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Authoritarian Populism and
Bovine Political Economy in
Modi’s India
Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India

analyses how the twin forces of Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism unfold
in India’s bovine economy, revealing their often-devastating material and
economic impact on the country’s poor.
This book is a rare, in-depth study of India’s bovine economy under
Narendra Modi’s authoritarian populism. This is an economy that throws
up a central paradox: On the one hand, an entrenched and aggressive Hindu
nationalist politics is engaged in violently protecting the cow, disciplining those
who do not sufficiently respect and revere it; on the other hand, India houses
and continuously promotes one of the world’s largest corporate-controlled beef
export economies that depends on the slaughter of millions of bovines every
year. The book offers an original analysis of this scenario to show how Modi’s
authoritarian populist regime has worked to reconcile the two by simultaneously
promoting a virulent Hindu nationalism that seeks to turn India into a Hindu
state, while also pushing neoliberal economic policies favouring corporate
capital and elite class interests within and beyond the bovine economy.
The book brings out the adverse impacts of these political-economic
processes on the lives and livelihoods of millions of poor Indians in countryside
and city. In addition, it identifies emerging weaknesses in Modi’s authoritarian
populism, highlighting the potential for progressive counter-mobilisation. It will
be of interest to scholars in the fields of development studies, South Asia studies,
critical agrarian studies, as well as scholars with a general interest in political
economy, contemporary authoritarian populism, and social movements.
Jostein Jakobsen is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Development

and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests are
broadly within political ecology and critical agrarian studies. He is the co-
author of The Violent Technologies of Extraction: Political Ecology, Critical
Agrarian Studies and the Capitalist Worldeater (2020).
Kenneth Bo Nielsen is associate professor of social anthropology, University

of Oslo, Norway. He works on land politics, agrarian issues, and the political
economy of development in India. His books include Land Dispossession and
Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India (2018) and The Great Goa Land
Grab (2022, co-authored).
Routledge Studies in South Asian Politics
36 Extremism and Counter-Extremism Narratives in Pakistan

An analysis of narrative building
Sadia Nasir
37 Politics of Socio-Spatial Transformation in Pakistan

Leaders and Constituents in Punjab
Asad ur Rehman
38 Insurgency in India’s Northeast

Identity Formation, Postcolonial Nation/State-Building,
and Secessionist Resistance
Jugdep S. Chima and Pahi Saikia
39 Security of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor

Counterinsurgency in Balochistan
Khurram Shahzad Siddiqui
40 Track Two Diplomacy Between India and Pakistan

Peace Negotiations and Initiatives
Samir Ahmad
41 Administration in India
Challenges and Innovations
Edited by Ashish Kumar Srivastava and Iva Ashish Srivastava
42 Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political

Economy in Modi’s India
Jostein Jakobsen and Kenneth Bo Nielsen
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/asianstudies/

series/RSSAP
Authoritarian Populism and
Bovine Political Economy in
Modi’s India
Jostein Jakobsen and

Kenneth Bo Nielsen
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Jostein Jakobsen and Kenneth Bo Nielsen
The right of Jostein Jakobsen and Kenneth Bo Nielsen to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-70934-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-70937-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-70940-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781032709406
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
List of figures vii

Acknowledgements ix
1 Authoritarian Populism, Bovines, and State

Contradictions in Modi’s India 1
2 Hindu Nationalism and Bovine Political Economy 24
3 The “Double Victimisation” of Classes of Labour in

Countryside and City 46
4 Towards Corporate Concentration: COVID-19

and Beyond 65
5 Concluding Reflections on State Contradictions

and Counter-Hegemonic Projects Under Modi’s
Authoritarian Populism 84
Index 97
Figures
2.1 India’s buffalo meat exports: Quantity in tonnes (MT) 34

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank our good colleagues at the University of Os-
lo’s Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) Arve Hansen and
Karen Lykke, whose invitation some five years ago to contribute to a book on
meat cultures first brought us together to jointly think about the relationship
between bovines, Hindu nationalism, and neoliberalisation in contemporary
India. Had it not been for their invitation, this book would not have happened.
Draft chapters have been presented at various workshops and confer-
ences over the past three years. We are grateful for the many constructive
comments we have received along the way, and wish to thank Jens Lerche,
Richard Axelby, and James Staples, in particular. Their contributions to our
conference panel on “Bovine Politics and Agrarian Change: Hindutva, Vio-
lence and the Indian Cattle Economy” at the Madison South Asia Confer-
ence in 2021 have been particularly influential in shaping our arguments.
Thanks also to our regular partner in crime Alf Nilsen for critical input and
encouragement; to the Oslo-based South Asia Symposium for the generous
discussion of earlier drafts; to the two anonymous reviewers who read the
draft manuscript and offered crucial input that helped us reframe the analysis
in important ways; and to Sagari Ramdas whose work we remain indebted
to, for accepting our invitation to speak on several of the topics discussed in
this book at the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies online “Asia Week
Conference” in 2020.
We are particularly grateful to Jonathan Pattenden at the Journal of
Agrarian Change, whose incisive comments and suggestions spawned criti-
cal reflections on our part on the scope for progressive counter-movements
from below at the current conjuncture. Some material in this book has ear-
lier appeared in article form (Jakobsen and Nielsen 2023) in a special is-
sue of Journal of Agrarian Change on “Populism, Agrarian Movements and
x Acknowledgements
Progressive Politics” that Jon guest edited. We are grateful to Taylor and
Francis for allowing us to reuse this material here. And, not least, we are
grateful to Dorothea Schaefter and Routledge for their work on the book.
Part of the research undertaken for the book was carried out under the re-
search project “Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global
Promise” (Transsustain), funded by the Research Council of Norway (pro-
ject number 301352).
Reference
Jakobsen, J., and Nielsen, K. B. 2023. Bovine Meat, Authoritarian Populism, and State
Contradictions in Modi’s India. Journal of Agrarian Change 23 (1): 110–130.
1 Authoritarian Populism, Bovines,
and State Contradictions in
Modi’s India
In March 2016, two Muslim cattle herders were brutally murdered in Balu-
math in Latehar district in the Indian state of Jharkhand. The deceased were
Mazlum Ansari, aged 35, and Imteyaz Khan, aged 12. The two had been herd-
ing their last batch of eight oxen to a Friday cattle fair in Chatra district in
Jharkhand, where they planned to sell them. Earlier, Mazlum and Imteyaz
had reportedly been threatened several times by so-called “cow protection”
activists affiliated with a Hindu nationalist right-wing group who had come to
Mazlum’s house, warning him to stop trading cattle. If he did not, they would
kill him. Fearful of his life and business, Mazlum therefore now planned to
sell off his last animals and venture into another business. But Mazlum and
Imteyaz never made it to the cattle fair. Having set off before sunrise, they
were soon intercepted and attacked by a group of cow protection vigilantes in
the early hours of the morning. Mazlum and Imteyaz had been forcibly taken
to a nearby forest, where they were brutally beaten to death and subsequently
hanged from a tree, their hands tied behind their backs, and their eyes covered
by cloth. Their bodies were badly bruised, with wounds and injuries inflicted
by long, hard, blunt rod-like objects. Imteyaz’s father, Azad, had gotten word
of the attack and had set out on his motorbike to look for his son. Finding
Mazlum’s oxen wandering unattended near the road, Azad had heard his son
screaming for help from the forest nearby. As he moved towards the forest,
Azad had seen the lynch mob and witnessed the attack, but fearing for his own
life, he had remained hidden in the bushes: “If I stepped out, they would have
killed me too. My son was screaming for help, but I was so scared”, he said
later (Anwar 2018; HRW 2019).
*
Fifteen months later, in June 2017, Allanasons Pvt. Ltd., India’s largest ex-
porter of buffalo meat, received what one commentator called “a remark-
able official recognition of the firm’s performance”, namely a government
award for outstanding export performance. Allanasons was one of only two
firms that won a so-called diamond trophy, awarded by India’s Agricultural
and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), the
DOI: 10.4324/9781032709406-1
2 Authoritarian Populism, Bovines, and State Contradictions
Commerce Ministry’s apex body for agricultural exports. According to an
APEDA press release, Allanasons received the award for “outstanding export
performance and overall contribution in the food sector” for the years 2014–
2015 and 2015–2016. Rita Teotia, the Commerce Secretary in the Narendra
Modi-led Hindu nationalist government, observed at the awards function that
India was the seventh largest exporter of agricultural products in the world,
adding that her ministry was taking steps for “furthering outward shipments”.
When receiving the award, the Director of Allanasons said that in both years
the company had exported buffalo meat at a total value of INR 10,000 crore,
amounting to more than one-third of all of India’s buffalo meat exports (Dhara
2017). At the same award function, the Aligarh-based Al-Hamd Agro Foods
Products Pvt. Ltd. – another major actor exporting halal fresh and frozen buf-
falo boneless meat and other meat products – was awarded a Golden Trophy
for their performance in buffalo meat exports.
*
As the anthropologist James Staples (2020: 7) has recently argued, “beef and
the animals from which it comes … tell us something about what is going on
in Indian society in more explicit ways than might otherwise be obvious”. In
this book, we take inspiration from Staples’ argument as we use beef and bo-
vine bodies as our entry point for analysing the political economy of “Modi’s
India” (Jaffrelot 2021). In this regard, our opening vignettes illustrate two
defining and intertwined features or “moments” of what we in this book con-
ceptualise as Modi’s authoritarian populism. In the political sphere, we see an
aggressively advancing Hindu nationalist cultural politics centred on Hindu
pride and unity. This cultural politics seeks (so far with remarkable success) to
incorporate significant proportions of India’s poor and working classes across
the lines of class and caste, in antagonistic opposition to a threatening Muslim
“Other” (Jaffrelot 2019, 2021). Bovine bodies are crucial to advancing this
agenda, as seen in the way in which Hindu nationalist vigilante groups operate
with an increasingly free hand to violently enforce their brand of cow protec-
tionism to punish individuals (and Muslims, in particular) who do not respect
the rules of Hindu cow veneration that are upheld as the ultimate indicator
of true patriotism (Patel 2018). These groups operate with the tacit approval
of the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government that has, addition-
ally, presided over the introduction of ever-stricter legal restrictions on the
consumption of cow meat and the transportation of cattle for slaughter since
it came to power in 2014.
In the economic sphere, however, we find the Modi government heavily
invested in neoliberalising the economy, opening up new spaces for capital
accumulation by promoting corporate-led agricultural exports from India on
a global scale, and extending official awards, recognition, and accolades to
central actors in this field. Bovine bodies are crucial to advancing this agenda
too as the slaughter of millions of bovines every year is required for key firms
Authoritarian Populism, Bovines, and State Contradictions 3
in the corporate beef export industry to sell Indian beef meat worth several
billion US dollars to markets in the Middle East and South and South-East
Asia. These firms are based on corporate concentration around dominant class
interests and have been key in establishing India as a world-leading exporter
of beef, accounting for as much as 20 percent of global exports.
This scenario has sometimes been discussed in the media and elsewhere
as India’s “bovine paradox”: How is it that India can rigorously “protect the
cow” at home while simultaneously killing millions of bovines every year for
global exports? While this may at one level seem paradoxical, it is our central
contention in this book that India’s bovine paradox should be understood as
exemplary of broader and acutely important political-economic dynamics and
contradictions at play in Modi’s India. In schematic form, a central contra-
diction runs between a bovine politics that protects bovine bodies to further
the project of “Hindutva ultranationalism” (Kumbamu 2020), and a bovine
economics that slaughters bovines in the millions to facilitate the further in-
tegration of Indian agriculture into global markets and value chains; and be-
tween a political project that seeks legitimacy from and the incorporation of
India’s poor and working classes, and an economic project that is hostile to
the class interests of those same groups. In other words, it runs between the
socio-cultural agenda of Hindu nationalist politics and the economic agenda
of neoliberal restructuring, both of which are crucially intertwined moments
of Modi’s authoritarian populism.
Understanding this contradiction and its political-economic dynamics is
important in its own right. Indeed, while the unfolding political dynamics of
Modi’s authoritarian populism have been the subject of incisive recent analy-
ses (e.g. Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019; Hansen and Roy 2022; Jaf-
frelot 2021), the political economy of the Modi regime remains “secretive”
(Jaffrelot 2021: 459) and underexplored. This book seeks to address this la-
cuna by bringing economic relations of production into central consideration
to understand the form and direction of capital accumulation in Modi’s India.
Drawing on Nicos Poulantzas’ notion of “state contractions”, which we return
to below, a key aim in this book is therefore to illuminate and understand
capitalist dynamics under Modi’s authoritarian populism, using India’s bovine
paradox as our entry point and magnifying glass.
An important related aim is to understand the wider ramifications of these
dynamics and contradictions as they unfold in the specific domain of bovines
for the hundreds of millions of rural Indians who live precarious lives in the
Indian countryside. This is a heterogeneous category that we in this book con-
ceptualise as rural “classes of labour”, that is, “all those who share a position
as members of directly and indirectly exploited classes” (Pattenden 2023: 6).
India has the highest livestock population in the world, at more than half a
billion animals. Of these, more than 300 million are bovines, making rural
Indians the largest global owners of this species (Narayanan 2023: 15–16).
Given the average size of a rural Indian household, coupled with the fact that
the mean “herd size” of bovines in rural India is just one or two animals, it
is clear that the bovine economy is important to a very large number of ru-
ral Indians. Indeed, approximately two-thirds of all rural households report
generating income from livestock (Mahapatra 2012). Already a decade ago,
livestock surpassed crop production in terms of monetary contribution to the
Indian economy (Mahapatra 2012), and more than a quarter of the total earn-
ings in the category known as “agriculture and allied activities” now comes
from livestock (Narayanan 2023: 11). These additionally act as an important
“living bank” for rural households who increasingly have to manoeuvre a situ-
ation of agrarian distress and economic hardships. Changes to the bovine po-
litical economy, in other words, very directly and very immediately impact the
lives and livelihoods of India’s classes of labour in rural but also “rurban” and
urban areas, where bovines are important to the livelihoods of cattle traders,
transporters, butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, craftsmen, and small retailers
in the informal economy.
A key argument of this book is that the ways in which central contra-
dictions in Modi’s authoritarian populism have played out in the domain of
bovine politics and economics have had distinctly negative ramifications for
India’s classes of labour. Specifically, we show how those groups among
classes of labour in the countryside and cities across India whose livelihoods
are dependent upon the livestock economy have, in various ways, experienced
a “double victimisation”, being at the receiving end of destructive Hindu na-
tionalist cow vigilantism and legal crackdowns, as well as at the losing end of
an ongoing restructuring of the livestock economy that favours major actors
backed and represented by dominant class interests. What our story shows,
then, is that ongoing Hindu nationalist efforts at incorporating India’s poor
and working classes in their political project notwithstanding, the bovine poli-
tics and economics of the Modi regime offer few benefits for India’s classes
of labour. They are, rather, destructive of key parts of the livelihoods of these
groups and overwhelmingly further accumulation among politically favoured
classes of corporate capital. A final aim of this book is, therefore, to use this
finding to reflect on the extent to which these political-economic dynamics
constitute a potential challenge to the longer-term reproduction of Modi’s au-
thoritarian populist regime. To what extent can the Modi regime sustain what
Echeverri-Gent and colleagues (2021: 425) call the paradox of “remarkable
political success amidst serious economic distress”? Leaning towards the op-
timism of the will rather than the pessimism of the intellect, this book uses
the analysis of bovine political economy under Modi to explore openings or
possibilities for political unravelling that may pave the way for novel forms
of counter-hegemonic mobilisation from below.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we introduce the key themes
and analytical concepts that run through the book. We start with a brief review
of the literature on bovines and India’s bovine paradox, before situating our
analysis in an emerging literature within critical agrarian studies scrutinising
the relationship between authoritarian populism and the rural world. We then
mobilise the idea of “state contradictions” to analyse the political economy of
the Modi regime in general terms and elaborate on our argument about its key
contradictions. We end with an overview of the chapters followed by a note
on methodology.
The Bovine Paradox, Authoritarian Populism,

