International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities http://journal.tumkuruniversity.in/ Vol. 2. Issue 1, June 2013, pp. ISSN 2277 – 7997

COMMUNITIES IN CONFLICT: FIGHTING FOR THE ‘SACRED COW’1

Elizabeth Thomas Doctoral Fellow, Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme

University of Humanistics, Netherlands elizabeth@cscs.res.in

Cow slaughter has been a long-standing issue in India leading to conflicts and disturbances. It

resurfaced again in recent times when Anti Cow-Slaughter Bills were introduced in various Indian

states such as Karnataka, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh. There has been a common framework

determining the debate about the issue and the conflicts surrounding it: the colonial state dealt with

the issue as a problem of opposing and clashing beliefs of Hindus and Muslims, while present day

academics, intellectuals and activists treat it as a problem of ‘communalization’, a result of

fundamentalist attitudes. Both refer to the religious belief of the ‘sacredness’ of the cow, a value

held by some among Hindus, and how that gets used, interpreted, manipulated. Both colonial and

postcolonial frames treat cow protection as a normative injunction for the Hindus. This paper

argues that this common assumption ignores many of the contradictions visible in the Hindu

attitude towards cow protection when seen as an essential religious belief. It argues that statements

about worshipping the cow was part of a set of ethical dispositions inculcated in various groups

rather than a religious norm or practice. It argues that the conflicts around the issue are a result of

the 19th

century transformation of practices to represent religious beliefs of communities.

Keywords: Cow Protection, slaughter, legislation, communal,

Introduction:

In March 2010, the Karnataka State Assembly

passed the controversial Anti-Cattle Slaughter Bill,

which led to a public outburst both within and outside

the state.2 The Bill was introduced as an amendment

to an existing Act from 1964 that bans slaughter of

cattle that are still in their productive years.3 The new

Bill was seen by many as an attack on the minorities

and the secular ethos of the country by right-wing

politics and politicians. There were also arguments

about the adverse effects on the livelihood of some

sections of society belonging to the Muslim

community and to the lower caste Hindu

communities, who are butchers by trade or in related

professions like leather trade4. Following this Bill,

other similar bills were introduced in Gujarat and

Madhya Pradesh in 2012. The Gujarat bill, entitled

the Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill

2011, prohibits killing of cows, their transportation

and selling, purchasing and possession of beef. It also

includes imprisonment of up to seven years and a fine

of up to Rs. 50,000 for transporting cows for

slaughter, in addition to seizure of vehicles.5

The slaughter of the cow in particular has been a

contentious subject from at least the latter half of the

19th

century. There are reports of small-intensity

communal riots as well as major disturbances from

the 1880s to the 1920s in parts of northern India,

especially in the state of Uttar Pradesh (Pandey 1993;

Freitag 1990; Bapu 2012). The Constituent Assembly

included prohibition on cow slaughter under Article

48 of the directive principles of the constitution, for

the states to take up as a general direction for

agricultural considerations6. From 1955 onwards a

number of states started enacting laws for the

protection of cattle and against cow slaughter

(Deparment of Animal Husbandry, Government of

India 2011). In 2003, the government at the Centre

had attempted to pass a legislation to enforce a

blanket ban on cow slaughter that would be

applicable to all states, but this was defeated in the

parliament.

Although some invoke economic aspects related

with the ban, the primary issue appears to be that of

the state favouring some groups over others in terms

of their religious, social, or political values. It is

pointed out that for some groups the cow is a ‘sacred’

animal while other groups make many instrumental

uses of the animal, from consumption to uses for

professional reasons. One of the crucial aspects of

this situation is of the state’s commitment to

ELIZABETH: COMMUNITIES IN CONFLICT: FIGHTING FOR THE ‘SACRED COW’

secularism and tolerance, where the state cannot be

seen as privileging one way of thinking and living

over others .

In an article on the anti-cow slaughter ban

proposed in 2003 for the whole country, surprisingly

by a Minister from the Congress Party, Pratap Bhanu

Mehta wrote:

It is, in the context of our lifestyles and other

beliefs, nothing but an expression of a

religious identity. Is it an accident that we

are talking just about cows? We have all the

rights to express this identity, spend as much

on serving cows as we want, buy out every

cow that is a candidate for slaughter. We

have a right to appeal to others to voluntarily

desist from cow slaughter or to abstain from

beef. What we do not have the right to do is

enforce this identity using the coercive

power of the state…Accepting a ban on cow

slaughter is accepting the fact that religious

sentiment is sufficient warrant to invoke

state power. That is a frightening prospect.

Whatever its function as a short term

palliative, in the long run it will jeopardize

liberty and justice alike (Mehta 2003).

Arguments are made constantly in favour of and

against such legislations. On the one hand, many see

the proposed ban as an attack against minorities.

They point out that cow sacrifice and consumption of

beef have been practiced in India for centuries from

the Vedic period onwards, even before the arrival of

Islam and Christianity (thus opposing the

controversial argument that cow slaughter is a

practice put in place by foreign rulers and followed

by non-Hindus) (Jha 2004). Introduction of such

legislation is opposed not only because it is an

infringement into everyday social practices of

specific groups, but also because it tends to provide

false descriptions of Indian society. Recent academic

debates looking into the issue focus largely on the

increasing ‘communalization’ of society, leading to

issues such as cow slaughter being used as tools for

political mobilization.7 It is argued that particular

political interests are being furthered by protecting

‘Brahminical’ practices (Rajashekhar and Somayaji

2006). In fact, many point out that the cow is not

sacred for all Brahmins in India either. The practice

thus does not neatly overlap with the interest of any

one group at a pan-Indian level. However, the debate

in the Indian context from pre-independence to the

present represents cow slaughter as a problem for the

overarching community of all Hindus (S. Chigateri

2011).

Most arguments favouring the legislations are

based on the figure of the ‘holy cow’ or ‘sacred cow’.

They claim that the special place for the cow in

Hinduism is not an argument that has come up in

recent times. When the Bill came up for discussion in

the Karnataka Assembly, the then ruling BJP

government used quotes attributed to the Mughal

emperor Akbar to justify the ban8, thus claiming that

the ban on the slaughter of cows has been a norm in

one form or another through the centuries.9

Despite the statements about the cow’s

sacredness, most legal prohibitions are justified on

economic grounds. Citing the Jan Sangh’s anti cow-

slaughter campaign in 1966-67, Christophe Jaffrelot

says that the Hindutva groups have found it useful to

base arguments that tie the sanctity of the cow with

the economic utility of the animal (Jaffrelot 2008).

The VHP in 1966 created the Sarvadaliya Goraksha

Maha-Abhiyan Samiti (SGMS) in order to mobilize

the Hindus and force the Congress-led government to

reform the Constitution by making cow-slaughter

illegal. The Jan Sangh, while supporting the VHP’s

campaign placed more emphasis on the economic

aspect. According to Jaffrelot, the Jan Sangh’s

strategy is a clear indication that a simple argument

based on religious sentiments is rarely enough for a

large scale mobilization (Jaffrelot 1993).

