicised religion by attending to the materialities of
Authoritarian Populism, Bovines, and State Contradictions
bovine-human interactions and how bovines co-produce social worlds with humans. In doing so, they persuasively deconstruct many of the misleading binaries that both inform but also blur the discussion of bovines in India: The holy cow vs. the merely economic buffalo; legality vs. illegality; and ethical living vs. violent practices. Equally firmly rooted in the same multispecies tradition, Yamini Narayanan’s (2023) Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India offers a powerful critique of the way in which current Indian debates on the cow have become so polarised and hyperpoliticised that the animal itself is almost lost from view. In recuperating the bodily experience of bovines in the Indian dairy and meat industry, Narayanan brings to our attention another paradox that the strong focus on cow protectionism in the context of slaughter and beef exports glosses over, namely that while the slaughter of bovines is intensely politicised by Hindu nationalist organisations for whom the Mother cow embodies Mother India, the routine, large-scale violence done to bovine bodies in the Indian dairy industry –culminating in slaughter when animals are “spent” or “superfluous” – is whitewashed almost to the point of complete erasure.
These studies have opened important new avenues for exploring the roles and relationships that are formed around bovines in India and have crucially shifted the terms of scholarly engagement away from rigid binary conceptions. We draw inspiration from and engage with these studies throughout the book. And yet, our interest in using India’s bovine paradox as an entry point for understanding the political economy of the Modi regime and its consequences for India’s rural classes of labour necessarily requires a closer engagement with the growing literature on authoritarian populism. This is a literature in which India has come to figure ever more prominently over the past decade, as the country’s democratic institutions have withered, and its political leadership turned increasingly autocratic under Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. The various strands of this literature commonly conceptualise Modi as a “national populist” (Jaffrelot 2021) or an “authoritarian populist” (Chacko 2018; Nielsen and Nilsen 2022a; Sinha 2021; Sud 2022) and point to the same two defining features of this form of politics that we outlined above, namely (i) an aggressive and assertive religious nationalism that seeks to turn India into a Hindu majoritarian state (Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot 2019; Jaffrelot 2021; Hansen and Roy 2022), and (ii) neoliberal economic policies that seek to remove obstacles to and create new spaces for capitalist accumulation (Kaur 2020; Palshikar 2019). In this sense, Modi’s authoritarian populism has much in common with that of Erdogan in Turkey (Adaman and Akbulut 2021), Trump in the USA (Kellner 2016), Bolsonaro in Brazil (Tamaki, Mendonça and Fereira 2021), and Duterte in the Philippines (Juego 2017; Ruud 2023), who all combine an exclusionary nationalism with neoliberal restructuring of the state and economy. Indeed, given the entrenchment and hegemonic consolidation of the Modi regime (Bello 2019), Modi has come to
be seen as an almost paradigmatic example of the rise of new authoritarian populisms in both established and emerging democracies across the Global North and South (Widmalm 2021). This new wave of “democratic backsliding” may be unfolding in a slow and piecemeal way, but it has affected a very high number of democracies across the globe (Berberoglu 2020; Lührmann et al. 2018), including the world’s largest democracy, India.
The main contributions to the study of the relationship between authoritarian populism and the rural world that is among our key interests here have, however, come from the field of critical agrarian studies where the topic has received unprecedented attention in recent years. This is largely due to the research emanating from the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, a collaborative effort among scholars and activists striving to unravel the ramification for rural politics of right-wing deepening across the world.1 The Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative has spawned a series of publications scrutinising this relationship under various concepts such as “authoritarian populism” (Scoones et al. 2018), “counter-revolution” (Bello 2019), “rightwing populism” (Borras 2020; Pattenden 2023), or “reactionary nationalist populisms” (Akram-Lodhi 2022). While this scholarship acknowledges variegation in actually existing forms and dynamics across different parts of the Global South and North alike, recognising the academic and political pitfalls of over-extending the reach of a singular analytic, these various concepts all index a defining political feature of populism, namely “the deliberate political act of aggregating disparate and even competing and contradictory class and group interests and demands into a relatively homogenised voice, that is, ‘we, the people’, against an ‘adversarial them’ for tactical or strategic purposes” (Borras 2020: 5). Such political dynamics, the literature argues, need to be seen in relation to how authoritarian populisms take shape in rural societies, drawing upon ongoing processes of economic and social change, for the most part contributing to worsening and deepening economic dynamics that are detrimental to rural classes of labour (Scoones et al. 2018). These dynamics –all of which are on display in contemporary India – include widespread and longstanding yet accelerating conditions of distress, resource grabbing, widening rural-urban disparities, environmental breakdown, and agro-industrial transformation that are largely unhinged from employment generation or other economic benefits to rural communities and classes of labour. This is coupled with a likewise widespread exhaustion of progressive counter-mobilisation in much of the world (Scoones et al. 2018). In other words, the rise of authoritarian populism in the rural world – in India and elsewhere – simultaneously indexes an increasingly generalised crisis and a dire need for emancipatory politics from below (see also Pattenden 2023).
Despite the clear acknowledgement of the intertwined nature of the political and economic “moments” of authoritarian populism, much of the recent scholarship on authoritarian populism and the rural world has retained
a primary interest in the ideological and discursive qualities of authoritarian populism. This has, in turn, triggered new interventions calling for a recalibration of analytical emphasis towards more in-depth and sustained probing of constitutive capitalist and class dynamics. Henry Bernstein (2020: 1539), for example, writes that: “What should be clear enough is that authoritarian populism, for all its diverse manifestations, should always be interrogated first through the questions: what class interests does it serve? By what means? And with what effects?” Taking a cue from Bernstein’s assessment, McKay and colleagues similarly argue for moving beyond analysing authoritarian populism in a solely discursive manner, to probe underlying capitalist dynamics that structure authoritarian populism, with their distinctive class contradictions and antagonisms. This, they write, “requires going beyond the discourse to a serious engagement with the role and nature of the state, and thus, an analysis into the nature of the class and intra-class relationships in society and in agrarian formation” (McKay et al. 2020: 355).
In this book, we are inspired by this call for shifting the study of authoritarian populism from the domain of ideology and discourse, into the domain of the state, capitalist dynamics, and class and intra-class relationships. By exploring Bernstein’s questions of what class interests authoritarian populism serves, by what means, and with what effects in the specific context of India’s bovine paradox, we seek to shed new light on the political economy of the Modi regime, and on the transformations this regime is bringing about. We do so through an engagement with the writings of Nicos Poulantzas, whose work in the Gramscian tradition (Gramsci 1971) on “authoritarian statism” inspired Stuart Hall’s original thinking on authoritarian populism in the context of Thatcherism in Britain (Hall 2011: 727–728; McKay et al. 2020). We suggest, however, that the call for renewed attention to the state to unravel the capitalist dynamic beneath right-wing populism across the world invites attention to another strand of Poulantzas’ writings: his idea of “state contradictions”. Poulantzas (1978) discusses the state as “a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions” (ibid.: 128, emphasis removed). This relationship is necessarily strained and frequently conflictual, giving rise to a series of “internal contradictions within the State” (ibid., emphasis removed). Therefore, rather than looking for contradictions in hegemonies as such, or in hegemonic projects, Poulantzas offers a perspective that would emphasise contradictions within the state – within, in the Indian case, a state housing an authoritarian populism constituted by Hindu nationalist politics and neoliberal economics. Importantly, Poulantzas’ class-analytical approach to the state also invites consideration of the conjuncturally specific articulations between the “political” and the “economic”, considered not as distinct realms, but rather as aspects or “moments” of capitalist constellations, where relations of production –comprising both “political” class relations and “economic” relations – always remain determinant (Poulantzas 2008: 396–397).
