Market-driven dairying and the politics of value, labor and affect in Gujarat, India

Abstract

Ethnography in Gujarat, India’s poster-state of market reforms, recovers what transpires when the individual embraces capital for market-driven production. This contribution reports on resource-poor rural households who embark on dairying through buffaloes acquired with microcredit. The essay discusses the politics of economic value, and economic value encountering other values, lifeworlds and affective relations related to work, humans and non-human others. These phenomena interrupt commodity production. Human–animal relations challenge both capitalism’s treatment of bovines as machines, and the bovine politics of Hindu nationalism rooted in ignorance of rural economy, lifeworlds and livelihoods.

Keywords:

• gender
• Hindu nationalism
• caste
• Adivasis
• cattle
• smallholders

Linking the poor to markets has emerged as a major development strategy among global policy organizations, financial institutions and national governments. At the rural margins in the global South, cultivators are now linked to high-value commodity markets following the adoption of market-driven policy paradigms. This often involves extending microcredit to borrowers to purchase capital in order to undertake market-driven production. This essay explores the paradox of those who acquire capital for market-driven production then withdraw the use of capital from market production, and capital acquisition for income-generation being followed by its use for subsistence. I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork on the Indian state’s recent expansion of dairying across resource-poor rural India. The phenomenon of buffaloes, a form of living capital, acquired through microcredit in rural Gujarat, the beacon of market reforms in India, forms the landscape of this inquiry. This essay is motivated by the silences, ellipses and evasions of dairy producers regarding why they discontinued milk sale to the local dairy cooperative to which microcredit is formally linked.

Dairying has emerged as a leading market-driven economic activity in resource-poor rural areas worldwide (Braun 2005), spurred by the fact that most households own livestock (GOI 2006a). India is one of the world’s largest milk producers, but most of its milk is consumed in the domestic market. The spur is dairying is situated within market-driven development, which has been enacted on a massive scale in India’s resource-poor drylands comprising more than half the country’s territory. These regions are inhabited largely by small farmers owning 1–2 hectares of land, marginal farmers owning less than a hectare of land and landless households. While small farmers already have diversified livelihoods and have historically grown cash crops, my focus is on the relatively well-endowed marginal farmers who have acquired buffaloes through microcredit loans, and are emergent commercial farmers. I focus on this group because the production of the celebratory discursive image of the entrepreneurial smallholder that is newly linked to markets is based on this social segment. I report on how motivations that are often opposed to the logic of the market propel commodity production. The withdrawal of milk from the market is a window on values and worlds beyond capitalist production, and challenges celebratory claims of the embrace of markets by the poor.

I draw upon scholarship in postcolonial studies, economic anthropology, and Marxist interpretations of labor and capital to explore the intimacy of the relationship between the individual and capital she acquires, and human resistance to the logic of capital. Dairy households’ behavior that undermines market-driven production is rendered comprehensible when the individual is treated as a human being in the world, bearing non-capitalist desires and possibilities (Chakrabarty 2009; Gidwani 2008). Households’ behavior reveals the assertion of lifeworlds other than as ‘labor’ or ‘entrepreneurial farmer’, and affective capacities with human and non-human others. I discuss possibilities other than as labor that the individual inhabits, and divergence in the nature of value between market-driven policy paradigms and individual lifeworlds. Market-driven dairying reveals that exchange consists of friction between different values which are linked to distinct social actors. The values and lifeworlds of rural households emphasize belongings, identities and ways of being other than entrepreneurial in Gujarat, the exemplar of market reforms in India.

Theories of labor and capital in agrarian change

I take as my starting point scholarship in agrarian studies which is focused on market-driven production, specifically how markets are formed and the power relations through which they are constituted (e.g. Langan 2011; Longo and Clark 2012; Neimark 2010; Peluso 2009). This literature has focused on the interaction of policy and politics in shaping commodity markets (McCarthy, Gillespie, and Zen 2012), governance structures and their distributional impacts along a commodity chain (Konefal, Mascarenhas, and Hatanaka 2005), and the crucial role of state incentives in bringing markets into being (Selwyn 2010). However, the individual’s response to market expansion and the intimacy between the individual and the capital she embraces are less explored (but see Hébert 2008). Scholarship focused on contract farming undertakes more fine-grained analysis of households’ relationship with the means of production. The literature emphasizes that contract farming is better understood as labor working under contract for capital than as entrepreneurial agriculture by a household (Little 1994; Nevins and Peluso 2008; Watts 1992, 1994). This work brings clarity to property relations surrounding land, labor, capital and inputs between farmers and firms. However, it is thin on modes of resistance so that we miss other logics that may animate household practices even under adverse distributional terms. Furthermore, this approach tells us less about the relationship of the individual with the inputs of production – land, labor and capital – that she works with intimately. Where scholarship has focused on households’ encounter with capital in a largely subsistence-oriented domain (e.g. Appadurai 1989; Gupta 1998), we lack insight on people’s experiences in relation to their lifeworlds, affect and personhood.