An interesting anecdote quoted in Dr. Verghese

Kurien’s book, I too had a Dream complicates this

assumption as well. Kurien says that in the years

when he was trying to argue for disposing off old and

dying cows so that there is always a young breed for

the milk products industry in India, he befriended

RSS ideologue M. S. Golwalker. One day in 1967,

Golwalker asked him, “‘Kurien, shall I tell you why

I’m making an issue of this cow slaughter business?’

I said to him, ‘Yes, please explain to me because

otherwise you are a very intelligent man. Why are

you doing this?’ ‘I started a petition to ban cow

slaughter actually to embarrass the government,’ he

began explaining to me in private. ‘I decided to

collect a million signatures for this to submit to the

Rashtrapati. In connection with this work I travelled

across the country to see how the campaign was

progressing. My travels once took me to a village in

UP. There I saw in one house, a woman, who, having

fed and sent off her husband to work and her two

children to school, took this petition and went from

house to house to collect signatures in that blazing

summer sun. I wondered to myself why this woman

should take such pains. She was not crazy to be doing

this. This is when I realized that the woman was

actually doing it for her cow, which was her bread

and butter, and I realized how much potential the cow

IJSSH VOL. II (1) JUNE 2013

has. ‘Look at what our country has become. What is

good is foreign: what is bad is Indian. Who is a good

Indian? It’s the fellow who wears a suit and a tie and

puts on a hat. Who is a bad Indian? The fellow who

wears a dhoti. If this nation does not take pride in

what it is and merely imitates other nations, how can

it amount to anything? Then I saw that the cow has

potential to unify the country – she symbolizes the

culture of Bharat. So I tell you what, Kurien, you

agree with me to ban cow slaughter on this

committee and I promise you, five years from that

date, I will have united the country. What I’m trying

to tell you is that I’m not a fool, I’m not a fanatic. I’m

just cold-blooded about this. I want to use the cow to

bring out our Indianness, so please cooperate with me

on this.’10

This anecdote is a powerful indication of

the transformation of a practice and the meanings

associated with it, a point that I will return to later in

the paper.

Writing about the issue of cow slaughter, journalist

and political analyst, Praful Bidwai pointed out

several contradictions in the behaviour of Hindus

about the notion of the ‘sacredness’ of the cow. He

observed that even though the cow is held to be

sacred by some and not all Hindus, very poor

physical treatment is meted out to it, most of them are

found in an emaciated condition after their productive

years are over. Similarly, a large number of Hindus

eat beef and many of them who own cattle seem to

have a utilitarian attitude towards it (Bidwai 2003).

This seems to throw up a few puzzling questions.

Why is there such disparity among the same set of

people about the sacredness of the cow?11

And

despite such disparity what makes cow protection

available as an argument for political mobilization?

Who practiced cow protection, if at all, and how do

we understand this practice and its relation to the

notion of the sacred? As Christophe Jaffrelot

observed, the instrumental alone is not enough to

explain the appeal of the issue to so many. Nor, one

might add, is it sufficient to explain the contemporary

problems we are faced with.

The colonial ‘emergence’ of cow protection

The debate on the question of cow protection

goes back to 19th

century India, the contours of which

remain largely unchanged even today. The debate

emerged as a particularly contentious one in the years

between 1880 and 1930 leading to a number of

conflicts and riots in parts of north and west India.

Historical and anthropological writings on this period

tell us about the emergence of large numbers of cow-

protection societies called Gaurakshini Sabhas across

Punjab, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and present-day Uttar

Pradesh, which started mobilizing people for their

cause, thus producing a decisive practice called ‘cow

protection’. Scholarly works probing into these

events trace this practice to the emergence of Hindu

reformist movements particularly in North India in

this period. The Arya Samaj and other such reformist

organizations are often identified as being at the locus

of the debate urging people to take up cow protection

actively.12

Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the

Arya Samaj, initiated several cow protection

activities and movements in Punjab in 1882

encouraging people to take up the practice and to

start goshalas to care for old and infirm cattle.

Dayananda, and many others following him,

regularly wrote on cow protection saying that cows

are sacred and must be protected because they give

milk, they ensure agricultural productivity, and that

they will produce healthy sons for the nation. Lest we

assume that they were a group of cloistered

fundamentalists, many of these were also the same

people who opposed practices such as child marriage,

sati and the caste system. Dayananda argued that

Vedas are the guiding texts for Hindu beliefs and life,

and Hindu practices not rooted in Vedic texts should

be purged from society. Cultural theorists argue that

there is a deep connection between social reform and

Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva politics in India,

because reform required positing of ‘good’ vs.

‘corrupting’ Hindu practices, the former being ideal

for the nation (O’Toole 2003); (Gupta 2001); (Pinney

2004). Many works looking into this period find links

not only between the revivalist or reformist

movements and Hindu nationalism, but argue that the

mainstream nationalist movement also led to the

‘politics of communalism’ in its use of symbols and

practices such as cow protection (Freitag 1990).

By the 19th

century cow slaughter became a

heated issue especially directed against the British

who had opened a number of slaughterhouses to meet

the needs of their large standing armies. Numerous

critiques arose about the ‘moral degradation’ caused

by the British rule in India and writings appeared

associating foreign rule (these would sometimes club

the Islamic and the British rule and sometimes mark

their difference in approach) and the deterioration of

the moral quality of life in India. Enquiring into the

agitations of the late 19th

century the British officials

stationed in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and other parts of

north and west India observed that cow protection

was used as a political idea to unite against the

British. While they asserted that cow protection and

cow slaughter was a religious question between the

Hindus and the Muslims, and it reflected the essential

hostility between the two communities, they saw in

ELIZABETH: COMMUNITIES IN CONFLICT: FIGHTING FOR THE ‘SACRED COW’

the agitations and conflicts a ‘political motive’, to

promote ‘sedition and subversion against the

British’.13

The British were deeply concerned that the

movements if left uncontrolled had a potential to

become threatening for the empire. The colonial state

also read the Hindus’ growing power as the cause

behind the timing of the agitations (Dharampal and

Mukundan 2002, 179–180). Peter van der Veer

observes about the protectionist sentiment in late 19th

century that “…cow protection was clearly a sign of

the moral quality of the state” (van der Veer 1994,

91). In the later years of the independence movement,

Gandhi and the Congress members often talked about

the purification of the self or self-reform as a

necessary step to attain ‘swaraj’. In this discourse of

self-reform, cow protection was seen as having an

important role. The civil disobedience agitations of

the 1930s combined the ‘khadi’ and anti-foreign cloth

agitation with the cow protection movement, where

the one seemed to have fed into the other. Here again

cow slaughter was used to illustrate the “moral

degradation and cruelty of the government” by the

nationalists, particularly by the members of the

Congress (Gould 2005). Some historians thus argue

that the cow protection movement was tapped by

both reformists and nationalists to get access to the

Hindu society and to mobilize them for specific

political ends (van der Veer 1994; Bandyopadhyay

2004). It is pointed out that the practice lent itself to

the creation of a universal idea of Hinduism and to

counter the ‘communities in conflict’ argument made

by the colonial state.

Historians point to multiple instances of cow

protection being used by different groups of people

from diverse caste and class backgrounds to mobilize

people for various kinds of community-related needs.

