Menaka Gandhi recently wrote about the sacrifice at Gadhimai performance and gave a lot of valid arguments. She, however, began with a fallacious proposition that Hinduism has nothing to do with sacrifice. Animal sacrifice has been one of the essential features of various Hindu rituals. And, yet, for millions of Hindus, such sacrifice has nothing to do with faith and worship. Sacrifice was pervasive in almost all the ancient religions of the world. Killings to gratify deities and to seek blessings are pervasive even in contemporary rituals.
I may sound a pessimist realist but we all know that sacrifice is not going to be abandoned by human beings. Killing for survival and for pleasure is part of our cultural norms. It is an essential grammar of who we are. It determines what human beings are.
Sacrificial system is solely born out of human interest, desire and purpose. We justify that the weaker is negotiable on the god’s altar. We are not only clever but brutally cunning while designing the politics of faith. Such faiths are human constructs.
There are people who opinionate to preserve traditions. Sacrifice is one of the significant religious traditions at multiple places in South Asia. My problem is how we preserve traditions when such killings do not justify us as cultural beings. There are multiple reasons for this irrationality of killing animals. I will return to the point of preservation after a while.
Gadhimai performance looks terrifying. It is dark and ugly. It reveals our barbaric nature of imagining that we kill animals and then the gods are pleased. It is against animal rights. It brings environmental crises. It shapes confused identities in children and adult. It looks obnoxious. It hurts the sentiments of millions of people. It is an irresponsible act.
There are two more conceptual problems with such killings. One is that we have traveled far and beyond to fool ourselves that the supernatural needs blood of the animals for pleasure and satisfaction. If they really need, why do they only need animal flesh and blood, why not human blood? Animal sacrifice presupposes that humans are dear to them and hence they do not need our flesh and blood. Hence, such sacrificial system is solely born out of human interest, desire and purpose. We justify that the weaker is negotiable on the god’s altar. We are not only clever but brutally cunning while designing the politics of faith. Such faiths are human constructs.
The other problem is that the innocence of sacrifice has grossly disappeared in modern man. Human beings in the remote past may have conceived the nature as powerful determining elements which manifested themselves in forms of fire, water, deluge, storm, greenery, food and so on. They may have thought that to please such supernatural elements, the best way is to offer those things which are dear to them in their daily lives. Sacrifice was a sacred innocent act then. There was some essence of purity in their surviving modes. We do not possess such innocence. We mostly are cunning in our faith.
Some years ago during the Dashami festival, religious enthusiasts killed goats under the nose of national aircraft carrier in Kathmandu. Many of us wrote against such aestheticide and animal right violation. The third problem is that if one thinks of practicing such rituals in private, we have no laws and systems to forbid them. Public performance of hurting other’s sentiment and killing innocent animals manifest the darker side of culture.
Let me return to the issue of preservation. We are adamant to preserve traditions. We must preserve them at any cost. But there are sophisticated modes of preservation. We can preserve them in the domains of art and literature (we do that), in memory, in history, in museums and in our powerful narratives. Practicing and preserving those which defy our efforts to being cultural must be replaced into such locations of preservation.
I should not sound a moralist but I certainly can be harsh on all those modes of culture which lead us to being bizarre human beings. The best cultural behavior is to be close to nature. Our cultures are embedded in the multiple spectacles of nature around us. The animal world is the best nature has given us. Nature sustains and regulates herself, not the human beings only. Our anthropomorphic (human centric) arrogance and ignorance falsely lead us to think that we are the superior ones. While regulating and sustaining her, if nature intuits that the humans are the greatest enemies for her preservation, we will be the first to be sacrificed.
Man is thus in the crises of existence because man constantly tampers with the designs of nature. We are suffering mostly because we brutalize the nature around us. Gadhimai festival is one dark example of our tampering with her.
I respect Menaka Gandhi’s sentiments. We know how she works for the most marginalized mute animals and nature around us. The farce is that the government of Nepal is too occupied with our security and hence they would never ever think about these weak animals who taste so good with rice and roti. We still should raise our voice against such inhuman acts. If even one person waits and thinks before the killing, her ideas have worked.
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What needs to be sacrificed to please the Godess is our egos, our selfishness, not innocent animals. These actions will not please the Goddess. They will infuriate her and we will all share the bad karma of killing innocent animals for no reason but out own ignorance. Let´s make the real sacrifices here, not sacrifice innocent beings.
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Jnana Newman
Vegeterain Fallacies
"mass animal sacrifice" .. better out in the open for everyone to see than in hidden slaughter houses! this is a once-in-a-year ceremony, how about hundreds of thousands of animals being killed every day of the year in slaughter houses. the culture in nepal is close to nature by making people aware of cost and implication of their meat. not so in multi-nationals run slaughter houses that hide their act with well-paid PR runs. can you imagine having your meat kil
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Shishir Ranjit
Do you eat momos, Mr. Gupto? Or maybe some of the vitamins that are prescribed to us also have animal proteins and KFC is all geared up for their opening.
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