6 - Subverting the ‘Sacred Cow’: When Beef Becomes Edible

Summary

During my fieldwork in 2011, it was not uncommon to hear Thabangi elders describing the Maoist age as the epoch of cow slaughtering. Kripa, the elder from the clan of Budha who lived through all the major political upheavals of the 20th century—the deposition of the Rana regime in 1951, the arrival of multi-party democracy in 1990, and the People's War from 1996 to 2006—said:

In the old days, there was a maxim: do not kill a cow, do not kill a human being (gai namarne, manche namarne). A human being and a cow were equal, they were one (gai ani manche eutai ho). Since the beginning of the war, human life was taken, and cow's life was taken (mancheko jivan gayo, gaiko jivan gayo). During the Rana times [1851–1951], for killing either a human being or a cow one was put in prison. Now it is different: since the beginning of the war, everything is different. The war started and people went to the jungle, the police came and started interrogating, torturing people, it was the time of slaughter (maramar) …

The most serious transgression of the moral order in the past, cow slaughter, became acceptable during the conflict, for it was not only the killing of cows but also of human beings that became the norm. As a villager put it, ‘Police came and killed people, and if a man can be killed, why not a cow?’ For the villagers, devaluation of human life was of equal or even more salient concern than the inviolability of the sacred cow. In the same way that the war blurred the boundaries between higher- and lower-caste people, making them equal, at least for the duration of the war, the conflict equalized the life of a human, which was arguably not that sacred for the Nepali state in the past, and that of the cow, which had previously been protected by all means.

This chapter seeks to understand how the change in the fundamental principle underlying the social and legal order in Nepal—that of the sacredness of the cow—came about. Considered to be the gravest transgression of the moral and legal order in the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal, the killing of the cow was punishable by death in the early 19th century, later by life imprisonment, and most recently by a twelve-year jail sentence.