Cannibals and Kings (23 page)

I base my argument for this widening gulf between a pampered meat-eating aristocracy and an impoverished meatless peasantry partly on the fact that toward the middle of the first millennium
B.C.
a number of new religions began to challenge the legitmacy of the Brahman caste and its sacrificial rituals. Of these reformist religions, the best-known are Buddhism and Jainism. Founded in the sixth century
B.C
. by charismatic holy men, both Buddhism and Jainism outlawed caste distinctions, abolished hereditary priesthoods, made poverty a precondition of spirituality, and advocated communion with the spiritual essence of the universe through contemplation rather than through the sacrifice of animals. In their condemnation of violence, war, and cruelty, and their compassion for human suffering, both of these movements anticipated key elements of Christianity.

For the Buddhists, all life was sacred, although it could exist in higher and lower forms. For the Jains, not only was all life sacred but it shared a common soul: there were no higher and lower forms. In either case, priests who sacrificed animals were no better than murderers. Buddhists tolerated the eating of animal flesh, provided the eater had not participated in the killing. The Jains, however, condemning the killing of
all animals, insisted on a pure vegetarian diet. The members of some Jainist sects even deemed it necessary to employ sweepers to clear the path in front of them in order to avoid the calamity of accidentally extinguishing the life of a single ant.

As I suggested earlier, the end of animal sacrifice coincided with the growth of universalistic, spiritualized religions. With the erstwhile “great providers” increasingly unable to validate their majesty through popular displays of open-handed generosity, people were encouraged to look for “redistributions” in an afterlife or in some new phase of being. I have also pointed out that the image of the ruler as great protector of the weak against the strong arose as a matter of practical statecraft during periods of imperial expansion. Buddhism, like Christianity, was ideally suited, therefore, for adoption as an imperial religion. It dematerialized the obligations of the emperor at the same time that it obligated the aristocracy to show compassion to the poor. This explains, I think, why Buddhism became an official religion under Asoka, one of the most powerful emperors in the history of India. Asoka, grandson of the founder of the north Indian Maurya Dynasty, converted to Buddhism in 257
B.C.
He and his descendants forthwith set about creating the first and still the largest ever of Indian empires—a shaky realm stretching briefly from Afghanistan to Ceylon. Asoka was thus possibly the first emperor in history to set out to conquer the world in the name of a religion of universal peace.

Meanwhile, Hinduism was profoundly affected by the new religions and began to adopt some of the reforms which had made its Buddhist rival politically successful. Eventually, the widespread opposition to animal sacrifice came to be represented within Hinduism by the
doctrine of
ahimsa
—nonviolence based on the sacredness of life. But this change did not come all at once nor did it proceed in a single direction. After the collapse in 184
B.C
. of the Maurya Dynasty, Brahmanism revived and meat eating among the elite flourished once more. As late as
A.D
. 350, according to Prakash, “flesh of various animals” was served to Brahmans at Sraddhas, the redistributive ceremonies commemorating the dead. “The Kurma Purana goes to the extent of saying that one who does not take flesh in a Sraddha is born again and again as an animal.”

