(Some of these thoughts were first expressed on letterboxd)
This week, while looking into the documentary tradition in India, I had the misfortune of coming across a film called Holy Cowboys. I call it misfortune, because on the surface, the film purports to mimic the tradition of the leftist documentary that is exemplified by film makers such as Anand Patwardhan, Lalit Vachani, Deepa Dhanraj, and Uma Chakravarti, to name an illustrious few among many, but fails to lend its voice to anti-fascism, and harmonises with the right wing instead.
The film begins with a voice-over accompanying the image of a garlanded cow set to the din of prayer at a Hindu temple. The voice-over affirms that the cow is sacred to Hinduism, before cutting to a black screen that proclaims:
The Cow, sacred to India's majority hindu population has emerged as the nations most polarizing animal.
This statement is contentious; for one thing, the sacred character of the cow, usually demonstrated through the abstention of consuming its flesh, is debatable — many castes in contemporary north and south India do eat beef, in a non-religious context — and the very category of 'Hinduism' can be considered an agglomeration of diverse religious practices united solely by the hierarchy of caste — Brahminism. Regardless, while one must admit that within Indian polity, the category of 'Hindu' does exist, the contention emerges from the variety of relationships specific castes have to the consumption of beef. And while the polarising character of the cow may be an acceptable statement, to accept uncritically the sacred character of the cow is to do disservice to the history of the subcontinent.
The next inter-title proclaims
In 2014, under simmering tensions between vegetarian hindus and meat eating muslims, Narendra Modi's hindu nationalist government came to power after calling on hindus to unify and defend their religion.
Since then self appointed cow saviours and vigilante cow protection groups have surged.
Once again, we have an over-simplification. The Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P), the political front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (R.S.S), did not come to power solely by "calling on hindus to unify and defend their religion" but on a protracted programme of violence meted out to minorities both within and outside the 'Hindu' religion, with the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and the genocide at Godhra figuring as significant events in recent history (there are many, many more, these were simply very visible in their time). Moreover, cow vigilantes, or गौरक्षकs are a longstanding phenomenon in the subcontinent, as historian D.N. Jha puts it;
But the cow became a tool of mass political mobilization when the organized Hindu cow-protection movement, beginning with the Sikh Kuka (or Namdhari) sect in the Punjab around 1870 and later strengthened by the foundation of the first Gorakshini Sabha in 1882 by Dayanananda Sarasvati, made this animal a symbol of the unity of a wide ranging people, challenged the Muslim practice of its slaughter and provoked a series of serious communal riots in the 1880s and 1890s. Although attitudes to cow killing had hardened even earlier, there was undoubtedly a ‘dramatic intensification’ of the cow protection movement when in 1888 the North-Western Provinces High Court decreed that a cow was not a sacred object. Not surprisingly, cow slaughter very often became the pretext of Hindu-Muslim riots, especially those in Azamgarh district in the year 1898 when more than a hundred people were killed in different parts of the country. Similarly in 1912-13 violence rocked Ayodhya and a few years later, in 1917, Shahabad witnessed a disastrous communal conflagration.
D.N. Jha, Introduction, in, The Myth of the Holy Cow (p. 18-19).
While I would contend that Sikhism is not a part of Hinduism, the history of the former does intersect with the latter, specifically in its grappling with the question of caste. This aside, from the excerpt, we learn that cow protection and the violence emanating from the movement has been rife in India since before the establishment of the nation state, and it is only under certain circumstances that incidents of such violence are reported, the election of the B.J.P. to the center in 2014 was one such event. It drew attention to cow vigilante-ism anew, despite the fact that it had been widespread in certain parts of India as far back as the late 19th Century. Even before the film has begun in earnest, we find cracks in its foundations.
Next, the film moves into a sequence where a group of young boys discuss their daily lives on a rooftop as the sun sets, they talk about flirting with girls, masturbation, and smoking marijuana. This cuts to shots of a city, with no specifications as to where it is located, with views of a saffron flag and an Indian flag decorating one home (presumably a Hindu's) followed by a view of a green flag that represents Islam (I have yet to master the Urdu alphabet, and could not read the words on the flag). Next we see the insides of a factory with machines producing plastic bags, and one of the subjects of the film, who will later be identified as Gopal Yadav, is seen working at these machines. The subsequent shots cut to the city once again, before a field resplendent with discarded plastic bags comes into view, and Gopal can be seen holding a calf in the background. Gopal transports this calf to a cow shelter, a sort of half-way home for vagrant cows. After this he is seen recounting the incident to his friends, and one of them tells him about an organisation he participates in that does similar work, a cow protection organisation. The point here is that Gopal has a genuine love for cows. Whether this extends to other animals, is not explored.
