'Holy' Cow And 'Unholy' Dalit

There are some protagonists of Hinduism who say that Hinduism is a very adaptable religion,that it can adjust itself to everything and absorb anything. I do not think many people would regard such acapacity in a religion as a virtue to be proud of, just as no one would think highly of a child because it hasdeveloped the capacity to eat dung, and digest it. But that is another matter. It is quite true that Hinduismcan adjust itself... can absorb many things. The beef-eating Hinduism (or strictly speaking Brahminism whichis the proper name of Hinduism in its earlier stage) absorbed the non-violence theory of Buddhism and became areligion of vegetarianism. But there is one thing which Hinduism has never been able to do – namely toadjust itself to absorb the Untouchables or to remove the bar of Untouchability.

– BR Ambedkar

The dalits account for 165 million of India’s one billion-plus human population. The population of cowsis pegged at 206 million. There are more cows than dalits in India. The cows, therefore, have more rights thandalits. For instance, you can kill dalits before thousands of witnesses and get away with it. But the imaginedmurder of a cow will not be suffered. The state promotes the drinking of cow urine and dung, while dalits areforced to eat the shit and piss of caste Hindus.

Ambedkar was, perhaps, ironically, aware of the literalness of his metaphor. Hindus have proved that theycan not only eat dung and piss but digest it too. However, while he was right about what brahminic Hinduismcould not ever absorb, what he perhaps did not reckon with was that latter-day dalits would be forced to eatthe shit and piss of caste Hindus.

In Untouchables or The Children of India’s Ghetto, published posthumously like many of his otherworks, Ambedkar devotes two sections to highlight the practice of untouchability in his time through newspapersources from the 1920s and 1930s. Close to 50 reports, culled from a variety of sources, from The Times ofIndia to Hindi publications such as Jivan, Milap and Pratap, are cited in an effortto convince the reader that various forms of untouchability were indeed in practice.

 However, not one of these mentions that the dalit-untouchables were forced to consume human excreta.Not one talks about dalits being lynched by a Hindu mob for skinning a cow.

Brahminic Hinduism has always yoked together practices that are at such odds with each other that themeaning of one is to be found in the meaninglessness of the other. While it is the brahmin who ritualisticallyexcludes himself from the rest of the caste heap and indulgently renders himself untouchable, it is the dalit– whose touch of labour informs perhaps everything that is consumed and used by society – who is condemnedto be untouchable.

The brahmin, to protect his untouchableness, has to render others untouchable. Such a play ofcontradictions that binds the brahminical social order is as historical as it is contemporary. In such abinary, the ridiculous and the unimaginable jostle with each other; the claim to superiority and merit of theone depends on the making inferior of the other. The ridiculous easily invites sarcasm, even critique byrational-scientific voices that unwittingly participate in the ridiculous, but the unimaginable defies words,language – it demands outrage but forces aphasia.

Demonstrative of this dichotomy, we see in New Delhi, India’s human resource development minister, MurliManohar Joshi, proudly asserting the legitimacy invested upon the use of cow’s urine for therapeuticpurposes by the United States patent authorities, while in Thinniam, an obscure village in Lalgudi taluq,Tiruchirapalli district, Tamil Nadu, two dalits are forced to eat dried human shit.

The state and the brahminical social order play equally proactive roles in both cases – promoting cowurine drinking among caste Hindus, and in forcing human shit and piss down dalit throats. The bizarrepatenting of cow-urine therapy elicited three kinds of reactions: sniggers from the ‘secularists’ who wereamused, at best; a sense of pride from a mostly-Hindutvaised brahmin-dominated media fraternity, among whomthere could be several members who practice cow-urine therapy; and sheer indifference. How-ever, Thinniam wentunnoticed, uncommented upon.

On 21 May this year, a caste-Hindu thevar family in Thinniam branded two dalits, Murugesan and Ramasamy,with hot iron rods and forced them to feed dried human excreta to each other. After local activists of theDalit Panthers Movement heard about the incident on 30 May, they informed a human rights activist-lawyer andsometime in mid-June a press conference was organised where the dalits presented their testimonies. Themainstream media in India, which has almost no dalit members, ignored it.