No one is able to say precisely when cows and oxen became distinct objects of veneration among Brahmans and other high-caste Hindus. It is impossible to assign precise dates to changes in Hindu ritual because Hinduism is not a single organized religion but an immense number of loosely affiliated congregations centering on independent temples, shrines, deities, and castes, each with its own doctrinal and ritual specialties. One authority, S. K. Maitz, claims that the cow had already become the most sacred of animals by
A.D.
350, but his evidence is a single canto in an epic poem which describes a certain king and his queen as “worshipping cows with sandal paste and garlands.” There is also the inscription of King Chandragupta II, dated to
A.D
. 465, which equates the killing of a cow with the killing of a Brahman. But the modern Hindu point of view may be intruding. The Gupta emperors issued royal decrees aimed at preventing the consumption of various animals by commoners. Hindu royalty fussed over horses and elephants as well as cows. They garlanded their animals, bathed them, provided them with carpeted stalls, and set them free to roam in protected reserves. It may have been only after
A.D
. 700 and the Islamic conquest of India that the sacred cow complex acquired its
familiar modern form. The followers of Islam had no compunctions about eating beef. Hence under the Moguls, the Islamic emperors of India, cow protection may have become a political symbol of Hindu resistance against beef-eating Moslem invaders. At any rate, the Brahmans—for centuries the sacrificers and consumers of animal flesh—gradually come to regard it as their sacred duty to prevent the slaughtering or eating of any domestic animals, especially cows and oxen.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has previously been able to offer a rational explanation as to why India, unlike the Middle East or China, became the center of a religion that forbade the consumption of beef and venerated the cow as the symbol of life. Let us see if the general principles concerning the establishment of animal taboos that I suggested in the previous chapter are applicable. Ancient Indian beliefs and practices were initially similar to beliefs and practices common to most of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. As predicted, the general transformation from redistributive animal sacrifice to the taboo on the consumption of previously valuable and abundant species followed upon the intensification of agriculture, depletion of resources, and growth of population density. But these generalities do not explain the particular emphasis on cattle and vegetarianism in India or the particular religious complexes associated with animals in other regions.

The place to start, I think, is in the Ganges Valley, where the rate of population growth appears to have been much greater than in the Middle East—or, indeed, than anywhere else in the ancient world. During the Vedic period population was scanty and spread out in small villages. As late as 1000
B.C
. population density was low enough to permit each family to own many
animals (the Vedic texts mention twenty-four oxen harnessed to a single plow), and as in pre-Roman Europe cattle were regarded as the principal form of wealth. Less than 700 years later the Ganges had probably become the most populous region in the world. Estimates by Kingsley Davis and others give India a population of between 50 and 100 million in 300
B.C.
At least half of that total must have been living in the Ganges Valley.

We know that during the early Vedic period the Gangetic plain was still covered with virgin forests. Scarcely a tree remained by 300
B.C.
While irrigation provided a secure base for many farm families, millions of peasants received either insufficient flows of water or none at all. Because of fluctuations in monsoon rains, it was always risky to depend on rainfall alone. Deforestation undoubtedly increased the risk of drought. It also increased the severity of the floods which the Holy River Ganges unleashed when the monsoons dumped too much rain all at once onto the Himalayan foothills. Even today droughts that endure in India for two or three consecutive seasons endanger the lives of millions of people who depend on rainfall to water their crops. From the
Mahabharata
, an epic poem composed sometime between 300
B.C.
and
A.D.
300, we know of one drought that lasted twelve years. The poem tells how lakes, wells, and springs dried up, and how agriculture and cattle rearing had to be abandoned. Markets and shops were left empty. The sacrifice of animals came to a halt, and the very stakes for tying up the animals disappeared. There were no festivals. Everywhere heaps of bone could be seen and cries of creatures could be heard. People left the cities. Hamlets were abandoned and set on fire. People fled from one another. They feared each other. Places of worship
were deserted. Old people were driven from their houses. Cattle, goats, sheep, and buffalo turned into ferocious beasts that attacked one another. Even the Brahmans died without protection. Herbs and plants withered. The earth looked like a crematorium and “in that dreadful age when righteousness was at an end, men began to eat one another.”

As population density grew, farms became increasingly smaller and only the most essential domesticated species could be allowed to share the land. Cattle were the one species that could not be eliminated. They were the animals that drew the plows upon which the entire cycle of rainfall agriculture depended. At least two oxen had to be kept per family, plus one cow with which to breed replacements when the oxen wore out. Cattle thus became the central focus of the religious taboo on meat eating. As the sole remaining farm animals, they were potentially the only remaining source of meat. To slaughter them for meat, however, constituted a threat to the whole mode of food production. And so beef was tabooed for the same reason that pork was tabooed in the Middle East: to remove temptation.

