In the chatrooms and messages boards of the Internet, there are often found bitter disputes between Indians and Pakistanis. This usually deteriorates into vulgar abuse and I have noticed that one of the commonest terms of hitting out at Hindus is that they worship the cow.

This might as well be cleared up now. The Hindu does not worship the cow, has never worshipped the cow, and is not likely to ever worship the cow. To continue to propagate this delusion is only indicative of ignorance and laziness, but the Hindu has nothing to do with it. The cow is not even sacred, in the way it has been misunderstood by Europeans. The cow is literally taboo, a very different animal indeed from the sacred cow of popular delusion. Taboos in sociological terms are both positive and negative; as in taboos that must be respected and deferred to, as well as taboos that deal with what is abhorrent.

The cow is Aghanya - that which may not be slaughtered. It is true that later sects began to call the cow the mother and even wrote some dubious scripture to support this, but it was a rather childish transference of reverence from the mother to the cow because both provide milk! The "milk-debt" was culturally a very strong more, and it was felt that it would not be fair to leave the cow out of its share of respect for contributing to your health. Nevertheless the cow was originally only Aghanya.

This set of circumstances arose for many reasons. Strange as it may seem, the Vedic age was a beef-eating one and animals were constantly being slaughtered. The reaction against flesh foods set in with the advent of Jainism and Buddhism and a remarkable cultural revolution took place - in that a predominantly flesh eating country became a predominantly vegetarian one. The many pastoral tribes that inhabited India could not afford to sacrifice their cow wealth for meat. In fact that is the real reason it became Aghanya. The norms of the time dictated that you sacrifice your best animal, usually the stud bull, for the feast when a distinguished visitor came by. As these worthies multiplied in numbers, the quality of the herds began to decline. You could not escape this obligation, as substitution of another animal would be regarded as a deadly insult. To save animals thus marked out, as well as in deference to the new trends, the inviolability of the cow came into being. Those who are distressed by this revelation of beef eating ancestors ought to be more distressed at their ignorance about it. Swami Vivekananda loved to puncture ostentatious piety by declaring that his favorite section of the Vedas was the bit where five brahmanas used to sit down to feast and polish off a cow at one sitting! The literature about this is extensive, and there is no need to be squeamish about it.

The scriptural reason for this obsession with cows and their protection is even stranger. Vedic Sanskrit is not the classical Sanskrit that exists today. It is an older, more difficult form of the language and one of the words for light that is used there is Go. Now Go primarily meant "light" but it also meant "cows". In classical Sanskrit the word means only the bovine friend. Thus, on the basis of a forgotten meaning of a word has Indian culture wrapped itself round the protection of the cow and rendered it a sacred taboo. "Protector of the Go", in the Vedas meant the keeper of the light not a cowherd! And all the admonitions about protecting the Go means something else altogether, and makes a great deal more sense too. However it was too late, and the word came to mean with all its nuances, cow protection and cow- reverence! A change in language renders a single word archaic, but the impact on a society is amazing.

A more environmentally friendly reason has in recent times been proposed for this cow respect. The cow represents the e