and State Contradictions
India’s seeming bovine paradox has been the subject of discussions in the
media from time to time, especially since the news broke in 2015 that India
had by then emerged as the world’s leading exporter of beef meat in the form
of carabeef, that is, meat from water buffaloes. Commentators taking a critical
stance against Hindu nationalism have often pointed to this paradox, where
the BJP and affiliated Hindu right-wing groups target beef and meat consump-
tion at home while encouraging their exports abroad, as evidence of hypocrisy
and the cynical readiness on the part of the government to discard the mask of
Hindu piety and cow veneration in favour of export revenue.
The still relatively limited scholarly literature that has substantially en-
gaged with this bovine paradox has, in contrast, sought to move beyond the
often intensely polarising debates that “the hyper-politicization of beef”
(Narayanan 2023: 9) can generate, to probe deeper complexities and nuances.
Recent contributions from the anthropology of food, such as Staples’ (2020)
Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating
Meat in India and Johan Fischer’s (2023) Vegetarianism, Meat and Modernity
in India, illustrate convincingly the often marginal or contradictory effects
that broader discourses on Hindu nationalism, cow protectionism, and “beef
bans” have on people’s everyday foodways and culinary choices, foreground-
ing instead how the latter are shaped by a wider set of social and economic
processes. Other scholars have approached the paradox from the standpoint
of interspecies or multispecies ethnography and animal studies. Radhika Go-
vindrajan’s Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central
Himalayas (2018) provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of the lim-
its to the Hindu nationalist project of cow protectionism by showing how its
use of undifferentiated and abstract metaphors of the cow as mother of the
Hindu nation is disrupted by “the distinct and lively materiality of the actual
cows it [seeks] to represent” (Govindrajan 2018: 65, emphasis in original),
and by people’s embodied everyday relationships with real bovines of flesh,
blood, and emotion. From a comparable starting point, Adcock and Govindra-
jan’s (2019) collection “Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking Religion,
Law and Ethics” similarly seeks to move the discussion of India’s bovines
beyond questions of politicised religion by attending to the materialities of
bovine-human interactions and how bovines co-produce social worlds with
humans. In doing so, they persuasively deconstruct many of the misleading
binaries that both inform but also blur the discussion of bovines in India:
The holy cow vs. the merely economic buffalo; legality vs. illegality; and
ethical living vs. violent practices. Equally firmly rooted in the same multi-
species tradition, Yamini Narayanan’s (2023) Mother Cow, Mother India: A
Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India offers a powerful critique of the way in
which current Indian debates on the cow have become so polarised and hyper-
politicised that the animal itself is almost lost from view. In recuperating the
bodily experience of bovines in the Indian dairy and meat industry, Narayanan
brings to our attention another paradox that the strong focus on cow protec-
tionism in the context of slaughter and beef exports glosses over, namely that
while the slaughter of bovines is intensely politicised by Hindu nationalist
organisations for whom the Mother cow embodies Mother India, the routine,
large-scale violence done to bovine bodies in the Indian dairy industry –
culminating in slaughter when animals are “spent” or “superfluous” – is
whitewashed almost to the point of complete erasure.
These studies have opened important new avenues for exploring the roles
and relationships that are formed around bovines in India and have crucially
shifted the terms of scholarly engagement away from rigid binary concep-
tions. We draw inspiration from and engage with these studies throughout
the book. And yet, our interest in using India’s bovine paradox as an entry
point for understanding the political economy of the Modi regime and its
consequences for India’s rural classes of labour necessarily requires a closer
engagement with the growing literature on authoritarian populism. This is a
literature in which India has come to figure ever more prominently over the
past decade, as the country’s democratic institutions have withered, and its po-
litical leadership turned increasingly autocratic under Modi’s Hindu national-
ist government. The various strands of this literature commonly conceptualise
Modi as a “national populist” (Jaffrelot 2021) or an “authoritarian populist”
(Chacko 2018; Nielsen and Nilsen 2022a; Sinha 2021; Sud 2022) and point
to the same two defining features of this form of politics that we outlined
above, namely (i) an aggressive and assertive religious nationalism that seeks
to turn India into a Hindu majoritarian state (Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot
2019; Jaffrelot 2021; Hansen and Roy 2022), and (ii) neoliberal economic
policies that seek to remove obstacles to and create new spaces for capitalist
accumulation (Kaur 2020; Palshikar 2019). In this sense, Modi’s authoritarian
populism has much in common with that of Erdogan in Turkey (Adaman and
Akbulut 2021), Trump in the USA (Kellner 2016), Bolsonaro in Brazil (Tam-
aki, Mendonça and Fereira 2021), and Duterte in the Philippines (Juego 2017;
Ruud 2023), who all combine an exclusionary nationalism with neoliberal
restructuring of the state and economy. Indeed, given the entrenchment and
hegemonic consolidation of the Modi regime (Bello 2019), Modi has come to
be seen as an almost paradigmatic example of the rise of new authoritarian
populisms in both established and emerging democracies across the Global
North and South (Widmalm 2021). This new wave of “democratic backslid-
ing” may be unfolding in a slow and piecemeal way, but it has affected a very
high number of democracies across the globe (Berberoglu 2020; Lührmann
et al. 2018), including the world’s largest democracy, India.
The main contributions to the study of the relationship between authoritar-
ian populism and the rural world that is among our key interests here have,
however, come from the field of critical agrarian studies where the topic has
received unprecedented attention in recent years. This is largely due to the
research emanating from the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, a col-
laborative effort among scholars and activists striving to unravel the rami-
fication for rural politics of right-wing deepening across the world.1 The
Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative has spawned a series of publications
scrutinising this relationship under various concepts such as “authoritarian
populism” (Scoones et al. 2018), “counter-revolution” (Bello 2019), “right-
wing populism” (Borras 2020; Pattenden 2023), or “reactionary nationalist
populisms” (Akram-Lodhi 2022). While this scholarship acknowledges var-
iegation in actually existing forms and dynamics across different parts of the
Global South and North alike, recognising the academic and political pitfalls
of over-extending the reach of a singular analytic, these various concepts all
index a defining political feature of populism, namely “the deliberate political
act of aggregating disparate and even competing and contradictory class and
group interests and demands into a relatively homogenised voice, that is, ‘we,
the people’, against an ‘adversarial them’ for tactical or strategic purposes”
(Borras 2020: 5). Such political dynamics, the literature argues, need to be
seen in relation to how authoritarian populisms take shape in rural societies,
drawing upon ongoing processes of economic and social change, for the most
part contributing to worsening and deepening economic dynamics that are
detrimental to rural classes of labour (Scoones et al. 2018). These dynamics –
all of which are on display in contemporary India – include widespread and
longstanding yet accelerating conditions of distress, resource grabbing, wid-
ening rural-urban disparities, environmental breakdown, and agro-industrial
transformation that are largely unhinged from employment generation or other
economic benefits to rural communities and classes of labour. This is coupled
with a likewise widespread exhaustion of progressive counter-mobilisation in
much of the world (Scoones et al. 2018). In other words, the rise of authori-
tarian populism in the rural world – in India and elsewhere – simultaneously
indexes an increasingly generalised crisis and a dire need for emancipatory
politics from below (see also Pattenden 2023).
Despite the clear acknowledgement of the intertwined nature of the po-
litical and economic “moments” of authoritarian populism, much of the re-
cent scholarship on authoritarian populism and the rural world has retained
a primary interest in the ideological and discursive qualities of authoritarian
populism. This has, in turn, triggered new interventions calling for a recali-
bration of analytical emphasis towards more in-depth and sustained probing
of constitutive capitalist and class dynamics. Henry Bernstein (2020: 1539),
for example, writes that: “What should be clear enough is that authoritarian
populism, for all its diverse manifestations, should always be interrogated first
through the questions: what class interests does it serve? By what means? And
with what effects?” Taking a cue from Bernstein’s assessment, McKay and
colleagues similarly argue for moving beyond analysing authoritarian pop-
ulism in a solely discursive manner, to probe underlying capitalist dynamics
that structure authoritarian populism, with their distinctive class contradic-
tions and antagonisms. This, they write, “requires going beyond the discourse
to a serious engagement with the role and nature of the state, and thus, an
analysis into the nature of the class and intra-class relationships in society and
in agrarian formation” (McKay et al. 2020: 355).
In this book, we are inspired by this call for shifting the study of authori-
tarian populism from the domain of ideology and discourse, into the domain
of the state, capitalist dynamics, and class and intra-class relationships. By
exploring Bernstein’s questions of what class interests authoritarian populism
serves, by what means, and with what effects in the specific context of India’s
bovine paradox, we seek to shed new light on the political economy of the
Modi regime, and on the transformations this regime is bringing about. We do
so through an engagement with the writings of Nicos Poulantzas, whose work
in the Gramscian tradition (Gramsci 1971) on “authoritarian statism” inspired
Stuart Hall’s original thinking on authoritarian populism in the context of
Thatcherism in Britain (Hall 2011: 727–728; McKay et al. 2020). We suggest,
however, that the call for renewed attention to the state to unravel the capital-
ist dynamic beneath right-wing populism across the world invites attention
to another strand of Poulantzas’ writings: his idea of “state contradictions”.
Poulantzas (1978) discusses the state as “a relationship of forces, or more
precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and
class fractions” (ibid.: 128, emphasis removed). This relationship is necessar-
ily strained and frequently conflictual, giving rise to a series of “internal con-
tradictions within the State” (ibid., emphasis removed). Therefore, rather than
looking for contradictions in hegemonies as such, or in hegemonic projects,
Poulantzas offers a perspective that would emphasise contradictions within
the state – within, in the Indian case, a state housing an authoritarian populism
constituted by Hindu nationalist politics and neoliberal economics. Impor-
tantly, Poulantzas’ class-analytical approach to the state also invites consid-
eration of the conjuncturally specific articulations between the “political”
and the “economic”, considered not as distinct realms, but rather as aspects
or “moments” of capitalist constellations, where relations of production –
comprising both “political” class relations and “economic” relations – always
remain determinant (Poulantzas 2008: 396–397).
While Poulantzas’ class-analytical focus has been critiqued for under-
playing the “economic” and for paying “too little attention … to basing the
analysis of class struggle on the actual dynamic of capital accumulation”
(Holloway and Picciotto 1978: 9),2 we find the Poulantzasian lens fruitful for
scrutinising the ways in which state contradictions play out across the osten-
sibly “political” and “economic” aspects of Modi’s authoritarian populism.
Insisting with Simon Clarke (1991: 9) that “the economic, political and ideo-
logical are complementary forms of a single social relation” under capitalism
and the ubiquitous compulsions of the capital-labour relation, in what follows
we draw on the suggestive formulation of state contradictions – seen as as-
pects of the patterning of “the fundamental class antagonism of capital and
labour” (Bonefeld 1992: 107) – to analyse Modi’s authoritarian populism and
its central contradictions. Consequently, we argue, rethinking authoritarian
populism – in contemporary India as well as elsewhere – to explore state and
class relations underpinning the ideological or discursive realm demands a
careful and simultaneous engagement with accumulation dynamics and their
contradictions.
State Contradictions in Modi’s India: Neoliberalisation

