[Hyderabadi]

Now guess what comes in packages - cow dung cakes!

Jaipur, Jan 10 (IANS) Don't be surprised to find packaged cow dung cakes sitting pretty with toiletries and groceries at retail stores here.

After cow urine or 'gau mutra', packaged cow dung cakes or 'kanda' have now hit the market and they are the brainchild of the city-based Gau Sena, which literally translated means 'cow army'.

The Gau Sena, which has launched the product under the brand Gauvar in Jaipur, claims it has mixed many ingredients in the cow dung cake so that burning it could purify the environment. The cakes would also help keep diseases at bay, the organisation claims.
MORE: http://in.news.yahoo...ow-47ba926.html

[WonderWomanUSA]

Quote

Gupta said the product has cow dung, water of the holy Ganges river, cow urine, rose water, cow milk, items of fire sacrifice - 'hawan samagri', rose petals, rice, clove, cardamom, the ayurvedic product guggal, camphor, butter, sawdust of the mango tree, 'itra' (essence), extract of tulsi, sandalwood powder and sand from the feet of sacred cows.

In Delhi a couple of years ago, I missed the scent of cow patty fires, first thing in the morning. Apparently the folks around CP have other means of making their first tea of the morning. Well, I also noticed that there were no veggie and milk wallahs wandering aruond the lanes, as well.

With all that stuff in it, though, it won't smell like burning cow dung.

[jyotirmoy]

Use of cow dunk cakes as a fuel had been the way of life and in villages it still is.
Certain food items like Litti can be cooked properly only by the gentle heat of the burning cakes. These are also used to start a coal fired stove.

[Hyderabadi]

jyotirmoy, on Jan 11 2008, 11:12 PM, said:

Use of cow dunk cakes as a fuel had been the way of life and in villages it still is.

Cow dung, mixed with water and mud was used as wall plastering in huts in the villages , exterior and interior.

Regularly and particularly on festive days, cow dung mixed with water is sprinkled (is the closest word I can think of) in front of homes and then decorated with 'muggu' or 'Rangoli. Sankranti in Andhra and Makar Sankranti elsewhere is one such festival, coming up on 14th Jan, with every housewife trying to out do the other with her mastery of rangoli:

http://www.hinduonne...11500390100.htm
From a 70's hit Telugu movie (Mutyala Muggu - Rangoli of Pearls) :
http://www.e-greenst...halk-paintings/

Kite flying is another Sankranti actitivity.

[Hyderabadi]

Here's a picture from Luckywoman's gallery:



http://www.gourmetin...p...si&img=1444

[gautam]

Different parts of India have different styles of "patties". Perhaps some anthropologist could make a study before these things disappear. Those from bengal are small and cute, the size of a hand, and bear the handprint of a Bengali woman or girlchild, never a man: ghoonte koodooni is a sociological term, and many women/widows earned [eked out] their living in this marginal niche. In the grazing plains of Bardhaman, Southern Bankura and northern medinipur, as late as the 1920s, there were bears and even leopards coming out in search of the odd weak calf and such, and maulings of the old women who followed the herds to collect every speck of dung were quite common.

Even in my time, say as late as the early 70s in Nadia, i have seen large jackals and even the very rare hyena, right in broad daylight, beset the very small children set the task of following cattle and collecting their dung. In my childhood, and Jyotida will remember this, we used to have something called "pheu daaka" :the jackal that tails a tiger, calling in a peculiar note after a successful kill by its patron. It announces to all the animals to graze safely, thus not wasting nervous energy wondering if they are being stalked that evening. Wonderful balance/parsimony/compassion of Nature. You may have noticed that leopards or cheetahs that have fed will walk among herds of grazers with their tails raised up showing the white tips: it sends the message "I am not hunting", and there is thus no disturbance, grazing and normal life proceeds without a hitch, very important, as life is always balanced on the knife edge, and there is need to acquire grazing and water as much as possible. Anyway, the pheu call used to come as dusk deepened into night, and we had no electricity, and scarcely any light, only a flickering kerosene lamp, and mud walls. Thick as they were, it felt really scary, although you knew it was coming from quite a distance. By the time i grew enough to make a Happy Meal for  mama and bhagney [people never mentioned them by their real names, calling them Uncle and nephew],  the former had long disappeared downriver.

As you go west from bengal, the cakes grow bigger and thicker, the palmprints less defined. When you reach western UP, and formerly Punjab, via palwal, although the two latter are too rich now to bother with such, the cakes become more rectangular and loaf-like, quite a bit thicker.

One of the most interesting applications of such thick loaves is made by the Havik brahmans of Uttara Kanada and other Haviks of Karnataka. These are among the most punctilious Agnihotris left in India, partially due to their partiality to the Jaiminiya Purva Mimamsa. At any rate, some households have kept the 5 sacred fires burning for upwards of a thousand years, using the loaves as a timekeeping device as well as a fuel block. The size and uniformity become important to keep all five fires stoked and lit through the night, since not anyone can toss a brick into a dying hearth! It all has to be done just so by the head of the household at a measured time, and reawakened only at a specific time before dawn. There is a specific meaning to the cycle, and to make it all work, the cakes need to made carefully.

The genetic inheritance of the indian breeds of humped cattle is such thatt he gut mass is at least 22%, if not more, of total body mass. This allows them to feed on a diet considerably enriched in not only cellulose, but also lignins. These are of course not digested, but have complex interactions with gut microflora; I guess not too many want to enter into an extensive discussion of these. But suffice to say, many will have notices that the US/European Bos taurus dairy breeds, with shorter gut lengths, and enjoying animal protein diets, excrete a more noisome, less well-formed mass that is well-described by the term cow-patty. it may be even more liquid and splatter. So will Indian cows' ejecta, when similarly fed.