While Poulantzas’ class-analytical focus has been critiqued for underplaying the “economic” and for paying “too little attention … to basing the analysis of class struggle on the actual dynamic of capital accumulation” (Holloway and Picciotto 1978: 9),2 we find the Poulantzasian lens fruitful for scrutinising the ways in which state contradictions play out across the ostensibly “political” and “economic” aspects of Modi’s authoritarian populism. Insisting with Simon Clarke (1991: 9) that “the economic, political and ideological are complementary forms of a single social relation” under capitalism and the ubiquitous compulsions of the capital-labour relation, in what follows we draw on the suggestive formulation of state contradictions – seen as aspects of the patterning of “the fundamental class antagonism of capital and labour” (Bonefeld 1992: 107) – to analyse Modi’s authoritarian populism and its central contradictions. Consequently, we argue, rethinking authoritarian populism – in contemporary India as well as elsewhere – to explore state and class relations underpinning the ideological or discursive realm demands a careful and simultaneous engagement with accumulation dynamics and their contradictions.
State Contradictions in Modi’s India: Neoliberalisation and Accumulation Patterns
To grasp state contradictions in Modi’s India, we proceed from the observation that the growth model pursued by the BJP – and indeed by all Indian governments since economic liberalisation gathered momentum in 1991 – has been highly unequal in its economic impact, generating stark social and economic inequities (Drèze and Sen 2013). Importantly, these inequities have increased since the Modi government assumed office in 2014, with estimates by Chancel and Piketty (2019) suggesting that inequality has now reached its highest level since the days of the British Raj.3 This is evident in the strong increase in the number of Indian dollar billionaires in the last few years, and the fact that the richest 98 of these own the same amount of wealth as the 555 million people who make up the poorest 40 percent of the Indian population (Oxfam India 2022: 7).
To appreciate how the Modi regime’s brand of neoliberalism builds on and departs from that of its predecessors, it is instructive to briefly contextualise it with reference to the longer Indian experience with liberalising economic reforms since the early 1990s. In contrast to many countries in Latin America and Africa, India never experienced the kind of neoliberal shock therapy that came with structural adjustment programmes. Rather, the reforms that India undertook from the early 1990s and into the early 2000s were carried out “by stealth” (Jenkins 1999). As Nielsen and Nilsen (2022b) have argued, this early period of restructuring can be understood as a form of incremental roll-back neoliberalisation, focused on selective deregulation and gradual state-led marketisation. The pace of neoliberal reform only picked up momentum under a
Populism, Bovines, and State Contradictions
BJP-led government (Corbridge and Harriss 2000) in the late 1990s. The BJP government branded their neoliberal reforms under the sign of “India Shining”, upholding these as the prime strategy of social mobility and prosperity in India (Kaur 2020: 125). However, as it became increasingly clear that these reforms had produced neither high economic growth, nor social mobility and prosperity for most Indians, simmering popular opposition to neoliberalism eventually led to a change of government in 2004.
While the Congress-led coalition – the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) –that replaced the BJP largely remained committed to maintaining and even deepening the process of neoliberal restructuring,4 it was also compelled to respond to countervailing social forces to shore up popular legitimacy and negotiate the required consent to govern in the context of competitive democratic politics. Towards this end, the UPA formulated a political programme that sought to address the needs of India’s poor masses and classes of labour in the countryside (see Hasan 2012; Nilsen 2021). This programme entailed the rolling out of a series of social policy interventions in the form of rights-based legislation that aimed to mitigate the marginalisation of vulnerable groups that neoliberalisation invariably produced (Ruparelia 2013). The interventions included new and ambitious welfare programmes in employment, food security, and education – programmes which, despite their uneven and often patchy implementation, became important to the lives of millions of rural Indians. The UPA’s rights-based approach to social policy in many ways, then, represented a partial and contradictory move in the direction of roll-out neoliberalism that combines regulatory reform with active state-building and the disciplining and containment of those marginalised by earlier waves of rollback neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell 2002). In this sense, the UPA years most clearly brought to light the “contradiction of the simultaneous production of neoliberal and welfare policy” (Ahmed and Chatterjee 2016: 332) in India.
Up until the end of the UPA period, then, neoliberalisation in India had been restrained, incomplete, and contradictory, even as the overall thrust was towards opening ever-more sectors to private capital, creating new avenues for accumulation for corporate and dominant class interests (Chatterjee 2008; Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011). By 2014, however, the UPA project had unravelled. An important driver of this change was the fact that Indian capital had, in the years leading up to the crucial 2014 elections that brought Modi to power, more or less unanimously fallen in line behind Modi and the BJP. This shift was propelled in large part by dissatisfaction with the UPA’s roll-out of rights-based welfare which India’s capitalists had come to regard as a wasteful drain on the state exchequer (Desai 2016: 53). As Kothakapa and Sirohi (2023: 14–15) put it, top corporates criticised the return of “socialism” under the UPA while the middle classes decried what they saw as freebies for the poor. Corporate India massively funded Modi’s 2014 campaign, leading commentators on the left to describe the elections as “the biggest corporate heist in history”.
With the subsequent coming to power of the authoritarian populist Modi government, India has seen a departure from the inclusive, incremental “rollout neoliberalism” of the UPA towards a more unambiguous promotion of pro-business policies. In the political sphere, this has been accompanied by a shift from the moderately secular orientation of the prior government, towards a more assertive form of Hindu nationalism that seeks to render India a Hindu state,5 advancing through the kind of violent xenophobia and racism that characterise authoritarian populisms more generally (Borras 2020). Indeed, these two features or “moments” – economic neoliberalism and political Hindu nationalism – are, as we have argued, constitutive of Modi’s authoritarian populism. To appreciate how this authoritarian populism works across these “moments”, it is worth quoting extensively from Suhas Palshikar’s illuminating work on the BJP’s strategy for “crafting a new hegemony” under Modi:
What the Modi regime is set to do is to acquire the support of corporate interests separately (i.e., unconnected from the cultural agenda) for its economic agenda, and at the same time, acquire approval for its socio-political agenda from the larger public by linking it to the economic agenda. The corporate classes are expected not to be interested in or concerned with the emerging debates in the arena of public political culture believing that irrespective of what political culture emerges, the economic agenda would be implemented vigorously and the erosion of diversity would not hurt the material interests of the corporates. On the other hand, the ordinary citizen is sought to be convinced that economic wellbeing is primarily a function of a strong nation and therefore, the hurdles in becoming a strong nation (such as social schisms, minority appeasement, anti-national use of freedom of expression) need to be overcome. This is where the ability of Modi to bring together the middle classes and corporate interests become crucial. This alliance is critical not only to his electoral prospects, but more so for the hegemonic project. Modi emerges as the extraordinary leader because of skilfully marrying an aggressive corporatized economy with an assertive majoritarian politics.
(Palshikar 2019: 113–114, emphasis added)
As Ravinder Kaur (2020) has shown, Modi’s work on forging this crucial close alignment between Hindu nationalist majoritarianism and an aggressive neoliberalisation of the economy goes back to the early 2000s when he was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. While the story of the crafting of Modi’s image as an “extraordinary leader” and iconic enabler of corporateled economic growth and development has been told (and deconstructed) elsewhere (e.g. Jaffrelot 2021; Muraleedharan 2023; Sud 2022), what is important for our purposes is the considerable degree of success Modi has had in articulating and building consent around his authoritarian populist project
Authoritarian Populism, Bovines, and State Contradictions
that marries Hindu nationalist politics with neoliberal economics. As Shankar Gopalakrishnan (2006, 2009) has argued, there are strong resonances and overlaps between the ideology of Hindu nationalism and the ideology of neoliberalism, and the alliance between the two has grown gradually, albeit at times uneasily, since the 1990s. Yet only with the ascent of Modi has this alliance successfully consolidated into a singular hegemonic project. Under Modi, Kaur argues, neoliberalisation is mediated by a cultural politics centred on “the desire to unhinge the national from its colonial past and the impatience to inhabit the long-promised future” (Kaur 2020: 18). The new nation that is to emerge from this, Kaur writes, is partly a capitalist dreamworld in which investor-citizens can enjoy social mobility and material prosperity. But it is also “an ancient Hindu civilizational culture that assumes new forms but never loses its original essence” (ibid.: 109). This ideology is then fused with accumulation strategies that bear the imprint of Modi’s close relationship with big business. As Palshikar also observes, Modi has been so instrumental in creating and holding together this fusion that he now embodies “the entanglements between the imperatives of capitalist growth and … cultural nationalism” (Kaur 2020: 248). In contrast to the lacklustre and largely unsuccessful “India Shining” campaign of the previous BJP government, then, Modi has been much more successful in harnessing the dream of “good times” to the vehicle of Hindu nationalism, instrumentalising the neoliberal formula of economic growth towards the making of a strong Hindu nation. This, Kaur argues (2020: 246), locks “illiberal” cultural nationalism and “neoliberal” capitalist growth into a state of mutual indebtedness under authoritarian populist leadership.