and Accumulation Patterns
To grasp state contradictions in Modi’s India, we proceed from the observa-
tion that the growth model pursued by the BJP – and indeed by all Indian
governments since economic liberalisation gathered momentum in 1991 – has
been highly unequal in its economic impact, generating stark social and eco-
nomic inequities (Drèze and Sen 2013). Importantly, these inequities have
increased since the Modi government assumed office in 2014, with estimates
by Chancel and Piketty (2019) suggesting that inequality has now reached its
highest level since the days of the British Raj.3 This is evident in the strong
increase in the number of Indian dollar billionaires in the last few years, and
the fact that the richest 98 of these own the same amount of wealth as the 555
million people who make up the poorest 40 percent of the Indian population
(Oxfam India 2022: 7).
To appreciate how the Modi regime’s brand of neoliberalism builds on and
departs from that of its predecessors, it is instructive to briefly contextualise
it with reference to the longer Indian experience with liberalising economic
reforms since the early 1990s. In contrast to many countries in Latin America
and Africa, India never experienced the kind of neoliberal shock therapy that
came with structural adjustment programmes. Rather, the reforms that India
undertook from the early 1990s and into the early 2000s were carried out “by
stealth” (Jenkins 1999). As Nielsen and Nilsen (2022b) have argued, this early
period of restructuring can be understood as a form of incremental roll-back
neoliberalisation, focused on selective deregulation and gradual state-led mar-
ketisation. The pace of neoliberal reform only picked up momentum under a
BJP-led government (Corbridge and Harriss 2000) in the late 1990s. The BJP
government branded their neoliberal reforms under the sign of “India Shin-
ing”, upholding these as the prime strategy of social mobility and prosperity
in India (Kaur 2020: 125). However, as it became increasingly clear that these
reforms had produced neither high economic growth, nor social mobility and
prosperity for most Indians, simmering popular opposition to neoliberalism
eventually led to a change of government in 2004.
While the Congress-led coalition – the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) –
that replaced the BJP largely remained committed to maintaining and even
deepening the process of neoliberal restructuring,4 it was also compelled to
respond to countervailing social forces to shore up popular legitimacy and
negotiate the required consent to govern in the context of competitive demo-
cratic politics. Towards this end, the UPA formulated a political programme
that sought to address the needs of India’s poor masses and classes of labour in
the countryside (see Hasan 2012; Nilsen 2021). This programme entailed the
rolling out of a series of social policy interventions in the form of rights-based
legislation that aimed to mitigate the marginalisation of vulnerable groups
that neoliberalisation invariably produced (Ruparelia 2013). The interven-
tions included new and ambitious welfare programmes in employment, food
security, and education – programmes which, despite their uneven and often
patchy implementation, became important to the lives of millions of rural In-
dians. The UPA’s rights-based approach to social policy in many ways, then,
represented a partial and contradictory move in the direction of roll-out neo-
liberalism that combines regulatory reform with active state-building and the
disciplining and containment of those marginalised by earlier waves of roll-
back neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell 2002). In this sense, the UPA years most
clearly brought to light the “contradiction of the simultaneous production of
neoliberal and welfare policy” (Ahmed and Chatterjee 2016: 332) in India.
Up until the end of the UPA period, then, neoliberalisation in India had
been restrained, incomplete, and contradictory, even as the overall thrust was
towards opening ever-more sectors to private capital, creating new avenues
for accumulation for corporate and dominant class interests (Chatterjee 2008;
Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011). By 2014, however, the UPA project had
unravelled. An important driver of this change was the fact that Indian capital
had, in the years leading up to the crucial 2014 elections that brought Modi to
power, more or less unanimously fallen in line behind Modi and the BJP. This
shift was propelled in large part by dissatisfaction with the UPA’s roll-out of
rights-based welfare which India’s capitalists had come to regard as a wasteful
drain on the state exchequer (Desai 2016: 53). As Kothakapa and Sirohi (2023:
14–15) put it, top corporates criticised the return of “socialism” under the UPA
while the middle classes decried what they saw as freebies for the poor. Cor-
porate India massively funded Modi’s 2014 campaign, leading commentators
on the left to describe the elections as “the biggest corporate heist in history”.
With the subsequent coming to power of the authoritarian populist Modi
government, India has seen a departure from the inclusive, incremental “roll-
out neoliberalism” of the UPA towards a more unambiguous promotion of
pro-business policies. In the political sphere, this has been accompanied by a
shift from the moderately secular orientation of the prior government, towards
a more assertive form of Hindu nationalism that seeks to render India a Hindu
state,5 advancing through the kind of violent xenophobia and racism that char-
acterise authoritarian populisms more generally (Borras 2020). Indeed, these
two features or “moments” – economic neoliberalism and political Hindu
nationalism – are, as we have argued, constitutive of Modi’s authoritarian
populism. To appreciate how this authoritarian populism works across these
“moments”, it is worth quoting extensively from Suhas Palshikar’s illuminat-
ing work on the BJP’s strategy for “crafting a new hegemony” under Modi:
What the Modi regime is set to do is to acquire the support of corporate

