But How Does the Cow Get Itself Sideways?

So I was at a fancy wedding (it’s the season now that the weather’s cool). Right in the middle of the sacred space marked out on the floor where a series of important rituals takes place (all night long and into the morning), amidst all the ritual artifacts there’s a big glob of cow dung. I wasn’t surprised. Cow dung is purifying and auspicious. Everything that comes from a cow, who expresses the fertility of the earth goddess and is associated with Gauri, the nourishing mother goddess, is holy. Milk is poured over the shiva linga. Some pregnant (!) associations there, but let’s take one thing at a time.

I keep reading (haven’t seen) that when somebody dies, the floor and walls of the house are smeared with cow dung.

I see little girls playing in the road with cow dung like it was modeling clay.

In town there are rows of flattened dung cakes drying on the walls.

And poor women gathering up cow dung from the road.

Near where I take my Hindi lesson is an area five or six football fields large of mostly packed earth where women squat on the ground and knead, slap and shape the dung cakes they’ll use for cooking and winter fuel for their families when they’re dry and, just as critically, sell in the meantime for income. At night you see small dung fires glowing in the doorways of the one room dwellings of lots of modestly fixed families, cooking dinner and keeping folks warm.

So I asked about that cow dung on the floor (my only model the departing renters of the rowhouse next door in Philly who smeared their own excrement on the walls as an unholy parting gift to the landlord).

Isn’t it kind of.....MESSY? Especially walking on it barefoot inside the house? It turns out cow dung is a binding agent so you mix it with a little water into a thin paste to smear on the floor in a sacred area near the family shrine. It’s smooth when it dries, and you can walk on it. If you have a dirt floor—lots of rural folks do—you might smear dung paste over all of it. When it dries, that’s your floor. When it’s dirty you sweep it clean and apply another paste layer. They make a sturdy floor over time.

Today I went to the riverbank in Nagwa in the southern part of the city to that large open bare-dirt space with scraggly patches of grass cover overlooking the river. There are several activities here that use a lot of space: First, rickshaw repair. Great numbers of rickshaws are parked together by a shed awaiting repair. (If there’s such a thing as a new bicycle rickshaw in Banaras, I haven’t seen it.) Second, lots of bulls and cows are standing, grazing and lying on a dirt meadow of urban detritus. Here the cows don’t bother much with the grass. They’re munching the city trash. During the day other cows roam the city doing just that. Late in the day, lines of cows following the leader are herded through the streets back home to be muzzled and tied to stakes for the night.

Third, in the middle of this big open space, huge piles of cow dung (gobah) maybe six feet high have been dumped by tractor. From early in the morning till dark, women stake out work areas around these piles to make dung cakes (gohari). Each one takes a roughly woven bamboo basket (30 inches or so in diameter) over to a central pile. She might moisten the pile a bit with water from a bucket to make it more pliable as a crust forms on the surface in the hot sun. Using, if necessary, a short, crude hoe to chop out a load of loose manure, she scoops it into the basket and carries it to her work area.

Sitting on one of the bricks lying around, she retrieves about a pound and a half of dung from the basket, slams it on the ground with both hands, pats and kneads and shapes it with movements that are very like kneading bread dough. The result is a thin, flattish rectangle-like shape about eight inches wide and a foot long that she slams on the ground a few more times and bends into a patty that looks like a boomerang with no sharp angles at the center. You could say it looks a lot like Richard Serra’s curving sheets of iron in miniature. There’s bound to be a word for that shape, but I don’t know it, so Richard Serra will have to do.

She sets the patty on its side (like Richard Serra would) to dry next to the hundreds of others she’s made and other women are making. When she uses up all the dung in her basket, she goes to get more. Gradually she makes a semicircle of patties around her, moving her brick and, therefore, her work area backwards as each curved row is finished.

Ranged across the field, these worked cakes form a great prairie with brown wavelets of cow cakes instead of waving grass. Maybe 10 or 12 semicircular parallel rows form a single arching swath, this repeated all across the field, except that each arching swath catches the light differently from the patterned swathes next to it because those swathes are set down at a different angle. It’s quite beautiful.