But when fed high-lignin, high cellulose diets, i.e. plant matter, stover and browse, the contents of the colon are firm and the peristalic motion clearly visible in the ejecta. it tis the frank presence of the lignin or aromatic compounds in the excrement that makes this such a prized fuel. The other type of excrement would create a strongly ammoniac and noxious smoke, quite unlike the woodsy aromas associated with the traditional material. For in truth, it is the indigestible remnants in abundant quantity of straw lignins, and tree leaf and twig lignins, bush twig lignins, all of which are "aromatic" compounds in the chemical sense, that allow the traditional dung cake to be a suitable fuel. In fact, as a fertilizer, it has a low N, P, K rating, less than 1, 0.1, 1, in after normal handling and atmospheric loss, and the lignins are resistant to decay in the soil. Whereas modern feeds enriched in animal proteins make for better fertilizer dung, and  poor burning material.

[Hyderabadi]

Absolutely Amazing, Gautam da!

I was hoping that you would elaborate here!

I lived ,for a very brief time, in the days without electricity, in rural AP and distinctly remember all those 'demons' in the dark! And the flickering shadows of the kerosene lamp.

Every shadow had a story behind it. Ah!

Could you please give a translation/explanation of "Jaiminiya Purva Mimamsa", I think I know what Purva and Mimamsa (..we have similar words in Telugu, may not be the same meaning or rather context, though..) mean but I'm unable to put them together to arrive at a translation.

[iwanttogoback]

the sight of cakes drying on the ghats in varanasi was quite a sight. unfortunately i didn't take my camera that day, but they created some beautiful patterns.

[noflylist]

An ecofuel if there ever was one!

[gautam]

Dear Hyderabadi,

As I have already explored diverse peripheries, including jackal behavior and the minute happenings inside a cow's colon, let us not try the patience of these good people further with further discussion of Purva and uttara Mimamsa [oh gosh, you had to step right in on a fresh cake, a juicy one, did you not??!!!!] by referring you to some initial sources. You always know where to turn to for some serious punishment!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimamsa

http://lists.advaita...ary/013377.html

http://www.geocities...va_mimamsa.html

BTW, Wikipedia is laughably inaccurate in evrything except the factual reportage. As ususal, it is creating it own imaginary universe to which Indians must subscribe, or Else. you will be demonised : accused of being neo Hindu, or neo-Hindu, or Hindutva, a usage of a vast armamntarium designed to cow you down so that if you do not bow your head to what the Orientalist schools have to tech you aboutt  your own religious traditions, you are a demon, ignorant, malevolent.. sheer idiocy. Sad, they still cannot realize at this late date how repugnant and wrong these types of gross errors of FACT and CONTENT grate on people's nerves  all the time, and more so because the larger Western and modern Indian  world will automaticall see these people as more reliable than the traditional interlocutors.

[Hyderabadi]

Great references Gautam da..

On a lighter note, if you don't mind - some one had told me when I was a kid that 'Khara' meant donkey.

I have a tendancy to get in trouble, what else can I say!



Just a tiny part of my name of course...   

[gautam]

Khara is donkey in Farsi or Arabic [i don't know], from which we get: Khar + gosh [ear] = rabbit. Your name is derived from a separate etymology altogether, no such blasphemy allowed to a beautiful concept there, chosen by your parents, in spite of copious  auto-inputs  later of biriyani and kamalini  to the inner man!!

In Indian cosmology Donkey is the vahana of Shitala Devi, the Mother who Heals, cools, comforts the burning of fevers, smallpox, so you are blessed!

Donkey's milk, while not something your gender is likely to provide [at least I hope not in this age of LGBT correctness ] is accepted as a powerful tonic and healing substance in Ayurveda

In some regions of Italy, donkey is used for certain famous salume, so be grateful in India we have not evolved that expertise. It is of the horse family, can interbreed freely with horses, and horses were the object of great culinary desire during the Vedic period. So!

Curiously, I have never seen donkey or horse ejecta employed for fuel. Why this might be I cannot say. Relative scarcity or higher ammonia contents? Horse manure is a much richer plant food than cowdung, as horse rumination is less efficient than cattle. Cattle are slow, big fermentation tanks, and horses need quicker throughput of higher quality feed in order to be able to run fast. Large weight in the stomach acts as a counter to its gait.

I used to listen in on the veterinary medicine classes at Cornell on how horses run. Obviously, this is a multi-million dollar subject, [affecting not just racehorses but show jumping and other horses owned by the rich] and a whole sub-specialty within veterinary medecine, as just the surgery of broken horse shins is itself is an impossible [until very recently] and hugely lucrative field. Racehorses are bred from Arab stock and European breeds, the "hot" and "cold" bloods that have anatomical and other genetic differences, including one vertebra more and less. Physics of the full stomach directly affects how a horse  runs, how its feet leave the ground, and so on. You have to admire how thorough the Western civilization is, on matters that interest it.

Indians are thorough in matters that interest them: we have minute and stupendous literature on all aspects of the human mind and its working, spiritual quests and so forth. You may consult Frits Staal who catalogued the total of Indian literature to be around 30 million volumes, written, aside from the oral. Being very conservative, and disregarding the huge amounts destroyed deliberately, say 10 million of these would be texts of a spiritual nature. Now, a major research library like Yale contains about 6 million volumes in its total system. You get the point aboutt he great mental activity and thoroughness, where Indians can be motivated to be thorough.

Edited by gautam, 14 January 2008 - 06:36 PM.