Food habits in India are varied and multiple protein sources are always tapped. In ancient times, the consumption of cattle meat was the norm. There are many archaeological sites in India where there is evidence of such consumption as observed by the study of fossilised cattle bones, although it is difficult to identify the exact category (ox, bull, cow etc.) to which the bones belonged. However, the corpus of textual evidence in favour of cattle meat consumption is enormous. In tracing the root cause of untouchability, Dr. BR Ambedkar cited beef eating as among the causal factors, quoting several textual references to the practice in his seminal book, The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables, originally published in 1948. Later, Dr. D N Jha who was a well-known professor of history at Delhi University, dared to engage with the issue of the ‘holiness’ of the cowand remarked in the introduction of his 2001 book, The Myth of the Holy Cow, “All that I could do for this Indian edition was to add, as an appendix, a longish extract from the classic work of Dr B R Ambedkar, whose writings on the origin of untouchability, despite the great strides Indian historical scholarship has taken after him, remain a landmark in the study of social marginality in India.” Jha delineates many historical sources to trace the historicity of the practice of cattle slaughter through records of religious texts across the spectrum. At the time of writing his book, the cow had been deemed as a ‘holy’ animal among the Indian population and its consumption was given a religious and communal angle with caste conflicts being completely set aside from the narrative. Jha concludes that “the image of the cow projected by Indian textual traditions, especially the Brahmanical-Dharmasastric works, over the centuries is polymorphic. Its story through the millennia is full of inconsistencies and has not always been in conformity with dietary practices current in society.”