interests separately (i.e., unconnected from the cultural agenda) for its eco-
nomic agenda, and at the same time, acquire approval for its socio-political
agenda from the larger public by linking it to the economic agenda. The
corporate classes are expected not to be interested in or concerned with
the emerging debates in the arena of public political culture believing that
irrespective of what political culture emerges, the economic agenda would
be implemented vigorously and the erosion of diversity would not hurt
the material interests of the corporates. On the other hand, the ordinary
citizen is sought to be convinced that economic wellbeing is primarily a
function of a strong nation and therefore, the hurdles in becoming a strong
nation (such as social schisms, minority appeasement, anti-national use of
freedom of expression) need to be overcome. This is where the ability of
Modi to bring together the middle classes and corporate interests become
crucial. This alliance is critical not only to his electoral prospects, but more
so for the hegemonic project. Modi emerges as the extraordinary leader
because of skilfully marrying an aggressive corporatized economy with an
assertive majoritarian politics.
(Palshikar 2019: 113–114, emphasis added)
As Ravinder Kaur (2020) has shown, Modi’s work on forging this crucial
close alignment between Hindu nationalist majoritarianism and an aggres-
sive neoliberalisation of the economy goes back to the early 2000s when he
was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. While the story of the crafting of
Modi’s image as an “extraordinary leader” and iconic enabler of corporate-
led economic growth and development has been told (and deconstructed)
elsewhere (e.g. Jaffrelot 2021; Muraleedharan 2023; Sud 2022), what is im-
portant for our purposes is the considerable degree of success Modi has had
in articulating and building consent around his authoritarian populist project
that marries Hindu nationalist politics with neoliberal economics. As Shankar
Gopalakrishnan (2006, 2009) has argued, there are strong resonances and
overlaps between the ideology of Hindu nationalism and the ideology of neo-
liberalism, and the alliance between the two has grown gradually, albeit at
times uneasily, since the 1990s. Yet only with the ascent of Modi has this
alliance successfully consolidated into a singular hegemonic project. Under
Modi, Kaur argues, neoliberalisation is mediated by a cultural politics centred
on “the desire to unhinge the national from its colonial past and the impa-
tience to inhabit the long-promised future” (Kaur 2020: 18). The new nation
that is to emerge from this, Kaur writes, is partly a capitalist dreamworld in
which investor-citizens can enjoy social mobility and material prosperity. But
it is also “an ancient Hindu civilizational culture that assumes new forms but
never loses its original essence” (ibid.: 109). This ideology is then fused with
accumulation strategies that bear the imprint of Modi’s close relationship with
big business. As Palshikar also observes, Modi has been so instrumental in
creating and holding together this fusion that he now embodies “the entangle-
ments between the imperatives of capitalist growth and … cultural national-
ism” (Kaur 2020: 248). In contrast to the lacklustre and largely unsuccessful
“India Shining” campaign of the previous BJP government, then, Modi has
been much more successful in harnessing the dream of “good times” to the
vehicle of Hindu nationalism, instrumentalising the neoliberal formula of eco-
nomic growth towards the making of a strong Hindu nation. This, Kaur argues
(2020: 246), locks “illiberal” cultural nationalism and “neoliberal” capital-
ist growth into a state of mutual indebtedness under authoritarian populist
leadership.
Yet as Palshikar’s remark on the “aggressive corporatized economy” un-
der Modi indicates,6 the current trajectory is one where major capitals and
specific capitalists – especially those on friendly terms with Modi’s regime
(Banaji 2022; Jaffrelot 2021) – are put in an increasingly comfortable posi-
tion within the evolving political economy, driving increasing concentration
of ownership across a range of industries (Chandra 2020; Chandra and Verma
2020). An estimate from 2023 found that a mere 20 companies accounted
for a full 80 percent of India Inc’s total earnings, up from around 70 percent
in 2019. The corresponding figure for early 2014 just before Modi came to
power was less than 40 percent. In 1989, just prior to the commencement of
liberalising economic reforms, the figure was a mere 14 percent (Jaffrelot
2021; Rajhansa and Mukherjea 2023). This accelerating drive towards greater
corporate concentration tallies with Kothakapa and Sirohi’s (2023) recent as-
sessment that dominant fractions of capital have enjoyed unprecedented op-
portunities to entrench their power and wealth during the years when Modi
has been prime minister. During this period, the largest and most profitable
firms have been winning out disproportionately, while small capitalists, in
contrast, find themselves increasingly marginalised. This, in turn, has fuelled
speculations that India may be moving towards a new form of “conglomerate”
capitalism dominated by a small number of large firms (Damodaran 2020), or
a new and increasingly unstable “oligarchic state capitalism” characterised by
“incestuously close links between state and business” (Chatterjee 2023; see
also Sircar 2022).
Crucial to our analysis, these political-economic developments have been
accompanied by a depression of macro-economic indicators under Modi,
alongside declining growth rates and increasing levels of hunger (Kothakapa
and Sirohi 2023) – all indicators of the precarious situation that India’s classes
of labour are facing. Indeed, unemployment in India is currently at its highest
level since the 1990s and exceeds those of most other emerging economies
in the Global South (Nilsen 2023), with youth unemployment, in particular,
being “shockingly high” (Basu, cited in Subramaniam and Farooqui 2023).
The real wages for workers engaged in construction work, or as agricultural
labourers or non-agricultural workers have remained almost stagnant since
Modi came to power, growing by less than 1 percent per year, thus indexing
a real crisis for India’s classes of labour. This crisis is mirrored in poverty es-
timates. While no new government data on poverty has been published while
Modi has been in power, World Bank estimates from 2019 suggested that
close to 45 percent of all Indians lived on less than USD 3.65 per day. In all,
the poorest half of the Indian population – around 700 million people – now
earns just 13 percent of all national income and owns only 6 percent of the
national wealth (Nilsen 2023). Unsurprisingly, this precarious situation for
India’s poor and working classes also registers in the domains of nutrition
and hunger: In 2022, India slipped for the third consecutive year in the Global
Hunger Index to 107th position among 121 countries – lower than other
South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh –
registering significant levels of undernourishment and child stunting in the
population (Al Jazeera 2022). In Modi’s India, in other words, increasing con-
centration of wealth and power at the top has been accompanied by greater
precarity and a crisis of social reproduction among India’s classes of labour.
This escalating economic instability and vulnerability emanating from the
class dynamics of state-capital relations under Modi, Elizabeth Chatterjee
(2023) suggest, may render Modi’s authoritarian populism politically vulner-
able. To appreciate how and why, we need to consider how – as the references
to the importance of “the larger public” and “the ordinary citizen” in Palshi-
kar’s analysis of the BJP’s hegemonic strategy – Modi and the BJP actively
seek to incorporate and gain political legitimacy from India’s poor and work-
ing classes. Since 2014, this strategy has met with considerable success as
lower caste groups and poor voters have been drawn into the BJP’s ambit of
electoral support in greater numbers: In 2019, the BJP won 44 percent of the
lower caste vote, around a third of the Dalit vote, and 36 percent of the votes
of the poor. In all, Modi and the BJP garnered support from 44 percent of all
Hindu voters across the lines of caste and class that are otherwise often salient
political identities (Nilsen 2023).
This significant inclusion of classes of labour into the Hindu nationalist
support base has been sought and achieved through a complex mix of strate-
gies. Electoral promises of unprecedented economic growth and “good times”
for all – backed up by sensationalist accounts of Modi’s achievements during
his tenure as chief minister of Gujarat – early on tapped into the frustrations
and aspirations of both the poor and the moderately upwardly mobile neo-
middle classes, predominantly from backward caste backgrounds (Jaffrelot
2015). This has been supplemented by an albeit moderate provision of tar-
geted welfare initiatives whereby individual voters are provided with tangi-
ble private goods such as cooking gas, toilets, and medical insurance, which
register more immediately in the lived experience of poorer citizens than do
substantial investments in more diffuse public goods such as education and
public health (Echeverri-Gent, Sinha and Wyatt 2021). In addition, Modi’s au-
thoritarian populist style has played a key role in mobilising support amongst
India’s classes of labour, projecting him as a strong, committed, and compas-
sionate leader in whom also poor voters can place their trust in exchange for
“good decisions for the polity” (Sircar 2020). To this we can add the power
of fascination that Hindu nationalism’s discourse of Hindu unity and a shared
sense of Hinduness has, in some contexts, been shown to exercise vis-à-vis
Dalits, who may “seek acceptance from the upper-caste Hindus who had al-
ways culturally and socially marginalised them” (Narayan 2009). Alf Nilsen
(2023) conceives of this as a form of “psychological wages” that accrue to
India’s poor and working classes through their involvement in Hindu nation-
alist politics, extending a promise of dignity, recognition, and development
that can only be realised within the Hindu fold. Such psychological wages
may be supplemented by what Thomas Blom Hansen (2001) calls “wages
of violence”. The violence that is integral to contemporary Hindu nationalist
politics through, for example, cow protection vigilantism relies on a cohort
of “angry young men” (Jaffrelot 2021: 87–89) recruited across castes. They
carry out public acts of violence and vandalism, attacks on “anti-national mi-
norities”, and the destruction of property, thereby carving open new spaces
for the public assertion and affirmation of plebeian or stigmatised identities
(Hansen 2001: 61–66).
And yet, the escalating economic instability, the widespread and increas-
ing precarity among India’s classes of labour, the prolonged betrayal of the
promise of material betterment, and the crisis of social reproduction that ema-
nate from intensifying class dynamics of state-capital relations under Modi’s
authoritarian populism arguably indicate a space from which the Modi regime
may potentially be rendered vulnerable. In our terms, this points most clearly
to the acute need, intellectually and politically, for unravelling state contradic-
tions, their concomitant capital and class dynamics, and their on-the-ground
ramifications as these unfold in Modi’s India. The remainder of the book seeks
to do this in the realm of India’s bovine political economy.
The Structure of the Book and the Argument

