World Milk Day: Re-Watching 'Manthan'
- Tejasvi Arneja
- Jun 2, 2020
- 2 min read
Born and raised in India, Amul is a milk brand, I have grown up drinking. Amul is a company that changed the entire milk procurement process and spurred the White Revolution in India. Today on World Milk Day, I hark back to the story of making Amul the taste of India.
An organization that was established by a couple of ranchers with a strategy to stop the middlemen from exploiting the farmers slowly turned into the greatest brand in the country. The story of which I know from watching the national award-winning film “Manthan, The Churning”, 1976, directed by Shyam Benegal.
If you are a millennial Indian like me, you probably have never heard of this film. I am, however, sure that you have seen the popular TV commercial playing the title track from this movie ‘Mero gaam ..', which was re-made in 2011.
It is an illustrious film for various reasons: the astral cast with Girish Karnad, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, and Amrish Puri, and the way that the film was financed by 500,000 ranchers, who were individuals from the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. Amul is the original Gujarat model gifted to the rest of India.
The story of the film is dedicated to Dr. Verghese Kurien, the father of the White Revolution, which has today made India the largest producer of Milk in the world. Manthan is a story not just about a man who goes and starts a revolution but shares new ideas, breaking stereotypes. The film is wonderfully layered, with numerous features of rank and caste, gender divide, privilege, and morals and ethics that accompany doing the 'greater good'.
Once you watch the film, you are surely going to look at your glass of milk, differently. Despite India being the world's biggest producer of milk and the second-biggest producer of fruits and vegetables, around 40 to 50 percent of all that food and milk, valued at USD 440 billion (bn) winds up in the trash, as noted by ASSOCHAM-MRSS India study, in 2017.
Your glass of milk has traveled through villages, through the caste system, breaking gender stereotypes, to reach your home. Today, milk farmers are going through a bad time, organized cooperatives and individual dairy farmers had to lay off employees to cut the cost due to drastic fall in sales, due to the COVID-19 lockdown in India, and at times threw away milk on roads and rivers as they could not sell it. Similar cases were seen across the globe.
This World Milk Day, raise a toast, with a glass of milk, to those farmers, who work tirelessly to make sure that you have milk on your breakfast table every day, and pledge to never waste it.
You can watch the movie, with English subtitles, free, on YouTube, uploaded on Amul’s official account.
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