Cattle, water buffalo, and milk in India

Hinduism is the oldest religion and the most complex. Hinduism makes many references and has many images to the "holy" cow and its milk: e.g., "Both Gods and mortal men depend for life and being on the Cow;" "They call the Cow immortal life, pay homage to the Cow as Death. She hath become this universe, Fathers, and Rishis, hath become the Gods, and men, and Spirits." Indeed, cattle are so scared that their manure is spread, ideally daily, over floors, outside and inside, of earth-surfaces in village houses.
 

Images of the holiness of cows (female cattle of the Brahmin kind) are see in temples, water tiles, posters, and books. Notice the importance of the cow's milk in the three images.
In the city, Brahmin cattle wander the streets in search of food: garage, vegetables from market stalls, occasional hand-outs from people, and even cardboard which, amazingly, cattle can digest. Although drivers blow their horns when they pass each other and pedestrians, they just drive around the cattle on the streets.
 
Brahmin cattle (left) and water buffalo (right) look very differently and are used for different purposes.
Bullocks (castrated Brahmin males) are the most common animals to pull plows and graders for growing crops for human consumption. They are also used to pull carts (2 wheels) and wagons (4 wheels).
Water buffalos are always either tied up in each farmstead eating rice straw or supervised by children or old women when away from the village grazing on stubble in the fields or cooling off in the river. The wall art in farm houses in an open-air museum in Udaipur shows two water buffalos tied to stakes.

By keep water buffalo tied up outside (the weather is very mild in all parts of India except in the mountainous North), farmers can easily collect their manure to make paddies. The manure is rolled into chips by hand and then left to dry. This work must be done in the dry winter season, before the rains of the monsoons in the summer.
According to the National Council of Applied Economic Research, water buffalo dung in India has a fuel value equivalent to 35 million tones of coal or 68 million tones of wood. An estimated one-third of the dung, amounting to some 300 million tones, is used as fuel in rural houses. When it is available, cattle dung will also be used for fuel for cooking food.
Farmers daily bring their water buffalo milk to central collection stations from hence it goes to nearby towns, often by bikes.

Water buffalo and cattle are also kept in towns and cities for fresh milk products, as the map from Bangalore, the IT (computer center) of India shows. The women is preparing feed for the black-and-while cows under the shed.
  Milk, regardless of its origin, is critical to the diets of Indians in the form of milk, buttermilk, curd, sour milk, yogurt, and ice cream. Many sweets are also most milk. Lassi (blended water and curd), often flavored with sugar or mangos, with an India meals provided protein and relief from spicy foods.


Delivering tea on the train! Source.		 In large hotels, it is called Indian tea or Masala tea (versus "tray tea" for English-style tea) but elsewhere in India, it is called chai. However it is called, tea in India is almost always made with buffalo milk which is richer and more distinctive in taste that cow's milk. Indian Chai is a spiced milk tea which contains black tea, milk, various spices, and a sweetner. The most common species are cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and pepper. In the USA, the preferred name is chai.