India’s Cow Urine Drink: From Religion to Science

Drink it to reduce cholesterol, to lose weight, even to fight cancer; rub it into your skin to make it firmer – these are some of the benefits of using cow urine, according to Baba Ramdev, a famous Indian yoga teacher and owner of a trading empire that sells traditional, Ayurvedic medicine. According to Ramdev, even the sole act of regularly drinking cow urine will reduce your weight by at least 2 kilograms in a month. When combined with practicing yoga, it can take away as much as 10 kg in the same period. On another occasion, however, Ramdev clarified that it would be best if the cow was Indian and a calf.

The yoga guru is one of the many traditional Hindus to praise the positive effects of cow urine (gomutr in Hindu) on the human body. It is also not the first time that his views have gone hand-in-hand with the position taken by the current Hindu nationalist government of India. In 2017, the central Indian government set up a panel called SVAROP: Scientific Validation and Research on Panchagavya. Panchagavya, a Sanskrit term, refers to the five substances which are derived – directly or indirectly – from the cow’s body: dung, urine, milk, curd, and ghee. Following the creation of SVAROP, one of the Indian Institutes of Technology has reportedly received dozens of offers to initiate research on the miraculous effects of panchagavya. This year, it is being said that the government of the state of Uttar Pradesh – ruled by a coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which dominates the central government – is planning to sell bottled cow urine as a health drink.

None of this is actually surprising; it is only that the present political situation blows more wind in the sails of cow urine promoters.

As the cow is considered sacred by a majority of Hindus, and is referred to as “Mother” by many of them, the products of her body are believed to have special, religious value. Apart from the obvious importance of milk and its derivatives to the human diet, and apart from the common use of cow dung as fuel in India, both cow dung and urine are believed to have purifying capabilities. Small flasks of cow urine can be purchased in religious places (for instance, by the steps leading to river Ganges in the holy city of Varanasi) and can be used to purify people or locations during certain rituals. Besides this – and because of this – there are some people in India who believe that drinking cow’s pee is simply good for health and practice this as part of their diet regularly.

Such religious traditions were given a new dimension in the 19th century, with the birth of the strategy of defending faith by proving that it is scientific. Dayanand Saraswati, a thinker who inspired generations of Hindu reformists and nationalists, spoke against cow slaughter not only by using the religious argument – that the cow is holy – but also by resorting to what he claimed to be scientific methods (which proved that it would be more useful to keep the cows alive and have them provide milk than kill them for meat). A 21st century Hindu nationalist school textbook insisted that cow dung and cow urine eliminate bad bacteria. The current government’s attempts at funding research on the benefits of cow dung and urine are not new, only raised to a higher level.

In 2009, Indian and global media circulated the news that the Hindu nationalists were planning to invent a cow urine-based soft drink. Such a move would be symbolic on at least two levels: it would promote a religious tradition but also provide an indigenous alternative to the dominance of foreign soft drinks such as Coca-Cola. This plan never materialized, and hence one should be careful with the current news that the government of Uttar Pradesh may introduce a health drink on the basis of bovine urine.

While the majority of Hindus worship the cow, it is likely that only a few that partake of her urine regularly. Thus, the new health drink may not scale any great heights of popularity. What is more important, however, is that it would be yet another case of official patronage and promotion of a religious custom. The idea of the health drink would be an addition to such endeavors as further restricting cow slaughter in India and establishing a greater number of cow shelters by private and government bodies.

The health drink as such would not be new either. Such drinks are already available on the Indian market, sold by private companies. One of them is Patanjali, the company started by Baba Ramdev – the same guru whose praise of cow urine was referred to at the beginning of this article.