Yet as Palshikar’s remark on the “aggressive corporatized economy” under Modi indicates,6 the current trajectory is one where major capitals and specific capitalists – especially those on friendly terms with Modi’s regime (Banaji 2022; Jaffrelot 2021) – are put in an increasingly comfortable position within the evolving political economy, driving increasing concentration of ownership across a range of industries (Chandra 2020; Chandra and Verma 2020). An estimate from 2023 found that a mere 20 companies accounted for a full 80 percent of India Inc’s total earnings, up from around 70 percent in 2019. The corresponding figure for early 2014 just before Modi came to power was less than 40 percent. In 1989, just prior to the commencement of liberalising economic reforms, the figure was a mere 14 percent (Jaffrelot 2021; Rajhansa and Mukherjea 2023). This accelerating drive towards greater corporate concentration tallies with Kothakapa and Sirohi’s (2023) recent assessment that dominant fractions of capital have enjoyed unprecedented opportunities to entrench their power and wealth during the years when Modi has been prime minister. During this period, the largest and most profitable firms have been winning out disproportionately, while small capitalists, in contrast, find themselves increasingly marginalised. This, in turn, has fuelled
speculations that India may be moving towards a new form of “conglomerate” capitalism dominated by a small number of large firms (Damodaran 2020), or a new and increasingly unstable “oligarchic state capitalism” characterised by “incestuously close links between state and business” (Chatterjee 2023; see also Sircar 2022).
Crucial to our analysis, these political-economic developments have been accompanied by a depression of macro-economic indicators under Modi, alongside declining growth rates and increasing levels of hunger (Kothakapa and Sirohi 2023) – all indicators of the precarious situation that India’s classes of labour are facing. Indeed, unemployment in India is currently at its highest level since the 1990s and exceeds those of most other emerging economies in the Global South (Nilsen 2023), with youth unemployment, in particular, being “shockingly high” (Basu, cited in Subramaniam and Farooqui 2023). The real wages for workers engaged in construction work, or as agricultural labourers or non-agricultural workers have remained almost stagnant since Modi came to power, growing by less than 1 percent per year, thus indexing a real crisis for India’s classes of labour. This crisis is mirrored in poverty estimates. While no new government data on poverty has been published while Modi has been in power, World Bank estimates from 2019 suggested that close to 45 percent of all Indians lived on less than USD 3.65 per day. In all, the poorest half of the Indian population – around 700 million people – now earns just 13 percent of all national income and owns only 6 percent of the national wealth (Nilsen 2023). Unsurprisingly, this precarious situation for India’s poor and working classes also registers in the domains of nutrition and hunger: In 2022, India slipped for the third consecutive year in the Global Hunger Index to 107th position among 121 countries – lower than other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh –registering significant levels of undernourishment and child stunting in the population (Al Jazeera 2022). In Modi’s India, in other words, increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top has been accompanied by greater precarity and a crisis of social reproduction among India’s classes of labour. This escalating economic instability and vulnerability emanating from the class dynamics of state-capital relations under Modi, Elizabeth Chatterjee (2023) suggest, may render Modi’s authoritarian populism politically vulnerable. To appreciate how and why, we need to consider how – as the references to the importance of “the larger public” and “the ordinary citizen” in Palshikar’s analysis of the BJP’s hegemonic strategy – Modi and the BJP actively seek to incorporate and gain political legitimacy from India’s poor and working classes. Since 2014, this strategy has met with considerable success as lower caste groups and poor voters have been drawn into the BJP’s ambit of electoral support in greater numbers: In 2019, the BJP won 44 percent of the lower caste vote, around a third of the Dalit vote, and 36 percent of the votes of the poor. In all, Modi and the BJP garnered support from 44 percent of all
Hindu voters across the lines of caste and class that are otherwise often salient political identities (Nilsen 2023).
This significant inclusion of classes of labour into the Hindu nationalist support base has been sought and achieved through a complex mix of strategies. Electoral promises of unprecedented economic growth and “good times” for all – backed up by sensationalist accounts of Modi’s achievements during his tenure as chief minister of Gujarat – early on tapped into the frustrations and aspirations of both the poor and the moderately upwardly mobile neomiddle classes, predominantly from backward caste backgrounds (Jaffrelot 2015). This has been supplemented by an albeit moderate provision of targeted welfare initiatives whereby individual voters are provided with tangible private goods such as cooking gas, toilets, and medical insurance, which register more immediately in the lived experience of poorer citizens than do substantial investments in more diffuse public goods such as education and public health (Echeverri-Gent, Sinha and Wyatt 2021). In addition, Modi’s authoritarian populist style has played a key role in mobilising support amongst India’s classes of labour, projecting him as a strong, committed, and compassionate leader in whom also poor voters can place their trust in exchange for “good decisions for the polity” (Sircar 2020). To this we can add the power of fascination that Hindu nationalism’s discourse of Hindu unity and a shared sense of Hinduness has, in some contexts, been shown to exercise vis-à-vis Dalits, who may “seek acceptance from the upper-caste Hindus who had always culturally and socially marginalised them” (Narayan 2009). Alf Nilsen (2023) conceives of this as a form of “psychological wages” that accrue to India’s poor and working classes through their involvement in Hindu nationalist politics, extending a promise of dignity, recognition, and development that can only be realised within the Hindu fold. Such psychological wages may be supplemented by what Thomas Blom Hansen (2001) calls “wages of violence”. The violence that is integral to contemporary Hindu nationalist politics through, for example, cow protection vigilantism relies on a cohort of “angry young men” (Jaffrelot 2021: 87–89) recruited across castes. They carry out public acts of violence and vandalism, attacks on “anti-national minorities”, and the destruction of property, thereby carving open new spaces for the public assertion and affirmation of plebeian or stigmatised identities (Hansen 2001: 61–66).
And yet, the escalating economic instability, the widespread and increasing precarity among India’s classes of labour, the prolonged betrayal of the promise of material betterment, and the crisis of social reproduction that emanate from intensifying class dynamics of state-capital relations under Modi’s authoritarian populism arguably indicate a space from which the Modi regime may potentially be rendered vulnerable. In our terms, this points most clearly to the acute need, intellectually and politically, for unravelling state contradictions, their concomitant capital and class dynamics, and their on-the-ground
ramifications as these unfold in Modi’s India. The remainder of the book seeks to do this in the realm of India’s bovine political economy.
