Look at the animals in Gadhimai festival. These animals are not in their habitat, they are slaves under our clutches. Free them in the wilderness and go and fight with them, and if you win, take them back to the temple of the goddess. Take the challenge to kill and to be killed. Then, probably, if there is any deity residing in the shrine, she would be pleased by your daring act.
Gadhimai reveals the most gruesome nature of humans. It is not a prey and predator relationship. It is not love for the taste of flesh, which many of us love to savor. It is a spectacle of chaos: Human love for flesh turning into senselessness.
The devotees come to the festival with the helpless creatures devoid of their natural homes. They are helpless creatures under human trickery. Like a daring devotee, to please the goddess, one would have gone to the powerful beasts of the jungle, not to these meek animals, unfed, weak, diseased and domesticated.
Go in the darkness of the forest as a hunter used to go, fight with a clawed animal and bring it to Gadhimai. Not like thieves tracking helpless tigers and goats but like adventurous hunters with the folk weapons and zeal to act or to be acted upon. Bring the meat home after the puja like an accomplished survivor. Not the bleating domestic animals!
The entire idea about animal sacrifice is to comprehend how inhuman we have become while treating animals in sacrificing rituals. Man will not stop eating flesh and hence there is no question of stopping them from killing. We are the accomplished killers and have perfected in the art of killing.
There is no hope to change the eternal relationship between the predator and the prey. Man is both and when man is in the receiving end, man laments. But when man is the killer actor, he glorifies the Gadhimai modes of rituals.
So, the only resort for the time being is to see what animals are as symbols in our lives and myths and arts. I am always fascinated by how animals range in extremities from the divinities to the demons, from protectors to slaves.
The dog walking with Yudhishthira, writes Gayatri Spivak, turns Dharmaraj, the god of socio-ethical bond in the “Great Departure” episode. The animal ascends to divinity or better yet the animal is divine. The crane-faced Bagalamukhi is the deity of knowledge in the Mahavidya tradition. The boar-faced deity Dhumvarahi is a protector goddess in the valley tradition. Animals are sacred in South Asian myths. The socio-political behavior in religious practices takes animals differently now.
Gadhimai is a festival of animal genocide. Killing the animals is not merely the practice of eating meat; it is a celebration of slaughtering animals in mass. Frenzied men and women throng around animals within the pool of blood as sanctified object. The spectacle reveals the most gruesome nature of humans. It is not a prey and predator relationship. It is not love for the taste of flesh, which many of us love to savor. It is a spectacle of chaos: Human love for flesh turning into senselessness.
It is an organized killing of animals. He who compares with the survival instinct of a tiger pouncing on a wildebeest confuses survival with murder. Gadhimai is a festival of systematic killing. It is not eating meat but is the mere act of cowardice joy of killing.
Are the devotees in the festival worse than those who privately eat meat? The later does not justify the act of the former, neither the argument that if we eat meat we must kill animals like we do in Gadhimai. Any form of killing is brutal whether you kill one animal or kill thousands. The problem is that Gadhimai is the ultimate story of human brutality.
Arguments in favor of not killing animals will not stop our love for flesh. The reason for opposing animal killings in mass is to educate people against believing that the tradition of sacrifice to please the gods is a mythical symbolism. Such sacred symbolisms have lost their value in contemporary times. We do not hold the sacred relationship of the god, the blood and the intent devotee. The triangle of faith gradually disappeared when we turned social from being natural.
Once out of nature, we cannot perform the sacredness. We are the people of this vast consumer world and Gadhimai ritualism is a thing of the sacred past. We do not know Gadhimai. The goddess has disappeared from the triangle of faith: It is the greedy man and the helpless animal. The animal too is not in its natural home; it is domesticated to be tricked into death.
You drag the helpless animal in the killing field and call yourself the devotee. We go for the weakest of them and always for the weakest of them! Modern farce of our sacrificing motives!
orungupto@gmail.com
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