How did Hindus Become Vegetarians?

GT

absolutely, bengali brahmins eat fish, kashmiri brahmins eat goat and so on. So there is no such thing as monolithic food rules for "hindus" - it has always been a mixture of jati rules with some premium on giving up "tamasik" meat. Again, things are never straightforward in hinduism - bengali gaudiya vaishnavas are pure vegetarian somewhat irrespective of jati origin, probably because they are a reform group anxious to prove their purity. This is why the beef prohibition feels out of place...

jang

It is generally thought that the business classes were early supporters of buddhism and jainism. If you think about it, these more reflective traditions are in some ways very supportive of business, much more so that ancient hinduism with its kings and sacrifices and so on.

But your point is also a very good one - in a hot climate eating bits of meat is going to be risky. In fact, that is the story of Buddhas death - that he eat a tainted meal of pork and died as a result.

Akbar, Shivaji, Ranjit Singh all prohibited cow slaughter. But I think this is a response to something that already existed at before that time - not something they invented.

An interesting read!

I think it all happened 10 million years ago, when a huge meteor struck earth and wiped off dinosaurs and other life form from the planet. The only survivors of that apocalyptic event were two species - cows and some humans. Cows survived because it is the most resilient creature on this planet. Every year hundereds of millions of cows get eaten up, not to mention a substantial number falls victim to Coccidiosis, Anaplasmosis,Blackleg,Brucellosis, ringworm,
mad cow disease and hoof and mouth disese and what not, and yet not only they survive but thrive as well.

The humans who survived decided not to eat cows for a while because they needed milk for their babies. But some of the humans were greedy; they would miss the roast angus beef. They stole some cows and ate them. The elders among the survivors when realized that the number of their toes all put together now did not match with the legs of the all the cows put together, they quickly figured out that some cows were missing. Did I mention that they were all good mathematicians? Anyhoo, they put their head together and decided to declare cow as the sacred animal and also declared taht if anyone tried to eat a cow again, god will again strike them with the ball of fire that had already wiped off most of the life form from the planet. That was the birth of a new religion which we now know as hinduism. That was also the birth of vegeterianism; for hundereds of years people had to suck green slime and algae from rocks to survive after the big fireball struck - and the word vegeterianism was coined to dignify the practice.

#19 miaN Urstruly

Very original.

Now, what's your take on some people not eating pigs?!

A PRINCESS BRIDE

The great-great-granddaughter of the legendary "Lion of the Punjab" returns to her home in Pakistan after an overlong absence

BY SUKETU MEHTA/LAHORE

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One day in august 1947, Nony Singh overheard her father talking about shooting her. She was around ten then, a Sikh girl growing up in a big house in Lahore, just before partition. She was walking along a passageway when she overheard a conversation out on the veranda: her grandfather, her father and her uncles were planning how they would defend themselves against Muslim mobs that were returning with increasing frequency to the house. The men--most of whom were army or police officers--had stockpiled a huge cache of arms in the house. The teenage girls in the family--her oldest sister and her three aunts--had already been sent to safety across the border to Simla, a hill resort that would eventually fall to India; only Nony and her two younger sisters were left in Lahore. She heard her father tell the others that, if Muslims broke into the house, he would fight to the end. But before the end came, he said, "I will take the three girls into a room and line them up and shoot them."
We were standing on this same veranda now, my friend Nony Singh and I, 50 years later. It was the first time she had returned to Lahore since 1947. She was making a unique crossing, not merely from the country in which she lives to the one left behind, not just from her present home to an earlier one, but from approaching old age back to the territory of childhood, a realm preserved only in dreams and old photographs.

What made her return unusual was that she is the great-great-granddaughter of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the "Lion of the Punjab," the Sikh king who at the beginning of the 19th century ruled over all of Punjab from Lahore. So when she came back, it was with a special sense of belonging, above and beyond that of the many other partition refugees visiting ancestral homes. Signing the Pakistani visa forms in Delhi, she had remarked: "I felt I own the place. How dare they ask for a visa?"

