NEW DELHI - When Verghese Kurien demanded an autopsy on a dead fly, it was to protect the honor of his milk. Did the fly drown in the milk, or was it dead before it landed there? Was the fly planted by his foes?
It was the 1950s and Mr. Kurien, a young engineer who had returned to from Michigan State University, was the improbable chief of a cooperative society of impoverished dairy farmers in the western state of Gujarat. Under his leadership, their milk production had increased dramatically, and with success came bitter enemies - and the discovery of the fly in the milk that the society supplied to a vital wholesale buyer. Mr. Kurien's ludicrous demand for a postmortem to determine whether the fly had indeed drowned in the milk, according to him, made the scandal vanish.
It was among the many tricks he was to play in the decades to come as he turned India from a milk-deficient nation into the world's leading milk producer, transformed a cooperative society of dairy farmers in a small pastoral town into the country's largest food brand, rescued millions of dairy farmers from crushing poverty and gradually became one of the few beloved public figures in India. He died on Sunday, at the age of 90, following an illness. The man who described himself as an employee of farmers lay in state inside a coffin in a large auditorium in Anand, the small town where he had spent most of his life. Thousands came to pay their respects.
He was a man who saw the world as a conflict between the clever and the fools, and took the side of both to push his plans through. In his final years, he became a lumbering patriarch with an illuminated face and dark twinkling eyes, who was very aware of his greatness but chose his words with care in a nation where humility is the only permissible form of pride.
When he was young, a friend took him to an astrologer who discerned people's fate by measuring their shadows at noon. The shadow astrologer, obviously, worked far from the equator. Mr. Kurien recounts the experience in his pleasant memoirs, “I Too Had a Dream,†which he wrote with the journalist Gouri Salvi. The astrologer foretold an extraordinary career.
It was an accidental career. He arrived in Anand reluctantly in the summer of 1949 as a government clerk. Circumstances soon made him the general manager of a farmers' cooperative - the Kaira District Milk Producers Union Ltd.
He swiftly increased the cooperative's milk production, but to grow it further he needed a scientific breakthrough. He had to find a way to convert buffalo's milk into milk powder, which the leading dairy experts of the time said was impossible. But, with the help of a friend who was a chemist, he achieved the seeming miracle. Mr. Kurien implied in his memoirs that the supposed difficulty of converting buffalo's milk into powder was a myth created by the Western world, which had abundant cow's milk and wanted other nations, like India, to continue to import its milk powder.
Over time, Mr. Kurien's stature rose. Some of the most important politicians in the country, including prime ministers, lodged in his house when they visited Anand. The first time Jawaharlal Nehru stayed with them, Mr. Kurien and his wife, Molly, refrigerated a rose so that the prime minister could put the fresh flower in his buttonhole, as was his style. But soon the couple got tired of all the fuss around dignitaries. Once, a very tall governor was to visit, and his security detail complained that the bed in Mr. Kurien's guest room was too short, to which Mr. Kurien asked his excellency to sleep diagonally.
In the late 1950s, Mr. Kurien decided to market the produce of the cooperative through a brand name, and that led to the creation of one of the most enduring Indian brands - Amul Butter. Amul's billboard advertisements, which play on current affairs, are a parallel historical record of modern India. So endearing is the brand that even The Times of India, which does not grant any corporation free mileage on its editorial pages and even blurs images of company logos in its editorial photographs, carries images of Amul's billboards when the brand is in the news. Mr. Kurien's obituary was, inescapably, accompanied by the images of Amul's billboards in several newspapers.
In 1965, Mr. Kurien set up the National Dairy Development Board for the Indian government to replicate the success of Anand in other towns. The board's logo is derived from an ancient Harappan seal that featured the engraving of an ox. That led the veteran Congress party leader Margaret Alva to comment in jest once that Mr. Kurien must be a male chauvinist to have an ox represent a dairy board.
Rahul Da Cunah, whose advertising agency designs the Amul advertisements, was 6 when he first met Mr. Kurien. At that meeting, he told me, “Dr. Kurien gave me a big box as a gift. I opened it and found just papers. At the bottom was a small cube of Amul cheese.â€
Mr. Kurien, who was probably the most famous dairy administrator in the world, didn't like drinking milk.
Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.â€
