Food Bigotry Nothing New

[Guest guest]

Nor is it just us Western cultures who suffer from it. Consider this

radical response.

 

From THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/arts/17COW.html?todaysheadlines

 

Holy Cow a Myth? An Indian Finds the Kick Is Real

By EMILY EAKIN

 

oly Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions, " is a dry work of

historiography buttressed by a 24-page bibliography and hundreds of

footnotes citing ancient Sanskrit texts. It's the sort of book, in other

words, that typically is read by a handful of specialists and winds up

forgotten on a library shelf.

Advertisement

 

 

But when its author, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, a historian at the

University of Delhi, tried to publish the book in India a year ago, he

unleashed a furor of a kind not seen there since 1989, when the release

of " Satanic Verses, " Salman Rushdie's novel satirizing Islam, provoked

rioting and earned him a fatwa from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

 

As Mr. Jha's book was going to press last August, excerpts were posted

on the Internet and picked up by newspapers. Within days the book had

been canceled by Mr. Jha's academic publisher, burned outside his home

by religious activists and — after a second publisher tried to print it

— banned by a Hyderabad civil court. A spokesman for the World Hindu

Council called it " sheer blasphemy. " A former member of Parliament

petitioned the government for Mr. Jha's arrest. Anonymous callers made

death threats. And for 10 months Mr. Jha was obliged to travel to and

from campus under police escort.

 

After months of legal wrangling, Mr. Jha's lawyers succeeded in having

the ban lifted this spring. And now his book has been published in

Britain and the United States by Verso, with a new preface and a more

provocative title: " The Myth of the Holy Cow. " But though copies have

been shipped to India, few bookstores there are likely to stock it.

 

His offense? To say what scholars have long known to be true: early

Hindus ate beef.

 

Mr. Jha says his book has become a casualty of the culture wars that

have plagued India since the hard-line Hindu nationalist Bharatiya

Janata Party took office five years ago. " The battle lines are drawn

very clearly, " he said. " On one side of the barricade are the ideas of

cultural pluralism, rationality and democratic values. On the other side

are Hindu fundamentalism and cultural nationalism. "

 

Under this government, scholars and journalists say, history books have

been rewritten and occasionally censored. Two years ago, for example, a

multivolume project on the history of Indian independence sponsored by

the Indian Council of Historical Research was scuttled by government

officials who apparently deemed its scope too liberal.

 

In a telephone interview from his home in New Delhi, Mr. Jha said, " The

prohibition on beef-eating has been made a mark of Hindu identity, but

this is historically not true. "

 

Anyone who has tried to navigate India's cow-choked streets knows the

special status conferred on the beast by Hindus, who make up more than

80 percent of the population. Gandhi referred to the cow as " our

mother, " calling cattle protection " the central fact of Hinduism. " And

in several Indian states killing a cow is against the law.

 

But while cow veneration and vegetarianism may be the hallmarks of

Hinduism today, Mr. Jha compiles copious evidence that this has hardly

always been the case. Citing sources ranging from the ancient sacred

scriptures, the Vedas (circa 1000 B.C.), to Sanskrit epics like the

Ramayana and the Mahabharata (200 B.C to A.D. 200) as well as data from

archaeological digs, Mr. Jha contends that " the `holiness' of the cow is

a myth and that its flesh was very much a part of the early Indian

nonvegetarian food regimen and dietary traditions. "

 

Not only were oxen and other animals offered as sacrifices to the Vedic

gods, he writes, they were routinely eaten by mere mortals as well.

 

One religious text declares meat to be quite simply " the best kind of

food, " while another captures Yajnavalkya, a revered Vedic sage who

lived around 500 B.C., confessing to a particular weakness for beef.

" Some people do not eat cow meat, " he is quoted as saying. " I do so,

provided it's tender. "

 

Meanwhile, the Mahabharata recounts the story of King Rantiveda, who

earned his renown by slaughtering 2,000 cows a day in his royal kitchens

and distributing beef along with grain to apparently grateful Brahmins,

the Hindu priests.

