40 India's Sacred Cow
MARVIN HARRIS
itself. Specialists in food habits around the world like Fred Simons at the University
of California at Davis consider Hinduism an irrational ideology that compels people
to overlook abundant, nutritious foods for scarcer, less healthful foods.
What seems to be an absurd devotion to the mother cow pervades Indian life.
Indian wall calendars portray beautiful young women with bodies of fat white cows,
often with milk jetting from their teats into sacred shrines.
Cow worship even carries over into politics. In 1966 a crowd of 120,000 people,
led by holy men, demonstrated in front of the Indian House of Parliament in support
of the All-Party Cow Protection Campaign Committee. In Nepal, the only
contemporary Hindu kingdom, cow slaughter is severely punished. As one story
goes,
the car driven by an official of a United States agency struck and killed a cow.
In order to avoid the international incident that would have occurred when the
Although its form varies widely from one culture to another, religion is one of humanity's
fundamental social institutions. A generation or so ago, some “experts” predicted that with
the increasing dominance of science and the secularization of U.S. culture religion would
fade quietly into the background. On the contrary, religion is as vital for Americans today as
it was in the past. Church membership is even much higher now than when the country was
founded. Tens of millions of Americans seek comfort and guidance in religion, looking to
religion for answers to many of the perplexing questions that social life poses and that
science cannot answer.
Like the other social institutions, religion is interconnected with the other parts of society.
It sometimes is difficult to recognize these interconnections when we refer to our own
religion, for we tend to focus on its smaller aspects, such as our own congregation,
synagogue, or mosque. It often is easier to see this point, however, when we look at
unfamiliar religions, those whose practices are far removed from our experiences. There,
since we are not immersed in taken-for-granted assumptions, we may be prompted to ask
basic questions. For example, why are cows allowed to wander India's city streets and
country roads? Why don't deprived and hungry Indians eat them? Essential interconnections
between religion and culture become evident as Harris analyzes such questions.
official was arrested for murder, the Nepalese magistrate concluded that the cow had
committed suicide.
Many Indians agree with Western assessments of the Hindu reverence for their
cattle, the zebu, or Bos indicus, a large-humped species prevalent in Asia and Africa.
M.N. Srinivas, an Indian anthropologist, states: “Orthodox Hindu opinion regards
the killing of cattle with abhorrence, even though the refusal to kill vast number of
useless cattle which exist in India today is detrimental to the nation.” Even the
Indian Ministry of Information formerly maintained that “the large animal
population is more a liability than an asset in view of our land resources.” Accounts
from many different sources point to the same conclusion: India, one of the world's
great civilizations, being strangled by its love for the cow.
The easy explanation for India's devotion to the cow, the one most Westerners
and Indians would offer, is that cow worship is an integral part of Hinduism.
Religion is somehow good for the soul, even it if sometimes fails the body. Religion
orders the cosmos and explains our place in the universe. Religious beliefs, many
would claim, have existed for thousands of years and have a life of their own. They
are not understandable in scientific terms.
NEWS PHOTOGRAPHS that came out of India during the famine of the
late 1960s showed starving people stretching out bony hands to beg for food while
sacred cattle strolled behind undisturbed. The Hindu, it seems, would rather starve to
death than eat his cow or even deprive it of food. The cattle appear to browse
unhindered through urban markets eating an orange here, a mango there, competing
with people for meager supplies of food.
By Western standards, spiritual values seem more important to Indians than life
form of yogurt and ghee (clarified butter), which contribute subtle flavors to much
spicy Indian food.
But all this ignores history. There is more to be said for cow worship than is
immediately apparent. The earliest Vedas, the Hindu sacred texts from the second
millennium B.C., do not prohibit the slaughter of cattle. Instead, they ordain it as
part of sacrificial rites. The early Hindus did not avoid the flesh of cows and bulls;
they ate it at ceremonial feasts presided over by Brahman priests. Cow worship is a
relatively recent development in India; it evolved as the Hindu religion developed
and changed.
This evolution is recorded in royal edicts and religious texts written during the
last 3,000 years of Indian history. The Vedas from the first millennium B.C. contain
contradictory passages, some referring to ritual slaughter and others to a strict taboo
on beef consumption. A.N. Bose, in Social and Rural Economy of Northern India,
600 B.C.-200 A.D., concludes that many of the sacred-cow passages were
incorporated into the texts by priests of a later period.
By 200 A.D. the status of Indian cattle had undergone a spiritual transformation.