In the 1890s agricultural castes such as Kurmis and

Ahirs who lived both by Hindu and Islamic traditions

adopted cow protection as part of their social reform

movements, representing themselves as protectors of

cow and thus dharma. Similarly, in her observations

about Hindus in Maharashtra, Shabnum Tejani quotes

local Maulvis pointing out that lower caste Telugu

Mahars and Chamars who were eating beef till

recently participated in protests against cow slaughter

in the 1890s (Tejani 2007). It is suggested that in the

case of some of the lower-caste groups, anti-cow-

slaughter agitation becomes a means for upward

mobilization. Historians and cultural theorists have

argued that such symbols and practices from upper

caste Hindu life became, and continues to be, the

source of consolidation of ‘dominant’ ‘powerful’

identities around which Hindutva groups and other

fundamentalist groups organise their politics

(Mayaram 1997; Datta 2002). In an important

empirical work on the issue Sandra Freitag points to

various local groups in north India using the cow-

slaughter debate to generate what she calls a sense of

community (Freitag 1990). She examines the

gaurakshini sabhas that emerged in the U.P region in

this period and which became a wide spread

movement tapping on commonly shared values of

cow protection. Freitag shows that supporters of cow

protection were known to pursue a variety of

reformist and community-related activities

(collecting money for a common cause, getting poor

girls married) through such sabhas. Large gatherings

used to come together for the meetings of these

sabhas which had participants varying from rajas to

local merchants, to sadhus and fakirs. On some

occasions, the members of these sabhas would buy

cows marked for slaughter, and bring them to

goshalas established to look after them. On other

occasions, local agents of these sabhas would meet

Muslims and try to offer incentives to them or use

coercion to give up cow slaughter.14

In the Bombay

region, many influential Parsis were actively

involved in cow protection movements who also

refused any religious sentimentality associated with

the act. Critics find contrary examples as well:

Shabnum Tejani points to instances of members in

the gaurakshini sabhas who would pay handsomely

for cow protection but were otherwise indifferent to

the inner workings of the sabhas. Tejani also refers to

government questionnaires in the 1893 in the

Maharashtra region where many high class Hindus

say that they are indifferent to the Mahomedan

consumption of beef. Sandra Freitag observes, “In

symbolic terms, the figure of the cow could unite

popular and high culture; it could serve reformist and

traditional ends; it could reach the hearts of

townsmen and peasants alike” (Freitag 1996, 218).

Freitag argues that the exact ideological content of

cow protection and cow slaughter varied in all these

groups; yet according to her, movements like these,

by giving ‘public expression to religious precepts’,

succeeded in forming community-based civil society

groups in India (Freitag 1996, 220). On similar lines

Gyan Pandey observes, “It scarcely needs stating that

the ‘unity’…which cut across several castes and

classes on each side, was built up on the basis of

certain deeply shared religious concerns in this

period. In the course of the development of their

agitation in the 1880s and 1890s, the gaurakshini

sabhas circulated numerous pamphlets, leaflets and

pictures of the cow to drive home the sanctity of this

particular symbol” (Pandey 1993, 109).

Enquiring into the cow protection movement and

its importance to Indian society, Peter van der Veer

asks, “What is left to be understood (at least partially)

IJSSH VOL. II (1) JUNE 2013

is why people would die and kill for the protection of

cows. Much of the research begs the question what

the cow’s body meant to the Hindu protectionist...the

sanctity of the cow has instead to be understood in

terms of the Hindu religious tradition, but

unfortunately not much progress has been made in

understanding that tradition. My argument is that the

sanctity of the cow’s body and the prohibition against

killing and eating her flesh is made real for Hindus in

crucial ritual performances that communicate a great

variety of cosmological constructs” (van der Veer

1994, 89). This argument about the sacred religious

symbolism associated with cow protection for the

Hindus is common to all scholars who enquire into

the 19th

and 20th

century events around it.

As evident from the discussion above, the

scholarship designates these conflicts either as the

history of communalism, or as community

consciousness and emerging nationalist discourse, all

of which taps into religious symbols. The assumption

of the religious feeling or belief tied to cow

protection underlies most of the analysis of the

political debates and activity around the cow.

Various kinds of literature tells us that kings and

rulers are regularly asked to ‘protect the cow’, or to

work in the hita of the cow ’, or that many rulers

across time came to think of this as one of their

important duties. Some point out that from the time

of the Mughal rulers such as Babur and Akbar, as

well as later Islamic rulers, bans on cow slaughter

were prevalent. Similarly it is observed that Sikh and

Maratha rulers “defined kingship in terms of the

protection of the cow” (van der Veer 1994, 90). And

there was no obvious contradiction in the act of cow

protection and the fact of sacrifice or consumption by

others, one act need not have existed in the

elimination of the other (Bhandarkar 1989). Critics

and lay commentators note in passing that there is no

worship of cows in India, or terms such as aghnya

(variously interpreted as ‘not to be killed’ or violated,

‘not to be hurt’) are associated with the cow, but it is

not consistent to read that as implying the holiness of

the cow. Ambedkar who associates the ethic of cow

protection as the struggle between Hinduism and

Buddhism, has noted that the many sayings against

cow killing cannot be seen as positive injunctions but

rather must be read as exhortations or interpolations

in view of an existing practice (Ambedkar 1990).

For Gandhi cow protection was part of the many

constructive programmes he embarked on, such as

his work for removing untouchability. Gandhi’s

statements about cow protection and cow slaughter

surprise many in the centrality he attributed to cow

protection in Hinduism, going so far as to say that the

question of cow protection was one of the important

aspects of gaining swaraj. For instance, he says,

“Cow protection to me is not mere protection of the

cow. It means protection of that which lives and is

helpless and weak in the world”, and again “The

central fact of Hinduism is cow protection. Cow

protection to me is one of the most wonderful

phenomena in human evolution; for it takes the

human being beyond this species. The cow to me

means the entire sub-human world. Man through the

cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that

lives. Why the cow was selected for apotheosis is

obvious to me. The cow was in India the best

companion. She was the giver of plenty. Not only did

she give milk, but she also made agriculture

possible…” (Jack 1994, 170). He also refers to the

usefulness of the cow. “The cow is the protector of

India because, being an agricultural country, she is

dependent on the cow. The cow is a most useful

animal in hundreds of ways. Our Mohammedan

brethren will admit this” (Gandhi 2008).

About the issue of cow slaughter Gandhi says,

“Cow slaughter can never be stopped by law.

Knowledge, education, and the spirit of kindliness

towards her alone can put an end to it …People seem

to think that, when a law is passed against any evil, it

will die without any further effort. There never was a

grosser self-deception. Legislation is intended and is

effective against an ignorant or a small, evil-minded

minority; but no legislation which is opposed by an

intelligent and organized public opinion, or under

cover of religion by a fanatical minority, can ever

succeed. The more I study the question of cow

protection, the stronger the conviction grows upon

me that protection of the cow and her progeny can be

attained only if there is continuous and sustained

constructive effort along the lines suggested by me”

(Chapter II, Annex II(6) Department of Animal

Husbandry and Dairying, Government of India

2002). He also notes about the emerging cow

protection societies in his times that, “Am I, then, to

fight with or kill a Mahomedan in order to save a

cow? In doing so, I will become an enemy of the

Mahomedan as well as of the cow…When the

Hindus become insistent, the killing of cows

increased. In my opinion cow-protection societies

may be considered cow-killing societies. It is a

disgrace to us that we should need such societies.

