1 Although it is untenable to claim that all Hindus are either Vaisnavites or Saivites (such a claim would require a strict definition of Hinduism), yet the reverence and worship of Vishnu and Shiva is undoubtedly extremely widespread throughout the subcontinent. This spread of worship can be attributed to the Puranas which began to be written towards the beginning of the fourth century CE. They were compendiums of myth and rituals which, interestingly, were written during a time when Brahmanism was on the retreat. The writers of the Puranas are said to have appropriated several folktales and popular beliefs and plagiarized local storytellers in order to construct myths with a uniform cast of protagonists: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and Devi. Needless to say, of these Vishnu and Shiva were most popular (Doniger 2015, 231–78). Another aspect that needs to be considered is the rise of bhakti as a philosophy, under the aegis of Sankara and Ramanuja. Here, the focus moved from ritualistic and repetitional aspects of religious rites towards a faith in a personal god, and towards devotion to the figure (usually) Vishnu and Shiva, in one form or another (Doniger 2015, 295–304).
2 [The Brahmins of India fall into two divisions (1) Pancha Dravid and (2) Pancha Gauda. The former are vegetarians, the latter are not.] In Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Edgar Thurston notes that ‘it is customary to group them [the Brahmins] in two main divisions, the Pancha Dravidas and Pancha Gaudas’ (Thurston & Rangachari 1909, 268; emphasis added). Thurston sheds some light on the basis of this division, writing that ‘the Pancha Dravidas are pure vegetarians, whereas the Pancha Gaudas need not abstain from meat and fish, though some, who live amidst the Pancha Dravidas, do so’ (1909, 268). It is in the context of these flesh-eating habits that Ambedkar cites this distinction. On the other hand, Walter Elliot in his ethnographic survey, “On the Characteristics of the Population of Central and Southern India” (1869) notes that ‘the people themselves arrange their countrymen under two heads; five termed Panchgaura, belonging to the Hindi, or as is now generally called the Aryan group, and the remaining five or Panch-Dravida to the Tamil type. The latter is restricted in native parlance to the more civilized societies speaking languages closely affiliated to Tamil’ (Elliot 1869, 94). Swati Datta (1989) drives home a similar, geographic basis for this division: Gauda was, at least in the tenth century CE, a large section of Northern India, and the Pancha Gaudas (Saraswats, Kanyakubjas, Gaudas, Maithilas, Utkalas) were those who had the freedom to travel anywhere within the Gauda region. Rosalind O’Hanlon (2013) claims that the concretization of the Pancha Dravida and Pancha Gauda categories is relatively new. The new classification became necessary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when there was a marked inequality between Brahmins, some of whom were quite poor while others prospered. This necessitated a renewed need to look at what exactly made a Brahmin (to weed out the unworthies). So while up until the early centuries of the second millennium Brahmins identified themselves through the Vedic shakhas they studied and their gotras, now Benarasi Brahmins sought to classify all Brahmins within ten large groupings, five each for Northern and Southern India: Pancha Gaudas and Pancha Dravidas.
3 Asoka was the emperor of the Maurya dynasty from 268 to 232 BCE. He was the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya and ruled over the largest empire known to the subcontinent. He famously adopted the Buddhist dhamma and propagated it within and beyond the borders of South Asia. Just like Buddhism was stamped out of Indian soil by a resurgent Brahmanism, so was the life and work of Asoka, who stepped out of the mists of academic history owing to the work of European archaeologists and philologists as outlined by Charles Allen in Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor (2012). Among the primary sources on Asoka are the Pillar and Rock Edicts erected by him. Asoka’s religious paradigm was defined by his conception of dhamma. ‘For Asoka, dhamma was essentially a code of ethical behaviour and the benefits thereof.’ As sovereign of his empire, his dhamma strived to strike a middle ground between the ‘welfare of his praja (subjects)’ and his obligations as Emperor. He did not subscribe to a specific religious code because ‘he was attempting to universalize a code focused on social ethics and on the accommodation of diverse views’ (Thapar 2009, 31). In his ethical system, taking life was immoral and therefore prohibited. Romila Thapar argues that ‘his formulations of dhamma were intended to influence the conduct of categories of people in relation to each other, especially where they involved unequal relationships’. This new formalized code of ethics was ‘virtually the reversal of the other system, varnashrama dharma’ (Thapar 2009, 32).
4 The Rock Edict No. I was found inscribed onto a boulder in Girnar near Junagad, Gujarat. It covers about a hundred square-feet area, rising to twelve feet in height and having a circumference of seventy-five feet. There is a total of fourteen inscriptions on the Girnar rock. Besides Asoka’s directives it also contains an inscription which records the restoration of lake Sudarsana, which dates back to the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, by king Rudradaman of the Satavahana dynasty, and a third inscription which records the Gupta king, Skandagupta’s, work in carrying out repairs of the same lake (Hultzsch 1925, ix–x).