About a month and a half later, the media splashed the news that the United States Patent and Trade Officehad granted Patent No 6410059 to an "Indian innovation which has proved that cow’s urine can makeantibiotics, anti-fungal agents and also anti-cancer drugs more effective" (The Hindu 4 July2002). The product, cow-urine distillate (CUD), was the result of a joint enterprise by the centrally fundedCouncil of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Go-Vigyan AnusandhanKendra (cow science research centre) in Nagpur.

Seems Murli Manohar Joshi, union minister for science and technology as well, notorious for introducing ‘vedicastrology’ and reviving Sanskrit courses in universities, had asked the Centre for Science and IndustrialResearch in 1999 to investigate the chemical properties of cow’s urine. According to The Indian Express(4 July 2002), 10 lakh rupees were spent over three years by the Central Institute of Medicinal and AromaticPlants at Lucknow to establish that "certain compounds in cow urine, when used in combination withcertain antibiotics like the commonly used anti-tuberculosis drug rifampicin, can help kill more bacteria thana single application of the antibiotic".

In Tamil Nadu, the Thinniam incident did not make any impression on the government, media, civil society orthe mainstream intelligentsia. Most newspapers and television channels did not report it and those that did,like The Hindu, ran shy of seeming scatological and referred to it as simply "a heinousincident".

This neglect led to another Thinniam. On 7 September, Sankan, a dalit, was drinking tea with a friend at ashop in Goundampatti, Nilakottai taluq, Dindigul district when he was attacked by six caste Hindus. He wasverbally abused and beaten up, after which an off-duty constable urinated in his mouth. Sankan had earned thewrath of the caste Hindu gounder community because he had aggressively pursued his right to a piece of land ofwhich he had been cheated.

Today in the village, even the dalits appear angry with Sankan because the caste Hindus are threatening theentire community with social boycott. Peace in a village can be maintained as long as the dalits acceptoppression and learn to digest urine.

The profanity of the sacred
Before ‘discovering’ the medicinal values of cow-urine and dung, the brahmins, during the vedic andimmediate post-vedic period, ate the meat of all kinds of animals (see Indian Food by KT Achaya, 1998). Asevident from brahminic texts such as the Satpathatha Brahmana and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, beef was infact a favourite food in vedic times.

Following the powerful discourse of spiritual democracy that Buddhism unleashed, brahmins were forced togive up beef and their cults of animal sacrifice. As the dalit-bahujan writer, Kancha Ilaiah, points out inGod as Political Philosopher, "Though the use of animal power had been discovered, the killing of animalsin the yajnas prevented their practical implementation". With the coming to power of the Buddhist kingAsoka in the third century BCE, whose edicts proscribed the killing of animals for sacrifice (however, notnecessarily for food), the brahmins not only gave up beef but slowly turned vegetarian and remained so in apost-Buddhist society; in a reversal, those who continued to, and were forced to, consume beef, specificallythe meat of the dead cow – not in a grand sacrificial manner, but as ordinary food – were labelleduntouchables. They became the ‘broken people’, literally "dalit", falling outside the pale ofthe fourfold varna system to which all caste Hindus belong.

According to this theory of the origin of untouchability that Ambedkar formulates, the broken people werethe pre-untouchables of the ‘primitive society’. To paraphrase him: During the frequent wars between the‘settled tribesmen’ and the ‘nomadic tribes’, those who were separated from their communities came toconstitute the ‘broken men’; these were then captured and used by the agriculture-bound settled communityto protect the villages from the invading nomads. Though there was no ritual untouchability imposed on thebroken people, they were to live segregated from the main village. It was a time where there was no taboo oncow’s meat and it was consumed by all.