There is also more than one patty shape, though the one I’ve described is predominant. Some cakes are round and flattened in different sizes. Every so often the women pick up some of the drier cakes and throw them helter skelter into still another space, also next to their own swath of drying patties. In this way they turn the original patties over to expose the bottoms that previously touched the dirt to the sun. These upended dry patties look like roiling waves all tossed together. Still others dry patties are stacked up neatly in roughly the shape of English haystacks or beehives.

Or try this. The field of cow cakes looks like the wave patterns in sand dunes after the wind has blown every which way over them. But it’s more interesting looking because the size and texture of the patties contrasts so sharply with the ground beneath and each other. A kind of earth quilt of undulating light, rhythm, symmetry.

Sometimes the women get up to tend kids (boys are flying kites nearby, and the occasional woman totes an infant), go home and cook lunch for their families, whatever. There’s the stray water pot for drinking from or short straw broom to sweep the detritus from the work area, but most women bring only a bucket of water to rinse their hands when they leave and their baskets. Not capital intensive.

Straw is mixed all throughout the dung which gives it additional burning capacity and a bit of structure for molding. As a city girl, it took me a while to figure out whether the straw was mixed by the cow, so to speak, or added later. Verdict: The cow did it. Nagwa field isn’t the only cake-making site in Varanasi, but it does have a great river view. Since dung is plentiful in the street, especially on the smaller roads, anybody can make them, but you can obviously make more where the cows collect. Typical are a number of small grassy plots in the village behind the university where households keep a few cows and goats, and there are often curving rows of patties there.

I’m sitting on my own brick in the middle of all this, happy as a pig in…..uh, feeling quite pleasant from the warm sun and manure smell, and not a bit dirty partly because the orderly procession of the worked patties adds to the sense that it’s all quite clean, and asking various women if I can take pictures of them working. Some say no, some yes. If anyone had offered, I would have tried to form a patty myself. I was half surprised there were no vermilion tilaks or other religious symbols around since cow dung is auspicious. There is a roadside shrine nearby that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with patty making. On the other hand, like the doms that stoke the cremation pyres, these women are very low caste or casteless dalits. (The doms are rumored to be rich, the patty-makers obviously aren’t.)

From time to time a woman will gather up the driest patties and stuff them into a great white rectangular sack made of some kind of woven cloth, load them on her head and walk off to sell them. Others stack great pyramids of patties in their baskets and balance those on their heads. These are seriously heavy loads. To anchor the basket bottoms, which have the shape of an inverted coolie hat, the women fashion a kind of cow dung doughnut for top of their heads into which they settle the basket.

I am reminded of the class of students, boys, cleaning up the ghats as a form of community service, that I recently talked to. Asking about (the lack of) women in public space, I was assured that women have equal rights under the Indian constitution but are simply shy: “It’s her ornament,” as one put it. He added that women aren’t strong enough to work outside the home—of the many claims that were made about women, this was the one point I gently challenged (my purpose being to learn their thoughts rather than advance my own) from the plainly visible evidence of women daily carrying heavy loads of all kinds. (Let it be said that a number of these guys had more progressive views.)

Traveling through town, one sees additional aesthetically pleasing, orderly rows of round, flattened cakes adhering to the sides of concrete walls. Here are family tores of winter fuel. Each cakes has four parallel ridges in the middle that I thought might be symbolic but, no, they’re just the trace of the fingers that made the patty stick to the wall.

I wondered if, sitting outside like that, somebody might steal all that fuel. I got three answers. One, you don’t realize it but people are watching that wall and keeping track. Two, there are better things to steal since each cake is only a quarter of a rupee. Unless you went to the considerable effort (and risk) of denuding the whole wall, there’s no value. If you’re too poor to buy dung and don’t have a cow, you can scrape it off the road. Three, somebody might take something in an emergency, and that would be ok.

Middle class-affluent folks have gas stoves or stoveplates (that’s what I have, two burners) and space heaters. No houses have central heating even though Varanasi nights can get down to freezing in January; people build for summer heat and monsoon. Winter is the good weather.

It’s always a relief to be included in humor about the stupid questions that videshis ask and know there are stupider questions even than mine. I shared in the general hilarity about the videshi who, having learned that was cow dung on the wall, looked at it quizzically and asked, but how does the cow shit sideways like that?