 

Even the Buddha, on record as opposing animal killing for either food or

sacrifice, was apparently not above the occasional carnivorous nibble.

Mr. Jha cites passages from early Buddhist texts suggesting not only

that the Buddha ate meat but that a meal of contaminated pork may

ultimately have been what did him in. (Mr. Jha dismisses a dissenting

interpretation that the offending food was not pork but mushroom.)

 

None of this, scholars say, is news. In a recent review in The Times

Literary Supplement, Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of

religion at the University of Chicago, called Mr. Jha's book " a dry,

straight academic survey . . . proving what every scholar of India has

known for well over a century. "

 

" This is not `Satanic Verses,' " Ms. Doniger added in a telephone

interview. " This is just a relatively intelligent, academic book. It

doesn't depict Hindus as horrible people. "

 

Indeed, until the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, said Michael

Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, much of the

history Mr. Jha records was taught in Indian schools.

 

" It's very much a reality of the culture here in India that scholars

have to face harassment and intimidation, " said Sukumar Muralidharan,

the Delhi bureau chief for Frontline, a biweekly news magazine. " The

Hindu nationalist lobby is trying to force a kind of polarization in

terms of a singular cultural inheritance on one side and all the rest on

the other side. And their idea of the inheritance is very much their own

construct, not a full reading of history. "

 

In this context, even food has become politicized as Hindu nationalists

use their vegetarianism to distinguish themselves from the nation's

beef-eating and implicitly immoral Muslim minority.

 

Mr. Jha's book, Ms. Doniger wrote in her review, " contradicts the party

line, which is that we Hindus have always been here in India and have

Never Eaten Cow; those Muslims have come in, and Kill and Eat Cows, and

therefore must be destroyed. "

 

From a scholarly point of view, she said, what's shocking about ancient

Indian history is not that some people ate meat but that some did not:

" Since the human species is by nature carnivorous, what is surprising is

that there ever were vegetarians. "

 

Beginning around A.D. 500, Mr. Jha writes, killing cows became

increasingly taboo — according to the religious texts, a sinful practice

associated with the lowest social order, the untouchables. In part, he

speculates, the change in official attitude may have coincided with the

explosion of agriculture. The cow, on whose strength (for plowing), dung

(for fuel) and milk the community depended, was just too valuable to

slaughter.

 

Other scholars, however, say the taboo probably owed more to factors

increasingly integral to Hindu, Buddhist and Jainist thought: the belief

in reincarnation, which blurred the lines between humans and animals,

and the doctrine of ahimsa, or nonviolence.

 

" The feeling that people have about killing animals and taking lives,

that's the basis of it, " Ms. Doniger said. " Obviously, people were

feeling guilty. Anytime you eat beef, that meant someone had slaughtered

a cow. "

 

Mr. Witzel says that the word cow was frequently a metaphor in Vedic

texts, most notably for the poetry composed by Brahmin priests. When one

Vedic poet writes, " don't kill the innocent cow, " he really means " don't

make bad poetry, " Mr. Witzel said. Ultimately, he speculated, both

figurative and literal connotations may have contributed to the

prohibition on cow slaughter. " As soon as you identify cow with poetry,

you cannot do anything to that cow. Step by step, this becomes

concretized. "

 

Of course, these are just the kind of explanations likely to infuriate

Hindus who are determined to have the cow's sacred status enshrined in

Indian law.

 

" Only two days ago, I saw the news that they are trying to get the cow

declared a national animal, " lamented Mr. Jha, a Hindu who says he is a

vegetarian purely for health reasons. " In Delhi, cows should best be

treated as a safety hazard. You cannot drive safely for the cows that

stray around. "

 

 

 

" In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes

out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with

another human being. We should all be thankful for

those people who rekindle the inner spirit. "

--Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, and musician

(1875-1965)