The Brahman priesthood exhorted the population to venerate the cow and forbade
them to abuse it or to feed on it. Religious feasts involving the ritual slaughter and
consumption of livestock were eliminated and meat eating was restricted to the
nobility.
By 1000 A.D., all Hindus were forbidden to eat beef. Ahimsa, the Hindu belief in
the unity of all life, was the spiritual justification for this restriction. But it is difficult
to ascertain exactly when this change occurred. An important event that helped to
shape the modern complex was the Islamic invasion, which took place in the eighth
century A.D. Hindus may have found it politically expedient to set themselves off
from the invaders, who were beefeaters, by emphasizing the need to prevent the
slaughter of their sacred animals. Thereafter, the cow taboo assumed its modern
form and began to function much as it does today.
The place of the cow in modern India is every place—on posters, in the movies,
in brass figures, in stone and wood carvings, on the streets, in the fields. The cow is
a symbol of health and abundance. It provides the milk that Indians consume in the
This, perhaps, is the practical role of the cow, but cows provide less than half the
milk produced in India. Most cows in India are not dairy breeds. In most regions,
when an Indian farmer wants a steady, high-quality source of milk he usually invests
in a female water buffalo. In India the water buffalo is the specialized dairy breed
because its milk has a higher butterfat content than zebu milk. Although the farmer
milks his zebu cows, the milk is merely a by-product.
More vital than zebu milk to South Asian farmers are zebu calves. Male calves
are especially valued because from bulls come oxen, which are the mainstay of the
Indian agricultural system.
Small, fast oxen drag wooden plows through late-spring fields when monsoons
have dampened the dry, cracked earth. After harvest, the oxen break the grain from
the stalk by stomping through mounds of cut wheat and rice. For rice cultivation in
irrigated fields, the male water buffalo is preferred (it pulls better in deep mud), but
for most other crops, including rainfall rice, wheat, sorghum, and millet, and for
transporting goods and people to and from town, a team of oxen is preferred. The ox
is the Indian peasant’s tractor, thresher, and family car combined; the cow is the
factory that produces the ox.
If draft animals instead of cows are counted, India appears to have too few
domesticated ruminants, not too many. Since each of the 70 million farms in India
require a draft team, it follows that Indian peasants should use 140 million animals
in the fields. But there are only 83 million oxen and male water buffalo on the
subcontinent, a shortage of 30 million draft teams.
In other regions of the world, joint ownership of draft animals might overcome a
shortage, but Indian agriculture is closely tied to the monsoon rains of late spring
and summer. Field preparation and planting must coincide with the rain, and a
farmer must have his animals ready to plow when the weather is right. When the
farmer without a draft team needs bullocks most, his neighbors are all using theirs.
faces—the failure of the monsoon.
Any delay in turning the soil drastically lowers production.
Because of this dependence on draft animals, loss of the family oxen is
devastating. If a beast dies, the farmer must borrow money to buy or rent an ox at
interest rates so high that he ultimately loses his land. Every year foreclosures force
thousands of poverty-stricken peasants to abandon the countryside for the
overcrowded cities.
If a family is fortunate enough to own a fertile cow, it will be able to rear
replacements for a lost team and thus survive until life returns to normal. If, as
sometimes happens, famine leads a family to sell its cow and ox team, all ties to
agriculture are cut. Even if the family survives, it has no way to farm the land, no
oxen to work the land, and no cows to produce oxen.
The prohibition against eating meat applies to the flesh of cows, bulls, and oxen,
but the cow is the most sacred because it can produce the other two. The peasant
whose cow dies is not only crying over a spiritual loss but over the loss of his farm
as well.
The local Indian governments aid the process of recovery by maintaining homes
for barren cows. Farmers reclaim any animal that calves or begins to lactate. One
police station in Madras collects strays and pastures them in a field adjacent to the
station. After a small fine is paid, a cow is returned to its rightful owner when the
owner thinks the cow shows signs of being able to reproduce.
During the hot, dry spring months most of India is like a desert. Indian farmers
often complain they cannot feed their livestock during this period. They maintain the
cattle by letting them scavenge on the sparse grass along the roads. In the cities the
cattle are encouraged to scavenge near food stalls to supplement their scant diet.
These are the wandering cattle tourists report seeing throughout India.
Westerners expect shopkeepers to respond to these intrusions with the deference
due a sacred animal; instead, their response is a string of curses and the crack of a
long bamboo pole across the beast's back or a poke at its genitals. Mahatma Gandhi
was well aware of the treatment sacred cows (and bulls and oxen) received in India.
