Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
travagant. Since the produce of multiple acres of land was concentrated into the carcases
of the slaughtered cows, the issue of sacrifice was no mere doctrinal spat but a matter of
paramount social and economic importance. 'At a time when ordinary people were starving
and in need of oxen to plough their flelds, the Brahmans went on killing cattle and getting
fat from eating them'. This ostentatious overconsumption accounts for the growing pop-
ularity of Buddhism in India and its eventual espousal by the Emperor Ashoka in 257 BC.
Buddhists preached a gospel of
ahimsa
, non-violence, opposing animal sacrifices, and the
killing of animals in general. However their religious tenets did not prohibit the eating of
braxy, nor did Ashoka forbid the killing of beef where necessary. To explain what happened
next Harris turns to Rajendra Mitra, a 19th century Sanskrit scholar who wrote:
When the Brahmans had to contend against Buddhism which emphatically and so
successfully denounced all sacrifices, they found the doctrines of respect for animal
life too strong and too popular to be overcome, and therefore gradually and impercept-
ibly adopted it in such a manner as to make it part of their teaching.
Indeed, to regain control the Brahmans felt they had to outshine the Buddhists in their
dietary restraint. The Dalit campaigner B R Ambedkar wrote:
Without becoming vegetarian the Brahmans could not have recovered the ground
they had lost to their rival namely Buddhism. What could the Brahmans do to recover
the lost ground? To go one better than the Buddhist Bhikshus … become vegetarians
- which they did.
34
The result, as Buddhism's influence waned and Hinduism became the dominant religion,
was that the holier-than-thou Brahmans became completely vegetarian, while lower classes
could eat meat but refrained from beef. However, the cow was not rejected as unclean, as
was the pig by Muslims, but instead venerated as sacred. The very plausible reason Harris
advances for this is that the cow was necessary to provide oxen to plough the relatively dry
lands of Northern India. Taboos against eating draught animals are by no means unusual. In
some parts of Europe there were prohibitions against killing oxen for meat, and in the UK
there is still a reluctance to eat horse meat. According to Keith Thomas, 'the rise of the cult
of the roast beef of England closely paralleled the decline of the ox as a working animal.'
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Since, in India, it was necessary to go to the expense of feeding cows to produce draught
animals, it followed that milk (rather than pigs as in China) should become the domin-
ant animal protein. Milk became the ritual food and the cow became, in Gandhi's words
'a mother to millions of Indians', supplanting the bull symbolism of the macho Aryan in-
vaders. There remained the issue of the braxy meat and the hides, which together constitu-
ted a by no means negligible resource. The answer was to be found in the 'Broken Men', as