Dairy households are both owners of capital and ‘labor’ that actually undertakes milk production. Scholarship pertaining to labor under contemporary capitalism offers innovative insights on labor identities. However, most accounts focus on the individual as a worker (e.g. Azmeh 2014; Cross 2010; Ngai 2005; RoyChowdhury 2005). Accounts that challenge the unitary identity of individual-as-labor emphasize that ‘workers’ are also consumers (Ramamurthy 2003). However, this formulation still utilizes the framework of an exchange economy, with the individual cast as ‘worker’, ‘consumer’, or both. Furthermore, the identity of the ‘worker’ is subsumed within the framework of capital itself – as a productive input in the value-generation process. Analytical frameworks outside the logic of capital are less utilized. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in Gujarat, western India, publicly celebrated as India’s most pro-market state, I unpack what transpires when the individual acquires buffalo capital for market-driven production. I suggest that a dialectical analysis centered on capital alone is unable to fully explain household behavior, and understanding household practices involves seeing a person as a whole in the world, beyond relations defined by capital.

This contribution focuses on both households’ engagement with the market, and people’s lifeworlds beyond the market and elusive to incorporation into it. In studying household transactions with dairies, I draw from David Graeber’s (2001) account of the multiple meanings of value and his call for treating these meanings in a unified way to uncover the politics of value in exchange. Apart from being the degree to which objects are desired in an economic sense, value, in a sociological sense, is a conception of what is good and desirable, and in a linguistic sense denotes meaningful difference (Graeber 2001). People mark meaningful difference between acquiring buffaloes for commodity production and for economic security. Individuals differentiate between the use of milk for subsistence and for market, and between human effort for cash income and for realizing affective capacities. Ideas about what is valuable animate the choices of both ‘market-driven’ and ‘subsistence’ households.

Vinay Gidwani’s (2008) interpretation of Marx, and his emphasis on the potentials and possibilities of labor to exist for itself rather than as use value for capital – as an input in the production of a commodity, and as itself a commodity bearing a price – strongly informs this essay. Gidwani (2008) emphasizes separating work – an individual’s effort for her own non-capitalist ends – from labor which constitutes wage activity that is involved in commodity production. This formulation helps parse people’s activities not simply in terms of market-driven production or withdrawal from it, but in terms of many generative potentials and possibilities. Gidwani’s (2008) exhortation for intellectual practice to recognize the possibilities of life in terms of its range of acapitalist relations and capacities provides a window through which to understand individual behavior and choice-making in conditions of contemporary capitalism.

Gujarat is a compelling site to study capitalist expansion in new geographies such as India’s resource-poor districts. The state is historically one of India’s most pro-market (Sinha 2005). The Gujarat government’s bureaucrats have worked closely with the central state to attract private investment to Gujarat (Sinha 2003). Gujarat’s market-driven path has intensified under the rule of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party since 1995. Since the 2000s, the government of Gujarat has adopted a ‘government to business’ policy of using development to deepen the market’s penetration of communities (Daftary 2016; GOI 2006b). Bureaucrats urge producers to manufacture marketable goods, exhort households to respond to market signals (GOG 2007), order the lowest level administrators to identify profitable economic activities for rural households (GOG 2007) and emphasize e-marketing commodities through district level cooperatives (Daftary 2016; GOG 2007, 62). India’s high-profile prime minister won the 2014 national election partly by invoking the Gujarat model of development, characterized by venerating the private sector and extolling entrepreneurial identities. This essay discusses what happens when those at the margins are linked to capital in Gujarat, the place where the individual is purpotedly the most entrepreneurial and the market a force of social good.

Methods and research site

The policy thrust on dairying since the 2000s is implemented through watershed development, the Indian state’s largest development intervention for the country’s poorest districts. The term ‘watersheds’ refers to these regions’ erodible and sloping lands, from which water drains to low-lying valleys. Watershed development delivers microcredit to cultivators for the purchase of capital for commercial agriculture (GOI 2007). Given the coupled nature of agro-livestock systems, this is accompanied by a thrust on dairying (Basu 2009). Indeed, the green revolution of capital intensification in well-endowed districts in the 1960s was accompanied by the white revolution of dairy development (Basu 2009). Gujarat is regarded as the home of the white revolution. The Indian state established the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in Anand, central Gujarat, in 1965 (George 1990). The NDDB is a national federation of regional dairies that are linked to village milk cooperatives to which milk producers supply one to two liters of milk a day. Dairy expansion in Gujarat is lubricated by the dense infrastructure of rural roads laid down during earlier waves of dairy development.

I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork in Dahod district in eastern Gujarat, bordering the states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. I undertook a long-term stay in Mahipura village in Limkheda block (a block is a cluster of 20–30 villages) which has a village milk society. Borrowers repay their buffalo loans by selling milk to Panchmahal dairy in Panchmahal district adjoining Dahod. This paper is based on mixed-method data collected over 18 months from 2006 to 2008 and December 2014 to January 2015. I analyzed watershed development guidelines, training manuals of the Gujarat government, reports of World Bank staff regarding the Bank’s investment in India’s cooperative dairy sector, policy research on smallholder dairying in Gujarat, regional banks’ evaluations of livestock loans, and annual reports of the Panchmahal Dairy. In Mahipura, I conducted participant observation of fodder collection, grazing, cattle-shed cleaning and milking. I conducted an original, in-depth household survey, with a household defined as that entity which has a common kitchen. A list of all households was built from Mahipura’s voters’ list (N = 123). The survey focused on demographic information, subsistence production, market-based production, livestock management, capital ownership, wage labor, household labor and loan-taking. Quantitative data were entered in SPSS Version 17.0 and statistical analysis was conducted in SAS Version 9.1.

