olks with infantile minds keep laying down laws for what is dharma and the true path and what is holy or unholy, says Matsyendranath (the guru of Gorakhnath who laid the foundations for the Nath sect in North India), in his seminal treatise Akulveer Tantra (78-87). One doesn’t know if his present-day follower, the newly incumbent chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath, would agree, but according to Guru Matsyendranath, to gain true knowledge is to rise above various petty rules and definitions propagated in the name of dharma. Kaulopanishad, the shorter but even more intense treatise of the Kaul Siddhanta (yes, the Kashmiri surname derives from it), goes a step further and says the only thing that is forbidden is badmouthing others (lok ninda). Real self-knowledge, adhyatma, means observing no fasting, feasting or rules thereof, and no desire for founding a sect. All are created equal and one who realises this becomes truly free (mukt).The present-day political dispensation, blinded as it is by its politicised and reductive vision of things, including vegetarianism, would do well to look towards the true Indian culture foreign to its lunatic fringes, and one that they are unable to absorb. My mother’s teacher, the great scholar Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, once used a wonderful term from the Shakta Tantra for a true understanding of history. He called it shav sadhana, a term used by a tantrik sadhaka to explain to him that to gain true knowledge (siddhi), one needs to find and straddle a dead body at a masan (cremation ground, a spot where all lives have been reduced to ash) and then meditate, shutting out everything around him. It is a long and tedious process during which evil forces try their best to distract the seeker with half-truths, but if he can remain detached and focused, at some point the head of the corpse will turn completely around and as it faces the constant sadhaka, address and explain the quintessential wisdom, setting all his queries at rest. Picture this: pure knowledge being passed on through an inert form with the head at an angle of 360 degrees, offering no attachment either to the old or the new, the traditional or the practised forms of life. This, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi writes, is knowledge that sets one free.

It is only against this rather long philosophical context (the Sanskrit for philosophy is darshan, meaning to see) that the highly incendiary subject of the long history of meat eating in India can be understood properly.
 

History of meat-eating

There is enough historical evidence by now that Indians since the days of the Indus Valley have indulged in dishes made with meat and poultry: zebu cattle (humped cattle), gaur (Indian bison), sheep, goat, turtle, ghariyal (a crocodile-like reptile), fish fowl and game. The Vedas refer to more than 250 animals of whom about 50 were deemed fit to be sacrificed and, by inference, for eating. The marketplace had various stalls for vendors of different kinds of meat: gogataka (cattle), arabika (sheep), shookarika (swine), nagarika (deer) and shakuntika (fowl). There were even separate vends for selling alligator and tortoise meat (giddabuddaka). The Rigveda describes horses, buffaloes, rams and goats as sacrificial animals. The 162nd hymn of the Rigveda describes the elaborate horse sacrifice performed by emperors. Different Vedic gods are said to have different preferences for animal meat. Thus Agni likes bulls and barren cows, Rudra likes red cows, Vishnu prefers a dwarf ox, while Indra likes a bull with droopy horns with a mark on its head, and Pushan a black cow. The Brahmanas that were compiled later specify that for special guests, a fattened ox or goat must be sacrificed. The Taittireeya Upanishad praises the sacrifice of a hundred bulls by the sage Agasthya. And the grammarian Panini even coined a new adjective, goghna (killing of a cow), for the guests to be thus honoured.

The meat, we learn, was mostly roasted on spits or boiled in vats. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad has reference to meat cooked with rice. Also the Ramayana, where during their sojourn in the Dandakaranya forest, Rama, Lakshmana and Sita are said to have relished such rice (with meat and vegetables). It is called mamsambhutdana. In the palace at Ayodhya, during the sacrifices performed by king Dashratha, the recipes described are far more exotic with acid fruit juices being added to mutton, pork, chicken and peacock meat and cloves, caraway seeds and masur dal also being added to various dishes. The Mahabharata has references to rice cooked with minced meat (pistaudana) and picnics where various kinds of roasted game and game birds were served. Buffalo meat was fried in ghee with rock salt, fruit juices, powdered black pepper, asafetida (hingu) and caraway seeds, and served garnished with radishes, pomegranate seeds and lemons.