When we forget how to protect cows, I suppose we

need such societies” (Gandhi 2008, 187–188). He

saw cow protection as a ‘noble sentiment’ and a

‘tapasya’ and said, “To carry cow protection at the

point of sword is a contradiction in terms” (Gandhi

1978).

ELIZABETH: COMMUNITIES IN CONFLICT: FIGHTING FOR THE ‘SACRED COW’

Gandhi’s attitude towards cow protection reveals

a deep understanding that although cow protection

was an important ethical action for many Hindus, no

normative rule or principle could be derived from it

which can take the shape of a religious or legal

injunction. His statements about the centrality of cow

protection to Hindu faith or religion hint not at his

sense of it as a core belief or principle in Hinduism,

but indicate the prevalence of a practice. It is also

evident from many of the things Gandhi said that he

saw in cow protection an exemplary action with a

moral charge to it that could address the burning

question of Hindu-Muslim unity.15

Similarly, much

later, in 1956, Jayaprakash Narayan issued a

statement in Calcutta, advising the West Bengal

government to ban cow slaughter. He says, “Banning

cow slaughter is an affirmation of a great human

value. The Hindu view of the cow is not due to any

superstition, blind faith or what the anthropologists

would call primitive taboo. There is enough evidence

to show that at the earliest states of Indian civilization

even the Brahmins, even rishis took beef…”, rather

he affirms that it was through a gradual process that

Indians arrived at the notion of ahimsa and protection

of animals (Prasad 2007). Interestingly, what is

common to both Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan is

that both warned against using the issue as a political

strategy to evoke partisan interests.

These multiple references and resonances of

positions can be used to formulate a hypothesis about

cow protection as a practice: it hardly functioned as a

religious or normative injunction among these

communities and in Indian society in general.

Instead, the many statements made about it indicates

that rather than being a practice reflecting a religious

belief, it seems to have been closely tied to people’s

notions of good moral actions, resonant in Gandhi’s

claim ‘that revering cows might be a good

manifestation of a commitment of reverence towards

all life’ (Mehta 2003). We will take this up for

elaboration later in the paper.

In his work on the Indian textual traditions about

the holy cow, D.N. Jha notes many contradictions in

the Hindu attitudes towards the cow. Jha argues that

in the Vedic and post-Vedic periods (roughly second

millennium B.C onwards) cow and other cattle were

used for ritual sacrifices and for non- ritual

consumption especially by Brahmins and by other

castes. This was simultaneous with views about the

cow and other animals being sacred, about the

purificatory value associated with cow’s products,

and specific restrictions such as not sacrificing a

Brahmana’s cow. He notes a shift in the sacrificial

rituals using cow and other cattle after the spread of

Buddhist and Jaina traditions, which generally spoke

against animal sacrifice and spoke in favour of

ahimsa. Later Medieval period texts like the

Upanishads and Dharmasutras thus spoke of cow

slaughter as a sin (although Jha notes that this was a

minor and not a major pataka or wrong), while also

prescribing penances if one had indulged in it. Jha

poses a question that if all this is factually correct

how should we understand the increasing

‘inviolability’ and sanctity of the cow. The accuracy

of the interpretation of the textual sources apart, Jha’s

question can be reframed thus, how did a set of

varied practices take on the form of a normative

value?

It must be noted that most anti-slaughter

mobilizations from the late 19th

century represent the

cow as a sacred object and the act of cow protection

as a religious duty of the Hindu. The scholarly

analysis of the agitations of the last two decades also

sees it as part of a growing religious consciousness.

More specifically, they argue that cow protection and

cow worship are part of Brahmanical rituals and thus

these mobilizations are attempts to resuscitate and

impose ‘Brahmanical norms’ on all people,

particularly by religious fundamentalist groups like

the Hindu Mahasabha (Bapu 2012). They also point

to the violence associated with the issue of cow

slaughter that continues from the colonial times to the

present, consistently alienating many communities

from each other. The existing analyses put us in a

particular bind, where on the one hand, we have to

explain the importance of the practice by assigning it

a religious belief, while on the other, we claim the

opposite, that the recent meanings and intensity

associated with the practice was only a later

construct. Arguments that deny such religious value

are unable to offer a satisfactory account of how to

view the practice and how to theorise the changes it

underwent from the 19th

century onwards.

How do we explain the transformation in the

practice? If one holds the hypothesis that the practice

functioned as an action heuristic most likely meant to

inculcate a good moral orientation, how did cow

protection become a sectarian symbol, worrying

communities and nationalist leaders like Nehru

(Iyengar 2007)16

? An important and related question

is about the particular historical time of these

conflicts. The cow slaughter problem is seen as a

communal issue primarily between the Hindu and

Muslim communities. If so, why is it that the

conflicts increased in the 19th

century and not before?

If one assumes that there was always some form of

tension around this issue, what conditions in the 19th

century led to a drastic increase in these conflicts.

IJSSH VOL. II (1) JUNE 2013

Most of the scholarship that we have looked at

provides answers to this question by pointing to the

politicization of the issue by the Hindu right and

others who lean toward that ideology (like Gandhi,

according to many) from the late 19th

century

onwards. However, from there the explanations

become a narration of how ‘Brahmanical or upper

caste religious norms’ were universalized for

everyone through political processes. What are the

conditions that led to such a ‘universalization’,

wherein a practice acquired a religious normative

status?17

How did a specific set of instructions or

actions meant for individuals to cultivate a moral

disposition, to inculcate certain attitudes, become a

norm prescribed to and/or accepted by all? In these

analyses, the general assertion is that the cow is

sacred for Hindus. At the root of our present-day

socio-political quandaries with the cow, it is argued,

is the Hindu belief in the sanctity of the cow. Most

scholars who comment on the issue treat statements

and discourses surrounding the ‘sacredness’ of the

cow to imply a religious belief, or a norm than

treating it as an action heuristic. The problem of cow

slaughter thus emerges as a crisis in the idea of

religious tolerance. As an implication, we are

required to understand conflicts between different

communities as a result of the divergent values and

beliefs held by people.

Assuming that cow protection and cow slaughter

are two contending practices requiring a resolution

through the value of tolerance is to continue the

colonial understanding of the conflicts. The paper

tries to present another understanding of the action

and practice of cow protection that gives us a better

handle on how it was used and referred to in forms of

public action in the 19th

century, and transformations

it underwent henceforth, by keeping aside the

normative charge assigned to it. Another point that

deserves mention: most of the 20th

century debates,

especially the ones in the last decade, speak more of

beef eating than cow protection or cow slaughter. The

debate cuts up the problem as an opposition between

people who eat beef and those who do not. Rather

than see this as a separate problem, we need to see

how this is an aspect of the transition that we have

been referring to: eating or not eating a particular

item is more of a social habit acquired in

communities over long periods of time. In itself, that

is no evidence to assume that such culinary habits

necessarily are a religious or normative practice.