Watershed development guidelines mandate its implementation by the elected local body in the community. The Indian state enacted Panchayati Raj Institutions in 1994, devolving the power and resources for local governance and community development to elected local bodies called panchayats. Each panchayat is led by an elected leader called sarpanch who is elected by the entire electorate of a panchayat. The sarpanch heads the village watershed development committee and facilitates borrowers’ linkage to banks. Each village milk society is governed by a committee, which is led by a chairperson and secretary. The secretary is in charge of milk collection at the society twice each day. The secretary measures the quantity and fat content and records each household’s payments. The Panchmahal Dairy’s tempo (a five-wheeled vehicle with an open carrier) transports milk to the plant. I conducted in-depth interviews with cattle owners, buyers of loan buffaloes (N = 12), milk sellers (N = 13), the sarpanch and the secretary of the milk society. I analyzed the accounts of the milk society and read the minutes of panchayat meetings and records of watershed development.

The politics of value in high-value commodity production

I draw upon Appadurai’s (1986) insight that demand is located within the political economy of a society rather than emanating from some predetermined human need to elaborate the forms of knowledge and power through which milk has been rendered essential in the making of a national consumer identity in India. I then unpack the erasures and diminution of values through which low price to producers is established. The critical thrust of genealogy is to uncover the power and knowledge moves involved in rendering ideas as natural, and revealing their historical and therefore contingent character (Sivaramakrishnan 1996). Through a genealogy of milk, I situate the universalized demand for milk in light of its historical production.

In his animal history of imperial Burma, Saha (2015) suggests that British rule may have brought the practice of milking cattle for dairy to Burma and elsewhere, and that widespread dairying may not have existed prior to colonial rule. In postcolonial India, dairy consumption by an urban middle class became a marker of an emerging national identity. The second wave of cooperative-sector dairy expansion in the 1970s listed as its objective the formation of milk as a stable part of a ‘national diet’ (NDDB 1977, 3). Dairy scholars reproduce goals such as guaranteeing ‘urban consumers permanent access to milk at stable prices at any time’ (Terhal 1987, 167), and reducing the cost of milk ‘to benefit consumers’ (Bardhan and Huria 1987, 95–96). Improving milk consumption in rural diets is strategically articulated as a goal only during waves of dairy intensification. However, evidence from banks that provide livestock loans for dairying challenges milk consumption as being habitual among rural households. The Bank of India (n.d.) notes, about its borrowers in tribal south Gujarat, ‘they were not drinking tea at all before they brought the buffaloes home. With the availability of milk at home, these families have learnt to drink tea daily in the morning’ (47). The taste for milk had to be learned; it was acquired and cultivated, not a part of habitus. Household dairy consumption followed commercial dairying rather than preceding it.

A focus on the social life of commodities – the social relations through which production, consumption and circulation take place – helps unpack the power relations through which dairies and households engage in exchange. The notion of symmetry that the term ‘exchange’ invokes erases households’ bargaining disadvantage and monopsonistic dairies’ ability to set the terms of exchange. Milk is devalued through discursive practices that are rooted in particular logics related to production inputs. While Appadurai (1986) emphasizes that social practices and classifications shape demand, social practices also shape what is considered valuable. Dairy experts devalue fodder, feed and women’s labor, critical inputs in milk production. For instance, J.M. Shah (1987, 41) asserts that ‘feeds and fodders, which accounts [sic] for about 70–80% of the total cost under rural conditions, are usually available as farm by-products which otherwise would go waste’. Halse (1987, 21) surmises that ‘a traditional farmer …  may consider that his only cost of production is the kilo of grain that he gives his milch animal each day’. Households periodically face foodgrain shortages, and the narrative of ‘the kilo of grain’ as the only cost of production materializes a false foodgrain abundance. What counts as an input of production is a matter of ontological invention (Castree 2003). Halse (1987, 21) surmises that a milk producer ‘may consider that … the coarse straw fed, ha[s] no estimable value’, although straw is highly valued given the absence of green fodder, and women expend considerable time and labor to gather it. However, built into the discounting of fodder is the deeper devaluation of women’s labor, which merits elaboration.

In dairy scholars’ narratives, a basket of fodder is assumed to appear miraculously before a waiting bovine which then chews cud and ruminates. Women’s multiple-times-a-day labor of gathering fodder by lopping grass from fields and field boundaries, and grazing cattle in distant pastures, entailing three to six hours of work each day is obliterated. In Mahipura, older boys who occasionally grazed cattle were teased by men and women alike with calls that floated across the pasture: ‘Oye! Where’s your mother/sister-in-law today? Has she fled to her natal home?’ Watering livestock is women’s work. Across Mahipura, women and girls fetch water from the nearest handpump 150 to 300 meters away, twice to thrice each day. Distance increases when these sources are depleted during the summer. Ironically, policy and academic narratives acknowledge women’s centrality in bovine care. Halse (1987, 21) notes that dairying labor is ‘often his [the farmer’s] wife’s’. World Bank staff record that women play a ‘dominant productive role’ (Candler and Kumar 1998, 50) in dairying.

