Milking a Nation: analysing the nonhuman in the post-independence context of India through a postcolonialist and feminist perspective

Abstract

Abstract This thesis focuses on the neo-colonialist quality of milk and its transformative power across the controversial interspecies conjunctures of post-Independence India. The specific socio-historical context of reference corresponds to the ecological and economic framework of Operation Flood, a political intervention developed in India during the last decades of the 20th century within the agrifood system, dictating policies on the domestic management of the natural resource of milk. Firstly, I will investigate the versatile quality of the white animal protein, a real protagonist of what I will present as a more-than-human history of the making of a Nation. I will do so by introducing the cultural, religious and ecological features that are part of the rich historical heritage of today’s largest dairy producer in the world. Milk will be analysed not only as paramount ingredient to the culinary traditions of India, but especially as powerful symbol that mirrors the anthropocentric and constructed dualism of Nature and Culture. The latter will be exposed as alarmingly thriving within the discriminative narrative of the Indian agrifood system, thus leaving space to a transversal approach for understanding. The intersectional quality of the topic in fact will be addressed in four sections, through a cross-analysis of Critical Animal Studies, Environmental Anthropology, Food Studies, Feminist Studies and Environmental Humanities of India. My argumentation then retraces the historical facts and the socio-economic consequences related to the ecological context of 1970s India, submitted to the ambitious plans of the so-called White Revolution. The unsuccessful environmental transformations and anthropological changes triggered by Operation Flood will be examined as useful illustrations of the following deterioration in the management of natural resources, where milk appears as a neo-colonialist vehicle of exploitation of human and nonhuman lives. A postcolonial lens will be used to unfold the many insights of interspecies entanglement behind the huge development plan of international scale, questioning the sustainability of the interference of Western wealthier countries with their controversial food aids and agreements. Achieved milk production and consumption data then will be addressed as problematic within the Indian context of speciesist and sexist inequalities. With this aim, I will focus on a specific phase of the industrial development plan, that involved breeding practices on the genes of domestic Indian bovines with the ones of more performative Western cows, under the illusion of post-Independence economic affirmation among wealthier States. The same exploitation of bodies is replicated on the lives of Indian rural women, employed at the lowest level of the dairy chain production, whose rights have been ignored by capitalistic ideologies. Milk, symbol of maternity and care, will be proposed as incarnation of a proper paradigm of growth that opposes its biological nurturing function and instead gets colonized, capitalized and violated within the sociocultural spheres of Indian societal hierarchies, still coping with problematic Gandhian beliefs on the profitability of feminine bodies. I will then discuss how the food policies of Operation Flood keep favouring uneven distribution of goods and unequal collective growth at the expenses of human and nonhuman female individuals, proceeding to silence the plurality of voices that, because of their reproductive power, are involved in the project and experience oppression. Lastly, after having examined the contextual interconnections between women and animals, I will reflect upon existing responsive perspectives to this entanglement, transcending the bodily vulnerability of both human and nonhuman counterparts. In this light, the conclusion of this thesis will be based on my personal consideration of ecofeminism and veganism as valuable responses to the problem.