However, when cultural practices acquire a

normative charge, our ways of talking about all

aspects of social life undergo change. In the next

section of the paper, I take up the question of the new

understanding of the practice of cow protection,

making it and the terms associated with it into a

religious one. If at a particular historical point,

statements about the sacredness of the cow, or the

practice of cow protection did not imply a religious

or normative attitude then how did it transform so

irrevocably.

Cultural practices in the province of colonial law

The years when the cow-slaughter movements

were taking a violent turn, also saw the increased

intervention of the colonial courts in community

conflicts. In the 1860s, several legislations were

passed and revoked where the colonial courts were

asking whether the practice of cow slaughter was

intended to hurt religious sentiment. If the intention

was not so and cow slaughter was only for the

purpose of food, it could not be banned or punished.

One such instance was in the year 1888 when the

North Western Provinces High Court following

complaints of slaughter of cows from some Hindu

groups, declared that the cow was not ‘a sacred

object within the meaning of section 295, of the

Indian Penal Code, and thus slaughtering of cows

cannot be seen as incitement of religious violence’

(Bapu 2012; Pandey 1993; van der Veer 1994).

Historians observe that this statement of the court

intensified the anti-cow slaughter movement

dramatically (Pandey 1993; Bapu 2012). Another

instance is from Azamgarh district in 1893 before the

Bakr-Id festival, where the fears of communal

disturbance led the magistrate to summon Muslims

from all villages to register with them if they

intended to slaughter cows for ‘qurbani’. People of

the villages were asked to adhere to custom (of

slaughter or prohibition) as far as possible. Many

Hindus and Muslims agreed to do so. However, this

recording of custom backfired with some Hindu and

Muslim groups accusing each other of false

statements and of perverting the custom.18

Gyan Pandey, argues that attempts to codify

customs and legislate on practices led to a further

destabilization of it (Pandey 1993). Pandey points out

that the stress on cow protection among Hindus and

shariat practices among the Muslims became more

pronounced particularly in response to the Christian

missionaries in the early part of the 19th

century. This,

coupled with the reform movements, helped in the

deepening consciousness of the people as members of

particular religious communities (Tejani 2007;

Pandey 1993). It is also noted by many that following

this period the community’s awareness of their ‘right’

to slaughter or to protect cows also increased leading

to more rigidified positions and more conflict.

ELIZABETH: COMMUNITIES IN CONFLICT: FIGHTING FOR THE ‘SACRED COW’

The colonial state in India was thus centrally

preoccupied with the problem of dealing with and

administering ‘diverse communities’ since the 19th

century onwards. It was an especially excruciating

problem for the colonial rulers because of the marked

difference of the Indian polity from anything

encountered in Europe, in its seemingly mind-

numbing diversity of languages, traditions, religions

and other social forms such as jatis or castes. By

1919 the colonial courts’ general position was of

maintaining status quo in the issue and yet they were

concerned that a mutually satisfactory solution could

not be arrived upon (Thursby 1975). In instances like

the above, the colonial government’s attempts to

understand, record and codify customs and practices

of communities led it to believe that India was a land

of warring groups and therefore an external structure

or government was necessary to rule it (Mukherjee

2010). This reading of India remains intact with

claims such as, “socio-political diversity continues to

be a major source of conflict in contemporary India”

(Bryjak 1986)), to this day.

Historians and anthropologists writing on the

cow-slaughter issue and cow-protection movements

often find evidence of various kinds which cannot be

fully explained by either of the theses forwarded to

account for the conflicts (Freitag 1990; Jalal 2001;

Hasan and Roy 2005; Pinney 2004). The first thesis

was generated by the colonial state in India to call the

conflicts on cow slaughter, from late-nineteenth

century, as a problem of Hindu-Muslim differences,

thus casting it as an issue of clashing religious values.

However, they saw an anti-British political

motivation in the cow protection movements.

Contemporary and postcolonial writings are critical

of the colonial formulation of the problem. They

challenge this thesis by showing varying

commitments by these communities to the practice,

and read the cow protection movements and practice

as more than a political tool. They also observe that

Hindu- Muslims differences were not so stark, and

the period prior to this shows a greater degree of

accommodation of differences between communities.

In a seminal writing on this issue, Dharampal argues

that gaurakshini sabhas and the conflicts surrounding

the cow were primarily agitations against the British

in the initial years of the nineteenth century in

response to large number of slaughter houses opened

in late 18th

century for the needs of the British

standing army (Dharampal and Mukundan 2002).

The writing also provides several examples of

Muslim support for these agitations and positive

intervention for the cause of cow protection (such as

getting beef shops closed) (Dharampal and

Mukundan 2002). In North India, Muslim zamindars

and Muslims from the Rajput caste are known to

have supported the call for ban on cow slaughter. The

authors also argue that everyday practices of Muslim

communities in the region prove that many Muslims

in India had inherited these practices as much as the

Hindus did.

An important work about the plural traditions in

India, Living Separately Together, provides

interesting examples of ‘cow protecting’ saints (both

real and mythical) from Hindu and Islamic traditions,

venerated by several intermediate castes between

both traditions (Hasan and Roy 2005). One essay in

the book talks about warrior heroes and saints called

Pabuji and Salar Masud venerated by many

communities in north India around Awadh for having

become martyrs while performing their Kshatriya

duty of protecting cows and women. In a similarly

interesting account, Shahid Amin talks about the

narratives, songs, epics and ballads around the person

of Salar Masud known as the cow-saving Muslim

warrior in parts of North India. Amin points out that

this too is not a straightforward story. Masud is

venerated by Muslims in the region of Bahraich,

Uttar Pradesh, as a warrior saint who laid down his

life and became a martyr for the cause of Islam, while

Hindu communities like Ahirs, the cowherd caste,

revere him for being their protector (Amin 2002).

The second and latter-day academic thesis suggests

that the conflicts are a result of the appropriation of

upper caste, Brahmanical values, as ‘Hindu’ beliefs

and the violent imposition of the same on all people

by Hindu fundamentalists (Gupta 2001). Counter

examples that challenge this thesis are in fact present

in the very same scholarly writings. First, most

ancient literatures would show that cow protection

was one of the actions meant for the ruling and

agricultural classes. In the case of the rulers it so

happens that many of these instructions link the cow,

the Brahmana, the women folk and so on as

candidates for such protection. For the others there

might be diverse associations with the cow or other

household cattle, from reverence to use. Second, as

the commentaries on 19th

century movements and

conflicts show, cow protection and cow worship was

a value very easily picked up by various groups such

as local leaders and non-Brahmin castes, including

but not limited to castes linked with agricultural

work. Third, as the literature shows, people who

spoke against cow slaughter ranged from leaders like

Gandhi to Jayaprakash Narayan to eminent social

reformers and parliamentarians who can hardly be

clubbed together as Hindu fundamentalists. The

constituent assembly debates on the issue reveal that

parliamentarians who spoke against cow slaughter

IJSSH VOL. II (1) JUNE 2013

(justifying it alternatively as a religious and economic

necessity) also spoke about toleration between

communities and respecting religious sentiments and

practices of others.19

All these observations suggest

that the story of transformation of the practice cannot

be very simply shifted from the Hindu-Muslim divide

to the fundamentalist-marginalized divide. In order to

explain the abovementioned contradictions we tend

to find answers such as sanskritization to false

consciousness, to political instrumentality of the

crude kind. Although the colonial and postcolonial

formulation of the problem looks marginally different

from each other, the preoccupation is the same: of

contending religious and cultural values in the

political realm.

