Non-Veg India

Americans sometimes have an exaggerated idea of how vegetarian India is. Vegetarians predominate in some castes and regions, but probably most Indians eat meat . . . when they can afford it, which might not be often.

Meat-eating has been common throughout Indian history. It’s mentioned in epic poems such as the Ramayana, in which Sita, consort of the god Rama, favors a dish of meat cooked with rice.

The Aryans, who introduced the Sanskrit language and Vedic scriptures to India about 3,500 years ago, were cattle herders, and their preferred way of showing honor to the guest was slaughtering a cow, something many Hindus would consider a shocking sin today. “Goghna,” a Sanskrit word for “guest,” literally means “one for whom a cow is killed.”

In fact, for centuries it was obligatory to make a gift of beef to a Brahmin priest (the caste that is most likely to be vegetarian today) at a shraddha, or memorial ceremony for the dead. The Kurma Purana, a scripture from AD 300-500, went so far as to say that if you don’t eat meat at a shraddha, you’ll be reborn as an animal.

Vegetarianism had always existed in India, though, and it got a boost in the 5th century BC when the Buddha advised his followers not to kill animals for food. (It was the killing, not the eating, which was the sin in Buddhism, and even monks were permitted to eat meat as long as they hadn’t killed the animal or had someone else kill it for them. The only Indian religion that has always been rigorously vegetarian is Jainism.)

Thereafter a revulsion against meat-eating gradually spread among Hindus, starting with the Brahmin caste. It’s often said that it was based on the belief that the animal you eat might be a reincarnated relative, but that was only one reason offered in India. Meat involved the sin of killing, for starters, and it was also condemned as impure by nature, causing bad dreams and lustful thoughts, and eating it was considered a crude, uncultured thing to do.