“How we bleed her to take the last drop of milk from her. How we starve her to
emaciation, how we ill-treat the calves, how we deprive them of their portion of
milk, how cruelly we treat the oxen, how we castrate them, how we beat them, how
we overload them” [Gandhi, 1954).
Oxen generally receive better treatment than cows. When food is in short supply,
thrifty Indian peasants feed their working bullocks and ignore their cows, but rarely
do they abandon the cows to die. When cows are sick, farmers worry over them as
they would over members of the family and nurse them as if they were children.
When the rains return and when the fields are harvested, the farmers again feed their
cows regularly and reclaim their abandoned animals. The prohibition against beef
consumption is a form of disaster insurance for all India.
Western agronomists and economists are quick to protest that all the functions of
the zebu cattle can be improved with organized breeding programs, cultivated
pastures, and silage. Because stronger oxen would pull the plow faster, they could
Religious laws that forbid the slaughter of cattle promote the recovery of the
agricultural system from the dry Indian winter and from periods of drought. The
monsoon, on which all agriculture depends, is erratic. Sometimes, it arrives early,
sometimes late, sometimes not at all. Drought has struck large portions of India time
and again in this century, and Indian farmers and the zebus are accustomed to these
natural disasters. Zebus can pass weeks on end with little or no food and water. Like
camels, they store both in their humps and recuperate quickly with only a little
nourishment.
During drought the cows often stop lactating and become barren. In some cases
the condition is permanent but often it is only temporary. If barren animals were
summarily eliminated, as Western experts in animal husbandry have suggested,
cows capable of recovery would be lost along with those entirely debilitated. By
keeping alive the cows that can later produce oxen, religious laws against cow
slaughter assure the recovery of the agricultural system from the greatest challenge it
work multiple plots of land, allowing farmers to share their animals. Fewer healthy,
well-fed cows could provide Indians with more milk. But pastures and silage require
arable land, land needed to produce wheat and rice.
A look at Western cattle farming makes plain the cost of adopting advanced
technology in Indian agriculture. In a study of livestock production in the United
States, David Pimentel of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell
University, found that 91 percent of the cereal, legume, and vegetable protein
suitable for human consumption is consumed by livestock. Approximately three
quarters of the arable land in the United States is devoted to growing food for
livestock. In the production of meat and milk, American ranchers use enough fossil
fuel to equal more than 82 million barrels of oil annually.
Indian cattle do not drain the system in the same way. In a 1971 study of
livestock in West Bengal, Stewart Odend’hal [1972] of the University of Missouri
found that Bengalese cattle ate only the inedible remains of subsistence crops—rice
straw, rice hulls, the tops of sugar cane, and mustard-oil cake. Cattle graze in the
fields after harvest and eat the remains of crops left on the ground; they forage for
grass and weeds on the roadsides. The food for zebu cattle costs the human
population virtually nothing. “Basically,” Odend’hal says, “the cattle convert the
items of little direct human value into products of immediate utility.”
In addition to plowing the fields and producing milk, the zebus produce dung,
which fires the hearths and fertilizes the fields of India. Much of the estimated 800
million tons of manure produced annually is collected by the farmers' children as
they follow the family cows and bullocks from place to place. And when the
children see the droppings of another farmer's cattle along the road, they pick those
up also. Odend’hal reports that the system operates with such high efficiency that the
children of West Bengal recover nearly 100 percent of the dung produced by their
livestock.
cleanly, and with low heat-characteristics that satisfy the household needs of
Indian women. Staples like curry and rice can simmer for hours. While the meal
slowly cooks over an unattended fire, the women of the household can do other
chores. Cow chips, unlike firewood, do not scorch as they burn.
It is estimated that the dung used for cooking fuel provides the energy-equivalent
of 43 million tons of coal. At current prices, it would cost India an extra 1.5 billion
dollars in foreign exchange to replace the dung with coal. And if the 350 million
tons of manure that are being used as fertilizer were replaced with commercial
fertilizers, the expense would be even greater. Roger Revelle of the University of
California at San Diego has calculated that 89 percent of the energy used in Indian
agriculture (the equivalent of about 140 million tons of coal) is provided by local
sources. Even if foreign loans were to provide the money, the capital outlay
necessary to replace the Indian cow with tractors and fertilizers for the fields, coal
for the fires, and transportation for the family would probably warp international
financial institutions for years.
Instead of asking the Indians to learn from the American model of industrial
agriculture, American farmers might learn energy conservation from the Indians.
