Part 2: The Plate and the People - Ancient India Food History and the Vedas

The ruins of Mohenjo-daro — once the largest city of the Indus Valley Civilisation, home to 50,000 people, and according to its own rubbish heaps, enthusiastic meat-eaters. The civilisation most associated in popular imagination with ancient Indian spirituality left behind cut-marked cattle bones at every major excavation site. History, as usual, is more interesting than the myth.

Disclaimer: A note before you read this

This chapter draws on peer-reviewed historical scholarship — principally the work of Professor D.N. Jha of Delhi University, Romila Thapar, and D.D. Kosambi, published in academic journals and books over several decades. The interpretation of ancient Sanskrit texts is inherently contested, and scholars disagree on translations, contexts, and meanings. What follows presents the mainstream academic reading of these texts as they stand in the published historical record.

This is not religious commentary. It is not intended to offend any community or challenge any faith. It is a historical inquiry into what ancient texts say about food practices — the same kind of inquiry applied to every other civilisation in this series. The author is a Hindu, a Rajput by lineage, and approached this material with the same curiosity he brought to every other chapter: as a reader trying to understand what actually happened, not what we were told happened.

Read Part 1: Fire Built Us

CHAPTER 3

India Before the Myth: Ancient India's Food History — What the Bones and the Texts Actually Say

"What the archaeology, the DNA, and the animal bones actually say."

The First Indians — Who Were They?

Before we can understand what India eats, we need to understand who India is.

In Part 1, we established that humans are biological omnivores by design — built by 2 million years of cooked meat and fire — and that India, statistically, eats like one. Seventy-one percent of Indian women and seventy-eight percent of Indian men eat non-vegetarian food. The vegetarian story is real, but it belongs to a minority concentrated in four northwestern states. Which raises the obvious question: how did a largely meat-eating civilisation convince the world it was vegetarian? Part 2 is where the answer begins — and it begins in the bones. Literally. The ancient India food history buried at Harappa tells a very different story from the one on the yoga retreat brochure. So do the Vedic texts, if you read them carefully enough — carefully enough that the academic conclusions proved deeply controversial — and remind us that food history, in India, is never just food history.

Here is a question most Indians have never been asked and most non-Indians have never thought to ask: when someone says "Indians eat this way because of their culture" — whose culture, exactly, are they talking about? India is not one people with one culture and one food history. It is, genetically speaking, the outcome of at least four separate waves of migration, stretching across 70,000 years, arriving from Africa, from Iran, from the Eurasian steppe, and from Southeast Asia. These four groups met, mixed, clashed, traded, intermarried, and occasionally went to war — and what they left behind is not just a civilisation, but the most genetically diverse large population on earth.

When you sit down to eat in India — whether it's a Brahmin thali in Udupi, a mutton biryani in Hyderabad, a smoked pork curry in Nagaland, or a plate of dal baati in Jodhpur — you are, without knowing it, eating at the intersection of four completely different food histories. Let us meet the four peoples.

THE ORIGINAL INDIANS

The oldest strand in India's genetic story arrived approximately 65,000 years ago — a group of modern humans who had walked out of Africa, crossed the Arabian Peninsula, hugged the coastline of the Indian Ocean, and eventually settled what is now the Indian subcontinent. Geneticists call them the Ancient Ancestral South Indians, or AASI. They are the genetic foundation beneath most South Indian, Adivasi, and tribal populations today.

These were hunter-gatherers. They ate what the land gave them: deer, wild boar, river fish, roots, berries, and whatever else they could find or catch. Meat was not a luxury. It was not a moral question. The concept of vegetarianism would have made precisely as much sense to them as a conversation about organic certification.

THE INDUS VALLEY — WHAT THE BONES SAY

Between roughly 7,000 and 1,300 BCE, a remarkable civilisation emerged in the northwest of the subcontinent — the Indus Valley Civilisation, or IVC. At its peak, it was the largest Bronze Age civilisation on earth, larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, with cities of 50,000 people, covered drains, standardised weights, and a writing system that has still not been fully deciphered. These were, by any measure, a sophisticated people.

They were also, by the evidence of their rubbish heaps, emphatic meat-eaters.

Archaeologists excavating the great IVC cities have found cut-marked and burned animal bones in every major site. Cattle and buffalo bones are the most common find — these animals were kept, slaughtered, and eaten. Fish and turtle bones appear in river-adjacent settlements. The picture that emerges is of a population that ate across the full range of available animals, with no evidence whatsoever of a vegetarian food ideology.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Indus Valley Civilisation produced some of the earliest evidence of domesticated chicken anywhere in the world — found at Harappan sites dating to around 2500 BCE. The chicken's journey from an Indian jungle fowl to the world's most consumed bird begins, in a meaningful sense, in the civilisation that many people imagine as the birthplace of vegetarianism. History is rarely polite about our assumptions.

