Personified dharma, he's inquiring from the cow. He's addressing cow, amba. Amba means mother. So cow is our mother. Why mother? Because from practical point of view, we drink milk. So how mother . . . how cow is not mother? She's mother. We are taking her milk. There are seven mothers according to Vedic civilization:
- adau-mātā guroḥ patnī
- brāhmaṇī rāja-patnikā
- dhenur dhātrī tathā pṛthvī
- saptaitā mātaraḥ smṛtāḥ
- (Nīti Śāstra)
Real mother, from whose womb we have come to this world, real mother, adau-mātā. Then guru patnī, wife of the teacher or spiritual master, guru patnī. Brāhmaṇī, the wife of a brāhmaṇa. Adau-mātā guru patnī brāhmaṇī rāja-patnikā, and the wife of the king, or the queen, she's also mother. Dhenu, the cow. Cow is also mother. And dhātrī means nurse. Nurse is also mother. Tathā pṛthvī, and the earth, the earth is also our mother. That we say in country, in the country which we take birth, we say deśa-mātṛkā. In Sanskrit it is called deśa-mātṛkā. That is also mother. Motherland, mother language.
So this . . . so many mothers we have got, out of which cow is also mother. Therefore she's addressed as amba. Amba means mother. Still, in Gujarat province, they call amba. And in U.P., United States, er, United Province, in India, they also call amba, or in a broken language they call amma. Still . . . that is from very long time, mother is . . . Amba-devī. There is a . . . from Amba-devī, there is a big temple of Mother Durgā, Kālī, in Bombay. So this Amba-devī was pronounced by the Englishmens as Bamba-devī, and from Bamba-devī it has come to "Bombay." Actually, there is a big temple of Amba in Bombay. From that name, instead of Amba, they have become Bamba. Just like from Sindhu, they have called . . . they have designated the inhabitants of Sindhu-deśa as "Hindu." The Muhammadans, they pronounce s as h. So from "Sindhu" it has come to "Hindu." Otherwise, this "Hindu" name is not mentioned in any Vedic literature. It is given by the . . . this name is given by the other foreigners.