Cows, Pigs and Religion
Some enigmatic customs that occur in one culture might apparently appear irrational and inexplicable to other people. Hindus refuse to eat beef whereas Muslims and Jews avoid pigs. Hindus worship ‘Mother Cow’, but some ‘Dalits’, who basically are Hindus, eat beef. The so-called upper class Hindus – Brahmins and Chhetris – avoids pigs but other ethnic people (also Hindus) love pork.
Interestingly, in the past, some Western anthropologists suggested that poverty in India is severe because Hindu-dominated population consider cow killing a sin. Cows and bulls roam the street of Indian and Nepali cities. Mahatma Gandhi who emphasized Hindu-Muslim unity wanted a total ban on cow slaughter. However, beef is a part of food habit in Islam, and amongst Christians and Jews.
It is believed Hindu Aryans at the beginning ate beef, but when they arrived in the Indian sub-continent, they stopped killing cows. The reasons that the religious historians give seem appropriate. Cow took the form of money, apart from giving milk, and ox was used to plough land. By then, nomadic Aryans had started agriculture. Some say beef created health hazards in hot tropical climate but it was true that rearing cows was more beneficial than killing for meat. Many other options were also available in the Indian sub-continent.
Hindus venerate cows because cows are the symbol of everything that is alive. As Mother Mary is to Christians, the mother of Jesus Christ, the cow to Hindus is the mother of life. Some ethnic people and the Maoists rejected cow as a national animal. But we have to bear in mind the base of Nepal nation (Kathmandu valley in modern interpretation) stands on the sanctity of cow. The myth has it that a cow went to a hillock and milk from her udder fell by the will of divine, which later turned out to be the great Pashupatinath shrine. Buddhists believe it is the abode of the Buddha – the five heads in the lingam are the five different Buddhas.
And then there are pig lovers and pig haters. The riddle of pig is also a good follow-up to mother cow. Hebrew theologies denounced the pig as unclean, a beast that pollutes if it is touched or tasted. And Allah told his Prophet that the status of swine was to be the same for the followers of Islam. Among millions of Jews and Muslims, pig remains an abomination (also to the high-ranking Hindus), despite the fact that it can convert grains and tubers into high-grade fats and protein more efficiently than any other animal.
In some culture, pigs are unholy because their Gods denounced the animal as the Satan on earth. The modern facts point out that the pig is a vector for human disease (remember the present day swine flu epidemic). Though the Jewish and Muslim theologians have not searched for the naturalistic basis of abhorring pig, it is interpreted that in the Middle East raising pigs for meat was a sort of luxury because it needed water and mud bath that was quite unavailable in the arid climate. The animal was considered unclean for its abominable habitat.
Some scholars suggest that pigs tabooed in the Bible and the Koran were once the totemic symbols where those religions evolved and the totems are usually not animals valued as food resource. For those nomadic pastoralists, rearing pigs became hectic because the animal demanded sedentary life. Above all, the pig is thermodynamically ill-adapted to the hot, dry climate of the lands of the Bible and the Koran.
In New Guinea and the South Pacific Melanesian Islands, swine are holy animals that must be sacrificed to the ancestors and eaten on all important occasions such as marriages and funerals. The Tharus do the same in Nepal.
There are many such bizarre taboos and customs. Explanations into the patters of other cultures look convincing to us but we cannot take the startling insights into the riddles of our own.
Women and religion
A piece of news made headlines for quite some time on the BBC. A Bangladeshi woman studying medicine in the U.K. was told to return home immediately. Her mother was gravely ill, she was told. But soon as she reached Dhaka, she knew it was a blatant lie concocted to force her to marry a man of her parents’ choice. She refused and was kept locked in a room for months. When she leaked her condition to her friends back in Britain, it got the attention of Bangla authorities. A Bangla court has now ordered her release. But her parents insist on keeping her in confinement as she is apparently suffering from some kind of mental illness and is incapable of decisions for herself.
Unsurprisingly, half the world was appalled by the news. But for us in South Asia, this was no big news. Women in this part of the world have been suffering at the hands of the patriarchal society since time immemorial. Even educated women do not escape persecution.
Discrimination is everywhere. Even the nuns in monasteries suffer because of their gender. Buddhist nuns at Ladakh, India, are routinely persecuted by their male counterparts.
Buddhist monk cults have always vouched for equality on the basis of gender, race and class. But even they are guilty of routinely violating their stated belief. In parts of Ladakh, local people gift one of their daughters to the monastery. But even as their heads are shaved and their bodies covered in maroon robes, they stay at their parents’ working as domestic help and construction labourers. They are not married, have no other home to go. They instead have to take care of their old parents and look after the children of their siblings. As they don’t have children, they can’t claim their rights to property.
These uneducated women do not challenge their roles of lackeys. Some who are determined to remain in monastery cannot do so because parents would not pay for their upkeep. Now some nuns have banded together to reclaim their dignity and uplift their religious status. About time, too.
When we talk about women’s status vis-à-vis religion, we have to admit, Buddhism is one religion that practiced egalitarianism since its inception: Gautam Buddha’s step-mother Prajapati Gotami was the first women to become a nun.
As most religions practice celibacy taking women as a symbol of sin, it is sad that this false belief has crept into Buddhism. Islam is another religion that granted women property rights and the right to choice since its inception. However, such rights have been washed away in the rapids of hardliners. Like it or not, we still live in a highly patriarchal world where men still dictate how women should behave and practice her religion.