THE STEPPE ARYANS — NOMADS WHO BROUGHT THE VEDAS

Around 2,000 BCE, a new group of people began moving into the Indian subcontinent from the northwest — pastoral nomads from the Eurasian steppe, the vast grasslands stretching across modern Kazakhstan and Ukraine. We know them, via their language, as the Aryans. They brought with them Sanskrit, the horse, a set of religious hymns that would become the Rigveda, and an economy built entirely around cattle.

These were not farmers. They were herders. Cattle were their currency, their measure of wealth, their primary food source, and the central subject of their religious rituals. The Sanskrit word for war — gavishti — literally translates as "desire for more cows." The word for a generous host — goghna — literally means "cow killer," because killing a cow was what you did to honour an important guest.

Ancient DNA studies published in Science in 2019 (Narasimhan et al.) have largely settled what was once a heated political debate in India: the Steppe Aryans were a real, distinct genetic group who migrated into South Asia and mixed with the existing IVC population.

Their descendants make up a significant proportion of North Indian upper-caste genetics today. The ideological significance of this finding has not been missed — the communities most associated with strict vegetarianism are, genetically, descended from some of the most committed cattle-eaters in the ancient world.

THE NORTHEAST — A WORLD APART

The fourth stream entered from the east — Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic peoples who migrated from Southeast Asia and southern China, settling what is now India's Northeast. Their food culture has no connection whatsoever with the Gangetic plains tradition. No sacred cows, no Brahminical food hierarchy, no vegetarian philosophy. Pork, fermented fish, smoked meats, bamboo shoots, sticky rice — a complete and ancient culinary world that predates, and has remained entirely immune to, the vegetarian mythology that attached itself to India's mainstream identity.

THE ONES WHO NEVER CHANGED

There is a fifth group that deserves mention, though they do not fit neatly into any genetic stream: India's tribal communities — the Scheduled Tribes, or Adivasis — who make up approximately 8% of India's population today and live primarily in forest and hill regions across central, eastern, and northeastern India.

Many of these communities — the Gond, the Bhil, the Santhal, the Munda, among dozens of others — were never fully absorbed into the Brahminical social order that eventually defined mainstream Indian culture. They never adopted its food rules, its caste hierarchies, or its vegetarian ideologies. They hunted. They fished. They kept pigs and ate them. They foraged. They ate what the forest gave them, as their ancestors had for tens of thousands of years before anyone had thought to tell them otherwise.

India's food story, in other words, does not begin with the Vedas, or the Mughals, or the British. It begins with four waves of people, arriving across 65,000 years, each bringing their own relationship with food — none of it, not a single strand, originally vegetarian.

How, then, did vegetarianism become India's defining food identity? That story begins in the next chapter — with a goat, a priest, a fire, and the most politically inconvenient texts in the Sanskrit canon.

CHAPTER 4

What the Ancient Texts Say About Food — India's Most Suppressed Food History

What the ancient texts say — and what centuries of selective reading have made people think they say.

EDITORIAL NOTE

The interpretation of ancient Sanskrit texts is inherently contested. Scholars disagree on translations, contexts, and meanings. What follows draws on the peer-reviewed work of historians — principally D.N. Jha, Romila Thapar, and D.D. Kosambi — whose research represents decades of published academic scholarship. Their conclusions are not universally accepted. This chapter presents the scholarly evidence as it stands; it is not religious commentary.

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of India's food debate. The texts most frequently cited to prove that India has always been vegetarian — the Vedas, the Brahmanas, the various dharmashastra — are, on careful reading by Sanskrit scholars, among the most detailed records of animal sacrifice and meat consumption in the ancient world. The Rigveda describes the god Indra's consumption of bulls offered in sacrifice. The Taittiriya Brahmana contains explicit references to cattle as food. The Satapatha Brahmana records cattle sacrifice in ritual detail. And the Charaka Samhita — India's foundational Ayurvedic medical text — prescribes beef as a therapeutic food for multiple conditions.

This is not fringe scholarship. It represents the mainstream conclusion of historians and Sanskrit philologists working across the twentieth century. Among the most thorough assemblers of this evidence was the late Professor D.N. Jha of Delhi University, whose 2001 book The Myth of the Holy Cow drew on primary Sanskrit sources to make the case that beef eating was commonplace in ancient India.

The book's publication history is itself the argument, made visible. The first Indian publisher pulled out before going to press, citing ominous warnings. A second publisher, Matrix Books, had the courage to publish it in August 2001 — whereupon right-wing groups declared it blasphemous, demanded Jha's arrest, and obtained a court order from the Hyderabad Civil Court restraining the book's circulation. In Jha's own words, "a self-appointed custodian of Hinduism sentenced me to death." The book was subsequently published by Verso in London, and a new Indian edition appeared in 2009. Jha died in February 2021, having spent twenty years under death threats for the act of reading old texts carefully.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Sanskrit word for a generous host in the Vedic period was goghna — literally "cow killer." When an honoured guest arrived at your home, slaughtering a cow in their name was considered the highest form of hospitality. The word appears in Vedic texts as a term of deep respect. A language does not develop a word like this unless the practice it describes is completely routine.

