Yamini Narayanan’s book, Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India (Stanford University Press 2023) has been selected by the MCR Prize Committee as the winner of the 2024 ASAA Mid Career Researcher Book Prize.

A/Prof. 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.

This year’s MCR Prize Committee included Professor Vera Mackie (University of Wollongong), Associate Professor Patrick Jory (University of Queensland) and Professor Taylor Sherman (UNSW).

The Committee provided the following citation of the winning book:

“Mother Cow, Mother India takes the form of a multi-sited, multi-species ethnography of the dairy industry in India, conducted in multi-caste, multi-racial and multi-religious communities. It engages with the latest theoretical perspectives from the field of Animal Studies and applies it to a new field of inquiry: the dairy industry in India. It examines human-animal hierarchies and relations – a political spectrum of human-bovine relations. The book’s central claim is that the cow is simultaneously commodified for dairy production and weaponised in the interests of Hindu nationalism. This work makes original contributions to the fields of South Asian Studies and Animal Studies.”

Read more about Mother Cow, Mother India here and more about the ASAA’s MCR Book Prize here.