The Structure of the Book and the Argument
We start, in the next chapter, with a comprehensive analysis of the central state contradictions that are at the heart of Modi’s authoritarian populism. Starting from an analysis of the politics of vigilantism, cow protectionism, and the weaponisation of “bovine symbolism” (Staples 2020: 12) in Hindu nationalist discourse and practice, the chapter demonstrates the centrality of bovines to the Hindu nationalist project of turning India into a Hindu state. This project, we show, also unfolds in the legal domain where ever-stricter laws have been introduced to simultaneously protect the cow and discipline and punish those who harm her. Central state contradictions, however, become visible when we conjoin the analysis of this political moment of Modi’s authoritarian populism to its economic counterpart, revealing a surge in beef exports emanating from an expanding formal meat sector, operating with state support – albeit strained – yet sitting in uneasy proximity to the bovine politics being pursued by Hindu nationalist forces. Using bovines as a lens for exploring and empirically grounding the larger story of neoliberalisation and accumulation patterns in India recounted above, we uncover a process of considerable restructuring of the bovine economy over the last decades, characterised by the expansion and consolidation of a corporate beef export sector dominated by a limited number of large capitalist enterprises. Their rise within the bovine political economy aligns with the overall neoliberalising thrust of the Modi regime and, we argue, entails novel class and accumulation dynamics that differ markedly from how the livestock economy functions within the livelihoods of the country’s classes of labour.The emerging scenario is one wherean informal bovine economy largely in the hands of classes of labour faces usurping competition from a formal industry that is centralised, capital intensive, and firmly controlled by dominant class interests.
The subsequent chapters further explore the unfolding dynamics of these state contradictions in the realm of the country’s bovine political economy. Chapter 3 analyses their impact among classes of labour in the Indian countryside and cities, documenting their decidedly negative consequences. Classes of labour engaged in sectors of the bovine economy across the rural-urban divide, we argue, live through what we refer to as a process of double victimisation. Specific segments of classes of labour are both direct and indirect victims of new forms of legal and extra-legal regulation of the bovine economy that restrict their economic agency and produce economic hardship and physical suffering. At the same time, they are also increasingly excluded from a transforming bovine economy because of broader political-economic restructurings that favour dominant class interests. This chapter thus offers
substantial evidence concerning the class interests that Modi’s authoritarian populism serves, as well as its ramifications. In addition, the double victimisation of classes of labour explored in this chapter potentially has broader implications for the capacity of Modi’s authoritarian populism to successfully seek legitimacy from India’s poor and working classes. Irrespective of the fact that the social, economic, and political emaciation of Muslim classes of labour is integral to the political moment of Modi’s authoritarian populism, the wider negative impact of this politics on India’s complex and extensive bovine economy nevertheless means that the livelihoods of larger segments of India’s classes of labour that Modi’s regime seeks to incorporate are considerably undermined. The political implications of this are something we return to in the concluding chapter.
Chapter 4 analyses the acceleration and intensification of the politicaleconomic dynamics in the bovine sector analysed in earlier chapters during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic. In this period, fast-changing class and accumulation dynamics in the bovine economy have, we argue, enabled further corporate consolidation across multiple sectors. This trajectory of change in favour of elite class interests and large corporate actors, we suggest, means that the organised industry is now increasingly well-positioned to capture a larger share of the value hitherto produced and retained among classes of labour in the informal bovine economy. This, we argue, starkly reveals the underlying class bias of Modi’s authoritarian populism. When read alongside the previous chapter’s argument that the incorporation of already-precarious classes of labour in Modi’s political project increasingly occurs through the destruction of key parts of their livelihoods, this chapter demonstrates how the state contradictions that this book is centrally concerned with are arguably moving towards being less contradictory insofar as the political and economic moments of Modi’s authoritarian populism move towards increasing alignment in an intensifying manner.
While this emerging dynamic may safely be interpreted as an acute threat to the livelihoods of millions of rural Indians, it also opens for another – and more hopeful – line of thinking politically about the prospects for emancipatory or counter-hegemonic projects. This is the ambition of our concluding chapter. Returning to our central contention that India’s “bovine paradox” must be understood as an exemplar of broader political-economic dynamics at play in Modi’s India – and of the contradiction between Hindu nationalism’s attempts at incorporating India’s poor and working classes while also pushing neoliberal economic restructuring to the benefit of capitalist classes –we suggest that the unfolding intensification of such dynamics may index emerging structural conditions of possibility for progressive counterhegemonic mobilisation. In making this argument, the concluding chapter engages the emerging scholarship on the recent farmers’ agitations in India, locating structural conditions of counter-hegemonic mobilisation surrounding
bovines within broader dynamics in a restructuring economy in which agrarian relations are taking on novel configurations; and where Modi’s authoritarian populism seeks political majority by pitting classes of labour against each other.
A Note on Methodology and Representation
When researching this book, we have worked almost entirely with secondary sources. Both of us have carried out longer and shorter ethnographic fieldworks in different parts of India since the early 2000s, on subjects as diverse as land grabbing, agrarian change, social movements and democracy, the political economy of development, and Hindu nationalist politics. This earlier research forms an important backdrop to how we approach and analyse the material we present in this book. That material, in turn, consists of the extant academic literature, as well as reporting, accounts, and investigations by journalists, social activists, academics, and other actors writing about bovine politics and economics in contemporary India. We also draw on material produced by and on the Indian beef industry, including promotional material, trade statistics, and online self-presentations, in addition to relevant government policy documents.
Locating material on that part of the story which involves Hindu nationalist vigilantism and extra-legal violence was, alarmingly, surprisingly easy. Such atrocities are in no small measure carried out in spectacularly violent form, to intimidate minorities in general and further communal polarisation on a larger scale. It is, in other words, undertaken for public consumption and is meant to be visible. It is sometimes filmed and shared on social media, is widely reported on in the national and international media, and figures prominently in many accounts of contemporary Hindu nationalism.
The part of the story that centres on the political economy of the bovine sector and of the Modi regime, however, proved considerably more difficult to research. This is no doubt attributable to the generally secretive nature of the latter, and to the “sensitive” and sometimes-controversial nature of the former. Our analysis of these factors therefore draws eclectically on a very diverse number of sources, which we seek to piece together into a bigger picture. The same is the case for our account of the impact of Modi’s authoritarian populism on rural classes of labour which similarly builds on secondary sources, and which would arguably have been greatly enriched by long-term fieldwork in specific rural settings. We hope readers will take the analysis and arguments in this monograph as an invitation to undertake precisely this.
Since the aim of this relatively short book is to describe and analyse the big picture, a more fine-grained and systematic mapping of interstate variation is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, we draw selectively on empirical examples from several Indian states to illustrate broader trends. A few states, however, receive more in-depth attention, particularly Uttar Pradesh and
Karnataka. Although these states have markedly different demographic, economic, cultural, and linguistic histories and characteristics, they are widely seen as the two most crucial “laboratories of Hindutva” today (Dhingra 2022; Ramakrishnan 2020). In both states, BJP governments have used their control of the state to tighten legal frameworks regulating the transport, slaughter, and consumption of bovines to further the political project of Hindu nationalism, while allied organisations operating in civil society have used extralegal vigilantism to violently regulate the lives, livelihoods, and behaviour of minorities, with the tacit or even active support of state institutions and the police. This fusion of Hindu nationalist forces in political and civil society has been described by Jaffrelot (2021: 250) as constituting “a vigilante state whose ideal type has taken shape in [Chief Minister] Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh”, but which also exists in some form in Karnataka and other states (see also Nielsen, Selvaraj and Nilsen forthcoming). In addition, Uttar Pradesh is a particularly crucial state to any discussion of bovine political economy as it contributes close to two-thirds of India’s overall meat export revenues, houses close to half of all abattoirs and meat processing export units in the country, and has the highest buffalo population of any Indian state (Alavi 2020). It is also a state with upwards of 100 million people living under or just above the official poverty line, and where vigilante groups are given a particularly free hand. In Uttar Pradesh, we thus find the most striking manifestations of the processes that we are concerned with in this book: Virulent Hindu nationalist forces, significant parts of India’s beef agro-industry, and those sections of rural classes of labour most heavily affected by double victimisation.
Based on this material, the book attempts to tell a singular story, a story that connects and interweaves the lives of small farmers and other owners of bovines in the Indian countryside; cattle traders, dealers, and transporters; butchers, tanners, and leatherworkers; the dairy industry, informal abattoirs, and modernised export-oriented slaughterhouses; cow protection activists, cow shelters, and corporate social responsibility; informal markets and global value chains; and Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism. Each chapter tells one or more parts of this interconnected story.
