Attitudes to Beef Eating in Early India


An average Indian of today rooted in what appears to him as his traditional Hindu religious heritage carries the load of the misconception that his ancestors, especially the Vedic Aryans, attached great importance to the cow on account of its inherent sacredness. The ‘sacred’ cow has come to be considered a symbol of community identity of the Hindus whose cultural tradition is often imagined as threatened by the Muslims who are thought of as beefeaters. The sanctity of the cow has, therefore, been announced with the flourish of trumpets and has been wrongly traced back to the Vedas, which are supposedly of divine origin and fountainhead of all knowledge and wisdom. In other words, some sections of Indian society have traced back the concept of sacred cow to the very period when it was sacrificed and its flesh was eaten.

More importantly, the cow has tended to become a political instrument at the hand of rulers over time. The Mughal emperors (e.g. Babar, Akbar, Jahangir and Aurangzeb etc) are said to have imposed a restricted ban on cow slaughter to accommodate the Jaina or Brahmanical feeling of respect and veneration of the cow[1].  Similarly Shivaji, sometimes viewed as an incarnation of God who descended on earth for the deliverance of the cow and brahmin, is described as proclaiming: “We are Hindus and the rightful lords of the realm. It is not proper for us to witness cow slaughter and the oppression of brahmanas”................Click for more

 

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