Hinduism and its complicated history

with cows (and people who eat them)

July 17, 2017 10.38am AEST
Are cows sacred to all Hindus? PRODaniel Incandela, CC BY-NC
Author

1. Wendy Doniger
Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago

Disclosure statement

Wendy Doniger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit
from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners

View all partners

Republish this article

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons licence.

 Email
 Twitter75
 Facebook449
 LinkedIn
 Print
Just this past June, at a national meeting of various Hindu organizations in India, a
popular preacher, Sadhvi Saraswati, suggested that those who consumed beef should
be publicly hanged. Later, at the same conclave, an animal rights activist, Chetan
Sharma, said,

“Cow is also the reason for global warming. When she is slaughtered, something
called EPW is released, which is directly responsible for global warming. It’s what
is called emotional pain waves.”
These provocative remarks come at a time when vigilante Hindu groups in India are
lynching people for eating beef. Such killings have increased since Narendra Modi
and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata party came to power in September 2014. In
September 2015, a 50-year-old Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, was lynched by a
mob in a village near New Delhi on suspicion that he had consumed beef. Since
then, many attacksby cow vigilante groups have followed. Modi’s government has
also prohibited the slaughter of buffalo, thus destroying the Muslim-dominated
buffalo meat industry and causing widespread economic hardship.

Most people seem to assume that no Hindu has ever consumed beef. But is this true?

As a scholar, studying Sanskrit and ancient Indian religion for over 50 years, I know
of many texts that offer a clear answer 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 India 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, but they would eat the female 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 third century B.C., say that a bull or cow should be
killed to be eaten when a guest arrives.

According to these texts, “the cow is food.” Even when one passage in the
“Shatapatha Brahmana” (3.1.2.21) forbids the eating of either cow or bull, a revered
ancient Hindu sage named Yajnavalkya immediately contradicts it, saying that,
nevertheless, he eats the meat of both cow and bull, “as long as it’s tender.”
Cows painted over a door are believed to bring good luck. Ross Funnell, CC BY-NC-ND
It was the Sanskrit epic, 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 there was a great famine, King Prithu took up his bow and arrow and
pursued the Earth to force her to yield nourishment for his people. The Earth
assumed the form of a cow and begged him to spare her life; she then allowed 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. It visualizes the cow as the paradigmatic animal that yields food without
being killed.

Beef-eating and caste

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 light 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 beef eating, but, as Thapar demonstrates, “only among the upper
castes.”
As I see it, the arguments against eating cows are a combination of a symbolic
argument about female purity and docility (symbolized by the cow who generously
gives her milk to her calf), a religious argument about Brahmin sanctity (as Brahmins
came increasingly to be identified with cows and to be paid by donations of cows)
and a way for castes to rise in social ranking.

Sociologist M. N. Srinivas pointed out that the lower castes gave up beefwhen they
wanted to move up the social ladder through the process known as “Sanskritization.”

A central tenet of Gandhi’s teaching was vegetarianism. But he did not

call for a beef ban.
By 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 beef, a central tenet of Hinduism. Gandhi’s attitude to cows was tied to his
idea of nonviolence.

He used the image of the Earth cow (the one that King Prithu milked) as a kind of
Mother Earth, to symbolize his imagined Indian nation. His insistence on cow
protection was a major factor in his failure to attract large-scale Muslim support.

Yet even Gandhi never called for the banning of cow slaughter in India. He said,

“How can I force anyone not to slaughter cows unless he is himself so disposed? It is
not as if there were only Hindus in the Indian Union. There are Muslims, Parsis,
Christians and other religious groups here.”

Today’s India
From my perspective, in our day, the nationalist and fundamentalist “Hindutva”
(“Hindu-ness”) movement is attempting to use this notion of the sanctity of the cow
to disenfranchise Muslims. And it is not only the beef-eating Muslims (and
Christians) who are the target of Hindutva’s hate brigade. Lower-caste Hindus are
also 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-caste Hindus were lynched for skinning a cow.

But, as local analysis shows, the violence has greatly increased under the Modi
government. IndiaSpend, a data journalism initiative, found that“Muslims were the
target of 51 percent of violence centered on bovine issues over nearly eight years
(2010 to 2017) and comprised 86 percent of 28 Indians killed in 63 incidents…As
many of 97 percent 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’s chief 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.