And so the film cuts to one of the offices of this cow protection organisation, where the boys sit and talk, organising their day to day activities under the supervision of an older activist who encourages them to decorate the Hindu households with saffron flags for Ram Navami, a Hindu festival that celebrates the birth of the fictional character, Ram, from the epic, Ramayan. During this sequence, the senior organiser delivers a line:
हम लोग सोचते है कि भाई चलो, भाई है, भाई है, लेकिन वह भाई नहीं हैं, वह कसाई हैं।
(trans. we think that they [muslims] are our brothers, but they aren't our brothers, they are butchers.) This is quite emblematic of the organisational form of the R.S.S., to stir communalism into community organisation. The boys continue talking about Ram Navami and strategies for cow protection under entirely imaginary circumstances. This sequence is followed by a short section where we see three boys playing cricket in a field surrounded by cows, the garb of two of the two smallest boys identifies them as Muslim. This is one of the very few shots of Muslims in the entire film.
Following this, the film shows Gopal reading from his environmental science textbook, repeating the same line over and over again, to reinforce that he does, in fact, have some interest in environmental issues. But the repetition of the line is annotated by the rising sound of the bells and prayers of a Hindu temple, which is a strange stylistic choice, because it denotes a sort of madness, which runs contrary to the rationalism of the Hindu nationalist project. This sequence cuts to one where Gopal and his friends tie saffron flags to electric poles in what appears to be a neighbourhood where Hindus and Muslims live in close proximity to one another, imagining that the local Muslims are viewing them with hatred, while the Muslim women around them go about their business largely ignoring them altogether.
Next, the film transports its viewers to one of the larger offices of the cow protection organisation, its whereabouts and name, of course, are not specified. In this sequence we see Gopal and his friend Ankit giving interviews for their place in the organisation. One of the senior activists recounts an incident where members of the organisation brutally beat some people who were transporting cows, setting their truck on fire, because they suspected that the transporters may have been scheming to kill the cows. This is followed by a short sequence of Gopal, lying in bed, watching a video of cow vigilantes in a vehicle chasing a van full of cows. This is significant, we'll revisit it later.
After this, the film takes us back to what is presumably the cow shelter, where a vet surgically pulls plastic bags out of a cow's stomach. There is Sanskrit chanting accompanying the procedure, as a man shaves an area of the cow's body, in preparation for the incision. Whether this is the vet himself chanting, or if it is non-diagetic sound added to the clip, is left unclear, but the vet is seen paying his respects to the cow before he cuts into its body. These sections are interspersed with sequences of Gopal playing with cows, an injured cow being brought in to the shelter, as well as a senior member of the cow vigilante group dispensing wisdom to Gopal, who listens intently. The camera draws the eye to one article pulled out of the cow's stomach, a black plastic trash bag, before cutting back to the factory at which Gopal works, and here we find the chief conceit of the film. The point it is trying to make is that Gopal is responsible for the plight of the cows he apparently loves so much. No heed is paid to the effects of environmental degradation on the poverty stricken families who live in the same polluted neighbourhoods as the cows. In this figuration, the environmental problems plaguing cows in particular are given credence, and the activities of the gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) is depicted as righteous, without much contrast against the violence and dispossession they spread. It's an odd stylistic choice to say the least, because the spatial dislocation in relation to the following section, where the violent rhetoric of the gau rakshaks is shown, appears as a separate scene than the one that has just been described.
And so the film turns back to the Hindu myths and inflammatory communal rhetoric quoted by cow vigilantes to their young recruits, encouraging them to commit violence against those who violate the Hindu creed. Then it cuts to Gopal and his friends watching the Republic day function which is widely televised across India every year, drawing attention to its military display. The boys discuss the function, and Ankit Yadav, one of Gopal's friends relates the story of the Godhra genocide from the perspective of the Hindu right. Following this, there are shots of a young boy wearing a mask akin to one at the cow vigilante office, and a saffron sash, sitting on the floor, practicing a form of yoga. This shot, and another like it that follows later, have no relation to the narrative at large, they are purely stylistic, and certainly staged.