After the brahmins made the cow a sacred animal and made beef-eating a sacrilege, the broken peoplecontinued to consume beef. The broken people were not to own any wealth, land or cattle. They could not kill acow for its meat because they did not own any. But why were they allowed to eat beef when the brahmins andnon-brahmins had given it up? Because eating the dead cow’s meat was not a crime; killing a cow was. Theycould also not imitate the savarnas in giving up beef-eating, because they "could not afford it. Theflesh of the dead cow was their principal sustenance. Without it they would starve. In the second place,carrying the dead cow had become an obligation though originally it was a privilege. As they could not escapecarrying the dead cow they did not mind using the flesh as food in the manner in which they were doingpreviously". (Ambedkar, Untouchables: Who They Were and Why They Became Untouchables, Volume 7 of Writingsand Speeches, 1990)

Having given up the most edible and nutritious part of the cow, and forcing the outcastes to consume thesame, the brahminic caste Hindus began sacralising the cow, specifically the humped zebu breed found in theSubcontinent, which finds mention in the Rig veda and is common on Indus Valley Civilisation seals. The blackbuffalo was not endowed with any such sanctity in spite of its more nutritive milk. They also sacralised andconsumed every product and by-product of the cow – milk, ghee, curd, dung and urine – substitutions forthe real thing, beef. They mixed these five ingredients to make panchgavya, assigned it therapeutic value, andascribed a place for it in the purity-pollution binary.

Hence the Manusmriti, a post-Buddhist text dated around the second century CE, ordains that "atwice-born man so deluded that he has drunk liquor should drink boiling-hot cow’s urine, water, milk,clarified butter, or liquid cow dung until he dies"(chapter 11, verses 91-92). Another verse decrees: tomake up for the crime of "stealing raw or uncooked food, a carriage, a bed, the cleansing is swallowingthe five cow-products" (Chapter 11, verse 166, from the translation by Wendy Doniger, Penguin, 1991).

Several Hindu temples, such as the one at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, serve panchgavya and cow’s urine asprasadam (divine offering) for a price. Cow’s urine has since remained ‘sacred’ and Murli Manohar Joshi,while announcing the patent achievement, recalled with pride the contemporaneity of it: "When I was youngand went to Chennai on an educational tour, I saw people drinking cow’s urine straight from the source.Everybody thought it was dirty. Today, I realise that all traditional practices from ancient Indian medicinehave a strong scientific base" (The Indian Express, 4 July 2002).

And today, that a patent on cow-urine therapy is being bestowed by the largest consumer of beef in theworld does not bother the rightwing Hindu fundamentalist Sangh Parivar or Joshi.

The brahmins and brahminic Hindus (dwijas – twice born) have been consuming cow’s urine and other wastefor centuries and continue to do so. The bovine becomes divine – Kamadhenu, gau-maata (the cow as themother) – but the dalit-untouchables are rendered subhuman.

Ambedkar says, "In Manu, there is also a provision for getting rid of defilement by transmission –namely by touching the cow or looking at the sun after sipping water". Meaning, a dwija, defiled by thesight or touch of a dalit-untouchable, has simply to touch a cow to be cleansed. The pollution caused bytouching the wrong human being can be nullified by touching the right animal. Hindus believe that some 330million gods and goddesses reside in the bowels of the cow. Yet, when a cow dies, caste Hindus would stayaway. Touching the dead cow and burying it are jobs assigned to the dalit-untouchables.

And yet, today we witness in India an episode that against this backdrop defies explanation. In Dulina,Jhajjar district, Haryana, two hours from the capital, New Delhi, five dalits were lynched by a mob on 15October. The dalits were reportedly sighted skinning a cow, but the local Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) rumourmill, in collusion with the police, spread the word that the dalits had slaughtered the cow (The IndianExpress 17-18 October).

Within three hours, a mob – of four to five thousand according to the police – gathered near the policestation where the dalits were sheltered, pulled them out, burnt two of the them alive and lynched the otherthree with stones and sharp implements. At least 50 police personnel, three sub-divisional magistrates, thedeputy superintendent of police of Jhajjar and Bahadurgarh and the block development officer watched thecarnage. It was the last day of the Dussehra festivities, and the Sangh Parivar of which the VHP is a member– which has been working overtime to raise the consciousness of Hindus on issues bovine – found it easy tomobilise villagers from the surrounding areas to "avenge the killing of the cow-killers".