We start, in the next chapter, with a comprehensive analysis of the central state
contradictions that are at the heart of Modi’s authoritarian populism. Starting
from an analysis of the politics of vigilantism, cow protectionism, and the
weaponisation of “bovine symbolism” (Staples 2020: 12) in Hindu nationalist
discourse and practice, the chapter demonstrates the centrality of bovines to
the Hindu nationalist project of turning India into a Hindu state. This project,
we show, also unfolds in the legal domain where ever-stricter laws have been
introduced to simultaneously protect the cow and discipline and punish those
who harm her. Central state contradictions, however, become visible when
we conjoin the analysis of this political moment of Modi’s authoritarian pop-
ulism to its economic counterpart, revealing a surge in beef exports emanating
from an expanding formal meat sector, operating with state support – albeit
strained – yet sitting in uneasy proximity to the bovine politics being pur-
sued by Hindu nationalist forces. Using bovines as a lens for exploring and
empirically grounding the larger story of neoliberalisation and accumulation
patterns in India recounted above, we uncover a process of considerable re-
structuring of the bovine economy over the last decades, characterised by the
expansion and consolidation of a corporate beef export sector dominated by
a limited number of large capitalist enterprises. Their rise within the bovine
political economy aligns with the overall neoliberalising thrust of the Modi re-
gime and, we argue, entails novel class and accumulation dynamics that differ
markedly from how the livestock economy functions within the livelihoods of
the country’s classes of labour. The emerging scenario is one where an infor-
mal bovine economy largely in the hands of classes of labour faces usurping
competition from a formal industry that is centralised, capital intensive, and
firmly controlled by dominant class interests.
The subsequent chapters further explore the unfolding dynamics of these
state contradictions in the realm of the country’s bovine political economy.
Chapter 3 analyses their impact among classes of labour in the Indian country-
side and cities, documenting their decidedly negative consequences. Classes
of labour engaged in sectors of the bovine economy across the rural-urban
divide, we argue, live through what we refer to as a process of double vic-
timisation. Specific segments of classes of labour are both direct and indi-
rect victims of new forms of legal and extra-legal regulation of the bovine
economy that restrict their economic agency and produce economic hardship
and physical suffering. At the same time, they are also increasingly excluded
from a transforming bovine economy because of broader political-economic
restructurings that favour dominant class interests. This chapter thus offers
substantial evidence concerning the class interests that Modi’s authoritarian
populism serves, as well as its ramifications. In addition, the double victimi-
sation of classes of labour explored in this chapter potentially has broader
implications for the capacity of Modi’s authoritarian populism to successfully
seek legitimacy from India’s poor and working classes. Irrespective of the
fact that the social, economic, and political emaciation of Muslim classes of
labour is integral to the political moment of Modi’s authoritarian populism,
the wider negative impact of this politics on India’s complex and extensive
bovine economy nevertheless means that the livelihoods of larger segments of
India’s classes of labour that Modi’s regime seeks to incorporate are consider-
ably undermined. The political implications of this are something we return to
in the concluding chapter.
Chapter 4 analyses the acceleration and intensification of the political-
economic dynamics in the bovine sector analysed in earlier chapters during
and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic. In this period, fast-changing
class and accumulation dynamics in the bovine economy have, we argue, ena-
bled further corporate consolidation across multiple sectors. This trajectory of
change in favour of elite class interests and large corporate actors, we suggest,
means that the organised industry is now increasingly well-positioned to cap-
ture a larger share of the value hitherto produced and retained among classes
of labour in the informal bovine economy. This, we argue, starkly reveals the
underlying class bias of Modi’s authoritarian populism. When read alongside
the previous chapter’s argument that the incorporation of already-precarious
classes of labour in Modi’s political project increasingly occurs through the
destruction of key parts of their livelihoods, this chapter demonstrates how
the state contradictions that this book is centrally concerned with are arguably
moving towards being less contradictory insofar as the political and economic
moments of Modi’s authoritarian populism move towards increasing align-
ment in an intensifying manner.
While this emerging dynamic may safely be interpreted as an acute threat
to the livelihoods of millions of rural Indians, it also opens for another – and
more hopeful – line of thinking politically about the prospects for emancipa-
tory or counter-hegemonic projects. This is the ambition of our concluding
chapter. Returning to our central contention that India’s “bovine paradox”
must be understood as an exemplar of broader political-economic dynamics
at play in Modi’s India – and of the contradiction between Hindu national-
ism’s attempts at incorporating India’s poor and working classes while also
pushing neoliberal economic restructuring to the benefit of capitalist classes –
we suggest that the unfolding intensification of such dynamics may in-
dex emerging structural conditions of possibility for progressive counter-
hegemonic mobilisation. In making this argument, the concluding chapter
engages the emerging scholarship on the recent farmers’ agitations in India,
locating structural conditions of counter-hegemonic mobilisation surrounding
bovines within broader dynamics in a restructuring economy in which agrarian
relations are taking on novel configurations; and where Modi’s authoritarian
populism seeks political majority by pitting classes of labour against each other.
A Note on Methodology and Representation

When researching this book, we have worked almost entirely with secondary
sources. Both of us have carried out longer and shorter ethnographic field-
works in different parts of India since the early 2000s, on subjects as diverse
as land grabbing, agrarian change, social movements and democracy, the po-
litical economy of development, and Hindu nationalist politics. This earlier
research forms an important backdrop to how we approach and analyse the
material we present in this book. That material, in turn, consists of the ex-
tant academic literature, as well as reporting, accounts, and investigations by
journalists, social activists, academics, and other actors writing about bovine
politics and economics in contemporary India. We also draw on material pro-
duced by and on the Indian beef industry, including promotional material,
trade statistics, and online self-presentations, in addition to relevant govern-
ment policy documents.
Locating material on that part of the story which involves Hindu nation-
alist vigilantism and extra-legal violence was, alarmingly, surprisingly easy.
Such atrocities are in no small measure carried out in spectacularly violent
form, to intimidate minorities in general and further communal polarisation
on a larger scale. It is, in other words, undertaken for public consumption and
is meant to be visible. It is sometimes filmed and shared on social media, is
widely reported on in the national and international media, and figures promi-
nently in many accounts of contemporary Hindu nationalism.
The part of the story that centres on the political economy of the bovine
sector and of the Modi regime, however, proved considerably more difficult to
research. This is no doubt attributable to the generally secretive nature of the
latter, and to the “sensitive” and sometimes-controversial nature of the former.
Our analysis of these factors therefore draws eclectically on a very diverse
number of sources, which we seek to piece together into a bigger picture. The
same is the case for our account of the impact of Modi’s authoritarian pop-
ulism on rural classes of labour which similarly builds on secondary sources,
and which would arguably have been greatly enriched by long-term fieldwork
in specific rural settings. We hope readers will take the analysis and arguments
in this monograph as an invitation to undertake precisely this.
Since the aim of this relatively short book is to describe and analyse the
big picture, a more fine-grained and systematic mapping of interstate variation
is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, we draw selectively on empirical
examples from several Indian states to illustrate broader trends. A few states,
however, receive more in-depth attention, particularly Uttar Pradesh and
Karnataka. Although these states have markedly different demographic, eco-
nomic, cultural, and linguistic histories and characteristics, they are widely
seen as the two most crucial “laboratories of Hindutva” today (Dhingra 2022;
Ramakrishnan 2020). In both states, BJP governments have used their control
of the state to tighten legal frameworks regulating the transport, slaughter,
and consumption of bovines to further the political project of Hindu nation-
alism, while allied organisations operating in civil society have used extra-
legal vigilantism to violently regulate the lives, livelihoods, and behaviour of
minorities, with the tacit or even active support of state institutions and the
police. This fusion of Hindu nationalist forces in political and civil society
has been described by Jaffrelot (2021: 250) as constituting “a vigilante state
whose ideal type has taken shape in [Chief Minister] Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar
Pradesh”, but which also exists in some form in Karnataka and other states (see
also Nielsen, Selvaraj and Nilsen forthcoming). In addition, Uttar Pradesh is
a particularly crucial state to any discussion of bovine political economy as it
contributes close to two-thirds of India’s overall meat export revenues, houses
close to half of all abattoirs and meat processing export units in the country,
and has the highest buffalo population of any Indian state (Alavi 2020). It is
also a state with upwards of 100 million people living under or just above the
official poverty line, and where vigilante groups are given a particularly free
hand. In Uttar Pradesh, we thus find the most striking manifestations of the
processes that we are concerned with in this book: Virulent Hindu nationalist
forces, significant parts of India’s beef agro-industry, and those sections of
rural classes of labour most heavily affected by double victimisation.
Based on this material, the book attempts to tell a singular story, a story
that connects and interweaves the lives of small farmers and other owners of
bovines in the Indian countryside; cattle traders, dealers, and transporters;
butchers, tanners, and leatherworkers; the dairy industry, informal abattoirs,
and modernised export-oriented slaughterhouses; cow protection activists,
cow shelters, and corporate social responsibility; informal markets and global
value chains; and Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism. Each chapter tells one
or more parts of this interconnected story.
Notes
1 See https://www.iss.nl/en/research/research-networks/emancipatory-rural-politics-
initiative
2 This shortcoming is derived from the “conceptual gulf” (Mau 2023: 56) between the
“political” and the “economic” that is taken for granted in his approach, arguably an
abiding flaw in much Marxist theorising (see Wood 1995).
3 The exact level of economic inequality in India today is debated. Some recent esti-
mates suggest that it remains high and widening (Nilsen 2023), while others detect
a slight decline in inequality since 2019 (Ghatak, Raghavan, and Xu 2022). Impor-
tantly, however, proponents of the latter view do not attribute any decline in inequal-
ity to redistributive efforts or wider structural changes to the Indian economy, but
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mentioned the “Lord Chancellor,” used by Maudslay before 1830. R.
Hoe & Company, of New York, in 1858, had a bench micrometer
reading up to 9 inches. But none of these could ever have influenced
mechanical standards generally as did the strong, compact little
instrument developed by Brown & Sharpe.
The circumstances surrounding its introduction are as follows: In
1867 the Bridgeport Brass Company had a lot of sheet brass
returned to them from the Union Metallic Cartridge Company as “out
of gauge.” Investigation showed that the sheets were to the gauge of
the manufacturer, but that the gauge used by the customer did not
agree, and, further, when both gauges were tested by a third, no two
of them agreed. All three gauges were supposed to be the regular U.
S. Standard, adopted by the wire manufacturers in 1857, of the well-
known round, flat form, with slits for the various sizes cut in the
circumference. Gauges of this form were the best and most accurate
method then known for measuring sheet metal.
S. R. Wilmot, then superintendent of the Bridgeport Brass
Company, seeing that the difficulty was likely to occur again, devised
the micrometer shown at A in Fig. 44, and had six of them made by a
skilled machinist named Hiram Driggs, under the direction of A. D.
Laws, who was then in charge of the mechanical department of the
Brass Company. The reading of the thousandths of an inch was
given by a pointer and a spiral line of the same pitch as the screw,
40 to the inch, running around the cylinder and crossed by a set of
25 lateral, parallel lines. In the early part of 1867, the matter was
taken up with J. R. Brown & Sharpe with a view to having them
manufacture the gauges, and the one shown, A, Fig. 44, with Mr.
Laws’ name stamped on it, is still in their possession. As submitted,
the tool was not considered to be of commercial value, for the
cylinder was completely covered with spiral and straight lines
intersecting each other so closely that it was impossible to put any
figures upon it, thus making it very difficult to read.
In 1848 Jean Laurent Palmer, a skilled mechanic in Paris,
patented a “screw caliper,” shown at B, Fig. 44, and began
manufacturing it under the name of “Systeme Palmer.” In this
micrometer the graduations were divided, one set being on the
cylinder of the frame and the other on the revolving barrel, an
arrangement which permitted all the markings necessary for
clearness. The importance of this tool does not seem to have been
appreciated until August, 1867, when J. R. Brown and Lucian
Sharpe saw one at the Paris Exposition. They at once recognized its
possibilities and brought one home with them. To use Mr. Sharpe’s
own words: “As a gauge was wanted for measuring sheet metal, we
adopted Palmer’s plan of division, and the Bridgeport man’s size of
gauge, adding the clamp for tightening the screw and the adjusting
screw for compensating the wear of end of points where the metal is
measured, and produced our ‘Pocket Sheet Metal Gauge.’... We
should never have made such a gauge as was shown us by the
Bridgeport man in 1867, to sell on our own account, as it would be
too troublesome to read to be salable. If we had not happened to find
the Palmer gauge, and thereby found a practical way to read
thousandths of an inch, no gauges would have been made. If we had
never seen the Bridgeport device we should have found the Palmer
at Paris, and without doubt have made such gauges, but possibly
would have made a larger one first. The immediate reason of making
the ‘Pocket Sheet Metal Gauge’ was the suggestion coming from the
Bridgeport Brass Company of the want of a gauge of the size of the
sample shown us for the use of the brass trade.”[194]
[194] From a letter of Lucian Sharpe, quoted in the American Machinist of
December 15, 1892, p. 10.
A B
C D
Figure 44. Early Micrometer Calipers
A—Wilmot’s Micrometer, 1867