Then the film cuts to night time, a tip is called in to one of the cow vigilantes, and in unfocused and uncentered shots, an incident of violence is seen. The victim remains unclear, besides his pleading for mercy, then, the cow vigilantes begin beating him. The camera cuts to black, but the sounds of impact are heard, alongside chants of "Jai Shree Ram" (trans. Glory to the Lord Ram) and "Bharat Mata ki jai" (trans. Glory to Mother India), and the image is restored as the cow vigilantes decide to burn the victim's truck. Gopal appears to be present during these events, though this is not made explicit in the image, merely implied through editing. This is where we must revisit the short scene where Gopal is watching footage from cow vigilantes in hot pursuit of alleged cow killers; you see, it is an established practice of the R.S.S. and its affiliated organisations to circulate videos of instances of violence against minorities, in order to give rise to fervour for the Hindu cause. Often, the actual provenance of the film is immaterial; videos of ISIS atrocities are passed off as atrocities against Hindus, and even scenes from fiction films are cut, edited, and circulated on Twitter/X.com and Whatsapp as propaganda for the Hindu nationalist project. In an interview with Nowness Asia, the director of the film, Varun Chopra, says:
In my filmmaking process, I like to blend the cinematic formalism of a narrative live-action film with the aesthetics of documentary filmmaking. I wanted this film to have the soul of a humanist portrait piece, tracing the lives and probing the grim reality of the characters but with a body of a coming-of-age drama with a dash of wry satire that at instances, plays a coy game with reality itself.
Making a documentary was a result of gathering rare access into the world of the cow vigilante movement and probing the truth behind the perpetrators of violence - people who claim to be guardians of a religious group but whose motifs are thoroughly insidious in actuality. The minimal scripted parts were based entirely on anecdotal references from the subjects themselves.
Whether the images of the lynching are documentary footage, i.e. the film maker filmed a lynching without intervening in a situation where a real person got hurt, entirely to preserve the sanctity of the cinematic text (this is an unequivocal act of support for the Hindutva cause, which it seeks to criticise), or whether it was a re-enactment no longer matters. That section of the documentary, if not many others, can easily be cut out and circulated as Hindu propaganda — the film maker has produced a snuff film for the Hindutva cause. Furthermore, the statement where the film maker uncritically accepts that gau rakshaks "claim to be guardians of a religious group" without underlining the fact that Hindus, being the religious majority in India do not require protection, except in cases of systemic caste atrocity perpetrated by upper castes on lower castes, is either an act of ignorance, or a deliberate distortion of facts.
This sequence is the apotheosis of Holy Cowboys, and after it, the film winds down with shots of the city, of Gopal working at the factory, of children playing in the trash heaps from which a cow eats plastic, and Gopal and his friends on a boat. The film ends with one last inter-title:
86% killed in reported cases of cow-related violence since 2010 are Muslim.
More than half of these attacks were based on rumours.
India remains one of the biggest exporter of cattle meat in the world.
I was especially curious about that statistic the film makers threw up in the end and tracked it down to an article written in 2017, traceable to the Hindustan Times, well, to its headline at the very least, almost as if the film makers had no time to read the whole thing. The film was released in 2022, making these statistics quite outdated by that time. The article includes some more details:
In 23 attacks, the attackers were mobs or groups of people who belonged to Hindu groups, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal and local Gau Rakshak Samitis.
During the period under consideration – 2010 to 2017– the first such attack occurred on June 10, 2012, in Joga town in Mansa district, Punjab, “after carcasses of about 25 cows were found” near a factory, as the Hindu reported the next day.
“Led by activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Gowshala Sangh, villagers gathered in the morning and broke into the premises of the factory…The mob went on the rampage damaging the factory and setting ablaze the houses of at least two of those running the unit, Ajaib Singh and Mewa Singh,” the report said. Four persons were injured and three arrests were made in the case.
We can see that in this particular piece of journalism, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (V.H.P.) and Bajrang Dal are explicitly named, and to those with the slightest notion of Hindutva politics, the affiliation of these two groups (as well as the Gau Rakshak Samitis, or cow protection leagues) to the R.S.S. is a known fact. This detail is noticeably absent from Holy Cowboys which purports to cater to an international audience (see interview in Nowness Asia, towards the end), in other words, an audience that might not be privy to this fact. Making documentaries on the R.S.S. and its affiliates has a very long history in India (Lalit Vachani's The Boy on the Branch and The Man in the Tree, and Anand Patwardhan's Ram Ke Naam and Father, Son, and Holy War come to mind) and they do tend to draw the viewer's attention to the organised economic, political, and social character of the Hindu right, rather than implying that organisations such as the cow protection leagues emerge ex-nihilo at Narendra Modi's call.
