First posted by Dr. Falak Rahman
Source: Huffington Post
By M.G.S. Narayanan; Historian, academic, Former Chairman of India Council Of Historical Research
The present controversy around beef eating, accompanied by violent objection and equally aggressive support, is engineered by extremist politicians on both sides reacting to the change of ruling parties at the Centre. They play with exaggerated or distorted reports and make sensational statements. With the pathetic decline of the Congress which has been enjoying power for long in most parts of India, people expect serious changes in government and government-related institutions and policies. The excitement of new power on the one hand and the fear of losing positions on the other have created confusion and uncertainty.
Beef is a sensitive issue which can be exploited by invoking religious sentiments, and profit from exports also could be involved. It is a favourite item of food mainly for Muslims and a few others as well, including Christians and Hindus in different parts of India. Many others, including habitual consumers of non-vegetarian food, find it distasteful either because they are unfamiliar with it or culturally conditioned against it.
“Our former colonial masters and their scholars, endowed with Eurocentric arrogance and ignorance about India, conceived the Hindu ‘religion’ on the model of the Semitic religions known to them.”
India is a vast country with a great variety of castes and creeds. There is no Hindu “religion”. Unlike the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam there is no one founder, sacred book and rules of conduct including procedure for conversion and excommunication applicable to Hindu society as a whole. The Varna system is a theoretical concept which is not always implemented fully in practice. For instance, Brahmins are to be teachers and priests and are not expected to own property and power according to the Chaturvarnya theory, but they have been land-owners on a big scale, political councillors, military commanders, money lenders etc. in many periods of history in several parts of the country. Similarly, the tribal ruling chieftains in South India were promoted to the Kshatriya Varna. The Nayars of Kerala are classified as Sudras, but some of them were kings and governors, and a large number of them served in battle as warriors. Varna was different from Jati. While there were only four Varnas, there were hundreds of Jatis with their status and occupations differing from place to place and time to time.
There were no rules prescribing food habits or dressing conventions or marriage and other customs and practices for Hindu society as a whole. There were no codes of conduct or modes of worship for Hindus in general. Our former colonial masters and their scholars, endowed with Eurocentric arrogance and ignorance about India, conceived the Hindu “religion” on the model of the Semitic religions known to them. They labelled all native groups outside the Semitic religious groups as Hindus in the census records. Actually the term Hindu, applied by outsiders to natives of India, was not a religious term, but a geographical term referring to the inhabitants of the Sindhu or Hindu or Indu region.
The Brahmins, who formed a small but influential group in North India and migrated to all parts of the subcontinent in the course of centuries in search of fertile agricultural land, cherished the Vedas, Vedic sacrifices and Vedic tradition. The sacrificial rituals were elaborated in later centuries and recorded in Aranyakas, Brahmanas, Grihya Sutras etc (see, for example, volumes 1 and 2 of Indologist Frits Staal’s Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar). They preserved the text of the Vedasas an oral tradition exclusively for themselves, and prohibited the learning of theVedas by Sudras. This rule must have been implemented in kingdoms where the Brahmins had control over the kings — to the extent to which the control could be enforced in administration.
Categories: Hinduism