Notes
1 See https://www.iss.nl/en/research/research-networks/emancipatory-rural-politicsinitiative
2 This shortcoming is derived from the “conceptual gulf” (Mau 2023: 56) between the “political” and the “economic” that is taken for granted in his approach, arguably an abiding flaw in much Marxist theorising (see Wood 1995).
3 The exact level of economic inequality in India today is debated. Some recent estimates suggest that it remains high and widening (Nilsen 2023), while others detect a slight decline in inequality since 2019 (Ghatak, Raghavan, and Xu 2022). Importantly, however, proponents of the latter view do not attribute any decline in inequality to redistributive efforts or wider structural changes to the Indian economy, but
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accustomed or not to such a scene; their eyes were swollen with the last night’s frequent flood of grief, and still weeping genuine tears of regret; the upper part of their cheeks perfectly black, and swollen so that they could hardly see, with the constant blows they had inflicted on themselves with their fists.
Among the chiefs and matabooles who were seated on the marly, all those who were particularly attached to the late king or to his cause evinced their sorrow by a conduct usual indeed among these people at the death of a relation, or of a great chief (unless it be that of Tooitonga, or any of his family), but which to us may well appear barbarous in the extreme; that is to say, the custom of cutting and wounding themselves with clubs, stones, knives, or sharp shells; one at a time, or two or three together, running into the middle of the circle formed by the spectators to give these proofs of their extreme sorrow for the death, and great respect for the memory of their departed friend.
The sentiments expressed by these victims of popular superstition were to the following purpose. “Finow, I know well your mind; you have departed to Bolotoo, and left your people under suspicion that I or some of those about you are unfaithful; but where is the proof of infidelity? where is a single instance of disrespect?” Then inflicting violent blows and deep cuts in the head with a club, stone, or knife, would again exclaim at intervals, “Is this not a proof of my fidelity? does this not evince loyalty and attachment to the memory of the departed warrior?” Then perhaps two or three would run on and endeavour to seize the same club, saying with a furious tone of voice, “Behold the land is torn with strife, it is smitten to pieces, it is split by revolts; how my blood boils; let us haste and die! I no longer wish to live: your death, Finow, shall be mine. But why did I wish hitherto to live? it was for you alone; it was in your service and defence only that I wished to breathe; but now, alas! the country is ruined. Peace and happiness are at an end; your death has insured ours: henceforth war and destruction alone can prosper.” These speeches were accompanied with a wild and frantic agitation of the body, whilst the parties cut and bruised their heads every two or three words with the knife or club they held in their hands. Others,
somewhat more calm and moderate in their grief, would parade up and down with rather a wild and agitated step, spinning and whirling the club about, striking themselves with the edge of it two or three times violently upon the top or back of the head, and then suddenly stopping and looking stedfastly at the instrument spattered with blood, exclaim, “Alas! my club, who could have said that you would have done this kind office for me, and have enabled me thus to evince a testimony of my respect for Finow? Never, no never, can you again tear open the brains of his enemies. Alas! what a great and mighty warrior has fallen! Oh, Finow, cease to suspect my loyalty; be convinced of my fidelity! But what absurdity am I talking! if I had appeared treacherous in your sight, I should have met the fate of those numerous warriors who have fallen victims to your just revenge. But do not think, Finow, that I reproach you; no, I wish only to convince you of my innocence, for who that has thoughts of harming his chiefs shall grow white headed like me (an expression used by some of the old men). O cruel gods to deprive us of our father, of our only hope, for whom alone we wished to live. We have indeed other chiefs, but they are only chiefs in rank, and not like you, alas! great and mighty in war.”
Such were their sentiments and conduct on this mournful occasion. Some, more violent than others, cut their heads to the skull with such strong and frequent blows, that they caused themselves to reel, producing afterwards a temporary loss of reason. It is difficult to say to what length this extravagance would have been carried, particularly by one old man, if the prince had not ordered Mr Mariner to go up and take away the club from him, as well as two others that were engaged at the same time. It is customary on such occasions, when a man takes a club from another, to use it himself in the same way about his own head; but Mr. Mariner, being a foreigner, was not expected to do this; he therefore went up and, after some hesitation and struggle, secured the clubs one after another, and returned with them to his seat, when, after a while, they were taken by others, who used them in like manner.
After these savage expressions of sorrow had been continued for nearly three hours, the prince gave orders that the body of his father
should be taken to Felletoa to be buried. In the first place, a bale of gnatoo was put on a kind of hurdle, and the body laid on the bale; the prince then ordered that, as his father was the first who introduced guns in the wars of Tonga, the two carronades should be loaded and fired twice before the procession set out, and twice after it had passed out of the marly; he gave directions also that the body of Finow’s daughter, lately deceased, should be taken out in the model of a canoe, and carried after the body of her father; that during his life, as he wished always to have her body in his neighbourhood, she might now at length be buried with him.
Matters being thus arranged, Mr. Mariner loaded the guns and fired four times with blank cartridge. The procession then went forward, and in the course of two hours arrived at Felletoa, where the body was laid in a house on the marly at some distance from the grave, till another and smaller house could be brought close to it; and this was done in course of an hour. The post being taken up, the four pieces which compose the building (a kind of shed in a pyramidal form, the eaves reaching within four feet of the ground) were brought by a sufficient number of men, and put together at the place where it was wanted. This being done, the body was brought on the same hurdle or hand-barrow to the newly-erected building (if it may be so termed); and then being taken off the hurdle, it was laid within, on the bale of gnatoo, and the house was hung round with black gnatoo, reaching from the eaves to the ground.
The women, who were all assembled and seated round the body, began a most dismal lamentation. In the mean time a number of people, whose business it is to prepare graves, were digging the place of interment under the direction of a mataboole, whose office is to superintend such affairs. Having dug about ten feet, they came to the large stone covering a vault; a rope was fastened double round one end of the stone, which always remains a little raised for the purpose, and was raised by the main strength of 150 or 200 men, pulling at the two ends of the rope towards the opposite edge of the grave till it was brought up on end. The body being oiled with sandalwood oil, and then wrapped in mats, was handed down on a large bale of gnatoo into the grave; the bale of gnatoo was then, as is
customary, taken by the before-mentioned mataboole as his perquisite. Next, the body of his daughter, in the model of a canoe, was let down in like manner, and placed by his side. The great stone was then lowered down with a loud shout. Immediately certain matabooles and warriors ran like men frantic round about the place of sepulture, exclaiming, “Alas! how great is our loss! Finow, you are departed: witness this proof of our love and loyalty!” At the same time they cut and bruised their own heads with clubs, knives, axes, etc.
The whole company now formed themselves into a single line, the women first, and afterwards the men, but without any particular order as to rank, and proceeded towards the back of the island for the purpose of getting a quantity of sand in small baskets.
They sang loudly the whole way, as a signal to all who might be in the road or adjacent fields to hide themselves as quickly as possible, for it is sacrilegious for any body to be seen abroad by the procession during this part of the ceremony; and if any man had unfortunately made his appearance, he would undoubtedly have been pursued by one of the party, and soon dispatched with the club. So strictly is this attended to, that nobody in Mr. Mariner’s time recollected a breach of a law so well known. Even if a common man was to be buried, and Finow himself was to be upon the road, or in the neighbourhood of the procession whilst going to get sand at the back of the island, he would immediately hide himself; not that they would knock out the king’s brains on such an occasion, but it would be thought sacrilegious and unlucky, the gods of Bolotoo being supposed to be present at the time. The chiefs are particularly careful not to infringe upon sacred laws, lest they should set an example of disobedience to the people. The song on this occasion, which is very short, is sung first by the men and then by the women, and so on alternately; and intimates (though Mr. Mariner has forgotten the exact words) that the fala (which is the name of this part of the ceremony) is coming, and that every body must get out of the way.