5 The second and fifth pillar edicts Ambedkar refers to here are found on the Delhi-Topra pillar, which is one among the six pillars discovered which possess Asokan edicts. Made out of pink sandstone and forty-two feet and seven inches in length, the Delhi-Topra pillar contains seven edicts. It originally stood in the village of Topra (in present-day Haryana) and was moved to Delhi by Sultan Firoz Shah (1351–88 CE) of the Tughlaq dynasty. Besides Asoka’s edicts the pillar also contains minor records of several pilgrims and travellers and three inscriptions by Visaladeva, the Chahamana ruler of Sakambari (in present-day Rajasthan), which has been dated 1164 CE. The first translation of the pillar texts was done by James Prinsep in 1837 (Hultzsch 1925, xv–xvi).
6 The following reference is taken from Vincent Smith’s Asoka—The Buddhist Emperor of India (1909), pages 155–6. Smith (1848–1920) was a British Indologist and art historian who taught at St John’s College, Oxford, and worked as a Curator of the Indian Institute (Oxford) after a stint as an administrator in the then United Provinces, India.
7 Taken from Smith 1909, 183–4, under the title ‘The Royal Example’. Inconsistencies in Ambedkar’s reference have been fixed here.
8 Smith 1909, 186–9. The title under which Pillar Edict No. V occurs in Smith’s rendition is: ‘Regulations restricting slaughter and mutilation of animals’.
9 Emphasis added by Ambedkar.
10 Emphasis added by Ambedkar. In E. Hultzsch’s 1925 work, Inscriptions of Asoka, the above paragraph is translated so: ‘…the following animals were declared by me inviolable, viz. parrots, mainas, the aruna, ruddy geese, wild geese, the nandimukha, the gelata, bats, queen-ants, terrapins, boneless fish, the vedaveyaka, the Ganga-puputaka, skate-fish, tortoises and porcupines, squirrels, the srimara, bulls set at liberty, iguanas, the rhinoceros, white doves, domestic doves, (and) all the quadrupeds which are neither useful nor edible’ (Hultzsch 1925, 127).
11 Tishya and Punarvasu are lunar constellations, and the day of the full moon for the particular constellation is considered an auspicious day, seeing as they had a special significance for Asoka. The scholar Nayanjot Lahiri writes, ‘Possibly, Tishya signified Asoka’s birth-star and Punarvasu his anointment’ (Lahiri 2015, 274)
12 In the Manusmriti it is established that ‘those that do not move are food for those that move, and those that have no fangs are food for those with fangs; those that have no hands are food for those with hands; and cowards are the food of the brave’ (5.29, Doniger and Smith 1991, 110). While the cow is the most revered animal in the text, there is no injunction against its slaughter. Only the caveat that the consumption of meat must be treated as, and preceded by, a ‘sacrifice’. In their introduction to the Laws of Manu (1991), Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith observe that ‘the vedic description of the natural and social orders as determined by power and violence (himsa, literally ‘the desire to inflict injury’) was preserved in later Indian thought’ (1991, xxx). In the preservation of this order, ‘eating and killing were regarded as two sides of the same coin. But eating was also frankly envisioned as the perpetual re-enactment of the defeat and subjugation of one’s rival’ (xxv). It is within this paradigm that, in ‘sacrifice’ to the gods, meat was consumed. The proliferation of vegetarianism and Ahmisa was a radical intervention into this space, and the Brahmins upholding it points to a shift in the status quo between the social groups. ‘It was no longer a matter of courage and fear, domination and servitude; it was instead an opposition between the pure and the impure and a hierarchy of castes. Abstention from eating meat became a criterion of purity’ (xxxiii).
13 The following extract is taken from Georg Bühler’s translation of the Manusmriti (1886, 171–2). Professor Johann Georg Bühler was a scholar of ancient India who was born in Hannover, Germany, in 1837. He completed his education at Göttingen University, and besides being fluent in the classical languages he also undertook study in classical philology, Sanskrit, Zend, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Archaeology and Philosophy. After fruitful stints in Paris and Oxford where he developed his research in Oriental Studies, with the help of Max Müller, he was appointed as Professor of Oriental Languages at Elphinstone College, Bombay, in December 1862. In the following years his health deteriorated and he accepeted the position of Professor of Sanskrit at Deccan College which was previously held by Martin Haug. During this period, Bühler was a frequent contributor in the Bombay Sanskrit Series, which produced cheap textbooks for students. In 1868, he also published the first volume of his translation of the Apastamba Dharma Sutra through the Bombay government. Apart from his books on grammar, like the Prakrit dictionary and On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet, he also produced translations of Indian classics like the Panchatantra and the Laws of Manu. Bühler’s translation of the Laws of Manu was part of Max Müller’s prestigious Sacred Books of the East series, for which he produced two other volumes, both of which were translations of ancient Indian law books (Jolly 2010). For criticisms of various aspects of Bühler’s translation of Laws of Manu, see Doniger and Smith (1991, lxi–lxxi).