Instead, one can observe that cow protection is a

valued practice for many Hindus and it has been a

practice prevalent in India with varying forms since

ancient times. The discomfort of the Hindu groups is

that contemporary intellectuals ignore this point all

too easily. While on the other hand, the secularist

discomfort arises from the use that such practices are

put to: mobilizations, legislations and other kinds of

political activity through which cultural practices

take the form of a normative injunction, making it an

imposition on even those who do not value that

practice.

One could argue that liberal concepts and ideas

that mark the cow slaughter debates as an issue of

diversity of values and then proceed to offer social

and political solutions often end up adding to the

strife. Attempts to codify and mark practices also

seem to take away from the life of these practices.

Not only do they exclude a multiplicity of practices,

but they also erase the matrix in which these actions

make sense, transforming them into actions that have

a religious or political telos. One of the ways by

which this transformation happens is by asking

foundational questions to practices. Such a trajectory

can be seen in the 19th

century attempts to deal with

the politics around the cow protection movements.

Whenever questions were posed using a religious

frame, such as, ‘for whom is this practice sacred?’,

or, ‘what are the underlying beliefs and texts that

authorize such practices?’, it led to a greater rigidity

of positions than before.

What indeed happens with the intervention of

law? Looking at the descriptions of the questions

posed by the courts, we notice that its central

problem relates to mining out intentions and beliefs

of the participants. The constant preoccupation of the

courts was to find out what kind of beliefs were

involved in this case and how to deal with contending

beliefs embodied in practices. In some cases, the

court is known to have given rulings observing that

cow slaughter was not a religious imposition on the

Muslim and so he/she could avoid it if necessary

(similar pronouncements are made by various courts

in India in the post-independence period). In other

cases statements were made around notions of

individual and community rights, such as the ruling

of the Allahabad High Court in the 1880s that

‘Muslims have a right to slaughter cows irrespective

of whether they had exercised the right’ (Freitag

1990, 206). In the same period, in response to

petitions by many individual Muslims or groups who

wanted to slaughter a cow for some personal or

public festival in a conflict-ridden area, the court

would often rule that if the slaughter was for religious

festivals then it has to be allowed. However, if it was

for consumption, then care was to be taken to avoid

performing the act in public places where it would

cause tension. The legal interventions led to a new

discourse of organising one’s world around

conceptions of community rights and beliefs (Pandey

1993; Freitag 1990). Debates and public speeches

around the issue of slaughter heightened various

groups’ sense of their rights, for instance, people

started talking in terms of ‘Muslim rights’, ‘ancient

rights of Hinduism’ and so on (Gould 2005, 81;

Freitag 1990, 158). Following such political and

juridical encounters, more conflicts came into the

public sphere about temple processions and other

practices, revolving around rights of people. One

historian notes, “Cow protection conflicts merged

easily with more general violence over religious

festivals and processions. Although in prior decades

Hindus and Muslims had participated in each other’s

festivals, by the late 19th

century, the two

communities were openly split along religious lines.

“What boon has Allah conferred upon you”, went one

turn-of-the-century Maharashtrian song, “That you

have become a Mussalman today? The cow is our

mother; do not forget her” (Walsh 2006, 161).

Evidently, the debate would have posed a deep

problem for the colonial state faced with two

communities with different practices. Several

writings demonstrate that issues such as cow

slaughter, music before the mosques and other similar

issues proved to be particularly tricky ones and

frustrated the colonial attempts at regulating

conflicts. Dharampal and Mukundan’s text

reproduces a series of correspondences and reports of

the British officers in the early 20th

century on this

issue wondering about how to intervene in the issue

(Dharampal and Mukundan 2002): should they

protects rights, should they protect ‘beliefs’, or

should they just see to their own interests. What

ELIZABETH: COMMUNITIES IN CONFLICT: FIGHTING FOR THE ‘SACRED COW’

flummoxed the colonial state was that even after

positing all the events as a problem of diverse beliefs,

it was difficult to understand a situation where both

communities participated in a common practice.

More recently legal scholars have shown that

when cases against or for cow slaughter has come up

in Indian courts after the independence, most often it

has continued to favour the ‘Hindu interests’ and

sentiments, assuming that the cow happens to be

sacred to all Hindus, ignoring voices from within the

Hindu community which oppose such assumptions.

In appeals by Muslim groups to the High Courts or

Supreme Court about cow slaughter on Bakr-Id, the

courts have echoed the colonial state’s position that

the Quran has not necessitated cow sacrifice. In cases

where appeals have come from butchers and other

trading communities, the courts have maintained a

total ban on cow slaughter, while delivering varying

judgements about bulls, calves and buffaloes.20

Shraddha Chigateri argues that the judicial and

political privileging of the ‘caste Hindu ethic of cow

protection’ is a simultaneous devaluing of Dalit and

lower caste ways of life, and thus is experienced as

an injustice by those communities (Chigateri 2013).

Chigateri also argues that, “…the legal arguments,

which are purportedly based on an economic,

ecological understanding of the use value of cows in

a predominantly agrarian economy, mask and elide

the prioritising of dominant-caste Hindu identity in

the regulation of cow slaughter. This elision is at the

expense of the even-handed recognition of all

religious sensibilities, and strikes at the heart of

Indian constitutional secularism” (Chigateri 2011).

This resonates with arguments made by many

other researches. A researcher writing on the recent

amendments in Indian states of the cow slaughter acts

observes that although the political discourse

revolves around religious faith and sentiment, the

legal language makes it necessary to argue for the

legislations from the standpoint of agricultural

interests. He says, “In legal terms, no State has

attempted to protect cattle as important religious

symbols and the absence of such a discourse

indicates the complex and problematic nature of that

argument in constitutional law. The legal and political

discourse on cow slaughter legislations are carried

out on very different terms and using vocabularies

that have very little intersection. Such attempts at

achieving non-secular aims through secular means in

the context of cow slaughter come to a head when

states prohibit possession and consumption of beef

per se. It does not fit the existing constitutional

discourse on the issue and a ban on cow slaughter

invoking religious grounds, rather than agricultural

interests, might provide a better basis to attempt a

wider ban. I do not think such a ban would succeed

even then but it is certainly better than relying on a

stretched notion of agricultural interests.”21

The

general argument thus revolves around failure of the

polity to be secular and tolerant to diverse values.

We see thus a transformation of cow protection from

an exemplary action, or an action heuristic into a

‘religious’ duty for many. In colonial and postcolonial

India through the juridical process, the law becomes

the main instrument of this transformation. The

colonial legal framework assesses practices in such a

way that it tries to connect a practice to some

irreducible value, or belief (this approach has been

carried over in postcolonial legal methodology). A

large part of the judicial process is to arrive at the

essential belief, through a series of exegetical

methods. Much has been written about colonial legal

procedures and the domain of practices and customs.