When they arrived at the back of the island, where anybody may be present, they proceeded to make a small basket of the leaves of
the cocoa-nut tree, holding about two quarts, and to fill it with sand; this being done, each of the men carried two upon a stick across the shoulder, one at each end: while the women only carried one, pressed in general against the left hip, or rather upon it, by the hand of the same side, and supported by the hand of the opposite side, brought backwards across the loins, which they consider the easiest mode for women to carry small burdens; they then proceeded back the same way, and with ceremony, to the grave. By this time the grave above the vault was nearly filled with the earth lately dug out, the remaining small space being left to be filled by the sand, which is always more than enough for the purpose. It is considered a great embellishment to a grave to have it thus covered, and is thought to appear very well from a distance, where the mound of clean sand may be seen; besides which it is the custom, and nobody can explain the reason why—which is the case with several of their customs. This being done, all the baskets in which the sand was brought, as well as the remaining quantity of earth not used in filling up the grave, are thrown into the hole out of which the earth was originally dug. During the whole of this time the company was seated, still clothed in mats, and their necks strung with the leaves of the ifi tree; after this they arose and went to their respective habitations, where they shaved their heads, and burnt their cheeks with a small lighted roll of tápa, by applying it once upon each cheek bone; after which, the place was rubbed with the astringent berry of the matchi, which occasioned it to bleed, and with the blood they smeared about the wound in a circular form, to about two inches in diameter, giving themselves a very unseemly appearance.
They repeat this friction with the berry every day, making the wound bleed afresh; and the men in the meantime neglect to shave and to oil themselves during the day: they do it, however, at night, for the comfort which this operation affords. After having, in the first place, burnt their cheeks and shaved their heads, they built for themselves small temporary huts for their own accommodation during the time of mourning, which lasts twenty days. Early in the morning of the twentieth day, all the relations of the deceased chief, together with those who formed his household, and also the women who were tabooed by having touched his dead body whilst oiling and
preparing it, went to the back of the island (without any particular order or ceremony) to procure a number of flat pebbles, principally white, but a few black, for which they made baskets on the spot to carry them in, as before mentioned, when they went to procure sand. With these they returned to the grave, strewed inside of the house with the white ones, as also the outside, as a decoration to it; the black pebbles they strewed only upon the white ones which covered the ground directly over the body. After this the house over the tomb was closed up at both ends with a reed fencing, reaching from the eaves to the ground; and at the front and back with a sort of basketwork made of the young branches of the cocoa-nut tree, split and interwoven in a very curious and ornamental way, which remains till the next burial, when they are taken down, and after the conclusion of the ceremony new ones are put up in like manner. A large quantity of provisions was now sent to the marly by the chiefs of the different districts of the island, ready prepared and cooked, as also a considerable quantity prepared by Finow’s own household: among these provisions was a good supply of cava root. After the chiefs, matabooles, and others were assembled, the provisions and cava were served out in the usual way. During this time no speech was made, nor did any particular occurrence take place. The company afterwards repaired each to his respective house, and got ready for a grand wrestling-match and entertainment of dancing the Mée too Buggi (literally, “the dance, standing up with paddles”).
Funeral Obsequies of King Finow
During the intervals of the dances, several matabooles, warriors, and others, indulged in bruising and cutting their heads with clubs, axes, etc., as proofs of their fidelity to the late chief; among them two boys, one about twelve, the other about fourteen years of age (sons of matabooles), made themselves very conspicuous in this kind of self-infliction; the youngest in particular, whose father was killed in the service of the late chief, dining the great revolution at Tonga, after having given his head two or three hard knocks, ran up to the
grave in a fit of enthusiasm, and dashing his club with all his force to the ground, exclaimed, “Finow! why should I attempt thus to express my love and fidelity towards you? My wish is that the gods of Bolotoo permit me to live long enough to prove my fidelity to your son.” He then again raised his club, and running about bruised and cut his little head in so many places, that he was covered with streams of blood. This demonstration on the part of the young hero was thought very highly of by every one present, though, according to custom, nothing at that time was said in his praise; agreeable to their maxim, that praise raises a man’s opinions of his own merit too high, and fills him with self-conceit. The late Finow’s fishermen now advanced forward to show their love for their deceased master in the usual way, though instead of a club or axe, each bore the paddle of a canoe, with which they beat and bruised their heads at intervals, making similar exclamations to those so often related. In one respect, however, they were somewhat singular, that is, in having three arrows stuck through each cheek in a slanting direction, so that while their points came quite through the cheek into the mouth, the other ends went over their shoulders, and were kept in that situation by another arrow, the point of which was tied to the ends of the arrows passing over one shoulder, and the other end to those of the arrows passing over the other shoulder, so as to form a triangle; and with this horrible equipment they walked round the grave, beating their heads and faces as before stated with the paddles, or pinching up the skin of the breast and sticking a spear quite through: all this to show their love and affection for the deceased chief.
After these exhibitions of cruelty were over, this day’s ceremony (which altogether lasted about six hours) was finished by a grand wrestling match, which being ended, every one retired to his respective house or occupation; and thus terminated the ceremony of burying the King of the Tonga Islands.
The Sandwich Islanders observe a number of singular ceremonies on the death of their kings and chiefs, and have been till very recently accustomed to make these events occasions for the practice of almost every enormity and vice.
“The people here,” writes Mr Mariner, “had followed only one fashion in cutting their hair, but we have seen it polled in every imaginable form; sometimes a small round place only is made bald just on the crown, which causes them to look like Romish priests; at other times the whole head is shaved or cropped close, except round the edge, where, for about half an inch in breadth, the hair hangs down its usual length. Some make their heads bald on one side, and leave the hair twelve or eighteen inches long on the other. Occasionally they cut out a patch in the shape of a horse*-shoe, either behind or above the forehead; and sometimes we have seen a number of curved furrows cut from ear to ear, or from the forehead to the neck. When a chief who had lost a relative or friend had his own hair cut after any particular pattern, his followers and dependants usually imitated it in cutting theirs. Not to cut or shave off the hair indicates want of respect towards the deceased and the surviving friends; but to have it cut close in any form is enough. Each one usually follows his own taste, which produces the endless variety in which this ornamental appendage of the head is worn by the natives during a season of mourning.
“Another custom, almost as universal on these occasions, was that of knocking out some of the front teeth, practised by both sexes, though perhaps most extensively by the men. When a chief died, those most anxious to show their respect for him or his family, would be the first to knock out with a stone one of their front teeth. The chiefs related to the deceased, or on terms of friendship with him, were expected thus to exhibit their attachment; and when they had done so, their attendants and tenants felt themselves, by the influence of custom, obliged to follow their example. Sometimes a man broke out his own tooth with a stone; more frequently, however, it was done by another, who fixed one end of a piece of stick or hard wood against the tooth, and struck the other end with a stone till it was broken off. When any of the men deferred this operation, the women often performed it for them while they were asleep. More than one tooth was seldom destroyed at one time; but the mutilation being repeated on the decease of every chief of rank or authority, there are few men to be seen who had arrived at maturity before the introduction of Christianity to the islands with an entire set of teeth;
and many by this custom have lost the front teeth on both the upper and lower jaw, which, aside from other inconveniences, causes a great defect in their speech. Some, however, have dared to be singular, and though they must have seen many deaths, have parted with but few of their teeth.
“Cutting one or both ears was formerly practised on these occasions, but as we never saw more than one or two old men thus disfigured, the custom appears to have been discontinued.
“Another badge of mourning, assumed principally by the chiefs, is that of tatooing a black spot or line on the tongue, in the same manner as other parts of their bodies are tatooed.
“The Sandwich islanders have also another custom almost peculiar to themselves, viz., singing at the death of their chiefs, something in the manner of the ancient Peruvians. I have been peculiarly affected more than once on witnessing this ceremony.
