Why India Don T Eat Beef
Just this past June, at a national meeting of various Hindu organizations in India, a popular preacher, Sadhvi Saraswati, suggested that those who consumed beefiness should be publicly hanged. Afterward, at the same conclave, an animal rights activist, Chetan Sharma, said,
"Cow is likewise the reason for global warming. When she is slaughtered, something called EPW is released, which is directly responsible for global warming. It'southward what is called emotional hurting waves."
These provocative remarks come at a time when vigilante Hindu groups in India are lynching people for eating beef. Such killings take increased since Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata political party came to power in September 2014. In September 2015, a 50-year-erstwhile Muslim homo, Mohammad Akhlaq, was lynched past a mob in a village nearly New Delhi on suspicion that he had consumed beef. Since then, many attacks by moo-cow vigilante groups have followed. Modi's regime has also prohibited the slaughter of buffalo, thus destroying the Muslim-dominated buffalo meat industry and causing widespread economic hardship.
Virtually people seem to assume that no Hindu has always consumed beef. Simply is this true?
As a scholar, studying Sanskrit and ancient Indian religion for over 50 years, I know of many texts that offering a articulate respond to this question.
Cows in ancient Indian history
Scholars have known for centuries that the ancient Indians ate beef. After the fourth century B.C., when the practice of vegetarianism spread throughout Bharat among Buddhists, Jains and Hindus, many Hindus continued to eat beef.
In the time of the oldest Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 B.C.), cow meat was consumed. Like most cattle-breeding cultures, the Vedic Indians generally ate the castrated steers, merely they would consume the female person of the species during rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status.
Ancient ritual texts known as Brahmanas (c. 900 B.C.) and other texts that taught religious duty (dharma), from the tertiary century B.C., say that a balderdash or cow should be killed to be eaten when a guest arrives.
According to these texts, "the cow is food." Fifty-fifty when one passage in the "Shatapatha Brahmana" (3.i.ii.21) forbids the eating of either cow or bull, a revered ancient Hindu sage named Yajnavalkya immediately contradicts information technology, maxim that, all the same, he eats the meat of both cow and bull, "every bit long every bit it'south tender."
It was the Sanskrit ballsy, the Mahabharata (composed between 300 B.C. and A.D. 300) that explained the transition to the non eating of cows in a famous myth:
"Once, when at that place was a great famine, King Prithu took upwards his bow and arrow and pursued the World to force her to yield nourishment for his people. The Earth assumed the form of a moo-cow and begged him to spare her life; she so immune him to milk her for all that the people needed."
This myth imagines a transition from hunting wild cattle to preserving their lives, domesticating them, and breeding them for milk, a transition to agriculture and pastoral life. Information technology visualizes the cow as the paradigmatic animal that yields food without being killed.
Beef-eating and degree
Some dharma texts composed in this same period insist that cows should not be eaten. Some Hindus who did eat meat made a special exception and did not eat the meat of cow. Such people may have regarded beef-eating in the low-cal of what the historian Romila Thapar describes as a "matter of status" – the higher the caste, the greater the food restrictions. Various religious sanctions were used to impose prohibition on beefiness eating, only, as Thapar demonstrates, "only among the upper castes."
As I see it, the arguments against eating cows are a combination of a symbolic statement about female purity and docility (symbolized by the cow who generously gives her milk to her dogie), a religious statement about Brahmin sanctity (as Brahmins came increasingly to be identified with cows and to exist paid by donations of cows) and a style for castes to rising in social ranking.
Sociologist Grand. N. Srinivas pointed out that the lower castes gave up beef when they wanted to motility upwards the social ladder through the process known equally "Sanskritization."
Past the 19th century, the cow-protection movement had arisen. One of the implicit objects of this movement was the oppression of Muslims.
Famously, Gandhi attempted to make vegetarianism, particularly the taboo against eating beefiness, a key tenet of Hinduism. Gandhi'south attitude to cows was tied to his idea of nonviolence.
He used the image of the Earth cow (the one that Rex Prithu milked) equally a kind of Mother Earth, to symbolize his imagined Indian nation. His insistence on moo-cow protection was a major factor in his failure to attract big-scale Muslim back up.
Yet fifty-fifty Gandhi never called for the banning of cow slaughter in India. He said,
"How can I strength anyone not to slaughter cows unless he is himself so tending? It is not as if there were only Hindus in the Indian Matrimony. There are Muslims, Parsis, Christians and other religious groups hither."
Today'south Republic of india
From my perspective, in our 24-hour interval, the nationalist and fundamentalist "Hindutva" ("Hindu-ness") movement is attempting to utilise this notion of the sanctity of the moo-cow to disenfranchise Muslims. And information technology is non only the beef-eating Muslims (and Christians) who are the target of Hindutva'due south hate brigade. Lower-caste Hindus are as well being attacked. Attacks of this type are not new. This has been going on since Hindutva began in 1923. And indeed, in 2002, in a north Indian town, five lower-degree Hindus were lynched for skinning a cow.
But, equally local analysis shows, the violence has profoundly increased under the Modi government. IndiaSpend, a information journalism initiative, establish that "Muslims were the target of 51 percent of violence centered on bovine problems over nearly eight years (2010 to 2017) and comprised 86 percent of 28 Indians killed in 63 incidents…As many of 97 per centum of these attacks were reported after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government came to power in May 2014."
In 2015, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, lower-caste Hindus were flogged for skinning a dead cow, triggering spontaneous street protests and contributing to the resignation of the state'south chief government minister.
As these and so many other recent attacks demonstrate, cows – innocent, docile animals – have become in India a lightning rod for human cruelty, in the name of religion.
Source: https://theconversation.com/hinduism-and-its-complicated-history-with-cows-and-people-who-eat-them-80586
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