Then come the Buddhist Jatakas and Brahtsamhita (6th Century CE) that maintain the list of non-vegetarian food items, adding some more species. All in all, meat till then appears to have been deemed a nourishing food. It is even recommended by the famed physician Charaka for the lean, the very hard working and those convalescing from a long illness. The Jains, of course, remained totally averse to devouring any form of life. But the Buddha did not forbid the eating of meat if offered as alms to Buddhist bhikkus, provided the killing should not have happened in the presence of the monks. It was the responsibility of the giver of the alms to ensure this.
 

No inhibitions down south

Down south, the inhibitions against eating meat and fish are rare. In the earliest writings on food dating back to 300 CE, pepper (kari) is described as the main spice for flavouring meat. Fried meat had three names and meat boiled with tamarind and pepper was called pulingari. It was occasionally ground to make a sort of pasty relish. Kapilar, the famous Brahmin priest of the Sangam age, speaks with a certain relish of consuming meat and liquor. Old Tamil has four terms for beef: valluram, shushiyam, shuttiraichi and padithiram. There were 15 names for pork, a special favourite, we learn, among the wives of traders in the coastal region. There are also references to wild boar, rabbits and deer being hunted with hunting dogs. Captured boars were fattened with rice flour and kept away from the female to make their flesh tastier. Among more exotic meats were porcupines (a favourite of the Kuruvars) and fried snails (favoured by the Mallars). Down south, there was also no taboo on eating domestic fowl (kozhi). Fish and prawns were greatly relished all along the coastal region, so much so that the word for fish, meen, also entered the lexicon of Sanskrit as the north learnt to relish this fruit of the seas.

Contrary to prevalent notions, the Ayurvedacharyas did not deem meat as avoidable. The Sushrut Samhita compiled by the physician sage Sushruta lists eight kinds of meats. The Manasollas, a treatise ascribed to the 13th century king Someshwara, similarly gives pride of place to the chapter on food entitled Annabhoga. It refers to nuggets of liver roasted or fried and then served with yogurt or a decoction of black mustard, to pigs roasted whole with rock salt and pepper with a dash of lemon and served carved in strips resembling palm leaves.

There are no fewer than three great artistic works in Hindi that, like the panels of a tryptich, portray the hellish vision of things for this century: Yashpal’s Jhootha Sach, Rahi Masoom Raza’s Adha Gaon and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas. The Yogi’s Raj had only to make its entrance to mime what fiction had already imagined.

This Article was first published on Scroll.in
 

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This year's demonetisation is just one of the many turning points in India brought about by the supreme will of a ruler.

November 8 saw India’s first encounter with imperium, or absolute power, in years.

As I heard Prime Minister Narendra Modi speak on national television that evening, I thought: in what democracy can the persona of a leader, his manias and phobias, his pet theories and obsessions come together and lead him to declare 86% of the currency in circulation redundant with immediate effect?

Empires of India, whether of the old-fashioned kind, or dressed in democratic robes, have usually been created and consolidated under the leadership of a single leader, nearly always male. By the powers vested in him by patriarchy and/or lineage, such a leader will first create a solid constituency for himself, and then, assured by his total control over his followers, he will then mount an ambitious expansionist phase. If need be, during this he may stop in his tracks suddenly and subvert and change the rules of the power game that has brought him so far, thus ruling out another imitator overtaking him – the proverbial kicking away of the ladder.

From Ashoka to Kanishka, Mohammad Bin Tughlaq to Akbar, the Governors General of the British East India Company to various viceroys who served the British Crown, from Indira Gandhi to Narendra Modi, the list of undisputed leaders of the ruling dispensation initiating a sudden and astoundingly radical turnaround, and unleashing transformational changes to outwit their perceived challengers, runs long.

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote: “Man will get used to anything, if only he reaches an appropriate degree of submission.”

Silence falls when everything has been officially investigated, reported and interpreted and justified clearly. All else is rendered trivial, second-rate or likely to be termed seditious.

Empires have a history far longer than the democratic state. And it is undeniable that today globally, a climate conducive to conservatism and protectionism – the building blocks of imperium – has come to prevail.

In India, the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes is just the most recent example of this. Come to think of it, the exercise is just one of the many other turning points in our history that were brought about by the will of a Chakravartin Samrat (powerful ruler) or Shah of Shahs or a popular democratically-elected party supremo. The energy of the Indian nation has usually been spent far less on grassroots initiatives than carrying out the wish of the leader of a ruling elite.
 

