Why scenes of animal carnage are ‘not Hindu’

EVERY five years, devotees from across the India/Nepal southern border come to the temple of Gadhimai, a local goddess, in Bariyarpur village, to pray and offer sacrifice.

In 2014, 3,256 beasts were beheaded in a gruesome rite, exposure to which caused uproar across the media.

But that tally is nothing compared with a mind-boggling 18,600 animals slain in 2009.

Media coverage of the recent decision to ban the Gadhimai festival, the world’s largest animal sacrifice, has provoked widespread anger for being dubbed ‘Hindu’.

It has also obscured an internal debate that reveals more about the West’s religious illiteracy and less about the facts.

Since 2009, the media has played a critical role in highlighting the brutal slaughter of animals at the Gadhimai temple and helped build a global campaign against it.

But in its enthusiasm to declare the ritual ‘barbaric’ and ‘archaic’, it has grossly exaggerated the role of animal sacrifice in Hinduism as a whole, misunderstood the importance of community specific deities, and underestimated the confluence of local economics and politics that fosters such a practice.

Though the Gadhimai Mela’s origins are obscured in history, the most commonly accepted version tells of a convict named Bhagwan Choudhary who in the eighteenth century dreamt that goddess Gadhimai would free him in exchange for a blood sacrifice.

After discussing the matter with a local shaman, a ritual involving the shedding of five drops of human blood and a sacrifice of five animals - a pig, a rat, a rooster, a water buffalo and a goat - was performed.

Since then, the Chief Pujari or priest – a direct descendent of Bhagwan Choudhary – initiates the festival with panchbali or the sacrifice of the five animals.

But things are changing.

On 28 July, the Gadhimai Temple Committee, including Chief Pujari Mangal Chaudhary Tharu, agreed that they ‘would actively promote and campaign against animal sacrifice.’

Media coverage

While international and national media have reported this change enthusiastically, they have mostly done so without understanding the relative novelty of this festival among Hindus more generally.

The Daily Mail chose to depict a religion of over one billion followers, a significant population of which practices vegetarianism, with this strap: ‘Centuries-old festival where Hindus decapitate hundreds of thousands of animals to “appease goddess” is banned.’

While the Guardian has previously called the Gadhimai festival a ‘Hindu sacrifice’, the Daily Mail termed this a ‘Hindu ceremony’ ignoring the fact that it is a localised event, one which many Hindus across India, Nepal and the world had not heard of until 2009.

In its bid to condemn, the media sought to portray the Gadhimai festival, and other rituals of animal sacrifice, as a frequent occurrence among Nepal’s Hindus rather than a rare and localised event, which they are.

Indeed, a recent CNN report makes a smooth transition from reporting about an alleged case of child sacrifice in Nepal to how ‘Superstitions such as the sacrificial slaughter of animals such as water buffaloes, goats and chickens are common among the country's mainly Hindu population.’

This religiously uninformed commentary on the issue extended into the Indian media. The online portal Youth Ki Awaz suggested that the sacrifice was based on ‘Hindu mythology’ rather than a local legend.

Indian newspaper The Hindu on the other hand called it ‘Nepal’s Gadhimai festival’, not mentioning the fact that most devotees at this festival, and around eighty per cent of the animals, come from India.

After the April-May earthquake in Nepal that killed more than 8,500 people, there were a number of online articles and comments on how the earthquake was a ‘karmic’ reaction to the slaughter of animals during the Gadhimai festival.

‘A well-crafted ad campaign might even force the ignorant and superstitious Nepalese killers to abandon the bloody tradition for fear of future natural disasters befalling the country,’ wrote Roland Vincent, Special Editor, Animal Liberation for Greanville Post.

Dr Ramesh N Rao, Professor of Communication at Columbus State University and a commentator on Hinduism, says that this reaction of the media is not new and is rooted inthe idea of Hinduism as ‘exotic’.

‘The “liberal/progressive” Hindu, unmoored from tradition and ritual, distanced from intimate knowledge of his/her community, and concerned about presenting a “modern” face to his/her “Western/global” interlocutors, tends to write ill and speak harshly of “tradition” and of his/her fellow Hindu’, he said. 

He adds, ‘Then there are the Western and Abrahamic “others” who have considered India a land both exotic and unruly, and wished to impose upon the Hindu their worldview, and to caricature the Hindu for internal consumption.’

Hindus react

The indictment of rituals like animal sacrifice as ‘Hinduism’ stems from the Anglicisation of India’s multifarious devotional practices.  Orientalists and bureaucrats projected a view of Hinduism as a centralized, monolithic religion with a singular philosophy, often for administrative purposes.

This idea, Hindu intellectuals argue, was then lapped up by Hindu orthodoxy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seeking to emulate ‘modern’ Western societies.

Hinduism, however, doesn’t fit the Abrahamic model, and is instead grounded in plurality, with its own intellectual structures.  It is subject to change and merger, through ‘self-opposing and self-reforming’ flows.

Jeyamohan, a Hindu intellectual, writes that Hinduism’s ‘… fundamentals are not based on customs, rituals or beliefs. It is a Knowledge Space that progresses on its own internal dialectic that splits and splices, accepts and rejects constantly.’

Criticising animal sacrifice as a ‘Hindu’ tradition or based on an idea of Hinduism makes very little sense therefore, and is rooted in religious illiteracy.

Manoj Gautam, President of Animal Welfare Network Nepal (AWNN), one of the key activists negotiating with the temple authorities for more than six years, says that change has only been possible because of social progress, activism and community leadership.

‘We realised there is a space for change when the pujari himself said, back in 2010, that the animal sacrifice is wrong,’ Gautam told Lapido.

According to the sampling done by AWNN, while 18,600 water buffaloes were killed in the festival in 2009, the number decreased to 3256 in 2014.

For Gautam, however, this is an animal welfare issue and should not be politicised or communalised as ‘Hindu’ or pushed by Western influence.

‘As a Hindu and a Nepali, it was my duty to clean-up my house of things like animal sacrifice which is not part of the spiritual tradition at the core of Hinduism.’

He adds that a number of influential Hindu leaders, including Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev, and Swami Agnivesh, have lent their voices against animal sacrifice.

Maneka Gandhi, a BJP Minister and influential animal rights activist, has also been at the forefront of the campaign to end animal sacrifice and uses Hindu scripture to condemn the ritual.

Rao puts a stress on the meaning of sacrifice or yajna in the life of Hindus and the Hindu community – ‘both of whom embrace not just the immediate, material world but the world in all its cosmic manifestations and ambit.

‘In the large scheme of Hindu worship and rituals, animal sacrifice, especially now, is a “minority” affair, and sometimes abused by scheming tantrics and local godmen,’ adds Rao.

It appears that even he does not however rule out sacrifice altogether.  And that’s the rub.

‘Sacrifice in Hinduism, when performed correctly, has to be mindful and not a mindless ritual, and is governed by strict rules of what gets offered, how it gets offered, and who has the adhikara or right to perform the sacrifice’, he says.

According to Encyclopedia of Religions by John G. R. Forlong, there are seven forms of yajna in Hinduism, of which bali-yajna or bali, as animal sacrifice is usually called, is one small and not popular, form.

‘As such, animal sacrifice in the Hindu scheme of things, so to speak, is at present, as it was in the past, a “side show”, which has had both significance and importance to individuals seeking favours of the gods, and communities seeking bounty or forgiveness’, says Rao.

Given this continued significance of rituals, even animal welfare activists, who have been negotiating with the temple trust, realize that to transform the festival, they must convince the community by using Hinduism’s own vocabulary and intellectual structures, rather than secular indictments.