Beloved Mother — Rishi Kochhar

Cattle being fed early morning at a large shelter run by the Jagganath Temple Trust in Naklang, Ahmedabad district. This shelter houses approximately thousand bovines. The bulls, cows and calves are housed separately.

Burial site for bovines at Jamalpur, Ahmedabad. The site is administered by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and most animals that die within the city limits are brought here.

A bull buried at the site in Jamalpur.

Hides laid down to dry, after skinning, at a site in Kalol, Gandhinagar. Cattle dying in the areas outside the jurisdiction of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation are skinned and their skins are then dried and sent off to leather tanneries at Kanpur and Chennai.

A small cowshed in the old city of Ahmedabad.

A bull roaming the streets of old city in Ahmedabad. During the day, as is practice, cattle are let out into the streets to fend for themselves.

Cows being milked in the evening at a cattle shelter in Naklang, Ahmedabad district. The calves are allowed to be with their mothers only once a day to prevent them from draining the excess milk used for commercial purposes.

Cows rushing to eat their feed, early morning, at the cattle shelter in Naklang. On most days the cows are milked twice and then the milk is sold to the nearby villages, while the remaining quantity is used by the temple to prepare prasad and other milk-based items for the worshippers.

A heap of cowhides inside a godown in Mirzapur, Ahmedabad. Skinning now happens in a furtive way, mostly in such clandestine warehouses owned by members of Mirzapur’s sizeable Muslim community.

A burial being carried out by members of the lower castes, at the Municipal Corporation grounds in Jamalpur, Ahmedabad.

A vendor selling cattle feed, early in the morning, inside old city, Ahmedabad.

Bulls at the cattle shelter in Naklang. They are mostly treated as excess once they get old. Nor can they help in farms, neither be milked.

A bull being buried in Jamalpur, Ahmedabad.

Cows jostling for fodder at the shelter in Naklang, Ahmedabad district.

A street in the old city, Ahmedabad.

A freshly skinned buffalo skin drying in the backyard of a Dalit’s house near Naklang, Ahmedabad district. He had sprinkled chemicals to lower the stench and fasten drying. The burial and skinning of bovines is generally confined to the lower castes in India.

Stray cattle in the streets of Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

In Hinduism, cow is considered to be a symbol of earthly life, selfless giving and prosperity, much like a nourishing mother. In India, the contemporary political relevance of the cow has deep historical roots, an obvious outcome of the animal’s importance in Hinduism since the medieval age. Cow protection as a political issue really came into its own during the colonial period as Indians started to develop a collective consciousness based on their religious identity.

A new Act passed by the Indian government in 2015 had banned the slaughter of all cattle, with the exception of water buffaloes, in most Indian states. The law carries a seven-year jail term as punishment for slaughtering cows. The state targets only the act of slaughter and dietary habits of its citizens, while steak houses, tanneries and bone trade are as much to blame.

Beloved Mother is a social documentary project. It involves various aspects of cow politics in India, including the leather industry, vigilantism, and how a major section of the society depends on trade-based scavenging of carcasses.