Relax folks, this one has nothing to do with California textbooks. It seems that certain Hindu groups in India have succeeded, after a three-year campaign, in erasing all references to Hinduism’s meat eating past from school textbooks [via Desitude]. Whether you believe that eating meat is prohibited in Hinduism, or like me believe that it is a millenia old scam, you can nonetheless see why the distortion of historical fact is wrong.

Any references to the beef-eating past of ancient Hindus have finally been deleted from Indian school textbooks, after a three-year campaign by religious hardliners.

For almost a century history books for primary and middle schools told how in ancient India beef was considered a great delicacy among Hindus–especially among the highest caste–and how veal was offered to Hindu deities during special rituals.

The offending chapters have been deleted from new versions of the books which were delivered to schoolchildren last week. However, the National Council of Educational Research and Training [NCERT], which bears responsibility for the texts, now seems to be unhappy with the changes, which were agreed to by a former NCERT director.

NCERT counsel Prashant Bhushan said that ancient Hindus were indeed beef-eaters and the council should not have distorted historical facts by deleting the chapters.

“NCERT has committed a mistake by dropping those facts from the textbooks. It is a victory for Hindu fundamentalists who have lodged a misinformation campaign. Historians should unite against this cowardice by the council [NCERT],” said noted Kolkata historian Ashish Bos. [Link]

I thought surely the following quote must be the same brand of satire one of SM’s commenters is fond of writing. I was wrong of course. People actually do say stuff like this:

“Some low-caste Dalit [untouchable] Hindus used to eat beef [but] Brahmins [high caste Hindus] never ate it. Mr Sharma [Ram Sharan Sharma, author of the textbook chapters] had not researched well before writing the piece,” said firebrand Hindu leader Praveen Togadia.

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A Indian blogger in Malaysia named Sharanya Manivannan recently posted an open letter to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, asking him to take a stand on the Hindu temple demolitions that have been occurring in the country:

But I ask you this: when temples that stood for over a century are destroyed, what really dies? Not stone and statues. Not bells and prayers. Not — thankfully and thus far — people. You see, what frightens me is not the loss of these temples themselves, though architecturally speaking, that too is often a disappointment. What frightens me is what these temples are taken to represent, and by extension, what their demolitions therefore represent. (link)

[Note: if the link doesn’t work, try going to Sharanya’s blog]

Elsewhere in the letter she points out that the Indian government did send a letter of “official displeasure” to the Danish government following the publication of the anti-Islamic cartoons. Why the silence so far on the “temple cleansing” in Malaysia? She also makes some poignant comments about how Indians are treated as a whole in Malaysia, which I’ll quote below the fold.

Some background: In the past few months, Malaysian authorities have demolished a number of Hindu temples in different parts of the country, stating that they were built without a proper permit. But local Hindus have complained that they had applied for permits, sometimes waiting as long as 30 years for a response! Moreover, according to the BBC, at least two of the temples destroyed were more than a century old, which clearly suggests that getting a permit to build is not at all the issue driving the demolitions. Indeed, it seems pretty clear that these demolitions are part of an organized campaign in a country that is growing increasingly intolerant of religious minorities. (Churches and other religious structures have also been demolished along the same lines.)

Indians make up about 8% of the settled population of Malaysia, which amounts to about 2 million people, and the majority are Hindus. For the most part they have lived in Malaysia in peace (communal violence is very rare), but Indian Malaysians do often complain of discrimination and mistreatment. They have traditionally been a working class population, who came to Malaysia initially to work on rubber plantations. Continue reading →

Slate.com has a great Explainer series that I have referenced in several previous posts. Readers can write in with both serious and trivial questions alike, and Slate will find the best answer for them. A recent query inquired about what seems like a question that everyone should know a good answer to: Are Muslims Allowed To Kill Themselves?

The two Saudi detainees who reportedly hanged themselves at Guantanamo Bay must have been the victims of foul play, their relatives said on Monday. Since the men were strict Muslims, the families reasoned, they would never have taken their own lives. “It’s impossible for Yasser to commit suicide,” said the brother of one of the inmates. Are Muslims allowed to kill themselves?

No. There’s a clear prohibition on suicide in the collected sayings of the Prophet, known as the hadith. In particular, anyone who kills himself must spend an eternity repeating the act in the afterlife: “He who commits suicide by throttling shall keep on throttling himself in the Hell Fire (forever) and he who commits suicide by stabbing himself shall keep on stabbing himself in the Hell Fire.”

You won’t find as clear a statement in the Quran. This passage provides the closest thing to a ban: “Do not consume your wealth in the wrong way–rather through trade mutually agreed to, and do not kill yourselves.” But the word for “yourselves” could just as well be translated as “each other”–which would make this a ban on homicide, not suicide. [Link]

I love taking a look at the linguistics of religion. It seems almost amusing (if not for the great consequences) how a mistranslation or misinterpretation of a word (ancient vs. modern) can propogate down through all of history. Remember my earlier quoted reference pertaining to the role of the sacred cow in Hinduism?

The scriptural reason for this obsession with cows and their protection is even stranger. Vedic Sanskrit is not the classical Sanskrit that exists today. It is an older, more difficult form of the language and one of the words for “light” that is used there is “Go.” Now Go primarily meant “light,” but it also meant “cows.” In classical Sanskrit, the word means only the bovine friend. Thus, on the basis of a forgotten meaning of a word, Indian culture has wrapped itself round the protection of the cow and rendered it a sacred taboo. “Protector of the Go,” in the Vedas meant the keeper of the light–not a cowherd! And all the admonitions about protecting the Go mean something else altogether, and makes a great deal more sense, too. However, it was too late, and the word came to mean, with all its nuances, cow protection and cow reverence! A change in language renders a single word archaic, but the impact on a society is amazing. [Link]

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