But experts ultimately discount women’s labor by labeling livestock management ‘housework’ and obscuring female labor under the umbrella term ‘family labor’ (see J.M. Shah 1987, 41). Halse (1987, 21) presumes that ‘the farmer’ may consider ‘his wife’s’ labor to have no value. J.M. Shah casts women as ‘unemployed or highly underemployed’ (1987, 41). Candler and Kumar (1998, 50) assert that women are ideally suited to tend to livestock because they are ‘at home all day’. These narratives reproduce the logic of mainstream economic policy that erases women’s work of economic production (Agarwal 1992; Gururani 2002), and reproduce the lens of national accounting systems that undercount women’s work (Agarwal 1985; Mies 1981; Waring 1988). These remarks also construct men as household decision-makers and ignore women’s criticality in resource management and decision-making regarding livestock (Agarwal 1997; Kabeer 1997).

Basu (2009) notes that while cooperative dairy development repeatedly invokes women’s participation, it does not acknowledge how the gendered division of labor supports dairying. The political construction of dairying as domestic work instrumentalizes low prices to milk producers based on the de-valuation of women’s labor. That women were in charge of livestock management was so common-sense to me that I did not unpack this norm until confronted by its implication during household surveys. Mahipura consists of a main village inhabited by 105 households and the distant hamlet Bordi inhabited by 18 households. One summer evening, I reached the last house I planned to survey in Bordi that day as dusk fell. The householder was enjoying the cool brought by the setting sun, chatting with his age-cohort neighbor. Like most of Bordi’s inhabitants, Tera is a Patel from Mahipura’s wealthiest lineage. I began Tera’s survey and discovered that his was a single-person household. I was taken aback, assuming the swept verandah, neatly tethered goats, and Tera's enjoyment of leisure to be enabled by a laboring female presence in the background. In response to my questions on irrigation resources, Tera reported that he had a deep well and perennial irrigation. I moved on to livestock, and always started by enumerating goats which are owned by rich and poor alike and unlikely to cause discomfort for respondents. Tera listed his numerous goats, but my sequential queries about bulls, cows and buffaloes yielded a straightforward ‘nathi’ (‘Don’t have any’) for each kind of bovine. I visibly struggled to square the well-endowed Tera owning only goats, known as ‘the poor person’s bovines’. As my confusion grew, Tera, exasperated by what appeared to be willful incomprehension on my part, exclaimed, ‘There’s no woman (bairee) in the house, so I don’t have any cattle, only goats’.

Tera’s ownership of goats to the exclusion of cattle indexes women’s cruciality in cattle management, particularly fodder collection and cattle shed-cleaning. Goats are ruminants but buffaloes must be stall-fed, and goat-holding areas involve cursory cleaning, but cleaning cattle holding areas entails strenuous labor. Eastern Gujarat is inhabited predominantly by tribes called Adivasis and marginalized castes. Dahod’s dominant social groups comprise Bhils, western India’s largest tribe, and Kolis, ‘lower-caste’ cultivators who are classified in the Indian constitution as being among ‘Other Backward Classes’. Both Kolis and Adivasis tether their livestock indoors at dusk to protect them from predators and theft, and return them to outdoor holding areas at dawn. Dwellings have elevated mud flooring to keep the interiors dry. While goats tread lightly on the floor, bovines pit the floor with their hooves, forming deep craters. Each morning, slushy manure must be scooped by hand across the rough cratered floor, while pellet-shaped goat droppings are easily swept away. Women perform the harsh and tedious work of scooping dung by hand, pit by uneven pit each morning. My host Saroda spent two hours scooping the droppings of her pair of oxen and a cow. While men may graze cattle, they do not clean cattle sheds or harvest fodder from steaming fields under a burning sun, squatting and lopping with a sickle. To Tera, I was being deliberately uncomprehending – because he was a single householder, I should not even have been inquiring about cattle. That Tera owned no cattle despite their centrality to food security and economic security illuminates the cruciality of women in cattle management. Cattle command far higher prices than goats in livestock markets, and can be sold in case of drought or scarcity without having to sell or mortgage land.¹ Every perennial well owner in Mahipura owns bulls at the very least which are critical for plowing during sowing.