Nony had left Lahore on a sour note: a fight with her best friend Fauziya, who lived next door. Nony had made a doll, with a long plait, the face painted with watercolors, and a wardrobe fashioned of brightly colored scraps from her aunts' old clothes. Fauziya wanted Nony to marry her attractive doll to Fauziya's male doll. At first Nony agreed, but then Fauziya told her that since her doll was female, it would have to come with a dowry--all the doll-clothes and doll-bedding that Nony had hand-stitched. Also, Fauziya insisted, after the wedding the female doll would have to stay in the male doll's house--as was the custom among humans. Nony turned down the match, and Fauziya stopped speaking to her. A few days later, Nony and her family left Pakistan forever, taking the doll with her. She has always regretted, she told me, that she left Pakistan on a fight over the distribution of property.

What she wanted to do now was to go back to the two houses in which she had grown up: her maternal grandmother's amid the winding lanes of Anarkali Bazaar, and her paternal grandfather's in Model Town. Her grandmother had died soon after crossing the border, Nony said: "We were thrown out. We felt very hurt. My grandmother died of sorrow."

The Anarkali Bazaar house is now a printing shop. Sometime after partition it was taken over by the former tenants, and stacks of old books crowd the rooms where her grandmother once conducted business from behind a latticed screen with the accountants, making sure that rent-collection from her numerous shops in the bazaar was in order. Though he was quite ill, the old man who now owns the house invited Nony for dinner because, he said, he had something to explain. He was ashamed. At partition, he said, Nony's grandmother had given his father the key to the house for safekeeping. The father had kept all her grandmother's possessions locked in the upper rooms of the house, allowing no one to enter them. Then, he said, after a family dispute his cousins had broken into the rooms and stolen everything. He said he had lived with the guilt for 50 years. Now at last he could explain and apologize. Nony said later, "I was embarrassed also, and I was hurt. This was my house, and some other people took it over. But I admired him for telling me. His family was so affectionate. The human feeling was what mattered."

When she left the man's house, she was given bangles and an embroidered veil--the traditional gifts a daughter of the house is given when she returns to her in-laws. The symbolism was clear: this was Nony's true home, here in Lahore. Delhi and India were merely in-laws, the family into which she had found herself married.

Nony was overwhelmed at the reception she received, not just from the people who lived in her family's houses, but from taxi-drivers, bellboys, merchants in the bazaars. Her coming from India was good for substantial discounts in the ancient shops of Anarkali Bazaar. As a daughter of the neighborhood, she was able to buy a 750-rupee suit for 600 rupees. The elderly proprietor of a photo shop, upon learning Nony was from India, said he was, too, and asked her to have lunch or dinner with his family.

One evening we went to the Pak Tea House, a writers' cafe that Pakistan's greatest poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, used to frequent. A group of poets and writers clustered around us. Surprisingly, this was the place in Pakistan where Nony found the closest thing resembling hostility toward her as an Indian. A professor of Urdu literature declared that the enmity between India and Pakistan would be solved if India "liberated" Kashmir, Punjab and Assam. "I was scared of their fanaticism," Nony said. "They were so vehement. These are the people that create the frenzy. If they were my age, they would never have talked that way." After one in the group maligned Maulana Azad, a prominent Muslim in the freedom struggle who chose to stay in India and is therefore reviled in Pakistani history texts, Nony added: "He was talking like a fanatic about Pakistan. I wish he had seen that united India [before partition]. We sacrificed together, we shed our blood together to win freedom. Then what happened?" For all her warm feelings toward ordinary Pakistanis, Nony remained clear about the political gulf between the two countries: "The difference between India and Pakistan is army rule. Their youngsters hate India. Army rule has dinned it into their heads to make war. Our democracy, whatever it is, has worked."

Not always. Like most Hindu and Sikh refugees who fled to India, Nony's family did well in their new homeland. She married a fellow refugee, a farmer who in 1965 set a record for wheat production. Then in 1984 India's Sikhs suffered through what for many of them was a second partition: the pogroms against Nony's community that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Nony and her three daughters were saved by a Hindu neighbor across the street, who hid them from the fury of the mobs for 11 days.

Once the riots were over and she could return to her house, Nony worried about what she should put on the name plate outside her gate. After all, she had just witnessed the evil attention a Sikh name could attract. In the end, she used only the number 15, the address of the house. She still regrets not being able to display a name. "I felt one day people will be reduced just to numbers," she says. "We are not proud of being anything--Sikh, Hindu, Muslim."