14 [Smith – Asoka, p. 58] The quote is from Vincent Smith’s Asoka: The Buddhist Emperor of India (1909). Although Smith accedes to the point that Jains and Brahmanical Hindus do conform to the same notion of sanctity of (animal) life, he does concede that early Hinduism did not have similar values and that sacrificial killing of animals was an important part of their sacred rituals. He states that the origin of present-day reverence Hindus hold for cows was ‘very curious [and] imperfectly solved’ (Smith 1909, 58). He further notes that during Asoka’s time, though a great amount of sympathy was garnered for animal life, the same was not the case for the human one. For Asoka to enact the new rules of conduct as far as treatment of animals was concerned must have been a vexatious task, one that flew in the face of the common morality of the time, when sacrifices were deemed necessary to a large extent. Yet, the ‘revolutionary’ task of undertaking such a massive change in practice seems to have been taken in earnest. When this is juxtaposed against the treatment of human life, particularly in the case of the death penalty, it is strange to see that the same rules of sanctity of life didn’t apply, even though, as Smith notes, his position was much more liberal when compared to other rulers of his time: ‘The monkish legend that Asoka abolished the death penalty is not true. His legislation proves that the idea of such abolition never entered his thoughts, and that like other Buddhist monarchs, he regarded the extreme penalty of the law as an unavoidable necessity, which might be made less horrible than it had been, but could not be dispensed with. Late in his reign, in B.C. 243, he published an ordinance that every prisoner condemned to death should invariably be granted before execution a respite of three days in which to prepare himself for the next world’ (Smith 1909, 59).
15 [Mookerji, Asoka, p. 21, 182, 184] Radhakumud Mookerji (1884–1964) belonged to the school of nationalist historiography, a characteristic evident in his works such as The Fundamental Unity of India and Asoka, where he argues against the perception that a cohesive feeling of nationhood was the effect of the colonial rule and refutes the prevalence of beef-eating in ancient India. On page 21 he says: ‘[Asoka’s proclamation prohibited] the slaughter of numerous birds and beasts specified besides “all four-footed animals which are neither utilised nor eaten,” such as the cow, for example, which was never used as a pack-animal nor for food in India’ (Mookeri 1928, 21). He also states: ‘But a similar inference from the omission of the cow in the list, as made by V. A. Smith, is untenable, because the cow had been protected by popular religious opinion long before Asoka, and would also come under the class of quadrupeds which are ‘not eaten’ (khadiyati)’ (1928, 182). Mookerji goes on to substantiate this by citing Kautilya’s Arthashastra where it is forbidden to kill animals which do not prey on others as well as those which are considered auspicious (1928, 182). This, yet, seems to not point at the cow definitively.
16 Gabriel Tarde (1843–1894) was a French sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist who significantly contributed to ‘social interaction theory and to diffusion research’ (Kinnunen 1996, 431). Diffusion here refers to the ‘spreading of social or cultural properties from one society to another’. Tarde’s theories of social behaviour were based on psychology and were designed such that they could explain a whole nexus of social activity, ‘from [the] development of cultures to [the] acts of an individual’ (Kinnunen 1996, 431). This diffusion, according to Tarde, were carried out through the process of imitation. ‘People imitate beliefs and desires or motives transmitted from one individual to another’ (Kinnunen 1996, 433). His interest in criminology, and time spent at courts, lent to his conception of the ‘motive’ in human agency. In his lifetime, Tarde found himself eclipsed by the rising star of the other great sociologist, Emile Durkheim. His theories fell out of fashion and were soon forgotten. But in recent years, his monadism-influenced views of social organization which rejected the a priori assumptions of society, had come back into vogue among proponents of ‘Actor–Network Theory’, like Bruno Latour (see Candea 2010). This, rather than a theory, is a methodological approach towards viewing constellations and networks of relations and their effects, primarily in the sciences, rather than a predefined society or social group identified and governed by a set of pregiven parameters. To see how Ambedkar utilized Tarde’s theory of imitation to explain caste, see p. 275–6 note 17.
17 It has not been possible to establish the existence or provenance of such a purana; no scholar mentions it.