“A day or two after the decease of Keeaumoku, governor of Maui, and the elder brother of Kuakina, governor of Hawaii, I was sitting with the surviving relatives, who were weeping around the couch on which the corpse was lying, when a middle-aged woman came in at the other end of the large house, and, having proceeded about half way towards the spot where the body lay, began to sing in a plaintive tone, accompanying her song with affecting gesticulations, such as wringing her hands, grasping her hair, and beating her breasts. I wrote down her monody as she repeated it. She described in a feeling manner the benevolence of the deceased, and her own consequent loss. One passage was as follows:—
“‘Alas! alas! dead is my chief! Dead is my lord and my friend! My friend in the season of famine, My friend in the time of drought, My friend in my poverty, My friend in the rain and the wind, My friend in the heat and the sun, My friend in the cold from the mountain, My friend in the storm, My friend in the calm, My friend in the eight seas Alas! alas! gone is my friend, And no more will return!’
“Other exhibitions of a similar kind I witnessed at Mani. After the death of Keopuolani we frequently saw the inhabitants of a whole district that had belonged to her coming to weep on account of her death. They walked in profound silence, either in single file or two or three abreast, the old people leading the van and the children bringing up the rear. They were not covered with ashes, but almost literally clothed in sackcloth. No ornament, or even decent piece of cloth, was seen on any one. Dressed only in old fishing nets, dirty and torn pieces of matting, or tattered garments, and these sometimes tied on their bodies with pieces of old canoe ropes, they appeared the most abject and wretched of human beings I ever saw. When they were within a few hundred yards of the house where the corpse was lying they began to lament and wail. The crowds of mourners around the house opened a passage for them to approach it, and then one or two of their number came forward and, standing a little before the rest, began a song or recitation, showing her birth, rank, honours, and virtues, brandishing a staff or piece of sugarcane, and accompanying their recitation with attitudes and gestures, expressive of the most frantic grief. When they had finished they sat down and mingled with the thronging multitudes in their loud and ceaseless wailing.”
Though these ceremonies were so popular, and almost universal, on the decease of their chiefs, they do not appear to have been
practised by the common people among themselves. The wife did not knock out her teeth on the death of her husband, nor the son his when he lost his father or mother, neither did parents thus express their grief when bereaved of an only child. Sometimes they cut their hair, but in general only indulged in lamentations and weeping for several days.
Ellis, the Polynesian traveller, makes mention of a singular building seen by him in Hawaii, called the Hare o Keave (the House of Keave), a sacred depository of the bones of departed kings and princes, probably erected for the reception of the bones of the king whose name it bears, and who reigned in Hawaii about eight generations back. It is, or was when Mr. Ellis saw it, a compact building, twenty-four feet by sixteen, constructed with the most durable timber, and thatched with ti leaves, standing on a bed of lava that runs out a considerable distance into the sea. It is surrounded by a strong fence or paling, leaving an area in the front and at each end about twenty-four feet wide. The pavement is of smooth fragments of lava, laid down with considerable skill. Several rudelycarved male and female images of wood were placed on the outside of the enclosure, some on low pedestals under the shade of an adjacent tree, others on high posts on the jutting rocks that hung over the edge of the water. “A number stood on the fence at unequal distances all round; but the principal assemblage of these frightful representatives of their former deities was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where, forming a semi-circle, twelve of them stood in grim array, as if perpetual guardians of the mighty dead reposing in his house adjoining. A pile of stones was neatly laid up in the form of a crescent, about three feet wide and two feet higher than the pavement, and in this pile the images were fixed. They stood on small pedestals three or four feet high, though some were placed on pillars eight or ten feet in height, and curiously carved. The principal idol stood in the centre, the others on either hand, the most powerful being placed nearest to him; he was not so large as some of the others, but distinguished by the variety and superior carvings of his body, and especially of his head. Once they had evidently been clothed, but now they appeared in the most indigent nakedness. A few tattered shreds round the neck of one that stood
on the left hand side of the door, rotted by the rain and bleached by the sun, were all that remained of numerous and gaudy garments with which their votaries had formerly arrayed them. A large pile of broken calabashes and cocoa-nut shells lay in the centre, and a considerable heap of dried and partly rotten wreaths of flowers, branches and shrubs, and bushes and fragments of tapa (the accumulated offerings of former days), formed an unsightly mound immediately before each of the images. The horrid stare of these idols, the tattered garments upon some of them, and the heaps of rotting offerings before them, seemed to us no improper emblems of the system they were designed to support, distinguished alike by its cruelty, folly, and wretchedness.”
Mr. Ellis endeavoured to gain admission to the inside of the house, but was told it was tabu roa (strictly prohibited), and that nothing but a direct order from the king or high priest could open the door. However, by pushing one of the boards across the doorway a little on one side, he looked in, and saw many large images, some of wood very much carved, and others of red feathers, with distended mouths, large rows of sharks’ teeth, and pearl-shell eyes. He also saw several bundles, apparently of human bones, cleaned carefully, tied up with cinet made of cocoa-nut fibres, and placed in different parts of the house, together with some rich shawls and other valuable articles, probably worn by those to whom the bones belonged, as the wearing apparel and other personal property of the chiefs is generally buried with them. When he had gratified his curiosity, and had taken a drawing of the building and some of its appendages, he proceeded to examine other remarkable objects of the place.
Adjoining the Hare o Keave to the southward, he found a Pahio tabu (sacred enclosure) of considerable extent, and was informed by his guide that it was one of the Pohonuas of Hawaii, of which he had often heard the chiefs and others speak. There are only two on the island—the one which he was then examining, and another at Waipio on the north-east part of the island, in the district of Kohala.
These Pohonuas were the Hawaiian cities of refuge, and afforded an inviolable sanctuary to the guilty fugitive, who, when flying from
the avenging spear, was so favoured as to enter their precincts. They had several wide entrances, some on the side next the sea, the others facing the mountains. Hither the manslayer, the man who had broken a tabu, or failed in the observance of its rigid requirements, the thief, and even the murderer, fled from his incensed pursuers, and was secure. To whomsoever he belonged, and from whatever part he came, he was equally certain of admittance, though liable to be pursued even to the gates of the enclosure. Happily for him, those gates were perpetually open; and, as soon as the fugitive had entered, he repaired to the presence of the idol, and made a short ejaculatory address, expressive of his obligations to him in reaching the place with security. Whenever war was proclaimed, and during the period of actual hostilities, a white flag was unfurled on the top of a tall spear at each end of the enclosure; and until the conclusion of peace waved the symbol of hope to those who, vanquished in fight, might flee thither for protection. It was fixed a short distance from the walls on the outside, and to the spot on which this banner was unfurled the victorious warrior might chase his routed foes, but here he must himself fall back; beyond it he must not advance one step, on pain of forfeiting his life; the priests and their adherents would immediately put to death any one who should have the temerity to follow or molest those who were once within the pale of the pahio tabu, and, as they expressed it, under the shade or protection of the spirit of Keave, the tutelar deity of the place.
In one part of the enclosure, houses were formerly erected for the priests, and others for the refugees, who, after a certain period, or at the cessation of war, were dismissed by the priests, and returned unmolested to their dwellings and families, no one venturing to injure those who, when they fled to the gods, had been by them protected. Mr. Ellis could not learn the length of time it was necessary for them to remain in the Pohonuas, but it did not appear to be more than two or three days. After that they either attached themselves to the service of the priests, or returned to their homes.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A Samoan inquest Carrying a body about Embalming in Samoa Samoan grave fires Catching a spirit New Zealand burial customs—The Sexton in Borneo—Dayak funerals—Funeral customs of the Sea Dayaks—Tombs in the air—Exorcising the evil spirit Cruel treatment of widows The “village of the dead” The place of skulls Praying to the dead Ojibbeway mourners Disposing of the property of the dead A Chippewa ghost story An invisible presence A spirited ghost Veneration for the dead A royal funeral The death dance The last of the “Stung Serpent.”
n Samoa, another of the Polynesian islands, it is considered a disgrace to the family of an aged chief if he is not buried alive· “When an old man feels sick and infirm,” says the missionary Turner, “and thinks he is dying, he deliberately tells his children and friends to get all ready and bury him. They yield to his wishes, dig a round deep pit, wind a number of fine mats round his body, and lower down the poor old heathen into his grave in a sitting posture. Live pigs are then brought and tied, each with a separate cord, the one end of the cord to the pig and the other to the arm of the old man. The cords are then cut in the middle, leaving the one half hanging at the arm of the old man, and off the pigs are taken to be killed and baked for the burial feast. The old man, however, is still supposed to take the pigs with him to the world of spirits. The greater the chief the more numerous the pigs, and the more numerous the pigs the better the reception in their Hades of heathenism. The poor old man thus wound up, furnished with his pig strings, and covered over with some more mats, is all ready His grave is then filled up, and his dying groans are drowned amid the weeping and the wailing of the living.