The prices paid to milk sellers, listed in Table 1, confirm the devaluation of women’s labor and farm inputs. Ten households sold milk during 2006–2007, and were paid a modal price of 10 or 11 rupees per liter. Each household sold a daily average of 2.07 liters, earning 22 rupees.² Madalia (1987) analyzes the costs of milk production in well-endowed Amreli district in south Gujarat, and assigns 23, 25 and 22 percent shares, respectively, to the costs of green fodder, dry fodder and concentrates. In resource-poor districts which have scarce green fodder and where concentrates are unaffordable, labor expended in fodder collection replaces green fodder and concentrates. In Dahod, labor then constitutes 45 percent of the total cost of production. The agricultural wage in Dahod was 30 rupees in 2007–2008. Assuming dairying labor to be a reasonable four hours each day, labor’s share in earnings then equal 15 rupees. With non-labor costs constituting 55 percent, average daily earnings should be 33 rupees. However, earnings equaled 22 rupees, i.e. dairy households were underpaid at the rate of 33 percent. That dairies discriminate against resource-poor households is evident in policy prescriptions that emphasize that technocrats use the lower costs of production of large-scale milk producers to calculate milk producers’ remuneration (Bardhan and Huria 1987, 94). This is despite it being common knowledge that most milk producers are marginal households and the largest share of milk is contributed by this segment (D. Shah 1987).³

Table 1. Distribution of per-liter price to milk sellers (Indian rupees).

Price per liter	Number of households	Percentage of total milk sellers
10	4	40
11	4	40
12	1	10
13	1	10

Source: Household surveys conducted by the author in 2007.

Appadurai (1986) remarks that politics is the link between value and exchange. In the exchange of milk, the value of providing affordable milk to a middle class obliterates the value of providing fair prices to marginal producers. The divergence in the valuation of labor and farm inputs between dairies and households shapes households’ relationship with market-driven production. Taking a dig at my constant questions regarding what work people did, Leelaben, 33, called out loudly one day, ‘You ask us “What is your occupation (dhandho)?” Well, we do the business of selling foodgrains cheaper than we buy them’.⁴ This was a searing commentary on the asymmetric terms of exchange between peasants and markets.

Labor, work and anti-work imaginaries

With the devaluation of women’s work being at the heart of asymmetrical exchange relations, how do women understand exchange? Although 12 households acquired loan buffaloes during my fieldwork, only nine sold milk.⁵ Among milk sellers, most sold the minimum quantity necessary to service their loan rather than the maximum possible to generate cash income. Women discontinued milk sale during pregnancy, nursing, wage-work, or when close to fully repaying their loan, resisting claims on their labor. Even in households where female labor was not characterized by these conditions, those who had their own cow or buffalo responded in the negative to selling milk. People dissimulated or evaded my question by saying, ‘No, we don’t sell milk to the dairy’ or ‘the children need it’, precluding further questioning. A partial explanation for not selling milk lies in affective relations that led to utilizing milk for children’s consumption, which I will return to later in the paper. Importantly, milk withdrawal also constituted resistance to work, which I elaborate on next.

Exchange signifies the alienation of labor from the fruits of labor, and from human effort itself, which can be channeled to do work other than commercial production. Capital is a social relation based on the imposition of work (Cleaver 2000). Dairying involves gathering fodder at milking in the morning and evening and feeding the buffalo during milk extraction to ease this fraught process. Dairying involves the affective, negotiated and strenuous work of milking itself, including being watchful of a kicked hoof aimed at one’s shins or the milk pail, and then delivering milk rapidly to the collection center during a designated time period. The discontinuation of milk sale is situated in resistance to the discipline of space, time and labor imposed by dairying (Seidman 1991). Refusal to do dairying work involves both a conception of work and against work (Weeks 2011). Refusal both privileges labor to undertake dairying for subsistence, and rejects the labor norm – the norm of doing ‘productive’ work to manufacture a commodity. By rejecting the spatial, temporal and bodily discipline involved in dairying, women enacted ways of being against a particular order and its conception of individual governmentality (see Daftary 2014). By governmentality I mean the individual’s self-regulation in alignment with a particular idea of human effort, bodily endeavor, temporal orientation and spatial routinization. The rejection of the labor norm also constitutes the valorization of leisure. Women in my age cohort celebrated freed-up time to visit their natal homes, travel across Dahod to find potential brides and grooms for younger kin, visit haats (markets) and shrines, or do none of these and simply relish control over their time. Even when they engage in market-driven production, people may not share the same economic principles as the market (Bear et al. 2015). My point is that the universality of market principles is constantly under production, and is contested. The next section continues the focus on the individual as a whole and discusses how ways of being other than as either ‘labor’ or ‘entrepreneur’ drive dairying and the withdrawal from it.

The individual as the bearer of labor power and affective capacities

This section focuses on the relationship of producers, parents and peasants in eastern Gujarat with bovine capital. Given that milk prices are exploitative, why were buffaloes the most popular avenue for microcredit in Mahipura? The explanations for this lie outside the logic of capital. Table 2 illustrates the characteristics of Mahipura’s milk sellers. All owned winter or perennial wells that enabled two or three croppings and provided crop residue as fodder. Sixty percent (seven out of 12) had sufficient female household labor, on which dairying is predicated (George 1991). While these traits constitute resources that renders dairying attractive, a third trait denotes the desire for milk that propels dairying: 75 percent of milk sellers had children aged below five years. Each buffalo is sold in-lactation with calf and could be milked as soon as it was brought home. ‘We bought a buffalo because there are small children at home’ was a recurrent refrain. The household survey confirmed that 70 percent of new sellers had children ranging in age from three months to 11 years. For a third of milk sellers, the loan buffalo was their first female bovine.