B—Palmer Micrometer, brought from Paris by J. R. Brown and Lucian Sharpe,
1867
C—“Pocket Sheet Metal Gauge,” Brown & Sharpe, 1868
D—One-inch Micrometer, Brown & Sharpe, 1877
This gauge, shown at C, in Fig. 44, was put on the market in 1868,
and appeared in the catalog of 1869. Comparison of A, B, and C in
Fig. 44 shows clearly their close relationship. The term “micrometer”
caliper was first applied to the one-inch caliper (D, Fig. 44) which
was brought out and illustrated in the catalog of 1877. In Machinery
of June, 1915, Mr. L. D. Burlingame has given an admirable and very
complete account of the various improvements which have been
brought out since that time. In connection with the article, a modern
micrometer is shown and its various features, with the inventors of
each, are clearly indicated.[195]
[195] The origin and development of the present form of micrometer is
further discussed in Machinery, August, 1915, p. 999, and September,
1915, pp. 11, 58.
The cylindrical grinder was first made as a crude grinding lathe in

the early sixties, and used for grinding the needle and foot bars of
the Wilcox & Gibbs sewing machines. In 1864 and 1865 the regular
manufacture of grinding lathes was begun by using parts of 14-inch
Putnam lathes modified to produce the automatic grinding lathes.
These modifications consisted in mounting a grinding wheel on the
carriage, providing an automatic feeding and reversing attachment,
and included the use of a dead center pulley. From 1868 until 1876
various plans were worked out for a complete universal grinder, and
by 1876 one had been built and was exhibited at the Centennial
Exposition. The first one used at the factory was put into service a
few days after Mr. Brown’s death, which occurred July 23, 1876. The
patent granted to Mr. Brown’s heirs for this machine included not
only the ordinary devices of the universal grinder so well known
today, but also provision for form grinding. The designing of surface
machines as well as many other varieties followed, the work being
done under the direction of Charles H. Norton, who later had charge
of the design of their grinding machinery.
The manufacture of automatic gear cutters was commenced by
the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company in 1877, two designs
by Edward H. Parks, a small manufacturing machine for bevel and
spur gears and the larger machine for general use, being brought out
in that year.
In sixty years the Brown & Sharpe Company has grown from an
obscure local shop into a great plant employing thousands, but its
influence and its product represent a greater achievement. Many
mechanics of high ability have gone to other shops, among whom
are Henry M. Leland, president of the Cadillac Motor Car Company;
J. T. Slocomb, Horace Thurston, Elmer A. Beaman and George
Smith, of Providence; Charles H. Norton, of Worcester; John J.
Grant, of Boston; William S. Davenport, of New Bedford; A. J. Shaw,
of the Shaw Electric Crane Company, and H. K. LeBlond, of
Cincinnati. Hundreds of others, however, as managers,
superintendents, chief draftsmen and tool makers, have perhaps
done more to spread throughout the country the methods and
standards of accuracy which have made American machine tools
what they are.
Mr. Henry M. Leland, who was trained in the Providence shop,
says:
The man who is responsible for this and who thoroughly demonstrated his rare
ability and wonderful persistency in bringing out the accurate measuring tools and
instruments, and the advanced types of more efficient and unique machinery, was
the founder, Joseph R. Brown. I have often said that in my judgment Mr. Brown
deserved greater credit than any other man for developing and making possible
the great accuracy and the high efficiency of modern machine practice and in
making it possible to manufacture interchangeable parts, because the Brown &
Sharpe Company were the first people to place on the market and to educate the
mechanics of the country in the use of the vernier caliper. They were also the first
to make the micrometer caliper.
I remember that in those early days people came to Brown & Sharpe from all
over the world to consult with Mr. Brown in reference to obtaining great accuracy
and securing difficult results which had been deemed insurmountable by other
high-grade mechanics. The mechanical engineers are now searching the records
for men who have made themselves eminent in the industrial world as inventors
and manufacturers; for a list of men to have honorable mention and to have their
achievements and ability so recorded that the modern world may bestow upon
them the credit and gratitude which they so richly deserve. Among these names I
know of none who deserves a higher place than, or who has done so much for the
modern high standards of American manufacturers of interchangeable parts as
Joseph R. Brown.
CHAPTER XVII
CENTRAL NEW ENGLAND
At the close of the chapter on “Early American Mechanics” we referred to
the spread of machinery building northward from Rhode Island to the
Merrimac Valley and central Massachusetts. This by no means implies that
all the northern shops were started by Rhode Island mechanics, but their
influence is so strong as to be clearly seen; and here, as in Rhode Island, the
early shops were closely identified with the textile industry.
One of the first and most influential of these was the Amoskeag
Manufacturing Company. The beginnings of the Amoskeag Company were
made by a Benjamin Pritchard, of New Ipswich, N. H., who built a small
textile mill at Amoskeag Village, then Goffstown, in 1809. In 1822 it was
bought by Olney Robinson, from whom, that same year, Samuel Slater
received a letter asking for a loan of $3000. This was accompanied by a
magnificent salmon as a sample of the products of Amoskeag. Slater, with
the instincts of a good sportsman and a careful business man, went there to
investigate, with the result that he bought the property, which then consisted
of a water power, a two-story wooden mill and two or three small tenements.
Larned Pitcher soon joined him, and in 1825 four other partners were taken
in, Willard Sayles, Lyman Tiffany, Oliver Dean and Ira Gay. Three of the
partners were Pawtucket men—Slater, Pitcher and Gay. Slater and Gay were
very influential in the early history of the company. The business grew rapidly
and in 1841 they formed the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, which has
had a long and successful career. Their charter was broad, and they
extended their operations until they included textile mills, extensive
improvements of the water powers on the Merrimac, the founding of the city
of Manchester, and the operation of a large machine shop.
The last, which interests us most, was started about 1840. At first it was
used only for building and repairing textile machinery, but before very long it
was actively engaged in the manufacture of steam boilers, locomotives,
steam fire engines, turbine wheels and machine tools. It comprised two
three-story shops, each nearly 400 feet long, with foundries and forge shops,
and employed in all 700 men—a large plant for seventy-five years ago.
William A. Burke, its first head, left in 1845 to organize the Lowell Machine
Shop, which built textile and paper machinery and locomotives, and did
general millwright work. One of the workmen who helped install the
machinery in the Amoskeag shop was William B. Bement. He remained there
for two years as foreman and contractor, and in 1845 joined Burke at Lowell.
O. W. Bayley, who succeeded Burke as head of the Amoskeag shop, left in
1855 and founded the Manchester Locomotive Works.
Ira Gay came to New Hampshire from Pawtucket in 1824. Besides the
Nashua Manufacturing Company and the Nashua Iron & Steel Works, he and
his brother, Ziba Gay, founded (about 1830) the Gay & Silver Company, later
the North Chelmsford Machine & Supply Company referred to in a previous
chapter. Frederick W. Howe, who did such important work with Robbins &
Lawrence, the Providence Tool Company, and Brown & Sharpe, learned his
trade in the Gay & Silver shop.
It has been claimed that the shop of Gage, Warner & Whitney, established
by John H. Gage at Nashua in 1837, was the first one devoted exclusively to
the manufacture of machine tools. If this is true, it does not involve as high a
degree of specialization as would seem, for Bishop in 1860 says: “Their
manufactures include iron planers of all sizes, engine lathes, from the
smallest watch maker’s up to a size suitable for turning locomotive driving
wheels six or eight feet in diameter, hand lathes of all sizes, chucking lathes
of all dimensions, with sliding bed, bolt cutting machines for rapidly
transforming any part of a plain bolt into a nice, evenly threaded screw,
upright and swing drills, boring machines for shaping the interior of steam
cylinders, or other bores of large diameter, slabbers of all kinds, gear-cutting
engines of all sizes for shaping and smoothing the teeth of gear wheels with
perfect accuracy, power punching machines of various sizes, etc.”[196] In
1852 they began building steam engines. With all this formidable list, it
seems never to have been a very large shop.
[196] “History of American Manufactures,” Vol. III, p. 451.
In 1825 the improvement of the water power at what is now Lowell was
begun. Almost at the very beginning of this development work, a large
machine shop was built and placed under the charge of Paul Moody, who
was regarded as one of the foremost mechanics of his day and was an
expert in cotton machinery. This shop was retained by the Water Power
Company for nearly twenty years, when it was sold (1845) and reorganized
as the Lowell Machine Shop under Burke’s leadership. It employed at times
one thousand men, and became one of the most important shops in the
whole Merrimac Valley. James B. Francis, the great hydraulic engineer,
began his life work as a draftsman here in 1833; and later Bement became
its chief draftsman, leaving it to go to Philadelphia.
From 1820 to 1840, other shops sprang up in the Merrimac Valley, such as
C. M. Marvel & Company, of Lowell, the Lawrence Machine Shop, and the
Essex Machine Shop, where Amos Whitney, of Pratt & Whitney, learned his
trade, almost all of them building textile machinery, as well as machine tools.
The output of these shops showed little specialization. They built almost
anything which they could sell.
Of the Massachusetts towns, Worcester and Fitchburg seem to have been
the first to develop successful shops producing machine tools only. In
Worcester also the machinery trade had its beginning in the manufacture of
textile machinery; in fact, Worcester antedates even Pawtucket in its attempts
at cotton spinning, but these at first were unsuccessful. Practically all the
early water privileges in and about the town, not used for sawmills, were
used for textile mills. Prior to 1810 there was a small clock shop, some paper
mills, and a few other enterprises, but they could hardly be dignified as
factories. One of these was the old shop where Thomas Blanchard invented
his copying lathe for turning irregular forms.
An Abraham Lincoln operated a mill and a forge with a trip hammer as
