Another Indian human being, a Muslim, killed over a cow by Hindutva extremists.

The cow has had a long, quite variegated history in Hindu traditions in South Asia. Buckle-up for this whirlwind 🧵

thewire.in/communalism/ma… #Hindutva #cows #murder #India #History
Way back in the day, like 3,500 years ago, followers of Brahminical traditions sacrificed cows and ate beef. The Vedas--our earliest Indian texts--are quite clear on this.
Eating beef as part of religious practice continued for some time.

Then, in the first millennium CE, a new idea began to gain traction that not eating beef could be a mark of upper-caste status, especially being Brahmin. It was part of a larger set of prescriptions.
Around, say, 800 CE, what percentage of Brahmins were vegetarian? I have no idea. We don't have that kind of data for premodernity.

But we do know that discussion of vegetarianism generally and viewing cows as sacred in particular pops up a lot, and it was about caste.
A large part of the caste system depends on ideas of purity. And beef began to be thought of as polluting.

Note that this cuts both ways. Brahmins could be pure by avoiding beef, whereas many lower castes and Dalits were impure because they worked with leather.
Fast-forward to the nineteenth century, and there began to be a desire, among some, for a broad-based Hindu identity.

This was a big shift. In premodernity, "Hindus" rarely called themselves such, preferring instead caste terms, regional markers, etc.
In the quest to bring Hindus--many of whom had relatively little in common with one another--together under a single umbrella, some looked for rallying causes.

Cow protection was one of those. It played on long-standing Brahminical ideas of purity but was quite political.
In more recent years, cow protection has become a staple activity of the Hindu Right. It is often weaponized to harm the group that, for them, is enemy #1: Muslims.

But, that's not all you should know about cows in Indian society.
Lots of Hindus eat beef, including some Brahmins.

In part, that's attributable to regional differences. Hinduism is a hugely diverse tradition in general.

Also, human behavior doesn't always follow religious prescriptions. Some people like beef, no matter what a priest says.
India is the one of the largest exporters of beef in the world. Some years, it has topped the beef export charts.

For some, there are distinctions among bovine that matter and explain this away. Also, because capitalism.
I would sum-up, but there is no neat way to tie up these threads. And maybe that's the point we all need --

There is no single Hindu view on eating beef or cow reverence. Even religion aside, whether beef is anathema or a lucrative export depends on context.

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More from @AudreyTruschke

Aug 5
The Hindu Right is objecting to historical images of Hindu deities.

This isn't surprising, but it is appalling and, dare I say it, anti-Hindu. Here's how that works...

scroll.in/latest/1029850… #Hindutva #Hinduism
The "Hindu Right" is a set of groups and individuals aligned on political lines. Some are practicing Hindus, and some are not. They all share allegiance to a political ideology of Hindu supremacy known as Hindutva.
Hindutva thinkers have been intolerant of many Hindu ideas from the start. The godfather of Hindutva ideology, Savarkar mocked Hindu practices, such as cow veneration as lowering the standing of humanity (get angry at him, not me; I find many of Savarkar's ideas offensive).
Read 6 tweets
Aug 2
I'm writing today about the first Indian experience with European colonization -- the Portuguese Estado da India, established in 1505 and limited to a handful of cities along India's southwestern coast.
This chapter of Indian history gets going when, as the conventional narrative goes, Vasco de Gama successfully sails around Africa and arrives in Calicut in 1498.

That's true, but here's some things I think are pretty critical to add to the story --
Once the Portuguese navigated around the Cape of Good Hope, they found themselves in a world teeming with experienced Indian Ocean traders. They used this local knowledge.

Vasco de Gama even picked up a Gujarati, in what is now Kenya, to help him sail on to Calicut.
Read 8 tweets
Jun 8
We lose a lot of things in history, and right now I am somewhat obsessed -- in a healthy, historian way -- with the takht-i firuza, or the so-called Turquoise Throne.

Here's the story --
Kapaya Nayaka, ruler of Telangana in the second quarter of the 14th century, commissioned the throne.

He originally intended it as a gift for the Tughluqs, who were in Daulatabad, trying to hold onto their relatively newly acquired landholdings in central and southern India.
But the Tughluqs couldn't hold on. Some of their own rebelled, and the rest tucked their tail between legs and ran back to Delhi.

The rebels established a new Indo-Persian dynasty in 1347: the Bahmanis, originally based in Gulbarga.

So, they got the throne instead.
Read 7 tweets
Jun 6
Folks, some resources for educating yourself about the basics of #caste, in history and today. A lot Indians probably don't need this... some other folks who follow me here appear to be in dire need of this education.

#AcademicTwitter
I have successful taught Flueckiger's "A Note on Caste," which is about 5 pages in her book Everyday Hinduism.

It covers terminology in different languages, some caste markers, class / urbanization differences, and discrimination.

google.com/books/edition/…
For your really basic, sort of statement of facts, this BBC explainer can be helpful. It doesn't connect the dots much, but it has the virtue of being succinct:

bbc.com/news/world-asi…
Read 5 tweets
May 17
We have learned a lot about how the Hindu Right -- in the US and India -- operates in the last year, and how they coordinate with one another.

SASAC has updated the Hindutva Harassment Field Manual to reflect those advancements in our knowledge.

hindutvaharassmentfieldmanual.org/organized
Specifically, there is added information about TekFog, an app used to manipulate social media and encrypted messaging platforms.
There are also insights gained from analyzing the anti-intellectual attacks on the Dismantling Global Hindutva conference, which came from Hindu nationalist groups in the US and India.

They tried to make it look like grassroots concern, but the data reveals the harassment.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 21
@davidfrum Sure. In brief, Aurangzeb's name is a dog whistle to signal that it is acceptable to hate and use violence against present-day Muslims.

Here's a bit more on how it works --
@davidfrum Hindu nationalism stipulates that Muslims are the primary enemy, always.

This othering has electoral and social value for Hindu nationalists in the present. But it is hard to justify, and so Hindu nationalists demonize Muslims relentlessly, including in the past.
@davidfrum Hindu nationalist mythology stipulates, among other things, that Muslims oppressed Hindus for hundreds of years (this is historically inaccurate).

The Hindu nationalist idea, then, is that Muslims deserve to be oppressed today, as retribution for the past.
Read 4 tweets

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