Table 2. Characteristics of milk-selling households (‘X’ denotes presence of trait).

Adequate irrigation	Presence of small children	Availability of female household labor	Availability of fodder
X		X	X
X	X		X
X	X	X	X
X	X		X
X	X		X
X		X
X		X	X
X	X		X
X	X		X
X	X	X	X
X		X	X
X	X	X	X

Source: Household surveys conducted by the author in 2007.

There is a powerful link between the subsistence value of milk and its commodity production, so that dairying supports subsistence reproduction. Other high-value commodities such as flowers, oilseeds and medicinal plants do not embody this subsistence value. To understand the links between milk and children in resource-poor lifeworlds, consider the case of Shanta and her husband Kanti. The couple has five children, the youngest three being 3, 6 and 8 years old. Shanta is a Nayak – an Adivasi, and her family ranks among Mahipura’s three poorest. Shanta and Kanti own barren, upland plots, are chronically food insecure, and migrate as long-term wage-laborers. Shanta’s goats – her only livestock – died because her elderly parents-in-law, subsisting on old-age pensions in the village and indigent themselves, were unable to provide them fodder. Shanta recounted, ‘We had two babies and no milk. So we left the village, so that Kanti could work and we could provide milk to the children. We were away for three years then’.⁶ Shanta and Kanti risked the weakening of village ties and citizenship in order to provide nourishment for their children. Shanta’s valuing of milk for her children was not constrained by her poverty. Despite their long-term indigence, the couple’s three-year absence was animated not by the necessity of income but by affective capacities relating to their offspring.

Among the vast majority of households, milk is not a customary part of the diet, which consists of grains – chiefly maize and rice, and millets. The consumption of milk even in relatively well-endowed Mahipura, dominated by better-off Kolis, is so irregular that survey respondents did not list it in their consumption accounts. Kolis own better land than Adivasis, have deeper wells, and have better access to institutional credit and greater representation in government employment. Despite Kolis’ relative wealth, cattle endowments among Kolis are also small due to economic and ecological precarity, and cattle being seen predominantly as a form of living wealth rather than profit-making capital. In Mahipura, the average educational attainment was 6.9 years for Kolis but only 3.6 years for Adivasis, per-capita livestock holding was 1.13 for Kolis but 0.43 for Adivasis, and Kolis’ well rights averaged 2.59 while Adivasis’ averaged just 1.35.⁷ However, among both Kolis and Adivasis, milk is welcomed as a by-product of calving, but calving is not undertaken for milk but for sustainable cattle holdings. When available, milk is valued as nourishment for children and set aside for them.

Dairying opens up generative possibilities, yielding milk and colostrum for children, the acquisition of a female bovine and calf for herd expansion, and manure. Consider another survey activity that illuminates the treatment of milk in lifeworlds. One set of questions in my household survey focused on subsistence production. In reporting it, respondents systematically excluded milk from their accounts, although they reported vegetables grown on homestead plots which were consumed as rarely as milk. The category ‘subsistence’ is itself situated within an exchange economy framework, into whose matrix ‘subsistence goods’ produced by labor for itself, do not enter. Milk is treated as a by-product of the labor of bovine management undertaken chiefly for livestock holdings, and milk is simply not registered as a subsistence ‘output’ of agriculture.

This section focused on affective relations pertaining to children that shaped both buffalo acquisition and the withdrawal of milk from the market. The next section discusses how lifeworlds, and affective capacities pertaining to livestock, shape the limits to market-driven dairying. Households treat bovines as entities that enable realizing multiple generative possibilities precisely by resisting the treatment of bovines as dairy capital.

Human–animal relations and commodity production

The livestock loan is effectively a production contract because repaying the loan is formally linked to selling milk to the dairy. The loan influences the volume of milk a household will sell over a certain period to pay the principal and interest, and it treats the buffalo as an input in commodity production. The loan renders the buffalo a commodity, a reminder that commodity status is ‘not intrinsic but assigned’ (Castree 2003). The bank, dairy and household are connected through circuits of capital, credit and cash milk. Frequent lactation cycles help borrowers repay their loan quickly. However, frequent calvings dissipate the most reproductive period of a buffalo’s life, increase the chances of illness and injury, and diminish a living source of wealth. Therefore, households calve infrequently and discontinue milk sale for intervals in order to preserve bovine life for advantageous terms in downstream sales.