Memories of the Raj

In 1833, the British East India Company had tried initiating demonetisation of the old native coinage for its Indian presidencies, quoting British politician Lord Liverpool’s (1770-1828) thesis that bimetallism – the system of allowing the unrestricted currency of two metals like gold and silver as legal tender – is impractical.

In 1835, a declaration from Governor-General William Bentinck in Calcutta demonetised all old gold coins and introduced a unified coinage system for India with the Madras silver rupee as the standard. The gold mohur (coin) of the Mughal empire was deliberately undervalued to dissuade its usage, and soon its circulation began to fall. In 1841 came another proclamation authorising the government to receive gold, but it continued to pay out only silver.

Over two decades later, in February of 1856, Governor-General Lord Dalhousie’s doctrine of Summary Settlement, or a reassessment of land and revenues, (he called it “a parting coup”) summarily dismantled the centuries old mutual dependence and complementarity between rural land owners (jagirdar or talukadar) and cultivators in the newly amalgamated province of Awadh in present-day Uttar Pradesh.

With the simultaneous banishment of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the erstwhile ruler of Awadh, an entire range of subordinate rights – between the Nawab and the nobles, between rural Talukdars and their cultivators (sustained through the years by grants, special concessions during bad years, blood money and rewards), between the nobles and the guilds of weavers and artisans they employed – were also thrown out of the window.

The weavers and artisans, singers and dancers who had traditionally produced and directly sold their products to their noble patrons and well-to-do citizens, were reduced to penury, while farmers stood face-to-face with the rapacious revenue officials of the East India Company, also referred to as Company Bahadur, who undervalued their lands and over assessed the revenues payable to the company.

Company Bahadur representatives would arrive with armed sepoys and use strong-arm tactics to collect revenue. The local landowner who was steadily losing his lands under the Summary Settlement, was no longer a buffer between them and the government.

As ordinary citizens lapsed into brooding silence, and prices of commodities rose alarmingly, the atmosphere grew ominously dark. Threatening governmental decrees announced harsh punishments to be meted out to those who did not pay the new taxes, which, in some instances, were said to run as high as 45% of the total produce.

The Company Bahadur’s carefully chosen cadres embedded with native rural revenue officials (the Patwari, the Nazim and the Chakledar) now replaced and completely redefined a customary native system of governance based on caste and lineage. The British civil service for India, raised by Dalhousie’s predecessors, and the highest paid in the world at that time, now began to be perceived as the new mai-baap (masters), where citizens were at the mercy of their goodwill.

Thus the 19th century version of the licence raj of inspectors and bureaucrats, trained to be forever suspicious, and promoted for skills in exacting far greater revenues for the Company no matter what the human cost, came into being.
 

Easy corruption

This opened the floodgates for corruption in Awadh as wily bands of power-drunk revenue officials visited villages accompanied by a retinue of petty native revenue clerks who interpreted and measured and wrote out the horoscopes for coming generations of hapless cultivators.

By one stroke of the pen these early native representatives of the East India Company, who were mostly Bengali or Bihari as the British Raj’s capital was located in Calcutta, could now snatch priceless and vast inherited lands and exact revenues (jama) after they had been set at back-breaking rates.

Amrit Lal Nagar, a Hindi writer who roamed the villages of Awadh in 1957, a century after the first war of Independence, wrote that this stigmatised Bengalis and Biharis in villages in that area for generations. Even 100 years later, the words Bengali or Bihari were synonymous with lies and deceit all over Awadh, wrote Nagar.

But of course, the collection of revenue rose sharply. In 1856, on the eve of his departure from India, Dalhousie happily boasted that thanks to his efforts Britain’s Queen Victoria had not only acquired 50,00,000 more subjects, but also stood to earn £1,30,00,000 of extra revenue for the royal treasury.

While officials applauded and Britain toasted Dalhousie, the ordinary people of Awadh like farmers, including farmer-sepoys of the Bengal Army numbering some 75,000, land owners, courtiers and the host of craftspeople and artisans they had supported, found that they had lost control over their lives and means of livelihood.

Old patterns of life and livelihood, even old currency bearing the familiar seal of their summarily dethroned rulers, seemed to appear or disappear by a seemingly magical force.

Gold coinage was demonetised, and silver coins minted in far away Surat and Bombay were the new common currency even in Awadh. With a drastic upward reassessment of revenues, the price of essential commodities rose. As raw cotton was diverted to the British mills and an export-led boom in the Indian economy filled the Company coffers to the brim, an acute scarcity of currency loomed on the horizon even as the native farmers, many of them sepoys in the Company’s Bengal Army, the weavers and other artisans faced penury.