A post-mortem report of the cow was ordered by the superintendent of police, Mohammad Akil, and a casefiled against the dead dalits under the Cow Slaughter Act 1960. It was reasoned by the SP that if thepost-mortem proved that the cow was alive before the dalits skinned it, "it will show how the mob gotemotional when they saw an act like this". The priest of the local temple, Mahendra Parmanand, was quotedas saying: "If they can kill our mother then what if we kill our brothers who kill her". The cow,Kamadhenu, is the mother being referred to. And we need to console ourselves: at least in death a brahminpriest was referring to the dalits as brothers. The VHP justified the killings saying, "According toHindu shastras a cow’s life is very important".

Here is a country where the imagined murder of a cow can cause more outrage than the death of a humanbeing. Again, the root of such attitudes lies in ancient brahminic injunctions. After the brahmins gave upbeef-eating, cow-slaughter was made a punishable crime and equated with the killing of the brahmin, theultimate crime. According to the scholar of Hinduism, DR Bhandarkar:

We have got the incontrovertible evidence of inscriptions to show that early in the 5th century AD killinga cow was looked upon as an offence of the deepest turpitude, turpitude as deep as that involved in murderinga Brahman. We have thus a copperplate inscription dated 465 AD and referring itself to the reign ofSkandagupta of the Imperial Gupta dynasty. It registers a grant and ends with a verse saying: ‘Whosoeverwill transgress this grant that has been assigned (shall become as guilty as) the slayer of a cow, the slayerof a spiritual preceptor (or) the slayer of a Brahman’… A still earlier record [412 AD] placing go-hatya[cow-slaughter] on the same footing as brahma-hatya [brahmin-killing] is that of Chandragupta II, grandfatherof Skandagupta… (Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Culture 1940, quoted in Ambedkar 1948).

Commenting on Bhandarkar, Ambedkar notes: "The law made by the Gupta emperors was intended to preventthose who killed cows. It did not apply to the Broken Men. For they did not kill the cow. They ate only thedead cow". Ambedkar, probably, did not reckon with how the law against cow killing could become an excuseto lynch dalits. He also perhaps did not know that one day cow-urine therapy would make its way to the USpatent office, that India would have a law that prohibits cow-slaughter (Cow Slaughter Act 1960), and dalitswould be lynched for dealing with the hide of a dead cow, or that dalits would be forced to eat shit and piss.What is unfolding against the dalits in India is something that even the Gupta period, ‘the golden age ofHinduism’, would not have witnessed or justified.

The Thinniam ‘rebellion’
In Thinniam, what was Murugesan and Ramasamy’s crime? They beat the thappu – a traditional leather drumused by dalits – and went about the village announcing that Rajalakshmi Subramani and her husband Subramanihad cheated their friend Karuppiah of 2000 rupees. About two and a half years ago, Karuppiah had paid 5000rupees to Rajalakshmi who was then the president of the village panchayat (citizens council) – though herhusband Subramani, a former schoolteacher, was the de facto president – for a house under a governmentscheme for his sister. Karuppiah’s sister was never allowed to occupy the house, and despite repeatedrequests, neither was the house allotted nor the money refunded. Eventually, Subramani returned 3000 rupeesbut Karuppiah insisted on the whole sum. When Subramani refused to pay up, Karuppiah decided to tell everyonein the village how he had been cheated.

Murugesan and Ramasamy accompanied Karuppiah as he went around the village with his thappu. Inebriated, andthus made bold, they declared that they would no longer render their traditional caste-based service asvettiyans (a dalit sub-community involved in burial ground work) to the caste Hindus if they did not get themoney back from Subramani. In the villagers’ words, "They got drunk and made some noises they wouldotherwise not make".

Learning of this, Subramani summoned Karuppiah the next morning on 20 May. The entire family beat upKaruppiah, who then quietly returned home and left the village the same night. He rarely spends time inThinniam these days.