I have friends who don’t eat honey because
they feel the pain of the bees, whose food is being stolen.
And then I have friends who come from
communities where traditional ritual sacrifice is necessary to keep the wheel
of life turning.
As a Brahmin, I grew up in a household
where eating buffaloes, chicken and pigs were forbidden. Brahmins don’t eat
buffalo meat because buffalo is considered to be a bovine animal. Cows cannot
be killed, or eaten, by Brahmins. All we were allowed were goats, and that too a
few times a year. That’s why Dashain was special: the goat sacrifice was
eagerly awaited because the meat was a rare treat, and also because it did
taste special because it had been offered to the goddess.
I now live in a mostly vegetarian household
where only my father and I eat meat. We cook meat in the home—usually chicken,
since ideas have changed, chicken being considered healthier—about 4 times a
year. Before, Brahmins considered chicken dirty and forbidden because it would
eat shit off the ground—including its own, as well as human feces. With the
advent of industrial farming and stringy, hormone and antibiotics laden
chicken, even this rare meat-eating episodes have been getting rarer.
The huge outcry from animal activists
against the Gadhimai sacrifice, I feel, is an opportunity to keep the
discussion going about not just this one event in Nepal, but about the whole
notion of what “Civilization” means. It is easy to brand it “barbaric”—if you
go back to the history of Western civilization, “barbarism” was an accusation
that led to the decimation of entire population of Native populations in South
and Latin America, as well as the United States. “Barbarism” has also been a
useful excuse to keep Africans chained to wheels of Western capitalism, and to
decimate their local religions and beliefs.
The Western world had a special claim to
“civilization,” which was seen to the be the opposite of “barbarism.” But
strangely, the West never once acknowledged its own barbaric histories,
including genocidally decimating huge populations of indigenous peoples in the
New World, often in the name of the Christian religion.
I believe Gadhimai is a good moment to
bring up these histories and discussions, because often the West’s morally high
ground has been used, in complex ways, to create hierarchies of human beings
which allow it to continue its exploitation—including the economic exploitation
of capitalism—to continue unchecked. Civilization is the monopoly of countries
that don’t openly sacrifice animals to gods or goddesses—but often do eat meat
grown in factories three times a day. Civilization where cars flow in an
unceasing river and chemicals and pharmaceuticals cure all diseases.
Civilization rests on the ability of Wall Street to create the illusion that money
is printed fairly, and that it is distributed through some fair means.
Civilized countries get to print more money in fancy programs called
“quantitative easing.” Countries still mired in “barbarism” don’t get any. They
have toil on for years in the oilfields of the Gulf for low or no pay, to fuel
the cars of the West.
Capitalism relies on the “civilization
versus barbarism” dichotomy to keep up its illusion of superiority. The
Christian faith has often braided itself into this complex discourse over the
centuries, being an inextricable strand of why the West continues to dominate
other cultures.
Indeed, Brahmins of Nepal should be morally
opposed to the sacrifice of Gadhimai, because its about the sacrifice of
buffalos, amongst other animals. Buffaloes are a relative of the cow, and the
cow is considered sacred to Hinduism, especially Brahmins. The reason why the
Nepali Brahmins do not oppose this event, I think, is that there appears to be
a heavy indigenous culture component to the sacrifice. And in general, local
faiths and beliefs have always been allowed in Nepal, without heavy-handed
control from hegemonic groups-despite new academic theory to the contrary. If
that were not so, Nepal would long ago have become like the USA, where
indigenous cultures are only a memory and struggle on in very tiny spaces. The
fact that strange customs and rituals survive here is precisely because the
Brahmins haven’t been as hegemonic as many US trained social scientists glibly
proclaim them to be.
Mushahars are a group considered low on the
caste hierarchy and face the most discrimination due to their culture of
hunting “rats.” What are called rats are actually field mice that eat
grain—Mushahar in turn hunt these field mice and eat them during certain
food-lean seasons. Ten years ago, I visited a Mushahar village where the
village headman proudly showed us the ways in which they used bows and arrows
(from what I remember) during their annual festival, during which they went to
hunt for field mice. Note these pests eat half the grain grown, and it’s a
survival strategy—and protein-- for the Mushahar to eat them in return. These
field mice are also offered as sacrifice to Gadhimai, which shows the complex
interweaving of how religion is often an amalgamation of different faiths and
beliefs. All of those opposing this event in a simplistic manner, calling it a
“Hindu sacrifice,” often miss the fact that this is not an event that in any
way could have endorsement from the detested Brahmins who are supposedly
running the Hindu faith.
It appears to be a complex blend of
sacrifice offered by Tharu, Mushahar and other indigenous groups in the Terai,
which has taken on local significance after the Indian authorities closed down
animal sacrifice in India, bringing huge amounts of followers to Nepal. Local
goddess worship, of course, predates the evolution of Hindu gods. I have no
doubt animal sacrifice to goddess existed long before Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva
made their appearance in South Asia. Gadhimai is not a well-known goddess—she
is a local diety known only to the people of that specific locale, meaning that
the Hindus of Kathmandu, for instance, had not heard of her before media
highlighted this specific phenomena. Many Indians are also appalled by this
sacrifice—but because “Hinduism” is often a complex, broad, and flexible set of
faiths, practices and beliefs that span a billion people, there is no central
Pope or Bible to oppose local practices. The fact these practices are not
regulated by a central authority points to how “Hinduism” may have kept
indigenous faiths alive—despite accusations by indigenous groups who often
claim that Brahmins have imposed their lifestyles on everyone.
If Brahmins dictated Hinduism’s tenets and
their priests had as much power as claimed, Gadhimai would be shut down. But in
a multi-cultural country with 58 different kinds of ethnic groups, all carrying
various levels of beliefs and practices, this kind of behavior would not be
tolerated.
I advise people who are interested to
Gadhimai to read the history of how the “civilized versus barbaric” discourse
has played out in the West, often with greatly tragic results for indigenous
cultures. As someone trained in anthropology, in which this discourse played
out in great detail, I am interested in ways “civilization”, and the discourse
of it thereof, continues to play out in contemporary life.
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