Additionally, the documentaries I've mentioned on the Hindu right (other than Holy Cowboys, obviously) emphasise the author's voice; the presence of the author at the scene of the moving image is made quite clear, often through nothing more than a voice over, personal comments by the director, or through filmic style or lack thereof, to say nothing of the research that goes in to the projects prior to shooting, either in the archive, or as activism in the many movements launched against Hindutva. Holy Cowboys is different, it attempts to obviate not only the authorial voice — the camera attempts to remain unobtrusive, given away only by the occasional glance one of the younger participants throw its way — but also the specificity of the place where the events of the documentary take place. It might be clear to the seasoned viewer that the Hindi signage across the city implies that the film takes place in northern India, but to the foreign audience this is meant for, this might remain unclear. This is a disservice to any project that professes an interest in documenting Hindutva activism in India. After all, India is a vast land, and the specificity of Hindu violence against Muslims, Christians, Adivasis, and other minorities inside and outside Hinduism, changes from region to region, state to state, and village to village. To generalise is to omit the details and build a mystical, imaginary, all consuming Hindu right wing; a construction that does nothing more than rout any resistance to it.
And on the matter of violence, the subject of cow vigilante-ism in Holy Cowboys is reduced to a communal matter, a "Hindu-Muslim" issue, which is entirely disingenuous, because the other community that is extremely vulnerable to cow vigilante-ism is dalits, as Dr. Ambedkar puts it:
The Census Returns show that the meat of the dead cow forms the chief item of food consumed by communities which are generally classified as untouchable communities. No Hindu community, however low, will touch cow’s flesh. On the other hand, there is no community which is really an Untouchable community which has not something to do with the dead cow. Some eat her flesh, some remove the skin, some manufacture articles out of her skin and bones.
From the survey of the Census Commissioner, it is well established that Untouchables eat beef. The question however is: Has beef-eating any relation to the origin of untouchability? Or is it merely an incident in the economic life of the Untouchables? Can we say that the Broken Men came to be treated as Untouchables because they ate beef? There need be no hesitation in returning an affirmative answer to this question. No other answer is consistent with facts as we know them.
In the first place, we have the fact that the Untouchables, or the main communities which compose them, eat the dead cow and those who eat the dead cow are tainted with untouchability and no others. The co-relation between untouchability and the use of the dead cow is so great and so close that the thesis that it is the root of untouchability seems to be incontrovertible. In the second place, if there is anything that separates the Untouchables from the Hindus, it is beef-eating. Even a superficial view of the food taboos of the Hindus will show that there are two taboos regarding food which serve as dividing lines. There is one taboo against meat-eating. It divides Hindus into vegetarians and flesh-eaters. There is another taboo which is against beef-eating. It divides Hindus into those who eat cow’s flesh and those who do not. From the point of view of untouchability the first dividing line is of no importance. But the second is. For it completely marks off the Touchables from the Untouchables. The Touchables, whether they are vegetarians or flesh-eaters, are united in their objection to eating cow’s flesh. As against them stand the Untouchables who eat cow’s flesh without compunction and as a matter of course and habit.
B.R. Ambedkar, in, The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?, from, B.A.W.S. Volume 7 (p. 318-319).
Despite the many decades that have passed since Dr. Ambedkar wrote these words and fought tirelessly for their cause, dalits remain largely backward communities, having been neglected by the Indian government and Hindu society in general in the pursuit of progress, and exploited as a source of cheap labour in both India and abroad. This leaves dalit communities in positions where they must practice hereditary occupations to survive, such as those associated with the cow, and this puts them in grave danger of being lynched by cow vigilantes. A group of young dalit men were publicly humiliated and beaten in Una in 2016, and this is perhaps the one of the few widely publicised instances of such an event, precisely because several videos of the atrocity were widely circulated on the internet following the incident. Only one man intervened, and he was stripped and beaten alongside the dalit men wrongly accused of cow slaughter. The rest of the crowd were content with merely participating and making videos of the event. If one were to find a strange resonance in Holy Cowboys, one might not be entirely mistaken. And needless to say, the violence meted out to dalits by cow vigilantes continues; as recently as earlier this month, a dalit man in Odisha was lynched on suspicion of cow slaughter.
