That Jesus roamed the Himalayas, absorbing Vedic wisdom from the gurus he encountered; that the human race originated in Tibet; that the gods reside in the body of the cow, mother of us all—all this has long been taught as established fact in the 20,000 Vidya Bharati schools run under the auspices of the Sangh parivar, the hardline Hindu-nationalist network that lies behind India’s ruling party, the BJP. The Vidya Bharati agenda has already been introduced into primary and secondary schools in BJP-run states, where education policy is often a pawn in coalition deals with regional parties. In 2001, the Sangh-dominated National Council of Educational Research and Training began deleting and rewriting sections of the history textbooks—removing, among other things, any reference to Indian traditions of eating beef. In January 2002, NCERT produced a new history syllabus, founded on its ‘value-based’ national curriculum framework for the country’s schools, which had proposed introducing courses on Vedic mathematics and a ‘spirituality quotient’ as a form of academic assessment. On 12 September 2002, the Supreme Court set its seal on the new policy, rejecting the contention that the education system was being ‘saffronized’ with the dismissal of a petition brought against it by a group of educationalists. Prime Minister Vajpayee, schmoozing with Indian millionaires in New York, greeted the decision with glee—adding, for domestic consumption, ‘And if saffronization is taking place, what’s wrong with that? Bhagwa is a good colour, long associated with the battlefields.’ The opposition Congress party announced that it had ‘no legal problem’ with the judgement.
The teaching of history in post-Independence India, the revisionists argue, has been too ‘westernized’—dominated by the ‘children of Macaulay’. Instead, they propose to develop ‘a sense of belonging in every individual learner’, by focusing on ‘India’s contribution to world civilization’. The Vidya Bharati narrative that this ambition threatens to draw from is a genuinely postmodern fiction, seamlessly conflating mythology and fact. The Aryan race, indigenous to India, is the nucleus of its proud culture. During the golden age of the Vedic period, the country was the envy of the world; its trade networks spread across the globe, and foreign markets were filled with Indian goods. Its treasure chests flowed with jewels, silver and gold. Marauders and barbarians have always viewed the country with greedy eyes. Bacchus and Dionysus were among the first invaders—they suffered such a crushing defeat that Ancient Greece quaked with terror. After the rout of Darius, Iran could never raise its eyes to India again. Alexander the Great had to beg for Puru’s forgiveness.
But Buddhist influence, and the non-violent doctrine of ahimsa, weakened the kingdom. Cowardice spread throughout the land. Since the state bore the burden of filling the monks’ begging bowls, the Buddhists gained many recruits. The troops guarding the borders grew listless as army morale was sapped. Arab aggressors, sword in hand, imposed their religion, destroying books and temples, humiliating mothers and sisters. Practices of child marriage, jauhar, sati and purdah were defences against Muslim rapaciousness. Under the Moghuls, the country was divided into two classes: minority Muslim rulers, and the vast majority, the long-suffering Hindus, constantly oppressed.
At stake is the creation of a monolithic national narrative, focused around the supposed essence of Hinduism, an unchanging Brahmanical core. The complex social history of the priestly caste—its mutations through the millennia, its class character and the numerous challenges to its hegemony—is drowned out by shrill proclamations of innate Brahmanical purity, of which vegetarianism and, in particular, the immemorial sanctity of the cow are important aspects. The actual treatment of India’s often lame and rack-ribbed bovine population—bumbling between the Hyundais and Toyotas, or browsing on street-corner rubbish heaps—is not the issue. As last year’s protests by outraged customers at the Mumbai McDonald’s make clear, it is the ancient link with Hindu purity that counts.
Yet as Dwijendra Narayan Jha’s new work reveals, the connexion is far less ancient than it seems. In contrast to many of the revisionists, Jha has studied the Vedic writings in detail—as his thicket of footnotes reveals—as well as surveying a far wider body of textual and archaeological data. His book—the subject of initial banning orders and ritual burnings—is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature that gives a far more complex picture of ancient India. To the Aryan-speaking, semi-nomadic pastoralists who migrated to northwest India from the area of present-day Iran—and whose prayers and chants are recorded in the earliest extant document of the Subcontinent, the Rigveda, dating from between 1500 and 1000 bc—the cow was neither sacred nor unslayable. The Aryans’ gods—combining, it seems, some of the Avesta deities of Iran, strong-armed Indra and fiery Agni, with the mother goddess and Horned Being of the Indus valley—were particularly partial to offerings of roast ox, goat and beef. Animal sacrifice was a crucial element of their religion. Cattle were also valued for their leather, which was worked up into elaborate trappings for the Aryans’ chariots—important symbols of power in a mobile, pastoral world.
The textual evidence for this period relates essentially to northern India. But archaeological excavations have revealed charred and cut cattle bones from virtually all parts of the Subcontinent, suggesting that the consumption of beef, along with mutton, goat, ox and various fowls and fish, was fairly commonplace. At Hastinapura—the ancient capital of the Mahabharata, north of Delhi—bone fragments of sheep, buffalo, goat, pig, elephant and short-horned cattle have been found, many of them cut or charred, and dating from the eleventh to the third century bc. The social universe of the sprawling epic—its original nucleus generated around 800 bc—is exuberantly non-vegetarian. One section—the Vanaparvan—recounts the daily slaughter of two thousand cows in the kitchens of King Rantideva, renowned for distributing vast quantities of beef and grain to his brahmans. The Ramayana, too, contains numerous references to the killing of cattle, both for sacrifice and for food: as she is ferried across the Yamuna, Sita vows to sacrifice a thousand cows and a hundred jars of wine to the river, if Rama keeps his vows.
The later Vedic texts, products of the settled agrarian communities around the Ganga–Yamuna doab, provide detailed descriptions of cattle sacrifice, and make clear that humans (as well as gods) consumed the results. As the Satapatha Brahmana comments: ‘meat is the best kind of food’. Beef should not only be served to honour important guests or to celebrate a new house, but on far more banal occasions: according to Upanishadic precept a veal stew, served with rice and ghee, could ensure a father the happiness of a long-lived, learned son. That cows were highly valued, a symbol of riches, is not, Jha argues, synonymous with their being either sacred or unslayable.