Bovine bodies are the site of other conflicts between the logic of commodity production and lifeworlds. Dairies attempt to increase milk yields by selling urea molasses which is added to bovine feed to speed up fermentation in the digestive tract. Urea molasses helps bovines utilize fodder efficiently, speeds up calf maturity and reduces the inter-calving period. These chemical concentrates contain urea, proteins, minerals, molasses and gelling agents, ingredients overlapping with the constituents of fertilizer. People consider the heat of urea molasses to generate the same heat as fertilizer does in land. Ramabhai, my friend and key informant, recounted that fertilizer makes the land ‘taut’ like iron, and ‘strains’ it like a fevered body, transposing the human qualities of bodily rigidity and ill-health onto land. Cultivators experience the burn of urea themselves from handling fertilizer, and identify its corrosive qualities in urea molasses, transposing humans’ bodily effects in turn to bovines. When using green fodder from crop fields, people wait for two to three weeks until fertilizer has washed off to ensure that livestock do not ingest chemicals. Chemical inputs transform the bodily rhythm of lactating bovines into the daily time of the milk plant. Concentrates that tamper with bovines’ bodies produce emotions of discomfort, repugnance and loss of control in humans: human–animal relations break down boundaries between species. Only three milk sellers fed their bovines urea molasses, and, remarkably, two of them identified as cash-crop farmers, while the third discontinued after experimenting briefly with concentrates.

Koli and Adivasi lifeworlds and Hindu nationalism

As current controversies over both the ‘cow protection’ campaigns of the Hindu right and the brutal violence, murders and hangings over the consumption, transportation and sale of beef and bovines in Haryana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir, Gujarat, Bihar and Maharashtra in recent months show (e.g. Biswas 2016; Kateshiya 2016; Mishra 2016), the question of how cows, and increasingly buffaloes, should be treated has been a high-stakes battle for Hindutva. The political reasons for this are clear – it is largely Dalits (oppressed castes) that dispose of bovines’ bodies and treat their hide, and Muslims that are involved in processing beef. The ‘sacred cow’ is a potent symbol for the Hindu right to impose upper-caste norms on Indian society. ‘Cow protectionism’ is steeped in the erasure of bovines’ complex role in rural economy and household well-being. The worldviews of those who actually own, rear, tend to and work with bovines affirm their multiple roles as growing assets, milch animals, breeding animals, plowing animals, wealth, income, livelihood support and food. These worldviews challenge both dairy capitalism which treats bovines as machines, and Hindutva politics that dislocates the rural economy; robs Dalits, Muslims, small farmers, marginal farmers and landless households of their livelihoods; attempts social engineering to deepen religious and caste-based inequalities; and, ironically, threatens to deplete bovine populations by rendering their sales impossible.

People value cows, buffaloes, draught bulls and breeding bulls for future sale to meet expenses for children’s education, setting up a trade, gifting, or tiding over a drought. In the lifeworlds of Kolis, who constitute one of Gujarat’s largest voting blocs, and Adivasis who are numerically dominant in Gujarat’s resource-poor districts, bovine holdings signify social standing and economic well-being. Among Bhils and Kolis alike, families of prospective brides and grooms visit each other to note the depth of the homestead well and bovine holdings, which are sure indicators of a household’s economic footing. Households convert livestock into cash to meet emergency medical expenses, buy construction materials for house-building, or pay off a mortgage on land. Parents use livestock sales to pay for their children’s education, endow cattle to children when they marry, and gift a calf when a grandchild is born.

Ethnographic fieldwork which joins the lifeworld of the ethnographer with the lifeworlds of those she studies, even if briefly, yielded insights on bovines to me every day. Cattle are assigned anthropomorphic characteristics – my friend Chandra would remark on the gluttony of her cow and marvel at her distended belly when the animal returned from grazing. I learnt that a bovine kept indoors died. Livestock are integral to food production aesthetics – subsistence crops are grown in plots where only organic fertilizer comprising manure and compost is applied. Bovine manure is mixed with fine soil to coat the floors of dwellings with beautiful hand patterns. Kolis have adopted several caste Hindus’ practices aimed at social mobility such as nominal vegetarianism, ritualistic worship of Koli saints such as Surdas and Kabir who are from historically marginalized castes, and daily bathing, especially in order to distinguish themselves from Adivasis with whom they share historical proximity.⁸ With the first rain shower in June, Kolis prepare for sowing through a ceremony in which the foreheads of oxen and plowmen are marked with vermillion. Both are fed jaggery in celebration of their role in sowing (another breaking down of the human–animal boundary), which holds the promise of keeping stomachs full and granaries filled. This is followed immediately by yoking the oxen and plowing and sowing.

My attempt is to show that values other than economic value embodied in the price of cash milk animate bovine acquisition. People embody affective capacities, contingently fusing their lifeworlds with their bovines and enacting other ways of being than as milk yield maximizers. The social relations of capitalism are utilized to support diverse life projects that disrupt the logic of capital and render market-driven production unstable, as well as put Hindutva bovine politics in its place, refusing bovine reification and affirming bovines’ multiple roles in their lives and afterlives.

Limits to market expansion

The paper explores what seemingly inexorable processes market expansion sets into motion. The practices of households in Gujarat who acquire bovines through microcredit unsettle the celebratory discourses of the unbridled embrace of markets by the poor. Households resist the devaluation of labor and farm inputs by withholding labor, lactose and livestock use from the market. Women, on whose labor dairying hinges, resist the subordination of life to work, and forge entirely different relations between their lifeworlds and labor than dictated by the rationale of capitalist accumulation. People reveal heterogeneous existences as beyond labor – that which is solely the input of capital. Men and women reveal the inhabitation of motivations, affective connections and difference – what Chakrabarty (2009, esp. 91–92) interprets Marx’s ‘real labor’ as (Marx 1993 [1939] in Chakrabarty 2009) – that which remains elusive to being folded into the circuit of capital. Development subjects reveal that difference is not something external to capital, but lives in intimate and plural relationships with it (Chakrabarty 2009).