early as 1795. Here, in quarters rented from Lincoln, Earle & Williams
started, about 1810, the first machine shop in the city. The town grew slowly
and its interests were largely local. It was not until 1820 that Worcester took
first rank even among the towns in the county. There was quite an excitement
over the discovery of coal in 1823. It was found, however, to be so poor, that,
as someone put it at the time, “there was a —— sight more coal after burning
it than there was before.” The Providence & Worcester canal was opened in
1828, but its usefulness for navigation was greatly limited by the many power
privileges along its route. Its traffic was never large and it went out of
business in 1848. It served, however, to hasten the building of the Boston &
Worcester Railroad, which was built by Boston capital to deflect the trade of
the central Massachusetts towns from Providence to that city. It opened in
1835; and in 1836 there were listed in Worcester “seven machinery works,”
one wire mill and one iron foundry. Most of the earlier tool builders were
trained in the small textile-machinery shops which had sprung up after 1810,
such as Washburn & Goddard’s, Goulding’s, Phelps & Bickford’s, White &
Boyden’s. The rapid development of railroads created a demand for machine
tools which the Worcester mechanics were quick to recognize, as had
Nasmyth and Roberts in England.
Thomas Blanchard, who was born near Worcester, is one of the
picturesque and attractive figures in our mechanical history. He was a shy,
timid boy, who stammered badly, and was considered “backward.” The
ingenious tinkerer, laughed at by all, first secured his standing by devising an
apple-parer which made a hit, social and mechanical. At eighteen he began
building a tack machine and worked six years on it before he considered it
finished. The essentials of its design have been little changed since. It made
over two hundred tacks a minute and its product was more uniform and
better than the hand-made tacks. Blanchard sold the patent for it for $5000, a
large price for those days, but only a fraction of its real value.
A few years later, about 1818, he invented the lathe for turning irregular
forms which is associated with his name. It was first built for turning gun-
stocks at the Springfield Armory, and the original machine (Fig. 29) is still
preserved there in the museum. Blanchard worked at the Armory for several
years as an expert designer and invented or improved about a dozen
machines for the manufacture of firearms, chiefly mortising and turning
machines.
He was a fertile inventor and worked in many lines besides tool building.
His principal income came from royalties on his “copying” lathe. Many stories
are told of his ingenuity and homely wit. In his later life he was a patent
expert. His keen mechanical intuitions, his wide and varied experience and
unswerving honesty, gave weight to his opinions, and his old age was spent
in comfortable circumstances. He died in 1864.
In 1823 William A. Wheeler came to Worcester, and two years later he was
operating a foundry. He did some machine work, and had the first steam
engine and the first boring machine in Worcester, and also an iron planer
“weighing 150 lb., 4 ft. long and 20 in. wide,” the first one, it is said, in the
state. Beginning with three or four hands, this foundry employed at times two
hundred men. Its long career closed in the summer of 1914.
Samuel Flagg moved to Worcester from West Boylston in 1839, to be near
the Wheeler foundry from which he got his castings. “Uncle Sammy Flagg”
was the first man in Worcester to devote himself entirely to tool building, and
is considered the father of the industry there. He made hand and engine
lathes in rented quarters in the old Court Mills, which has been called the
cradle of the Worcester tool building industry. His first lathes were light and
crude, with a wooden bed, wrought-iron strips for ways, chain-operated
carriage, and cast gears, as cut gears were unheard of in the city at that time.
His first competitor, Pierson Cowie, began making chain planers about
1845. After a few years he sold his business to Woodburn, Light & Company,
which in a few years became Wood, Light & Company, one of the best known
of the older firms. About the same time S. C. Coombs began making lathes
and planers. Flagg meantime had organized the firm of Samuel Flagg &
Company, which included two of his former apprentices, L. W. Pond (whose
portrait appears in Fig. 46) and E. H. Bellows. Pond later bought out Flagg
and Bellows and developed the business greatly. It was incorporated as the
Pond Machine Tool Company, in 1875, specialized in heavy engine lathes,
and is now part of the Niles-Bement-Pond Company. Bellows went into the
engine business, and Flagg started another enterprise, the Machinist Tool
Company, which did not last long. It lasted long enough, however, to build
one of the largest lathes made up to that time, 35 feet long with ways 8 feet
wide.
From the old Phelps & Bickford and S. C. Coombs shops came the two
Whitcomb brothers, Carter and Alonzo, who formed the Carter Whitcomb
Company in 1849, which became the Whitcomb Manufacturing Company in
1872. From the Coombs company also came successively Shepard, Lathe &
Company; Lathe, Morse & Company, and the Draper Machine Tool Company.
P. Blaisdell & Company was founded in 1865 by Parritt Blaisdell, who had
been fifteen years with Wood, Light & Company; and S. E. Hildreth, who had
worked for more than twenty years with Flagg and Pond, became a partner in
this firm eight years later. The Whitcomb, Draper and Blaisdell companies
were united in 1905 into the present Whitcomb-Blaisdell Machine Tool
Company. From the old Blaisdell shop came also J. E. Snyder & Son through
Currier & Snyder, who began building drills in 1833 and were both old
workmen at Blaisdell’s. The original Reed & Prentice Company was started
by A. F. Prentice, who sold a half interest to F. E. Reed in 1875. The
Woodward & Powell Planer Company comes from the Powell Planer
Company, incorporated in 1876. This maze of relationships is made clear by
reference to the table given in Fig. 45. The Norton Company comes from F.
B. Norton, who began experimenting on vitrified emery wheels about 1873
and put them on the market in 1879. At his death the business was
incorporated as the Norton Emery Wheel Company, now the Norton
Company. Charles H. Norton’s work in developing precision grinding has
been perhaps the most distinguished contribution to the later generation of
Worcester mechanics. He began work in the shops of the Seth Thomas
Clock Company at Thomaston, Conn., under his uncle, N. A. Norton, who
was master mechanic there for about forty years. At his uncle’s death, Norton
became master mechanic. He was with the Clock Company about twenty
years in all, most of the time in charge of the design and building of all their
tools, machinery and large tower clocks.
WILLIAM A. WHEELER, ICHABOD WASHBURN
1823 Cards and Textile Machry.
PHELPS &
Foundry—Came from
BICKFORD
Brookfield,
Textile Machinery
Plant closed in 1914
S. C. Coombs
WASHBURN & HOWARD
Cards, Textile Machry. and
J. A. FAY & CO. SAMUEL Wire
Woodworking FLAGG, 1839 1820
Machry First tool-builder
Keene, N. H. in city—came S. C. COOMBS & CO.
J. A. Fay and from West 1845
Edw. Josslyn. Boylston to be R. R. Shepard and Martin WASHBURN & GODDARD
1836 near Wheeler Lathe Textile, Machry. and Wire
foundry A. A. Whitcomb 1822
PIERSON
C. READ &
COWIE
CO.
THOS. E. About 1845—
Worcester
DANIELS Made chain
—Screws
Woodworking planers SHEPARD, LATHE & CO.
Machry. SAMUEL FLAGG & C. WHITCOMB & AMERICAN SCREW
Worcester CO. CO. CO.
L. W Pond, E. H. 1849—Carter and Providence, R. I.
Bellows, S. E. Hildreth Alonzo Whitcomb
E. C. Pond bought out other LATHE, MORSE & CO. LORING & A.
TAINTER partners. G. COES
GARDNER 1847 1836
CHILDS
Daniels WOODBURN Began making
Planer, etc. , screw
Worcester LIGHT & CO. DRAPER MACH. TOOL wrenches
1846 CO. 1841
RICHARDSON, MERRIAM
& CO. F. B. NORTON
Worcester. Richardson was Began
Josslyn’s experiments
nephew. Name of J. A. Fay on wheels
was sold in 1873.
to Western agents, about WHITCOMB MFG. CO. Began sale in
1862 1872 1879.
Thomson, WOOD, Died 1885 and
Skinner of LIGHT & CO. business
Co. of Parritt incorporated
Chicopee Blaisdell 1886
WASHBURN
Falls,
& MOEN
bought
Wire 1850
out
Flagg’s
original NORTON
business EMERY
P. WHEEL CO.
NEW BLAISDELL & 1886
HAVEN CO.
MFG. 1865 A. F. PRENTICE
CO. P. Blaisdell, Sold half interest to F. E.
New S. E. Hildreth, Reed, 1875
Haven, Enoch
Conn. Earle, Currier,
Snyder
POND CHAS. H.
MACH. NORTON
TOOL CO. CURRIER & Invented
1875 SNYDER REED & PRENTICE Grinding
Both worked Reed bought whole Machines,
for Blaisdell. business in 1877 Came from
1883 Brown &
Sharpe
J. A. FAY & CO. NORTON
Cincinnati, Ohio, Moved to POWELL PLANER CO. Incorporated GRINDING
1862 Plainfield, 1887 later as CO.
N. J., Washburn & Grinding
1888
EGAN CO NILES-
EGAN CO. NILES
Moen Machines
Cincinnati, BEMENT-POND Mfg. Co. 1900
Ohio, CO.
1873 Hamilton, O.—
Philadelphia—
Plainfield REED-PRENTICE CO. COES
J. E. SNYDER WRENCH CO.
WOODWARD & POWELL PLANER CO.
& SON 1888
J. A. FAY & NORTON
EGAN CO. CO.
WHITCOMB-BLASIDELL MACH.
Cincinnati, Ohio. AM. STEEL & WIRE CO. Emery
TOOL CO.
1893 Worcester Plant—1899 Wheels,
Worcester—1905
etc.
1906
Figure 45. Genealogy of the Worcester Tool Builders
In 1886 Mr. Norton went to the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company
of Providence as assistant to Mr. Parks, their chief engineer. Soon afterward
he became designer and engineer for their work in cylindrical grinding
machinery, remaining in that capacity for four years. In 1890 he went to
Detroit with Henry M. Leland and formed a corporation called the Leland-
Falkner-Norton Company, Falkner being a Michigan lumber man. Associated
with them was Charles H. Strellinger, a well-known dealer in tools and
machinery. Six years later Mr. Norton returned to Brown & Sharpe and was
again their engineer of grinding machinery until he went to Worcester in
1900. The Norton Grinding Company, organized that year and financed by
men connected with the Norton Emery Wheel Company, have built cylindrical
and plain surface grinding machinery designed by Charles H. Norton, and
under his direction have been leaders in refining and extending the process
of precision grinding.
The Norton Company and the Norton Grinding Company should not be
confused. The former make grinding wheels; the latter build grinding
machines. Neither should F. B. Norton, who founded the grinding wheel
industry and who died in 1885, be confused with Charles H. Norton, who did
not come to Worcester until fifteen years later. There is no connection in their
work, and despite the similarity of name, they were in no way related.
The greatest industry in Worcester is the American Steel and Wire
Company, formerly the Washburn & Moen Company. While it is no longer
associated with tool building, it passed through that phase and traces back to
the textile industry as well. It was founded by Ichabod Washburn, who started
in as a boy in a cotton factory in Kingston, R. I., during the War of 1812.
