Mother India

In 1927, an American, Katherine Mayo, wrote a notorious book called Mother India. (There's an edited edition currently in print.) Gandhi called it a drain inspector's report, and one can see why. Mayo went through India and pointed out every sort of defect and disorder, especially with regard to medicine and hygiene. She condemned everything. And it was quite a bestseller: the first edition was published in May 1927; mine (which I bought in a second-hand bookstore for the perversity of it) was the thirteenth printing, in January 1928.

So I pulled it out of my bookshelf yesterday.

I had earlier posted a picture of a stuffed calf hanging from a house front in Mylapore, and speculated that it was meant to keep the cow lactating.

As I was leafing through Mother India, Lo, I found a photograph of another stuffed calf, and this text - you can also appreciate her prose style:

The young milch cow is usually carrying her calf when she is brought to the city. the Hindu dairyman does not want the calf, and his religion forbids him to kill it. So he finds other means to avoid both sin and the costs of keeping. In some sections of the country he will allow it a daily quarter- to half-cup of its mother's milk, because of a religious teaching that he who keeps the calf from the cow will himself suffer in the next life. But the allowance that saves the owner's soul is too small to save the calf who staggers about after its mother on the door-to-door milk route as long as its trembling legs will carry it. When the end comes, the owner skins the little creature, sews the skin together, stuffs it crudely with straw, shoves four sticks up the legs, and, when he goes forth on the morrow driving his cow, carries his handiwork over his shoulder. Then, when he stops at a customer's door to milk, he will plant before the mother the thing that was her calf, to induce her to milk more freely. Or again, in large plants, the new-born calves may be simply tossed upon the morning garbage carts, at the diary door, and carried away to the dumps where they breathe their last among other broken rubbish.

Dr. J. F. Kendrick, of the International Health Board
of the Rockefeller Foundation, a Madras City milk-man,
and his stuffed calf

And here's one more pair of then-and-now pictures:

In the streets of Bombay

And, from yesterday's The Hindu:

cattle on a Chennai road

So... a little ambiguity here. I deplore her attitude, but there is some truth in what Mayo has written. It's pretty interesting stuff, if one can sort out the information from the colour -- the masala.

(And by the way, I read recently - somewhere - that the classic Hindi film Mother India (1938), starring Nargis as a heroic woman who overcomes every sort of adversity, was deliberately so named, to counteract the image of India portrayed in Mayo's book.)