Cow Slaughter and India
- India is a strange country. People do not kill any living creatures, do not keep pigs and fowl, and do not sell live cattle. - Faxian, 4th-5th Century AD, Chinese pilgrim to India
- Hindus, like early Christians and Manichaeans, forbade the killing and eating of meat (of cows). - Al-Biruni, 1017–1030 AD
- They would not kill an animal on any account, not even a fly, or a flea, or a louse, or anything in fact that has life; for they say these have all souls, and it would be a sin to do so. - Marco Polo, III.20, 13th century AD on Jain monks
- They have a very strange order among them – they worship a cow and esteem much of the cow’s dung to paint the walls of their houses. They eat no flesh but live by roots and rice and milk. - Ralph Fitch, one of the earliest English travelers to India, 1580 AD
- According to the writer, Muhammad Mahbubur Rahman, any public cow-slaughter would lead to immediate punishment by people in the Moghul era. Even under the rule of Mighty Bigoted Tyrant Aurangzeb, Hindus resisted any public Cow-Slaughter with the biggest possible might. Francois Bernier wrote that cow slaughter was akin to manslaughter.
- In the rule of Ranjit Singh in Punjab, cow-slaughter led to capital punishments and executions too.
- Beef eating among Hindus entered with the arrival of the British & through Bengal. In the 1830s, Bengalis (The Young Bengal Group) of Hindu College began the “Whiskey & Beef” trend under the leadership of Derozio.
- In fact, according to Dharampal Ji, cow-slaughter & penetration of Beef-Eating entered among Hindus through British and not the Muslims. This is well supported from the records of the past too, which shows that fear of Hindus fought ferociously when the matter of Cow came.
- Sikhs were even more ferociously against cow slaughter than Hindus. See this separate article on that.
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