The only thing that grew manifold was corruption. Since the Nawab had no power over the revenue officers or the Army, it resulted in gross misgovernance. After throwing the entire system into a tail-spin, Dalhousie recommended the removal of the Nawab of Lucknow on charges of misgovernance terming Awadh as “a fortress of corruption…and misgovernance”.

This was supreme irony. But the normally witty Awadh had, by now ,lost its self respect and with it, its fabled sense of humour.
 

The new authority

In the years following the Summary Settlement initiated by Dalhousie, government officials quickly created regulatory methods to grab various advantages for their own kind. As old Awadh crumbled and vanished into the mists of time, in its place rose a heavy and powerful edifice symbolising the new authority: The Residency.

Here a devilishly cunning scheme was crafted whereby prime land was deliberately under assessed and convenient legal loopholes were then used to ease out the original owners and auction the land holdings deemed mismanaged.

No surprises for guessing that each auction was handled by the revenue officials who, along with their cronies from the new mercantile classes, managed to buy prime land at very low prices for their families.

The descendants of these civil servants and their crony capitalist friends replaced the earlier elite and turned into city-dwelling gentleman farmers who had the tenant farmers till their fields and visited the villages only to take air (havakhori) or to hunt.

Development became the buzzword to mask this, and the rapacious hunt for ever-higher revenues for the government. Farmers were coerced into growing cash crops like cotton and indigo, and the swift movement of goods and vital raw material for export to England was given a further push by developing the railway network, roads and ports. The telegraph services were extended to facilitate faster communication from Calcutta to Peshawar. The Army was provided the latest ammunition, among them the famous Enfield rifles whose cartridges, greased with animal fat, triggered the first war of Independence (that the British refer to as the Mutiny).

In 1856, Dalhousie departed for England surrounded by glory. It seemed that the government machinery he left behind was firmly in control. Then, suddenly, a year later, a bloody mutiny erupted within the Bengal Army headquartered in Meerut, which took everyone by surprise. Another major surprise was the rare solidarity that a common anger against the British had helped forge across caste, community and gender lines – between Hindus and Muslims, veiled queens and the nobility, land owners and lowly tenant farmers, and sepoys and civilians.

A few years later, while analysing the so-called mutiny in his 1864 book, A History of the Sepoy War in India, for the fatigued, disoriented and nervous British, military historian John William Kaye wrote that the British may have erred in playing down the resentment of an overtaxed people and forcing the pace of change with “an unwholesome rapidity” so as to “screw up the revenue…to the highest possible pitch”.

Sounds familiar?

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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Announcements about locating a life-enhancing medicinal herb will kindle extraordinary emotions and hopes among people. So, the news that the present Uttarakhand government has announced a budget of INR 25 crore to locate the mythical Sanjivani Booti in Uttarakhand, went viral. This plant is referred to in the Valmiki Ramayana, when Ram was battling the forces of Ravana in the far off lands of Sri lanka. When his brother Lakshman was fatally wounded during the battle Rama sent for Sushena Vaidya to help revive him. Sushena Vaidya, it is said, ordered Ram’s main attendant, Hanuman to fly to the greatest among the mountains, the Himalayas (Nag Sreshta Himavant) and bring him the Mrit Sanjivani (literally an infuser of life) plant so that he could revive the comatose young warrior. The plant grows in the Drongiri range, he tells Hanuman, and because it gives off a strange light, it can be spotted in the dark. Hanuman left without losing time but when he arrived among the mountains, he was confused and did not know where to look. Finally, the epic says, rather than delay matters any further, this son of the Wind God excised an entire hillside that was said to contain the plant, and took off. Lakshmana was revived and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today the Sanjivani Booti for scientists remains a mythical plant with little or no scientific proof of its existence. But the locals claim it can still be located if the government mounts an aggressive search in the remote region bordering Tibet. In 2009, the BJP government led by the poet CM Ramesh Pokhariyal “Nihshank”, had similarly announced a budget of some INR 6 lakh for the search and applied to the (then Congress-led) Central Government for an additional grant. Unfortunately the grant never came after which the plan fizzled out. But the present (Congress-led) State Government has announced a more ambitious budget of INR 25 crore, so things may pan out better. But this time there is a BJP-led government at the Centre, which has predictably turned down the request for an additional grant. The State Minister in charge of alternative medicine, Surendra Singh Negi, who controls Ayush, the department that will be carrying out the search, is expected to lead it.