Beyond opposition through the labor union or labor party, this contribution discusses the resistance of labor to capital at the individual level through a study of intimate relations of production. Buffalo owners embody values that both express ideas of a meaningful life, and mark meaningful difference between uses for livestock, utilities of milk, and sovereignty of labor. In Gujarat, the beacon of market reforms in India, households privilege the use-value of milk over its exchange-value. People assert meaningful differences between the logic of the market that depletes animal and human labor, discounts milk and degrades lifeworlds, and the multiple emergent possibilities rendered open by buffalo ownership. Human–animal relationships challenge both dairy capitalism’s treatment of bovines as machines, and the Hindu right’s ‘cow protectionism’ rooted in ignorance of the role of cows and buffaloes in rural economy and lifeworlds. Not only accumulation, but also social reproduction, the realization of affective relations, and the inhabitation of dryland lifeworlds propel market-driven production. Production for the market is interrupted by aesthetics and connections pertaining to the self and others, human and non-human.

Accumulation interdigitates with other value-creating practices (Gidwani 2008). Once bovine capital is acquired through the bank loan – a market mechanism – it is used in ways that undermine the terms of the loan – a market instrument. The ‘vectoral logic’ (Gidwani 2008, 94) of capital seeks to combine diverse entities – humans and financial capital, chemical concentrates and buffaloes – in order to have them function in specific ways and perform market-led accumulation. But the combination of labor and capital, and humans and animals, resulting in milk withdrawal has a real potential to emerge, and does. The ownership of bovine capital with its variegated and generative capacities illustrates that relations that rupture the process of accumulation are fused with relations that enable it. These ways of being mark the boundaries of encroachment of capital and raise questions about its totalizing logic.

Notes on contributor

Dolly Daftary is Assistant Professor at the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She conducts research in India on the political economy of development, agrarian change, the environment and the politics of civil society, democracy, markets and culture. Her articles appear in Development and Change and Journal of Development Studies, among others.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their engaged readings and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this work was supported by the Brown School and the Center for New Institutional Social Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, the Taraknath Das Foundation at the Southern Asia Institute at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and the Office of the Vice President for Research at Western Michigan University. Please direct author correspondence to [email protected].

Notes on contributors

Dolly Daftary

Dolly Daftary, Assistant Professor, School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd, Boston, MA 02125, USA. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 However, the ban on cattle markets in Maharashtra after the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition came to power at the center in 2014 and in Maharashtra in 2015 (Biswas 2016), and rising episodes of brutality against those involved in disposing dead cattle and in beef processing (Kateshiya 2016; Mishra, 2016), largely Dalits and Muslims, has likely rendered cattle sales difficult.

2 Using a price of 10.50 rupees, the average of the modal values of 10 and 11 rupees.

3 In D. Shah’s (1987) research, the average milch animal holding per family was 0.99. The figure for Mahipura was even lower, with average cow ownership being 0.66 (standard deviation, SD = 1.03) and average buffalo ownership being 0.83 (SD = 1.02).

4 Interview on 27 June 2007.

5 In all, 10 households sold milk. Of these, one had their own buffalo.

6 Interview on 26 July 2007.

7 Well ownership is defined as household rights to wells which are owned or inherited jointly with kin. Wells are categorized into perennial, late-winter and mid-winter wells. Perennial wells hold water all year round and allow three to four sowings. Late-winter wells dry up in March and enable two to three sowings. Mid-winter wells dry up by January and allow one or two sowings. Livestock are a critical form of wealth because they can be sold for cash in case of drought without having to sell or mortgage land. Livestock wealth is measured in terms of per-capita livestock per household. Bulls are assigned a weight of 1.25 because of their centrality in plowing. Milk cattle have a weight of 1, calves 0.5 and goats 0.25. The total number of each livestock type is multiplied by its weight, and this figure is added across types to measure total endowment. Per-capita livestock is measured by dividing each household's livestock by the number of household members using the adult equivalent scale which is often calibrated based on nutritional requirements for individuals by age and gender. Following Deaton and Muellbauer (1980), I assigned a weight of 0.2 to children aged 0–6, 0.3 to those aged 7–12, 0.5 to those aged 13–18, and 1.0 to those 18 and older. This formula is used to convert the number of individuals in the household to the adult equivalent by multiplying the total members in each age category by the category's weight, and adding the figures across age groups. This figure is used to divide household livestock to obtain per-capita values.

8 The caste/tribe groups Koli and Adivasi are not fixed but historically constructed. The lineage, whose members claim descent from a common male ancestor, is the basis of social organization across tribal western India. Kolis and Adivasis share many of the same lineage titles. Social categories are constructed, and this was reinforced in my household survey. When asked to identify their caste (jati), Koli respondents were unaffectedly conflicted about whether they were Koli or Adivasi.