Her grandfather's home in Model Town was a household of women before partition. Nony's father was frequently away on army duty, and her grandfather usually closeted himself with his second wife on the ground floor. As teenage girls are wont to do, Nony's aunts and her sisters liked to play the radio full blast, mostly film music--Saigal, Kanan Bala, Nurjehan. Her aunts often stole away to the movies, a forbidden activity. Once they took the family tonga, or horse-cart, and caromed down the road until they lost control of the horse, crashed, and fell off laughing--shocking all the neighbors. Before partition the family was united, rich and happy.

When she traveled to Lahore, she was looking for something that would be defined for her by Badar, the man who now lives in her grandfather's house. At the end of the lavish dinner his family had laid out for Nony and me, Badar became thoughtful. Like his wife, he said, he was the child of partition refugees who had made the crossing the other way, from Delhi and Bhopal to Pakistan. "It is a miracle you're here," he said, turning to Nony. "It's like a movie, a dream. After 50 years, coming back to this house." Then he reflected: "Man is always in search of old things. We go to ruins, to museums. You have come to look for old things. Something is lost. That is common to all men." A little later, he asked, "What is lost?" and then answered his own question. "I think it is love."

Now, age 61 and living in Delhi, Nony is not at peace. After her husband died in 1982, she became ensnared in property disputes--the curse of the descendants of India's princely class. Her days are taken up dealing with her six lawyers and her multiple ongoing law suits, many of which she has inherited from her ancestors like a useless watch. All this has made her a bit lonely in her adopted city. Says she: "Delhi to me seems faceless."

I returned to Delhi ahead of Nony. She wrote me from Lahore: "Here I am in conversation with my grandparents, my mother, my father, my aunts, my sisters, my little brother. For the first time I am not grieving for my grandmother having gone, for my Daddy having gone... For the first time I feel that part of my grieving shall go--as if I have called them all back to meet me at a place where they gave me birth, as if I have had a long conversation with them and clarified all my doubts, of not having done my best for them, for not having given them enough love... Here, meeting them after their deaths was easier because we all belonged together, we belonged to each other, we belonged to this soil, this town. On the other side of the border we had all separated, our personalities scattered. Here we are all one, we are together in grief and in happiness... Here--in Pakistan--an enemy of my country India!"

GT, here is my read.

Mr. Murad A Baig is either just ignorant or a bigot peddaling an alien, anti-Indian agenda. I think, both.

This article of his is not any different from all his other articles. :)

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Sahranpuri, please stop that. Now you are just spamming.

Re: # 3
"This guy is pure liar (like Muhammed).

Argue without derogatory remarks against a Prophet. Is this how you live where you live? I think Raam would disapprove of your behaviour.

Shanti

Murad,

You chose an excellent topic to write on. I think India suffers greatly from lack of research in many areas of history. History has become just whatever the white man deems fit to focus on. No attempt has been made to research the genesis of all the languages, variations in cultures, cuisines , music, sciences and arts in India by the Indians at a big scale.
Coming to the topic, first some inaccurate statements by you need to be corrected. Shiva is not a pre-vedic deity. He is also called Rudra eloquently mentioned in the Vedas in many verses riding on the bull etc. Second, Krishna movement is not a cult. If it were, then you may have to start calling Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed as cult leaders too.
Your premise that vegetarianism started in Hinduism due to the influence of Buddhists and Jains is based on Ambedkar's views. They are quite far from the facts.
It is here that the contribution of Krishna as the world's first environmentalist needs to be mentioned. Since you have researched many scriptures, you may want to focus on Srimad Bhagvatam to know what I'm writing below.
Prior to Krishna, the hindus worshipped Indra as the supreme deity as mentioned in the Rigveda. Animal sacrifice as you mentioned was rampant. The sacrifice was done to appease the unseen power in the skies (God). These were also the times that the concept of judgement at the end of one's life was an accepted belief. Hence the need to appease the judge to get in heaven. Krishna changed it by challenging the view that sacrifices need to be made to propitiate the unseen power high above us all. He instead argued that before caring for this unseen power, the immediate surroundings need to be cared for. Thus the importance of cows and other animals for milk and other things should be considered as a higher priority than this unseen and unknown power. Thus he came to be called Go-Vardhan (protector of cows). A respect for these animals then helps the society also get rid of useless rituals without calling the veneration of Indra as a false God and going to war against his worshippers. A needles ritual is replaced by inner reform silently and inclusively.
His sculptures of lifting the mountain to challenege the might of Indra (and hence called Giridharan) and that of Go-vardhana are there even in Mahabalipuram (6th-7th century AD).
The concept of animal sacrifice was replaced in Gita by sacrificing (AAhuti) one's desires and fruits of Karma in the sacrificial fire (Yagna). This way, Krishna freed the Hindus from rituals afflicting mindless violence in the name of God. The only other way of reform would have been to attack the Indra worshippers as wrong and exclude them from the fold of Hinduism or perhaps wage a war.
Is it any wonder then that Gandhi took Gita for inspiration and concluded that the method is equally important than the end. He perhaps understood the supreme rationality of Krishna's actions and message.
The last para was an unnecessary digression.
Adios