Making up his mind to become a machinist, he served an apprenticeship and
then worked in Asa Waters’ armory and with William Hovey, one of the early
mechanics in Worcester. About 1820 he began the manufacture of woolen
machinery and lead pipe in partnership first with William Howard and later
with Benjamin Goddard. The enterprise prospered. As he was making cards
for cotton and woolen machinery, he determined to manufacture the
necessary wire himself by a new drawing process. His first experiments were
a failure, but by 1830 they were successful enough to justify his undertaking
regular manufacture. He superseded the old methods entirely and built up
the present great business. Goddard retired, and, after various changes in
partnership, Washburn took in his son-in-law, Philip L. Moen, in 1850. By
1868 the firm employed more than nine hundred men, and wire drawing,
which began as an incident in the manufacture of textile machinery, had
become their sole activity. Today the works employ eight thousand men. In
1833 Washburn, in order to make an outlet for his wire products, induced the
Read brothers to move to Worcester from Providence and begin the
manufacture of screws. This business was operated separately under the
name of C. Read & Company. Later it was moved back to Providence, where
it developed into the American Screw Company.
Worcester mechanics have made many things besides machine tools; in
small tools and in gun work they have long been successful. The Coes
Wrench Company was started in 1836 by Loring and A. G. Coes, and began
to make the present form of screw wrench in 1841. Asa Waters, in Millbury
near by, was one of the early American gun makers. After Waters came other
gun makers, Ethan Allen, Forehand & Wadsworth, Harrington & Richardson,
and Iver Johnson, who later moved to Fitchburg.
Much of Worcester’s prominence as a manufacturing center is due to the
unusual facilities it offered to mechanics to begin business in a small way.
Nearly every manufacturing enterprise in the city began in small, rented
quarters. There were a number of large buildings which rented space with
power to these small enterprises; one of them, Merrifield’s, was three stories
high, 1100 feet long, and had fifty tenants, employing two to eight hundred
men. Coes, Flagg, Daniels, Wood, Light & Company, Coombs, Lathe &
Morse, Whitcomb, Pond and J. A. Fay, all began, or at some time operated,
in this way. One is struck, in looking over the old records, with the constant
recurrence of certain names, as the Earles, Goddards, Washburns, and
realizes that he is among a race of mechanics which was certain sooner or
later to build up a successful manufacturing community.
Fitchburg, while not so large or so influential, is almost as old a tool
building community as Worcester. Its history centers about the Putnam
Machine Company which was started by John and Salmon W. Putnam, who
came from a family of mechanics. The latter’s portrait appears in Fig. 47.
They, too, began in cotton manufacturing, John as a contractor making cotton
machine parts, and Salmon as a bobbin boy and later as an overseer at New
Ipswich and Lowell. In 1836 they went to Trenton, N. J., intending to start a
machine shop there, but the panic of 1837 intervened and made it
impossible. They had themselves built most of the machines required; they
stored these and found employment until business conditions improved.
Finally, they started in a hired basement in Ashburnham, Mass., under the
name of J. & S. W. Putnam.
A year later they moved to Fitchburg and began repairing cotton
machinery. At first they did their work entirely themselves, but their business
increased rapidly and they soon hired an apprentice. Their first manufactured
product was a gear cutter. This gave them a start and they soon developed a
full line of standard tools. Though he was the younger brother, S. W. Putnam
was the leading spirit. He first built upright drills with a swinging table so that
the work could be moved about under the drill without unclamping. He
designed the present form of back rest for lathes, and is said to have
invented the universal hanger. The latter invention, however, has been
claimed for several other mechanics in both England and America. In 1849
the brothers were burned out, without insurance. They repaired their
machinery, built a temporary shed over it, and were at work again in two
weeks. The present company was formed in 1858.
The Putnam company has been influential in other lines than machine
tools. Putnam engines were for many years among the best known in the
country, and the company was also intimately concerned with the early
development of the rock drill, through Charles Burleigh, the head of their
planer department and the inventor of the Burleigh drill. In fact, the first
successful drills, those for the Hoosac tunnel, together with the compressors,
were designed and built in the Putnam shops. Sylvester Wright, who founded
the Fitchburg Machine Works, was for ten years foreman of their lathe
department, and most of the old mechanics in and about Fitchburg were
Putnam men.
Scattered here and there are other companies. At Nashua were Gage,
Warner & Whitney, to which we have referred, and the Flather Manufacturing
Company which was founded by Joseph Flather, an Englishman, in 1867.
The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee Falls came from the old
Ames & Fisher shop at North Chelmsford. This was started by Nathan P.
Ames, Senior, in 1791, who operated a trip hammer and other machinery,
making edged tools and millwork. The shop was burned in 1810, and he
moved to Dedham, Mass., for a year or so, but returned and resumed his
former business on the old site. His sons, Nathan P., Jr., and James T.,
learned their trade with their father. The older brother, Nathan, moved to
Chicopee Falls in 1829. James joined him in 1834. The Ames Manufacturing
Company, formed the same year, lived for sixty years and employed at one
time over a thousand men. From the start they had close relations with the
Government and did an extensive business in all kinds of military supplies,
swords, bayonets, guns, cannon, cavalry goods, etc. They cast bronze
statuary, and the famous doors of the Capitol at Washington were made by
them. They rivaled Robbins & Lawrence in gun machinery and shared with
them the order for the Enfield Armory. This contract alone took three years to
complete. Their gun-stock machinery went to nearly every government in
Europe.
Figure 46. Lucius W. Pond
Figure 47. Salmon W. Putnam
In addition to all this they built the famous Boydon waterwheel, mill
machinery, and a list of standard machine tools quite as catholic as that of
Gage, Warner & Whitney. They did their work well, contributed material
improvements to manufacturing methods and had one of the most influential
shops of their day.
Most of the plants for manufacturing woodworking machinery can be
traced back to a comparatively small area limited approximately by Fitchburg,
Gardner, Keene and Nashua. This section was poor farming land, rough and
heavily wooded, and the ingenuity of its inhabitants was early directed toward
utilizing the timber. Mr. Smith, of the H. B. Smith Company of Smithville, N.
J., came originally from Woodstock, Vt., and Walter Haywood started at
Gardner. J. A. Fay and Edward Josslyn began manufacturing woodworking
machinery as J. A. Fay & Company at Keene, in 1836. In 1853 they felt the
need of better facilities and purchased Tainter & Childs’ shop at Worcester,
which was manufacturing the Daniels wood planer. Mr. Fay died soon after,
and the business passed through the hands of H. A. Richardson, Josslyn’s
nephew, to Richardson, Merriam & Company. They built up a good business
before the Civil War, and had branch offices in New York, Chicago, and
Cincinnati.
In the early sixties the western agents bought the name of J. A. Fay &
Company and started manufacturing at Cincinnati. Later this was united with
the Egan Company, and the present J. A. Fay & Egan Company formed.
When J. A. Fay & Company was started at Cincinnati, machinery,
superintendent and mechanics were brought from Worcester, and, as the
name implies, the present company was a direct descendant from the old
Worcester and Keene enterprise.
Winchendon, in the center of the district referred to, has long been known
for its woodworking machinery. Baxter D. Whitney began there before 1840.
He died in 1915, aged ninety-eight years, the last of the early generation of
mechanics. For many years he was a leader in the development of
woodworking tools, and the business which he founded is still in successful
operation under the management of his son, William M. Whitney.
Springfield, although an important manufacturing city, has had few
prominent tool builders. One company, however, the Baush Machine Tool
Company, has built up a wide reputation for drilling machines, especially
large multiple spindle machines.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE NAUGATUCK VALLEY
The most casual consideration of New England’s mechanical
development brings one squarely against a most interesting and baffling
phase of American industrial life, the brass industry of the Naugatuck
Valley. Here, in a narrow district scarcely thirty miles long, centering
about Waterbury, is produced approximately 80 per cent of the rolled
brass and copper and finished brass wares used in the United States, an
output amounting to upward of $80,000,000 a year. No concentration on
so large a scale exists elsewhere in the country. For example, in 1900,
Pennsylvania produced but 54 per cent of the iron and steel, and
Massachusetts but 45 per cent of the boots and shoes. Furthermore,
there seems to be no serious tendency to dislodge it. While there is more
competition from outside, its ascendency is nearly as marked today as it
was a generation ago. Why should this small district, a thousand miles or
more from its sources of raw material, far from its market, and without
cheap coal or adequate water power, gain and hold this leadership?[197]
[197] The best study of the brass industry of the Naugatuck Valley has been
made by William G. Lathrop, and has been published by him at Shelton, Conn.,
1909, under the name of “The Brass Industry.” Mr. Lathrop had intimate
knowledge of the subject and, in addition, unusual facilities for investigation. The
personal history of many of the men who have figured in its growth will be found
in Anderson’s “History of the Town and City of Waterbury,” 3 vols. 1895.
It was not the first in the field. The Revere Copper Company, in
Massachusetts, founded by Paul Revere, began rolling copper in 1801,
and the Soho Copper Company, at Belleville, N. J., in 1813. The brass
business in Connecticut had its origin with Henry Grilley, of Waterbury,
who began making pewter buttons there in 1790. In 1802 Abel and Levi
Porter joined him, and they started making brass buttons under the
name of Abel Porter & Company. In 1811 all the original partners retired
and a new firm was formed, Leavenworth, Hayden & Scovill. In 1827
Leavenworth and Hayden sold out to William H. Scovill, and the firm

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