Dictionary definition of “cow-dust hour”

cow-dust hour

n. dusk, twilight, or the end of the working day. Also cow-dust time. Subjects: English, India

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Citations: 1931 Spencer Harcourt Butler India Insistent p. 12: In the evening at “cowdust time” the cattle are driven home. 1938 Times (London, England) (Sept. 16) “A Second Chance” p. 15: It was the Indian “cow-dust hour"—an hour fit for reverie, all the more for Colonel X, because he was due to return to England within the month. 1948 Phil M. Buck Jr. Chicago Daily Tribune Mag. of Books (Feb. 29) “Exquisite Fantasy of Rural India” p. F13: The “cow dust” hour of evening—how I love that phrase—when the call comes for home and family, and the sky is filled with the green, gold, crimson of the screaming, homing parrots. 1978 Elwyn M. Chamberlain Gates of Fire p. 36 @ (Jan., 1984): Far away a faint roar signaled the mounting confusion of Delhi’s rush hour—the “cowdust hour” with its pungent odor of thousands of fires kindled in preparation for the evening meal. 1982 E.B. de Vito Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Massachusetts) (July 15) “Wedding” p. 21: She in her cotton skirt,/bare feet in sandals/and with him/in jeans and sleeveless vest, they might be a Brahmin couple/wed ritually at the cow-dust hour,/sashed together with a silken scarf. 1991 Beverly Shaver Los Angeles Times (Jan. 6) “Temple Caves of India Offer Spiritual Insight”: It was late afternoon, “cow dust time,” when the cattle being driven home to the villages stir up eddies of dust along the roads. 1998 Vithal C. Nadkarni Times of India (May 20) “The fuzzy logic of the divine Man-Lion”: Twilight is a special threshold moment in most shamanic traditions. This is the cow-dust hour, the window of opportunity at which to invoke the mystery of solar transformation through the Gayatri Mantra. Neither midnight-black nor blazing white, this is just the sort of “neither/nor’ state from which a fearful child might expect a man-cat to emerge, as it did from a pillar, in the Puranas. 1999 [M. Tandy] Usenet: alt.religion.vaisnava (Aug. 1) “Go-dhuli-kala”: The late afternoon/ early evening, when the cows are led home from their pastures, is called “go-dhUli-kAla” (cow-dust time), for the many herds of cows all moving at once stir up quite a bit of dust. 2006 Stephen McClarence @ India Telegraph (U.K.) (May 6) “My village hut’s a mansion”: By “cowdust time,” the evocative Indian term for dusk, we are still 30 miles from our village. After asking the way a dozen times (Indians tend to be relaxed about the subtle difference between “left"and “right"), eventually we find it but, in the darkness, it looks like no Indian village we have ever seen.

Posted 12 May 06 | Permalink | Tell a Friend