Eklavya,

You need not feel bad about Murad Bhai's expose. Afterall our Pakistani brothers' presumption that we are beatable because of our subsistent diet will no more carry weight ;-).

On a serious note, its not only the Brahmins who are staunch veggies, there are other castes at all levels of the caste pyramid.
In Tamilnadu, most of the Mudhaliars, Pillais,Vysyaas, Badugas (a hill tribe) and a few more castes are veggies.

Somebody on the board had said that not consuming meat means you move higher on the caste hierarchy. This is not correct.

Excellent, and mostly factually correct article.

Infact once my Grandfather, a conservative Brahmin, once quoted a famous passage ( I beleive from Rigveda), where Rishi Agastya offered to Indra, a leg of Indra. My Grandmother left the room in disgust......

Usually it is the case that we try to put our beleifs, our prejudices, and taboos in the mouths of our ancestors, beloved ones, prophets and holy books. Revisionism is usually the way of life.

It is well known in Turkey that Muslim hunters eat Wild Boar, just that they are not classified as pigs. Bosnians Muslims toast to Whisky since it is not classified as Wines. In fact the Alcohol in India came with the Muslim invasion, the older forms of Indian wines were long dead.

Let us try to treat history as it is. It is never going to diminish our Hinduism, or identity as Indians. If we start to lie, we will never identify the real cornerstones of our identity.

I dont see what is so controversial in this article. The most famous book on this topic is "The Myth of the Holy Cow. by D. N. Jha. a histroy prof at U of Delhi.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20021101fabook10064/d-n-jha/the-myth-of- the-holy-cow.html

Nirad Chowdhuri has also written very well on the topic in his book "continent of circe"

#3, nkg

"Ram had tried to trap the deer to gift to Sita"

I'lll try to find the reference if you insist, but seems like Sita's favourite food was venison cooked with rice and vegetables :-)

We all come from a hunter-gatherer past. The "Dandakaranya" was a huge forest. It stands to reason that people would partake in the wealth of such a forest, including its animals.

kaal,

he,he.... is all that I can say. By the way Murad may not know where you are comming from :)

#12 GT,

Traditionally a buffalo was slaughtered in many communities on the last day of Durga Puja (Dassera). Visit any Gorkha regiment on dassera day to watch the buffalo being despatched in one stroke of the khukri.

Among bengali's it has been replaced by a goat or more commonly today substituted by a pumpkin.

LOL, GT, I am sure Mr Baig is an informed person, and has done his research. Besides, he seems well intentioned and sincere. It's just that who knows, the earth might indeed be flat, and at least some people must have the right to fully believe so. :)

Anyways, personally, I fully expect that our ancestors ate the cow and the cow-ling (whatever that means), and then, somewhere along the way, for some reasons, beliefs changed, and some people stopped eating the cow. All of Hinduism is basically like that. Nothing divine or fixed about it, except for those who hold specific beliefs for a certain amount of time. Nowadays I am told that no one can be a Hindu without eating a couple of cows and bulls, which is perfectly fine. :)

If we ignore some of Mr. Baig's comments or insinuations, I owe him an apology for being dismissive.

Next topic for Murad A Baig Saab

How did Hingboos become urine drinkers