As you, in all likelihood, recognize, one of the triggers for the extremely good insurrection of 1857 (or the First War of Independence or the Mutiny, depending on your angle) becomes a tale that unfolds across India. According to individuals who claimed to be within the know, the British army had coated cartridges with animal fats. Soldiers needed to bite off the covering of the cartridges to use them. This supposed that they ended up eating bits of the animal fats.
But, or so went the tale, the fats came from cows and pigs. So foot soldiers have been now required to devour pork fats and red meat fat. This offended Hindus and Muslims and caused revolts in army gadgets. The British stated that no pig or cow fats become used and that the tale changed into only hearsay. But about the politicization of food, facts frequently remember for less than perceptions. (And it’s far totally possible that the Brits have been mendacity, anyway!) Much of these days’ so-known as meals records tend to be only approximately notion. The truth seems to remember less and less.
In reality, I am beginning to accept that, at no point seeing that in 1857, food was as politicized as it is today. The renewed furor about pork ingesting is typically political. The war between khichri and biryani is actually now not about rice dishes in any respect. It is ready so-known as Hindu foods and Muslim meals. And the talk is prolonged handiest for political motives.
In the famous creativeness, a sure cool animated film of Indian food habits persists. According to this model, properly Hindus were usually vegetarians. Meat-eating changed into a notable sin. Beef ingesting became an even extra sin. Then, along came the Mughals. They promoted meat-eating. They took their biryanis throughout India and contaminated the pure vegetarian Indian tradition.
By prosecuting those who devour red meat and using honoring vegetarianism, we’re told our country is going lower back to ancient Indian traditions. We restored this first-rate Hindu kingdom to time while gods walked the earth and peace ruled the land. The trouble with this cool animated film is that nearly every single reality in it is inaccurate. First of all, India changed into by no means a vegetarian u. S. Whether you went North or South in historical India, the kings normally ate meat. (So did the gods in our epics.) Ancient Indian rulers did not simply eat meat or fowl. They ate tortoises, deer, peacocks, and different birds and animals.
Even in the Indus Valley Civilisation course, one of the international’s oldest city civilizations courting again to 3,000 years earlier than the birth of Jesus Christ, animals have been raised and slaughtered for food. During the Vedic period, non-vegetarianism become common. Even Ayurveda, which we regard now as a merely Hindu vegetarian phenomenon, endorsed remedies based totally on meat.
The recognition of vegetarianism came from the Jain, in preference to Hindu culture. Even the Buddha (who came after Mahavir and the founding of Jainism) did no longer insist on vegetarianism. (Indians are always taken aback to find out that the Dalai Lama eats meat; he ate red meat till his doctors told him to move easily on beef.) Ancient texts, which include The Arthashastra, include many references to meat-eating.
So, the view that ancient Hindus were all vegetarians is a myth. What approximately the Mughals, the challenge of an awful lot demonization in recent times? The whole thing that you will examine many popular Internet websites, approximately the Mughals, is incorrect. First of all, they did now not name themselves the Mughals. That name was given to them centuries later by British historians considering that Babur’s mom might also have descended from Genghis Khan. Babur himself could be horrified to have been known as a Mongol or a Mughal.