In case they do locate the magical glowing plant, it will be the silver bullet Harish Rawat, the present Chief Minister, needs to fill the coffers of his government and win next year’s Assembly Elections. It is also notable that according to some reports Om Prakash, Secretary of the department concerned, has gone on record to say that there never was any move to make a proposal for seeking Central funding.

If naturopathy is the name of the game, can Baba Ramdev’s Ashram stay behind? Recently, Baba’s disciple and business associate in chief, Balkrishna, asserted that he has located two Sanjivani plants. He has, however, not revealed anything more thereafter.  

Be that as it may, let’s go back to the various names and description of Sanjivani Booti, from ancient myths that have travelled to lands as far off as Indonesia, Cambodia and of course Sri Lanka where Hanuman had carried half a mountain containing this plant. The name Sanjivani  occurs not only in the Ramayana,  but also in Mahabharata where the Asura Guru Shukracharya is said to have used it to bring back Asuras to life after they had been killed by the Devas. The same herb is also said have helped king Yayati to reverse the ageing of his body and regain male vigour. Ancient dictionaries like the Marathi Sanskrit Geervan Laghu kosh and the Sanskrit Shabd Kalpdrum, call it Rudanti or Rudantika, meaning a plant that oozes a liquid. Shabd Kalpadrum also calls it Romanchika, a nerve stimulator that can arouse a patient from  Coma.     

But history has continued beyond Ramayana in the Drongiri village from where Hanuman had brought the miracle plant, and in the process destroyed the right side of the holy mountain (Parvat Dev). This hard to access village (the 45 kms long bus ride from Joshimath to Jumma, has to be followed by a tedious trek for 8 kms) is home to some 400 Bhotiya families who migrate during the severe winters to villages at lower altitudes. This area measuring 5.5 kms has at least 500 glaciers like Bagini, Changbang and Neeti, and  attracts a host of poeple from outside during the summers: mostly gatherers of rare herbs and hunters looking (illegally) to hunt the musk deer and Himalayan bear. The Kidi herb, a kind of natural Viagra, that the locals collect from the grassy areas (Bugyal) fetch a most handsome price in the plains from where it is smuggled into China and other South East Asian countries for a fortune. Nothing much can be grown at this altitude (3610 metres) so the villagers live by breeding sheep and gathering herbs for selling in the city.

In this ecologically sensitive zone, Hanuman still remains unforgiven though. For the villagers of the Dronagiri village he is the destroyer of the right flank of a holy mountain they  worship. It is said that during the Treta Yug when Hanuman flew in to carry away the Sanjivani Booti for reviving his lord’s younger brother, the villagers did not allow him passage. Since time was running out, Hanuman dressed as a bedraggled Sadhu and begged an elderly woman in the village to help him locate the magic mountain where the herb grew. The matriarch was sufficiently moved by his plea and pointed out the carefully covered up area to the intruder who then proceeded to disfigure the mountain and carry away the magic plant. The old woman was then banished from the village and all women were then barred from the ritual worship of the mountain. Ecological preservation has been a way of life in the Himalayan villages ever since human families settled there. And any deliberate degradation of the local topography, flora or fauna brings up extraordinary emotions. Since Hanuman had dared destroy a hillside, even today, temples in the area refuse to house an idol of Hanuman. At the formal celebration of Jagar in the village, when the spirit of the Dev Parbat appears in the body of a medium (known as  Pashuwa) amid chanting of prayers, the right arm (symbolic of the right flank of the Drongiri hill) hangs limp and lifeless till the soul of the Parbat Devta departs.  

At the annual staging of a three day Ramlila too, all references to Hanuman have been expunged for centuries. Even today, when the state being dubbed Dev Bhumi or abode of gods is enjoying a period of accelerated growth of temples and attracting vast crowds of the faithful, the Ramlila in this village will still begin with Ram’s childhood, move on to his wedding following a Swayamvar to Sita and ends with his coronation.

If Hanuman is still not forgiven by the guardians of the holy mountain and of the life enhancing herb that glows in the dark, does a government of mere mortals stand a chance?

Courtesy: indianculturalforum.in

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