The respective interdictions against beef and pork, however, reflect the different ecological roles of the two species. The pig was abominated; the cow was deified. Why this should have been the case seems obvious from what I’ve said about the importance of cattle in the agricultural cycle. When pork became too costly to be raised for meat, the whole animal was rendered useless—worse than useless—because it had only been good as something to eat. But when cattle became too costly to be raised for meat, their value as a source of traction did not diminish. Hence they had to be protected rather than abominated, and the best way to protect them was not only to forbid the eating of their
flesh but to forbid their slaughter. The ancient Israelites had the problem of preventing the diversion of grains to the production of pork. The solution was to stop raising pigs. But the ancient Hindus could not stop raising cattle since they depended on oxen to plow the land. Their main problem was not how to refrain from raising a certain species but how to refrain from eating it when they got hungry.

The conversion of beef into forbidden flesh originated in the practical life of individual farmers. It was the product neither of a superhuman culture hero nor of a collective social mind brooding over the cost/benefits of alternative resource management policies. Culture heroes express the preformed sentiments of their age and collective minds don’t exist. The tabooing of beef was the cumulative result of the individual decisions of millions and millions of individual farmers, some of whom were better able than others to resist the temptation of slaughtering their livestock because they strongly believed that the life of a cow or an ox was a holy thing. Those who held such beliefs were much more likely to hold onto their farms, and to pass them on to their children, than those who believed differently. Like so many other adaptive responses in culture and nature, the “bottom line” of the religious proscriptions on the use of animal flesh in India cannot be read from short-term cost/benefits. Rather, it is the long term that counted most—performance during abnormal rather than normal agricultural cycles. Under the periodic duress of droughts caused by failures of the monsoon rains, the individual farmer’s love of cattle translated directly into love of human life, not by symbol but by practice. Cattle had to be treated like human beings because human beings who ate their cattle were one step away from eating each other. To this day, monsoon
farmers who yield to temptation and slaughter their cattle seal their doom. They can never plow again even when the rains fall. They must sell their farms and migrate to the cities. Only those who would starve rather than eat an ox or cow can survive a season of scanty rains. This human forbearance is matched by the fantastic endurance and recuperative powers of the Indian zebu breeds. Like camels, Indian cattle store energy in their humps, survive for weeks without food or water, and spring back to life when favored with the slightest nourishment. Long after other breeds have expired from disease, hunger, and thirst, zebus continue to pull plows, bear calves, and give milk. Unlike European cattle breeds, zebus were selected not for their strength, beefiness, or copious flow of milk, but largely for their ability to survive severe dry seasons and droughts.

And this brings us to the question why the cow rather than the ox has come to be the most venerated animal. The flesh of either sex is equally taboo, but in ritual and art Hinduism emphasizes the sacredness of cows far more than that of male cattle. Yet practice belies theory. Oxen outnumber cows two to one in the Gangetic plain—a sex ratio which can be accounted for only by the existence of systematic selection against female calves through malign neglect and indirect “bovicide” (exactly paralleling the sub rosa treatment of female human infants). This lopsided ratio reflects the greater value of oxen over cows as a source of traction for plowing the fields. Despite all the fuss made over the holy mother cow, under normal circumstances oxen are, in fact, treated much better. They are kept in stalls, fed by hand, and given grain and oil cake supplements to make them strong and healthy. Cows, on the other hand, are treated in everyday rural life the way American Indians
treated their dogs or the way European farmers used to treat their pigs. They are the village scavengers. They are not kept in stalls and fed on fodder crops. Instead, they are let loose to roam around the village to pick up whatever scraps of garbage they can find. Having licked the village clean, they are permitted to wander off in search of a few blades of grass that somehow survived their last tour of a roadside ditch or that have sprouted in the spaces between the railroad ties. Because cows are treated as scavengers, they are likely to show up in such inconvenient places as the gutters of busy thoroughfares and the edges of airport runways, giving rise to the foolish charge that India has been overrun by millions of “useless” cattle.