I had forgotten all about it. Who remembers incidents that happened 52 years ago? But then, as I watched the 1923 movie ‘Society of the Snow’, it started gradually coming back. On October 13, 1972, a short-duration chartered flight had crashed over the Andes. Search for the aircraft was abandoned after eight days, and the survivors were left to fend for themselves under extremely cold conditions. There was hardly anything to eat. A single biscuit for three days, cotton stuffing of the seats, leather of belts and shoes—the survivors tried everything till their body started consuming itself. Their urine output reduced to a few drops of black liquid. The ordeal continued for more than 70 days for the final survivors, who were left with no option but to cannibalise the dead co-passengers.
Some
creatures are carnivore. Other animals are their food. The herbivore mostly eat
plants but may also drink milk which is an animal product; and the omnivore eat
plants and food of animal origin. Humans, and many human deities, are omnivore.
The Muniyandi Swami temple in Madurai offers chicken and mutton biryani as prasad on its annual three-day festival,
the Vimala temple in Puri doles out fish and mutton dishes during the Durga
Puja festival, the Tarkulha Devi temple in Gorakhpur serves mutton during the
Khichari Mela, the Parassinik Kadavu temple in Kerala has a prasad of fish and toddy, and the meat
or fish at the Kalighat temple in Kolkata, the Kamakhya temple in Assam, the
Tarapith in Birbhim in West Bengal and Dakshineswar in the same state are not
unknown (The Times of India, July 13, 2022). Some years ago my aunt was
appalled to see eggs being offered at the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu. I
have seen meat dishes being enjoyed at Durga Puja pandals. Bengali and Maithil priests relish fish and meat. The meat
and seafood delicacies served to Budhhist monks in Thailand can easily be the
pride of the best gourmet meals. The Dalai Lama is not averse to eating meat.
Some people quote an instance of Ram and Lakshman eating deer meat from the
Valmiki Ramayana, while some others point out meat-eating instances in the
Mahabharata.
As
per a mythological story, the Buddha-to-be was a hare in a previous birth. He
decided to perform sacrifice by offering his favourite food, green succulent
grass, to humans. Finding no takers, he realised that humans didn’t eat grass
but loved to eat animal meat. Exercising the highest sacrifice, he resolved to
offer himself as food. Learning about it, Lord Indra came to him in the
disguise of a hungry Brahmin and asked for food. The hare jumped in the fire to
get cooked. However, Lord Indra saved him and commemorated the ultimate
sacrifice by placing an imprint of the hare on the moon. Some other versions of
this story also exist, but the gist remains the same.
Violence,
a killing to be exact, is associated with meat eating (to be fair to him, Dalai
Lama advocates eating naturally dead animals). Seekers of non-violence oppose
the consumption of meat because of that reason. American Indologist Wendy
Doniger writes about (Non)Violence as below in The Hindus - An Alternative History:
The
term “nonviolence” (ahimsa) originally
applied not to the relationship between humans but to the relationship between
humans and animals. Ahimsa means “the
absence of the desire to injure or kill,” a disinclination to do harm, rather
than an active desire to be gentle; it is a double negative, perhaps best
translated by the negative “nonviolence”, which suggests both mental and
physical concern for others. The roots of ahimsa
may lie in Vedic ritual, in animal sacrifice, in the argument that the priest
does not actually injure the animal but merely “pacifies” him; the primary
meaning of ahimsa is thus to do
injury without doing injury, a casuist argument from its very inception. In the
Rig Veda (the earliest Sanskrit text,
from c. 1200 BCE), the word ahimsa
refers primarily to the prevention of injury or violence to the sacrifice and
his offspring, as well as his cattle (10.22.13).
For
Mahtma Gandhi, nonviolence was the search for truth and love in the sense of
selfless service of one’s fellow beings. He considered poverty as the worst
form of violence.
In
other words, a soldier killing the enemy may be simply performing his duty, a
butcher slicing strips of meat may just be creating food for the needy, and an
eagle picking up a mountain goat may be just carrying its meal. At the same
time, a thief stealing money, a policeman slapping a helpless widow, and a
youth setting fire to someone’s house may be indulging in violence.
संदेश
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