Podcast 14

In this episode of the Engaged Jain Studies Podcast, Jonathan Dickstein interviews Yamini Narayanan about her groundbreaking book, Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India. This conversation, recorded from a live episode event, delves into Narayanan’s shift into animal studies and her extended analysis of Indian bovines.

During the discussion, Narayanan unpacks the complex symbolism of the “mother cow” in India, highlighting how it is weaponized against women, Muslims, and Dalits, and how “cow protectionism” serves as a thinly disguised tool of patriarchal ethnonationalism. Most critically, Narayanan draws attention to how mainstream narratives highlighting “beef” and “slaughter” distract from the core issue—the Indian dairy industry, which is directly responsible for the ongoing mistreatment and killing of millions of bovines each year.

Subscribe and stay tuned for more insightful episodes! This is just one of many live discussions we will be bringing to the podcast, featuring leading scholars and thinkers in Engaged Jain Studies.

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ABOUT OUR PODCAST GUEST

Dr. Yamini Narayanan is an ARC Future Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. Yamini's research intersects animal, political and environmental geography, multispecies ethnography, South Asian studies, and animals and geopolitics.

Yamini's book Mother Cow, Mother India (2023, Stanford/Navayana) won the Mid Career Researcher Book Prize 2024 from the Asian Studies Association of Australia, and has been shortlisted in the Non-Fiction category for the Crossword Book Award 2024, one of India's most prestigious national literary honours.

Yamini's substantive work focusses on the entanglement of animals in nationalist and developmental ideologies in India. She is currently researching animals in coercive labour in India’s brick kilns, exploring an anti-anthropocentric politics of poverty and development. Yamini's work is published in leading journals including Annals of the American Association of Geographers; Environment and Planning A, D and E; Urban Geography; Geoforum; Hypatia; and South Asia. Yamini's research is supported by three Australian Research Council grants, including the DECRA Fellowship.

Yamini is the founding Convenor of the Deakin Critical Animal Studies Network, and is a lifelong Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Yamini serves as Special Issues Editor of Urban Geography, and Associate Editor of Environmental Humanities.

ABOUT OUR PODCAST HOST

Dr. Jonathan Dickstein specializes in South Asian Religions, Religion and Ecology, and Comparative Religious Ethics. He received his doctoral degree in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he wrote his dissertation on ancient Indian animal taxonomies and their relevance for religious ritual and dietary practice. Jonathan’s current work focuses on Jainism and contemporary ecological issues, and accordingly extends into Critical Animal Studies, Food Studies, and Diaspora Studies.

Jonathan has published in a wide array of interdisciplinary journals on topics such as veganism and politics, yoga and diet, Jain veganism, and the ethic of nonviolence (ahiṃsa). Jonathan considers himself a scholar-practitioner, having spent many years not only in libraries but also in public advocating for justice for both humans and nonhumans alike.

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