Cow Veneration Among Meo Muslims of Mewat Presents the Complex Nature of Religious Identities
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ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Cow Veneration among Meo Muslims of Mewat Presents the Complex Nature of Religious Identities MUKESH KUMAR Mukesh Kumar ([email protected]) is doctoral scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney. Vol. 54, Issue No. 1, 05 Jan, 2019 Cows, as a symbol, enforce the notion of peasanthood across the Hindu–Muslim religious divide. The current identification of cows entirely with Hinduism is only representative of colonial and postcolonial politics. The article looks at the case of cow veneration among the Meo Muslims in the Mewat region to present the complex nature of religious identities. A dominant aspect of the contemporary imaginaries of the cow reinforces a belief about Muslims being enemies of the cow. Such an ideology strengthens the preconception that Muslims have been destroyers of Indian culture and heritage since the beginnings of Islamic influence in India. Not only this, the ideology gives the impression that cultural practices of Indian Muslim rulers, who were in power for almost 600 years, had little or no tolerance for Hindu religious symbols. The biggest threat of such a perception is the denial of a possibility of human co-existence despite religious difference. Contrary to this understanding, irrespective of religious difference, there exist many shared cultural symbols and elements, including religion, that constitute values of active embrace of the religious other in Indian society. These shared cultural symbols exist across religious denominations in almost every region and locality in India. This article attempts to look at the Muslim Meo community in the Mewat region of North India specifically in the context of cow veneration. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Local communities belonging to different religions are often bound into a close-knit network of inter-communal dependence and alliances through a sharing of cultural symbols, ones that enhance, enrich and make cohabitation a historically possible phenomenon. For such local alliances, common cultural practices like languages or dialects, symbols such as the cow, sacred groves, pilgrimage sites, shared saints, and myths/stories, play a vital role in the sustenance of co-existence, irrespective of a religious divide. Each community and caste group, beside their religious loyalties, contribute their own set of values towards making a specific region culturally vibrant and liveable. The religious encounter of Islam with prevailing diverse local traditions such as the Nath Panth, the Bhakti movement, and the Shaiva and Vaishnava traditions in India shaped the cosmopolitan outlook of many castes and communities, allowing them to also eulogise and critique the dominant religions in their own manner. Indian Muslims were deeply embedded in the regional societies and cultures while participating in the cultural world of Islam (Talbot 2009). It could be argued that many castes and groups responded to Islam and Hinduism vigorously out of spiritual- philosophical quests. However, it is obvious that local connections of people and communities were never weakened by an allegiance to Islam (Talbot 2009: 213). What are these connections? Do these connections still survive in India and beyond? For instance, presence of the caste structure among all religions in India is one such element. As Ashis Nandy (2002:123) writes, “castes often cut across religion; they have porous and fuzzy boundaries, complex relationship with each-other, and spill over ethnic boundaries.” If elements like caste can reveal deep-rooted local connections, then the transformation and reflections of other local connections—such as faith in other than one God or belief—into cultural-religious behaviour of a Muslim group is of importance to understand shared religious life. Such cases of social, religious, and cultural commonalities establish religious and cultural intersectionality beyond the binary of “Hindu” or “Muslim.” An Idea beyond Religious Boundaries The term “Indic,” in the context of religion interaction, refers to the fluid orientation of communities in which religious identities were expressed, shared, omitted, and shaped as much by broad cultural patterns, such as diffusion of Islam and emergence of uniform Hinduism, as by local practices, norms, and social structures. Gilmartin and Lawrence (2000: 2–4) who worked on South Asian religions, coined the term “Indic,” taking clues from Hodgson’s use of the neologism “Islamicate”. To open up the space between reductive religious orientations and mobile collective identities, one needs a new vocabulary that is not restricted to modern connotations of words such as Muslim and Hindu. It was to remedy the inadequacy of English popular usage that historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson coined the term Islamicate. For Hodgson, the neologism Islamicate allowed students of civilizational change to refer to the broad expanse of Africa and Asia that was influenced by Muslim rulers but not restricted to the practice of ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Islam as a religion. It is for the same reason, to suggest the breadth of premodern South Asian norms beyond Hindu doctrine or practice, that we employ the term Indic in the essays that follow. Both Islamicate and Indic suggest a repertoire of language and behavior, knowledge and power, that define broad cosmologies of human existence. Neither denotes simply bounded groups self-defined as Muslim or Hindu. Gilmartin and Lawrence (2000: 2–4) It is a way to understand the diverse and numerous practices marked by shared idioms that cannot be restricted to one religion or another. Indic practices have certain common tropes specific to South Asia, such as the veneration of cows by Muslims or the veneration of Muslim or Christian saints in the form of Hindu gods by Hindus. It refers also to any other particular tradition followed and influenced by more than one religious group which cannot be characterised purely in terms of religious categories. Presumably hostile characters in Indian history have also acquired a status of veneration. For instance, the cult of Ghazi Miyan, a 11th century Turkic warrior and fictive nephew of Mahmud of Ghazni (often represented as a Muslim iconoclast responsible for smashing Hindu idols), who is a figure of veneration particularly among Hindus and Muslims in parts of North India. Formerly considered an invader and iconoclast, he became a cow saviour warrior saint in the Gangetic folklores and his tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for many Hindus, Muslims, and people of other faiths from Nepal and India.[1] What is important to note here is that religious practices that are deeply entrenched in popular belief systems, symbolisms adopt a tone that is not necessarily either Hindu, or Islamic, and the mode of ritual-religious behaviour evokes a certain idea of localism. The tombs of the Sufi saints, sacred groves, pilgrimage sites as well as sects like the Kabirpanth, and Nath Panth exhibit religious-cultural interactions beyond standard definitions of a single religion. Emergence of Cow Veneration In recent times, the cow has been completely appropriated by the Hindutva agenda mainly to gain political mileage in democratic politics. Extensive use of cow symbolism in nationalist politics served the purpose of the Hindu orthodoxy at the cost of tainted communal relations as early as the 1890s as well.[2] The use of the cow as a mobilisation symbol played a crucial role in construction of Hindu communal-hood. “the cow protection movement was indicative to an extent that certain Hindus were identifying themselves with others as Hindu, but regardless of its impact, the identification was inevitably anti-Muslim” (Robb 1986: 292). All over the world, the species has been protected, revered, and saved from harms for several reasons. For instance, “in Phrygia, the slaying of an ox was punishable with death, in ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Egypt, the cow-goddess, Isis-Hathor, was supposed to be incarnate in an actual calf at Memphis, as Apis was in a bull; if any one slew one of these animals deliberately, he was punished by death, in Babylonia the ox was the representative of Ramman, the god of storm and thunder” (Crooke 1912: 275–77). Similarly, people of Mundari tribe still die to save their cows (Page 2016), as do the Kenyahs of Sarawak, and the Herero, Bantu, Damara, and Masai in Africa who have deep love and respect for their cows (Frazer 2010:355, 414; Crooke 1912: 276). In India, various Rig Vedic hymns speak about the importance of cows primarily for hunting and gathering mode of resource users who had limited knowledge of animal husbandry. For Vedic society living under under-developed pastoral mode, the cow proved to be a source of sustainable livelihood.[3] In this context, all economic activities were centred around the wise use of cows and other animals for harnessing maximum benefits. Later, the development of agriculture gradually resulted in surplus production, increased the importance of animals in harvesting activities. The use of oxen/bullocks not only facilitated trade and agriculture but also increased mobility of population to an extent. In all these developments, the cows remained the central node of the peasant life and agricultural activities. In fact, till the emergence of technology-dependent agricultural work in the 20th century, they were the backbone of the rural economy in India. Cow Among the Meo Muslim Peasants: Socio-economic and Cultural Significance The Meo community too, like any other peasant caste, had a similar use of bovines in daily peasant pastoral activities. The Meos are similar to other Hindu peasant pastoral communities such as the Gujjars, Jats, Meenas, and Ahirs with whom they had close inter- caste relations (Mayaram 2004: 4). Between the 10th and 18th centuries, the Meo community went through a “processes of sedentrisation, peasantisation, and finally, Islamisation” (Bharadwaj 2012). During this period, they had close associations with both Islam and Hinduism (Mayaram 1997) in the sense that their cultural practices were extensively drawn from both these religious traditions.