“This revolting custom of burying alive is, as I have noted, not confined to infants and the aged. If a person in sickness shows signs of delirium, his grave is dug, and he is buried forthwith, to prevent the disease spreading to other members of the family. A young man in the prime of life was thus buried lately. He burst up the grave and escaped. He was caught and forced into the grave again. A second
time he struggled to the surface, and they led him to the bush, lashed him fast to a tree, and left him there to die.
“Whenever the eye is fixed in death the house becomes a scene of indescribable lamentation and wailing. ‘Oh! my father, why did you not let me die, and you live here still?’ ‘Oh! my brother, why have you run away and left your only brother to be trampled upon?’ ‘Oh! my child, had I known you were going to die! Of what use is it for me to survive you?’ These and other doleful cries may be heard two hundred yards from the house; and as you go near you find that they are accompanied by the most frantic expressions of grief, such as rending garments, tearing the hair, thumping the face and eyes, burning the body with small piercing firebrands, beating the head with stones till the blood runs; and this they called an ”offering of blood for the dead.” Every one acquainted with the historical parts of the Bible will here observe remarkable coincidences. After an hour or so, the more boisterous wailing subsides, and, as in that climate the corpse must be buried in a few hours, preparations are made without delay. The body is laid out on a mat oiled with scented oil, and, to modify the cadaverous look, they tinge the oil for the face with a little turmeric. The body is then wound up with several folds of native cloth, the chin propped up with a little bundle of the same material, and the face and head left uncovered, while for some hours longer the body is surrounded by weeping relatives. If the person has died of a complaint which has carried off some other members of the family, they will probably open the body to search for the disease. Any inflamed substance they happen to find they take away and burn, thinking that this will prevent any other members of the family being affected with the same disease. This is done when the body is laid in the grave.
“While a dead body is in the house no food is taken under the same roof. The family have their meals outside, or in another house. Those who attended the deceased were formerly most careful not to handle food, and for days were fed by others as if they were helpless infants. Baldness and the loss of teeth were supposed to be the punishment inflicted by the household, if they violated the rule. Fasting was common at such times, and they who did so, ate
nothing during the day, but had a meal at night, reminding us of what David said when mourning the death of Abner: ‘So do God to me and more also, if I taste bread or aught else till the sun be down.’ The fifth day was a day of purification. They bathed the face and hands with hot water, and then they were clean, and resumed the usual time and mode of eating.
“The death of a chief of high rank was attended with great excitement and display: all work was suspended in the settlement; no stranger dared to pass through the place. For days they kept the body unburied, until all the different parties connected with that particular clan assembled from various parts of the island, and until each party had in turn paraded the body, shoulder high, through the village, singing at the same time some mournful dirge. The body, too, was wrapped up in the best robe, viz., the most valuable fine mat clothing which the deceased possessed. Great respect is still shown to chiefs on these occasions, and there was a recent instance of something like a thirty days’ mourning; but the body is seldom paraded about the settlements now-a-days.
“The burial generally takes place the day after death. As many friends as can be present in time attend. Every one brings a present; and the day after the funeral, these presents are all so distributed again as that every one goes away with something in return for what he brought. Formerly, the body was buried without a coffin, except in the cases of chiefs; but now it is quite common to cut off the ends of some canoe belonging to the family, and make a coffin of it. The body being put into this rude encasement, all is done up again in some other folds of native cloth, and carried on the shoulders of four or five men to the grave. The friends follow, but in no particular order; and at the grave again there was often further wailing, and exclamations such as, “Alas! I looked to you for protection, but you have gone away! why did you die! would that I had died for you!” Since the introduction of Christianity, all is generally quiet at the grave. The missionary, or some native teacher appointed by him, attends, reads a portion of Scripture, delivers an address, and engages in prayer, that the living may consider and prepare for the time to die. The grave is called the last resting place; and in the case
of chiefs the house is thatched with the leaves of sandal wood, alluding to the custom of planting some tree with pretty foliage near the grave. Attempts have been made to get a place set apart as the village burying-ground, but it is difficult to carry it out. All prefer laying their dead among the ashes of their ancestors, on their own particular ground. As the bones of Joseph were carried from Egypt to Canaan, so did the Samoans carry the skulls of their dead from a land where they had been residing during war, back to the graves of their fathers as soon as possible after peace was proclaimed. The grave is often dug close by the house. They make it about four feet deep; and, after spreading it with mats like a comfortable bed, there they place the body, with the head to the rising of the sun and the feet to the west. With the body they deposit several things which may have been used to answer the purpose of a pickaxe in digging the grave; not that they think these things of any use to the dead, but it is supposed that if they are left and handled by others, further disease and death will be the consequence. Other mats are spread over the body, on these a layer of white sand from the beach, and then they fill up the grave.
A Samoan Sepulchre.
“The spot is marked by a little heap of stones a foot or two high. The grave of a chief is nearly built up in an oblong slanting form, about three feet high at the foot and four at the head. White stones or shells are intermixed with the top layer; and if he has been a noted warrior, his grave may be surrounded with spears, or his gun laid loosely on the top.”
Embalming, the same authority informs us, is known and practised with surprising skill in one particular family of Samoan chiefs. Unlike the Egyptian method, as described by Herodotus, it is performed in Samoa exclusively by women. The viscera being removed and buried, they day after day anoint the body with a mixture of oil and aromatic juices, and they continue to puncture the body all over with fine needles. In about two months the process of
desiccation is completed. The hair, which had been cut off and laid aside at the commencement of the operation, is now glued carefully on to the scalp by a resin from the bush. The abdomen is filled up with folds of native cloth, the body is wrapped up with the same material, and laid out on a mat, leaving the hands, face, and head exposed.
A house is built for the purpose, and there the body is placed with a sheet of native cloth loosely thrown over it. Now and then the face is oiled with a mixture of scented oil and turmeric, and passing strangers are freely admitted to see the remains of the departed. At present there are four bodies laid out in this way in a house belonging to the family to which we refer—viz., a chief, his wife, and two sons. They are laid on a platform, raised on a double canoe. It must be upwards of thirty years since some of them were embalmed, and although thus exposed they are in a remarkable state of preservation. They assign no particular reason for this embalming, further than that it is the expression of their affection to keep the bodies of the departed still with them as if they were alive.
On the evening of the burial of any important chief, his friends kindled a number of fires at a distance of some twenty feet from each other, near the grave, and there they sat and kept them burning till morning light. This was continued sometimes for ten days after the funeral; it was also done before the burial. In the house where the body lay, or out in front of it, fires were kept burning all night by the immediate relatives of the departed. The common people had a similar custom. After burial they kept a fire blazing in the house all night, and had the space between the house and the grave so cleared as that a stream of light went forth all night from the fire to the grave. Whether this had its origin in any custom of burning the dead body, like the ancient Greeks, it is impossible now to ascertain. The probability, however, is that it had not. The account the Samoans give of it, is, that it was merely a light-burning in honour of the departed, and a mark of tender regard: just as we may suppose the Jews did after the death of Asa, when it is said they made a very great burning for him. Those commentators who hold that this and one or two other passages refer to a Jewish mark of respect, and not