Every step in an energy cycle results in a loss of energy to the system. Like a
pendulum that slows a bit with each swing, each transfer of energy from sun to
plants, plants to animals, and animals to human beings involves energy losses. Some
systems are more efficient than others; they provide a higher percentage of the
energy inputs in a final, useful form. Seventeen percent of all energy zebus consume
is returned in the form of milk, traction, and dung. American cattle raised on
Western rangeland return only 4 percent of the energy they consume.
But the American system is improving. Based on techniques pioneered by Indian
scientists, at least one commercial firm in the United States is reported to be building
plants that will turn manure from cattle feedlots into combustible gas. When organic
matter is broken down by anaerobic bacteria, methane gas and carbon dioxide are
produced. After the methane is cleansed of the carbon dioxide, it is available for the
From 40 to 70 percent of all manure produced by Indian cattle is used as fuel for
cooking; the rest is returned to the fields as fertilizer. Dried dung burns slowly,
same purposes as natural gas— cooking, heating, electric generation. The company
constructing the biogasification plant plans to sell its product to a gas-supply
company, to be piped through the existing distribution system. Schemes similar to
this one could make cattle ranches almost independent of utility and gasoline
companies; for methane can be used to run trucks, tractors, and cars as well as to
supply heat and electricity. The relative energy self-sufficiency that the Indian
peasant has achieved is a goal American farmers and industry are now striving for.
Studies of Odend’hal's understate the efficiency of the Indian cow, because dead
cows are used for purposes that Hindus prefer not to acknowledge. When a cow
dies, an Untouchable, a member of one of the lowest ranking castes in India, is
summoned to haul away the carcass. Higher castes consider the body of the dead
cow polluting; if they handle it, they must go through a rite of purification.
Untouchables first skin the dead animal and either tan the skin themselves or sell
it to a leather factory. In the privacy of their homes, contrary to the teachings of
Hinduism, untouchable castes cook the meat and eat it. Indians of all castes rarely
acknowledge the existence of these practices to non-Hindus, but most are aware that
beefeating takes place. The prohibition against beefeating restricts consumption by
the higher castes and helps distribute animal protein to the poorest sectors of the
population that otherwise would have no source of these vital nutrients.
Untouchables are not the only Indians who consume beef. Indian Muslims and
Christians are under no restriction that forbids them beef, and its consumption is
legal in many places. The Indian ban on cow slaughter is state, not national, law and
not all states restrict it. In many cities, such as New Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay,
legal slaughterhouses sell beef to retail customers and to restaurants that serve steak.
If the caloric value of beef and the energy costs involved in the manufacture of
synthetic leather were included in the estimate of energy, the calculated efficiency of
Indian livestock would rise considerably. As well as the system works, experts often
claim that its efficiency can be further improved. Alan Heston [et al., 1971], an
economist at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that Indians suffer from an
overabundance of cows simply because they refuse to slaughter the excess cattle.
India could produce at least the same number of oxen and the same quantities of
milk and manure with 30 million fewer cows. Heston calculates that only 40 cows
are necessary to maintain a population of 100 bulls and oxen. Since India averages
70 cows for every 100 bullocks, the difference, 30 million cows, is expendable.
What Heston fails to note is that sex ratios among cattle in different regions of
India vary tremendously, indicating that adjustments in the cow population do take
place. Along the Ganges River, one of the holiest shrines of Hinduism, the ratio
drops to 47 cows for every 100 male animals. This ratio reflects the preference for
dairy buffalo in the irrigated sectors of the Gangetic Plains. In nearby Pakistan, in
contrast, where cow slaughter is permitted, the sex ratio is 60 cows to 100 oxen.
Since the sex ratios among cattle differ greatly from region to region and do not
even approximate the balance that would be expected if no females were killed, we
can assume that some culling of herds does take place; Indians do adjust their
religious restrictions to accommodate ecological realities.
They cannot kill a cow but they can tether an old or unhealthy animal until it has
starved to death. They cannot slaughter a calf but they can yoke it with a large
wooden triangle so that when it nurses it irritates the mother's udder and gets kicked
to death. They cannot ship their animals to the slaughterhouse but they can sell them
to Muslims, closing their eyes to the fact that the Muslims will take the cattle to the
slaughterhouse.
These violations of the prohibition against cattle slaughter strengthen the premise
that cow worship is a vital part of Indian culture. The practice arose to prevent the
population from consuming the animal on which Indian agriculture depends. During
the first millennium B.C., the Gange Valley became one of the most densely
populated regions of the world.
Where previously there had been only scattered villages, many towns and cities
arose and peasants farmed every available acre of land. Kingsley Davis, a population
expert at the University of California at Berkeley, estimates that by 300 B.C.
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