By the time the riots around the cow started occurring

ideas of Hindu and Islamic personal laws were

heavily entrenched and texts prescribing the same

were a point of reference for the courts (‘the laws of

the Koran with respect to the Mohamedans and those

of the shaster with respect to the Gentoos’ (Derrett

1999, 289)). Having adjudged a particular practice

for its religious principles, the court’s strategy has

been to find ways to negotiate between conflicting

values, belief states and religious principles.

Chigateri argues that in recent appeals against state

law on cow slaughter, when the appeal comes from

Muslim groups, the Judges determine which social or

religious value is essential through a painstaking

interpretation of religious texts. While, when it comes

to assessing the arguments made by the Hindus, the

courts are satisfied to go by hearsay and quote a

couple of obscure Indian texts, or reassert the

argument of the usefulness of the cow (S. Chigateri

2011). The court’s approach in a way demonstrates an

unexamined reproduction of colonial knowledge

about practices.

A detailed survey of legal arguments or positions or

theoretical reflections about the same in the cow

slaughter cases or in reference to other practices is

outside the scope of this paper. One can just note that

these and similar contemporary debates around

practices can be subjected to a proper reflection only

if one begins to understand how much the thinking

about cultural practices are subsumed under the

social diversity and social justice frame from 19th

century onwards.

What is sacred about the cow: a possible route of

interpretation?

IJSSH VOL. II (1) JUNE 2013

The postcolonial theorists observe many

transformations that happen in 19th

and 20th

centuries

with respect to the cow protection/slaughter debates,

but their analyses amounts to saying that a marginal

religious (or traditional) value becomes more rigidly

religious (fundamentalized) or gets manipulated for

political ends (politicized). Although they note many

contradictions associated with the sacredness of the

cow, or with cow worship, there is no theoretical

framework to understand what these could mean

outside of a religious framework. Thus, they

reproduce colonial knowledge even in their nuanced

observations about Indian society.

I would like to extend the argument that in the

cow protection issue the term ‘sacred’ acquired

specific religious overtones in the 19th

century.

Although some groups might have traditionally

refrained from eating beef and even worshipped the

cow, their relation to others who did not follow these

practices, but followed practices diametrically

opposed to theirs, was not necessarily one of

animosity. In fact it is possible to argue that cow

protection was earlier seen as an action to morally

and ethically orient oneself and thus originally had

very different connotations from the religious matrix

in which it is seen today both by right wing groups

and their critics.

Initial hints to begin understanding the idea of

the sanctity of the cow are available from the pre-

colonial assertions about cow protection, where it is

associated with the moral quality of the state and

killing of cows is linked to a certain moral

degradation (Gould 2005; van der Veer 1994). More

crucially, in literatures prior to this period, cow

protection is a duty of the king or the ruler, who is

told that it is his duty to protect many from the

animal and human world – particularly cows, women

and Brahmanas (Ambedkar 1990). From the

scholarly readings and interpretations, we can

hypothesize that the notions of sacredness and purity

associated with cow protection or cow worship

demanded no specific normative action, while also

inculcating attitudes of respect and protection. It is

not useful to ask why the cow, why not the buffalo or

any other animal. In a sense, it is not cows that are

sacred, or even the act of protection a sacred duty in

the way that we understand it today. Although

different kinds of groups such as rulers, Brahmanas,

gwalas (cowherds), devotees of Krishna, perceived

cow protection as a sacred act, it is very difficult to

conclude from this that their practice is equivalent to

a religious action. In effect, it does not denote any

particular ideal or belief. When asked why one must

protect cows, or why they see cows as ‘pavitra’, most

ordinary, learned or spiritually-inclined Hindus are

likely to give the same reply given by a series of

national leaders advocating cow protection, from

Dayananda to Gandhi. These range from claims like,

the cow gives milk, the cow is a useful animal, the

cow represents our mother, our ancestors did the

same, and only in very rare circumstance, that it is

mentioned or prescribed in the Vedas. None of these

signal the presence of a religious principle tied to

cow protection. If cow protection indeed constituted

a religious injunction, deriving a religious belief or

principle from it would have been far easier.

To understand the nature of such practices more

precisely one can borrow the conception of rituals

that anthropologist Talal Asad, and linguist and

philosopher, Frits Staal, use. Studying the Vedic

rituals and mantras Frits Staal argued that rituals are

not symbolic activity; they do not stand for

something else. Instead, they are ‘self contained and

self absorbed’ (Staal 1979). The stress is not on the

meaning of the action, but on the rules governing

them, or the correct performance of an action. Staal

observes, “Why has it proved so difficult to define

the meaning, goals and aims of ritual...There is one

simple hypothesis which would account for all these

puzzling facts: the hypothesis that ritual has no

meaning, goal or aim”. Therefore, explaining a ritual

as a transition from profane to sacred is tautological

because these can only be terms within a ritual or

terms to mark the status of a person or object before

and after a ritual. Staal calls rituals ‘pure activity’,

where rules and not results are more important. Talal

Asad gives a genealogical account of the idea of

rituals from its use in the medieval Christian world to

its modern secularized usages in anthropology and in

other disciplines including modern Christian

theology, from signifying ‘discipline of the self’ to

representing a ‘symbolic act’ (Asad 1993). Asad

argues that in medieval Christianity rituals were

practices for cultivating particular moral dispositions

and capacities, and were part of disciplining the self.

In this view, there was no necessary separation

between visible signs and actions, and invisible

feelings or thoughts. Rituals and practices needed no

decoding to get at their inner meaning. In fact, Asad

observes that it was through the concept of a

disciplinary programme that outer behaviour and

inner motive were connected (Asad 1993, 64). While

in latter-day understanding, which Asad traces to

Bacon’s use of the terms simulation and

dissimulation in political behaviour, rituals became

more and more of a representative and expressive

activity, where they seem to stand for some yet to be

decoded thoughts, feelings, beliefs, or values.

ELIZABETH: COMMUNITIES IN CONFLICT: FIGHTING FOR THE ‘SACRED COW’

These descriptions about ways of understanding

rituals give us a sense of how to understand the

transition in cow protection practice.22

From being an

action heuristic, or a practice meant for a correct

ethical disposition it changes to something which

represents non-negotiable beliefs in the sacredness

the cow.23

One could say that the instruction of

protecting a cow can be meaningfully read as having

to do with instilling an ethic of care and

responsibility in whomever it was addressed to, most

frequently in a ruler towards his subjects. We could

also speculate that some strains of this tradition are

visible in the nationalist leaders’ picking of cow

protection as an exemplary action (Narayan 1968).

For others it signifies an ethical action for something

that sustains life and livelihood.

Conclusion

Two related but different aspects come together

in the making of the cow-slaughter problem in India.

One is the colonial-legal framework that interprets

community practices as embodying religious beliefs.

Once seen as embodying religious beliefs, these

practices have to be inevitably interpreted as flowing

from a non-negotiable crux of religious

commitments. Colonial courts interpreted much of

the tension surrounding the cow slaughter issue in the

19th

century as signalling a religious conflict.

