The Reality of Cow Dung – Panchgavya
The narrative examines the cultural and scientific context of cow dung in India, contrasts it with Japan’s advancements, and critiques the political and scientific narratives surrounding this issue, and talks about panchgavya.
What does one make of the Japanese space company successfully using biomethane from cow dung as a rocket fuel?
There were some social media outbursts that exhibited this as a resounding victory of Hindutva claims about… “We already said so, now they are copying us.”. Expectedly, the left-liberal camp clammed up, not knowing which way to run for the defence of their longstanding revilement of anything to do with the cow.
But the real issue is one of policy: we knew about the efficacy of cow dung since ages. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is a highly competitive and commercially successful, advanced space agency, and yet, it had never thought of this alternative to the highly expensive cryogenic fuels used for Indian space projects. Japan, as always, has produced a modern-day miracle from an ancient Indian science. On other words,Japan took us seriously. We did not.
The use of cow dung slurry for making usable biogas is old. Way back in 1998, I had seen biogas being used in households in the Makaibari Tea Estates, Kurseong Division of Darjeeling district. We knew this, but we never innovated. Instead, since the past 10 years or so, we have blindly fought for the cow as a religio-political symbol.
Yet, there is science. And some of the best brains in the world have been producing scientific papers in an unending series.
Cow: The ‘Wonder Animal’
Let us start with the ritual aspect of the cow. The cow produces five things, three of them natural and two created. The first three are dung, urine and milk, and the last two are derivatives of milk: curd, and clarified butter, or what we Indians call ghee, which is also an Indian innovation, but no Indian has a patent on it.
Cow milk has been used in all rituals of any branch of Sanatan Dharm. What is to be noted is that of the two major sources of milk, buffalo and cow. It is only cow milk that is used for these rituals.
If you look at the belief system, the reason behind this is that the propitiation of the gods is done using only cow milk because it is soothing, whereas buffalo milk is more about physical energy and belligerent prowess. Both have their uses for different purposes. Neither is better or worse than the other. It is just that their properties are different.
Biodynamics
Indians knew of this property of the cow eons ago. But it was only after the Second World War that a German psychic, Rudolph Steiner who demonstrated the use of the cow and its dung for “healing the earth”.
After the war had destroyed almost all farmlands in Europe, landowners turned to Steiner for a remedy. He invented the system of Biodynamics, in which eight Preps, or preparations are used in a mix to regenerate the land.
Primarily it is the use of the cow horn, in which cow dung and crystal powder is packed and buried underground for a specific period and when brought out, these produce some truly surprising soil and plant curatives.
Steiner had argued that the hollow inside a cow horn has a double-helix formation, and this helps the cow trap cosmic energies, which drastically enhances the usual properties of both the dung and the crystal powder.
Biodynamics is now a global movement, and in India I have studied its use in Makaibari Tea Estates, Darjeeling. My study lasted six years. And while there is no need to get into the finer details of the actual system, suffice it to say that biodynamics is used even to create biodynamic golf courses across the world.
This issue is closely associated with the completely Indian concept of the Panchvatee. This concept far outmarches the modern paradigms of forest conservation, where the forest is a distinct entity and distanced from human habitation.
The holistic outlook of Panchvatee is about habitation amidst the forest, and we find numerous descriptions of this in the two Indian epics and other ancient texts, but this issue we shall deal separately in another edition of this series.
Myth and Science
The brouhaha over mass sale of cow urine as a palliative that started 10 years ago is, simply put, a grossly unscientific religious dogma. So, are the properties of cow urine pure myth? No, and this is where the Left and the Right have both to mend their ways.
The pressure from the far right was such that a premier scientific institution dealing with pharmacopeia was made to dish out a statement that Indian cow milk is the only one in which one can find gold. Later, under pressure from the global scientific community, the concerned ministry issued a statement debunking any such ‘finding’.
Yet, we have always known two very unique concoctions made of cow products. One is the Sanjeevani, or a mix of cow dung and cow urine, and the other is the Panchgavya, the mix of dung, urine, milk, curd and ghee.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the apex health-science research body in the US in its National Library of Medicines, has an article on Panchagavya that appeared as recently as April-May 2022. And the article is essentially a compilation of at least 83 research papers on Panchgavya.
The series takes up the issue of each of the five cow products and arranges all the research that has been done on that.
(Coming up: Panchgavya: A Multidisciplinary Approach)
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