WHAT THE TEXTS SAY — AND WHAT THEY'RE ASSUMED TO SAY

The Vedic corpus was composed between roughly 1500 BCE and 500 BCE — the oldest surviving texts in any Indo-European language. They are not vegetarian documents. Below is what scholars have found when reading these texts without a predetermined conclusion. Citations on the left are drawn from D.N. Jha's research, corroborated against the standard academic translations of Griffith, Eggeling, and Keith.

The pattern is consistent across all these texts: the Vedic civilisation practised animal sacrifice routinely, consumed the meat of cattle, horses, goats, and sheep as part of both ritual and daily life, and developed a sophisticated vocabulary around these practices. The cow was important — but it was important the way gold is important: as something circulated, offered, and consumed by those with access to it.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Sanskrit word for war in the Rigveda is gavishti — literally meaning "the desire for more cattle." Cattle were so central to the Vedic economy that the word for armed conflict was simply the word for wanting more of them. Cattle raids — not cattle worship — are recorded in the Rigveda as the primary motivation for organised violence between tribes.

THE AYURVEDIC MEAT PRESCRIPTION

The Charaka Samhita is perhaps the most ironic piece of evidence in this chapter. It is the foundational text of Ayurvedic medicine — the tradition the modern wellness industry presents as the ancient basis of a vegetarian Indian healing system. The Charaka Samhita prescribes meat with the systematic thoroughness of a clinical pharmacopoeia, assigning specific therapeutic uses to over 150 animal-sourced substances.

The peacock and the crocodile are there for a reason: the Charaka Samhita has surveyed the entire available protein landscape of ancient India and assigned therapeutic properties to almost everything that moved. It is comprehensive, empirical, and entirely unconcerned with the idea that eating animals is spiritually problematic. That concern came later — and from a very specific direction.

HOW ECONOMICS BECAME THEOLOGY

If the Vedic texts describe cattle sacrifice and beef eating in such detail, and if Ayurvedic medicine still prescribed beef as recently as 200 CE, how did the cow transform from India's most sacrificed animal into its most protected one?

The historians' answer is clear: economics moved first. Theology followed.

As the Vedic pastoral economy gave way to settled agriculture — a transition that accelerated from roughly 1000 BCE across the Gangetic plains — the economic logic around cattle shifted fundamentally. A cow slaughtered feeds a village for a week. A cow kept alive ploughs the field, provides milk across seasons, produces calves, and serves as draught power indefinitely. In an agricultural economy, the living cow became dramatically more valuable than the dead one. This argument — that the sacred cow's origins are economic rather than spiritual — is the mainstream scholarly position, associated with D.D. Kosambi, Romila Thapar, and corroborated by Jha.

"The cow did not become sacred because it was loved. It became sacred because it was useful — and keeping it alive was more profitable than eating it. Religion formalised what economics had already decided. It did so gradually, over centuries, and not without a fight."

THE BUDDHIST INTERRUPTION — A PREVIEW

The economic argument alone doesn't fully explain the transformation. A second force entered the picture around the 6th century BCE — one that gave the emerging vegetarian ethic not just practical justification but a sweeping philosophical architecture. That force was the Shramana movement: the tradition of wandering ascetics, of whom the Buddha and Mahavira were the most consequential figures.

Buddhism and Jainism did not invent vegetarianism in India. But they gave it a language — ahimsa, non-harm — that was morally powerful enough to put the Brahminical establishment on the defensive. And when an established priesthood feels its cultural authority threatened by a rival philosophy, it doesn't simply argue. It adapts. It adopts. And it eventually claims, with the confidence of those who control the written record, that it believed this all along.

The ancient record is unambiguous: India's oldest civilisations ate meat, the Vedas described it, and the cow became sacred through agricultural economics, not divine instruction. But the vegetarian ideal was coming — built slowly, competitively, and with remarkable philosophical force by two wandering ascetics who would reshape the dinner table of an entire civilisation. That story — the Buddha, Mahavira, and the Brahmin response that invented modern Indian vegetarianism — is Part 3.

Part 3: Vegetarianism Was a PR Strategy → https://www.rathodm.com/post/history-of-vegetarianism-in-india-part-3

The historical record presented in this chapter reflects the scholarly consensus as published in peer-reviewed academic literature. Readers who wish to engage with the primary sources are encouraged to read D.N. Jha's The Myth of the Holy Cow (Verso, 2002), Romila Thapar's Early India (Penguin, 2002), and the original translations of Vedic texts by Griffith and Eggeling. The intent of this chapter is historical literacy — not the diminishment of any religious tradition.