Rendered as such, it has no conceptual resources to

deal with religious conflicts because religious

conflicts are not civil suites where a common legal

framework determines actions and behaviours of both

parties. Religious differences, by their very nature,

entail paradigmatic differences in beliefs that are not

reducible to common frameworks, legal or otherwise.

There is evidence now to believe that all the religious

hermeneutics the courts participate in to get at the

core of the practices prove unsuccessful in addressing

social conflicts.

The second aspect of the problem is the

transformation of the ethical domain of actions into a

moral domain of beliefs. What we see in the Indian

literature about cow protection is an ethic of care and

action. It is inappropriate to read the Indian texts

about cow protection as arguments for the religious

sanctity of the animal. Two typical arguments

provided by the Indian texts are this: 1) cows should

not be slaughtered because animal sacrifice is

deplorable and 2) cows should not be slaughtered

because it helps man in his essential agrarian needs.

The first argument over-determines the case because

it is not an argument about the sanctity of the cow,

but about the sanctity of all living creatures. The

second argument under-determines the case, because

it is not about the issue of sanctity at all, let alone

about the sanctity of the cow, but about the utility of

the animal. It is interesting to note that when Indians

worship the cow, they are involved in an activity that

has many parallels and equivalents for them:

worshipping implements, tools, gods, elders, trees

and pots and pans. It might be foolhardy to derive

from this the sanctity of all such things to Indians.

This fundamental difference in the significance

of cow protection for practicing communities on the

one hand and for the state on the other is what we are

stuck at today. When such a practice finds housing in

the hotbed of political rights and claim making, the

result can only be conflict. Put as the right of Hindus

to protect the cow, it obviously hurts another right of

another community, which is the right to sacrifice the

animal or use it for everyday purposes. Seen as the

design of the priestly classes or upper castes to

protect their hegemony, it only renders the

communities incorrigible and culpable beyond

redemption. Seen as the right of another community

to eat beef, it only goes to prove the malevolent

attitude of that community to practices of Hindus,

thus leading to more strife.

Along with other such practices, cow protection

has been at the centre of much thought about

secularism, tolerance, and diversity in contemporary

India. The 19th

century cow-protection and cow-

slaughter debate marks a shift in the way practices

were discussed henceforth. Practices are often

debated as reducible to a set of values or beliefs that

they represent and people are shown to have a right

to follow a practice, based on principles that adhere

to other liberal values of freedom and equality,

subjecting practices to a second level of analysis

about just principles. This has transformed a

repertoire of exemplary actions available for Indians

from texts and stories and perhaps even from real life

into normative actions, now made mandatory for

many. Narratives about sati daha, about Rama and

Ayodhya, and cow protection, fall largely into this

category. Mainstream scholarship has not paid

adequate attention to this profound alteration of the

conceptual landscape of Indian culture. In this paper,

I have attempted to discuss one such example of the

transformation by looking at what happens to

exemplary actions when they acquire the force of an

apparently normative injunction. Underlying this

transformation is the story of a deep change in the

ethical life of Indians brought about by long periods

of colonisation. That story, however, awaits another

author.

IJSSH VOL. II (1) JUNE 2013

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Amin, Shahid. 2002. “On Retelling the Muslim

Conquest of North India.” In History

and the Present, edited by Anjan Ghosh

and Partha Chatterjee. New Delhi:

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Notes:

1 This paper is a re-worked version of a jointly

authored unpublished paper by the present author

and Serene Kasim, entitled Legal Discourse

Around Social Practice: an enquiry into the

cattle slaughter bill presented in the Second Law

and Social Sciences Research Network

(LASSNET) Conference held in Foundation for

Liberal and Management Education (FLAME),

Pune, India, from 27-30 December, 2010. 2 See http://www.deccanherald.com/content

/58978/cow-slaughter-ban-bill-passed.html 3 Very recently, the Congress led government in

the state has withdrawn the bill and restored the

1964 Act. See http://www.asianage.

com/india/karnataka-congress-govt-reverses-bjp-

rules-tough-law-cow-slaughter-444 4 This became apparent in conversations with

activists in the Karnataka West Coast and

Bangalore. 5 http://www.indianexpress.com/news/gujarat-

cow-slaughter-ban-comes-into-force-today/

864513 6 Article 48 of the Constitution reads thus:

Organisation of agriculture and animal

husbandry: The State shall endeavour to organise

agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and

scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps

for preserving and improving the breeds, and

IJSSH VOL. II (1) JUNE 2013

prohibiting the slaughter, of cows and calves and

other milch and draught cattle. 7http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?

219505 8 Various newspaper reports.

9 One cannot quiet establish the veracity of such

statements at this stage, and there is little

evidence other than the speculative to suggest

why such bans came into place, or what

justification was used for it. 10

http://blogs.outlookindia.com/default.aspx?

ddm=10&pid=2695 11

At the face of it the implication is that ‘sacred’

implies something particular and actions such as

worshipping, or making use or killing (or

sacrificing) are mutually exclusive, that is, if the

cow is believed to be sacred then, one cannot

tolerate its being killed. 12

Prior to the Arya Samaj, in the 1860’s the Sikh

Kuka movement is supposed to have actively

agitated against cow slaughter in the Punjab

region. 13

See the British Intelligence note on Anti Kine

Killing Agitation, pages 87-122 (Dharampal and

Mukundan 2002) 14

An interesting incident is related by Sandra

Freitag about the Rani of Majhauli who deputed

an agent to buy 80 heads of cattle being taken by

butchers. She also agreed to give local butchers

rent free land if they gave up their trade in cattle

(Freitag 1990, 153). 15

See (Bilgrami 2003) on Gandhi’s thought on

moral principles and exemplary actions. 16

Immediately after independence, Nehru wrote

a letter to Rajendra Prasad expressing his anxiety

about the revivalist phenomena. He too asks the

question about how to counter the sectarian

outlook while also retaining the economic

aspects of the cow slaughter debates. 17

The use of universalization is not to suggest

that henceforth everyone started practicing it but

to indicate a particular conceptual use of the

practice as a core and essential ‘Hindu’ religious

practice. 18

This was also the time when many conflicts

emerged about ‘sacred’ spaces for different

communities and places like Ayodhya became

sacred in a particular sense. 19

Thakur Dass Bhargava, who moved the

amendment against cow slaughter, is also known

to have spoken in the parliament against

untouchability and was part of many social

reform committees including the age of consent

committee. 20

See http://www.indiankanoon.org/search/?

formInput=cow%20slaughter on judicial out-

comes on these cases. 21

http://lawandotherthings.blogspot.in/2012/02/

guest-post-by-anup-surendranath-anti.html 22

The suggestion is not that cow protection is

some sort of a sacred ritual. But that the role of

rituals can be borrowed to understand the role of

cow protection in India. 23

Also see (Polly Hazarika 2011). Polly

Hazarika’s work on the 19th

century reform

discourse and its postcolonial assessment shows

some of the crucial shifts in the understanding of

practices with the colonial encounter. She argues

that practices whose primary goal was to produce

ethical self-reflection and thus effect a

transformation in the individual came to be

associated with groups or communities in their

goal for identity formation. In the colonial

understanding diverse practices where marked by

diversity of doctrines and beliefs which was the

basis of the diversity of the groups.