It’s easy to see why the Right wanted this book about Indians’ beef-eating history to be banned
DN Jha’s ‘The Myth of the Holy Cow’ examined facts, and its detractors didn’t like that.
Satyavrat KK
History, not hate
Jha’s
Myth Of The Holy Cow was never intended to be provocative. It was merely an academic inquiry into the historical beef-eating dietary habits on the Subcontinent, one that was buttressed with ample evidence from ancient texts and sources. However, many publishers refused to take on the heat of brining it out, and after it was finally published in 2001 by Matrix Books, it was received with the usual symphony of death threats and brickbats from the fundamentalist Hindutva right.
Jha’s central premise is that the practice of eating beef is hardly a foreign concept brought to India by Islamic and Christian influences, and that people from the Vedic era not only ritually sacrificed the cow, but also relished its meat.
Jha meticulously brings this out by drawing our attention to various ancient texts – the Vedas, epics like the Ramayana, and Buddhist and Jain scriptures. Jha also charts out society’s transformation from a pastoralist, nomadic group to settled agriculturalists, where the the status of the cow was elevated to that a beast of burden.
However, the cow hadn’t yet become holy, with neither the Laws of Manu (which prohibit eating cows but condones their slaughter by Brahmins) nor the concept of ahimsa in Buddhist and Jain thought elevating the animal to a hallowed status. Beef-eating eventually became taboo in the medieval period among upper caste Hindus, but the cow was yet to be canonised, as this happened much later in the 19th century, when various cow protection groups galvanised themselves on this nebulous notion of a shared identity.
As Jha puts it “The holiness of the cow is elusive. For there has never been a cow goddess, nor any temple in her honour. Nevertheless the veneration of this animal has come to be viewed as a characteristic trait of modern day non-existent monolithic ‘Hinduism’ bandied about by the Hindutva forces.”
https://scroll.in/article/820818/it...bout-indians-beef-eating-history-to-be-banned
Hindu extremists wants to enforce cow ban global. They've just woke up from their long sleep to understand that except cow belt most of India as well as world eats cow meat. Virat Hindus attacking Jeremy McLellan:
