August 17, 2002
Holy Cow a Myth? An Indian Finds the Kick Is Real
By EMILY EAKIN
The New York Times


"Holy 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.

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."



Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company