So, how could a film maker who professes to care about such issues leave out such an important detail? Well, allow me to draw the reader's attention to the film's uncritical acceptance of the the holiness of the cow in Hinduism once again. This is a view the film shares with the R.S.S. and its affiliates, and so I must refer to the historian, D.N. Jha, one more time;
The veneration of the cow has been converted into a symbol of communal identity of the Hindus and obscurantist and fundamentalist forces obdurately refuse to appreciate that the cow was not always all that sacred in the Vedic and subsequent Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical traditions—or that its flesh, along with other varieties of meat, was quite often a part of haute cuisine in early India. Although the Shin, Muslims of Dardistan in Pakistan, look on the cow as other Muslims do the pig, avoid direct contact with cows, refuse to drink cow’s milk or use cowdung as fuel and reject beef as food, self-styled custodians of non-existent ‘monolithic’ Hinduism assert that the eating of beef was first introduced in India by the followers of Islam who came from outside and are foreigners in this country, little realizing that their Vedic ancestors were also foreigners who ate the flesh of the cow and various other animals. Fanaticism getting precedence over fact, it is not surprising that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and their numerous outfits have a national ban on cow slaughter on their agenda.
[...]
The communalists who have been raising a hullabaloo over the cow in the political arena do not realize that beef eating remained a fairly common practice for a long time in India and that the arguments for its prevalence are based on the evidence drawn from our own scriptures and religious texts. The response of historical scholarship to the communal perception of Indian food culture, therefore, has been sober and scholars have drawn attention to the textual evidence on the subject which, in fact, begins to be available in the oldest India religious text Rig Veda, supposedly of divine origin. H.H. Wilson, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, had asserted that ‘the sacrifice of the horse or of the cow,the gomedha or asvamedha, appears to have been common in the earliest periods of the Hindu ritual’.
[...]
In the early 1940s P.V. Kane in his monumental five-volume History of Dharmashastra referred to some Vedic and early Dharmasastric passages that speak of cow slaughter and beef eating. H.D. Sankalia drew attention to literary as well as archaeological evidence of eating cattle flesh in ancient India. Similarly, Laxman Shastri Joshi, a Sanskritist of unquestionable scholarship, drew attention to the Dharmasastra works that unequivocally support the prevalence of meat eating, including beef eating, in early India.
D.N. Jha, Introduction, in, The Myth of the Holy Cow (p. 20-22).
The Myth of the Holy Cow is by no means an obscure text, the late D.N. Jha was sent death threats by the R.S.S. and its allies on the book's publication in 2001, it was re-printed in 2009, and another edition was published by Navayana in 2017 as part of the EverBlue Editions marking the publishing house's 20th anniversary. It is a widely quoted book as well, it makes an appearance on the Wikipedia page for cow slaughter in India, and it isn't even the only book on the subject (it's just a relatively recent, and critically acclaimed one, + the one I've read over and over again). The holiness of the cow in Hinduism, when accepted uncritically, betrays a lack of research, an ideological resistance to the history of South Asia, or the confidence that a foreign audience will unquestioningly accept the fact on the authority of an Indian film-maker. Regardless of the reason, an air of disingenuity pervades Holy Cowboys, and it is also the cause of the omission of details regarding the splits and differences within Hinduism.
Finally, I want to say a few words about Gopal Yadav, the subject around whom the documentary chiefly revolves. We learn very little about Gopal, but his class and caste positions can be discerned from context; Gopal is in his last year of high school, studying commerce, and simultaneously holding down a job at a factory. This implies that he is from a working class family, and given the consonance of class and caste in India, possibly from a lower caste (though, not necessarily from a dalit caste). This degree of marginalisation causes Gopal to experience an immense degree of alienation, which is precisely why he finds refuge in the community offered by the Gau Rakshaks (cow vigilantes), and in this, I find that the documentary is singularly unkind to Gopal. It implies that Gopal has entered into these relations as a result of his own predilections, and while Gopal's own interests certainly play a role, the liberal Indian state has failed him. He appears to have very little distraction from work and school besides his friends and phone, and there appear to be no other outlets for his interests. Not to mention, by including the scene where the vet pulls a trash bag out of the cow's stomach and juxtaposing it with Gopal working at the factory, the film makes him responsible for a form of environmental degradation the that he is certainly not responsible for, and the film presents no coherent opinion about environmental issues, relying instead on a general, idealistic condemnation of environmental pollution, just as the cow vigilantes do. Furthermore, we learn nothing of Gopal's family situation, which certainly affects the choices he has made. And while I personally do not condone Gopal's alliances, I rue the fact that we are left with a poor image of a boy who is just starting his life, this level of cruelty seems truly unwarranted.
And so, I must conclude that quite apart from participating in the tradition of Indian documentaries that seek to shed light on the Hindu right, Holy Cowboys is a pretentious piece that is more interested in delivering poignant images with even more poignant background music, while harmonising with the intentions of the Hindu right wing. It's kind of pathetic, really.