The sacred cow in India: from the Vedas to Kamadhenu and Krishna

In India the cow holds a place without equivalent in other cultures: it is a working animal, a source of milk and clarified butter, but also an image of the nourishing earth and of divine generosity. This position did not arise suddenly. It is the result of a long history, which starts with the pastoral societies of the Vedas and reaches the political debates of contemporary India, passing through religious texts, legends and popular practices.

Wealth and light in the Vedas

In the hymns of the Rigveda, composed from the second half of the second millennium BC, cattle are the measure of wealth and the Sanskrit word go, «cow», recurs constantly. The Vedic poets compare the rays of dawn to a herd set free, and prayers ask the gods for abundant livestock. Already in some hymns the cow is called aghnyā, a term scholars usually translate as «not to be killed».

This does not mean that the Vedic world was vegetarian: the ritual texts describe animal sacrifices, including cattle. The refusal to kill grew stronger in the following centuries, under the influence of the doctrine of non-violence, ahimsā, developed in the Upaniṣads and above all in Buddhism and Jainism. Law treatises such as the Manusmṛti eventually came to regard the killing of a cow as a very grave sin.

Kamadhenu and the earth milked by Pṛthu

The mythology of the Purāṇas offers the best-known image of the divine cow: Kāmadhenu, the «cow of wishes», able to give whatever is asked of her. According to one of the most widespread versions she emerged from the ocean of milk during the famous churning carried out by gods and demons to obtain the nectar of immortality. In modern iconography she is often shown with a bovine body, wings and a woman's face, and all the deities were said to dwell within her body.

Another story, told among others in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, concerns King Pṛthu. The earth, which refused to produce food, fled before him in the form of a cow; the king caught up with her and persuaded her to let herself be milked, thus reviving agriculture and abundance. From his name, it is said, comes Pṛthvī, one of the Sanskrit names for the earth.

Krishna the cowherd and the bull Nandi

Devotion to the cow is linked in a special way to Krishna. The stories of his youth, set among the herdsmen of Vrindavan and the Braj region, show him leading the herds to pasture, playing the flute for the cattle and protecting the herders by lifting Mount Govardhana against the rain sent by Indra. Two of his most common names, Govinda and Gopāla, contain the root go and mean, broadly speaking, «protector of cows».

Alongside the cow, the bull too has its sacred dignity. Nandi, the white bull who serves as Shiva's mount, is depicted in many Shaiva temples crouching before the sanctuary, facing the image of the god. The great monolithic statues of Nandi, such as the one in the Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur, built at the beginning of the eleventh century, bear witness to the importance this figure attained in the art of southern India.

In today's India the question remains alive. Article 48 of the 1950 Constitution, among its directive principles, calls on the State to prohibit the slaughter of cows, and several states have laws on the matter. Festivals such as Gopashtami, dedicated to the herds, and the care of shelters for old animals, the goshalas, show how the ancient symbol of the nourishing cow continues to live in everyday practice.