"Let the cow be yellow, a rich yellow, pleasing to those that see it."
Gau, cognate with Cow, means compassion in ancient Vedic Sanskrit. It also means the Sun, its compassionate rays nurturing all life on earth.
Go, the speech of compassion, was used to measure distance in ancient India, the standard ‘yardstick’ for which was gosa (later kosa or kos) - the farthest distance over which the cow’s low could be heard from a given point of origin, in all directions. It was also the extent to which the Sun’s rays spread out on the surface of the earth without curving at any given point in time.
Lo (also low, lowe), in English, is the sound of the cow. It also means to look, see, pay attention, and is, therefore linked to Love.
And so, the entire Indic civilisation and its spiritual mooring is founded on this one word: Compassion.
This is reason why The Cow, the symbol of compassion, the supreme attribute of a mother, is held in high reverence by the people of this land as Gau Mata (Mother Cow).
She is sacred to our civilisation.
Millennia ago, cattle herders walked in the footsteps of Go or Gau to weave the rhythm of their chants, celebrating divinity in the many wonders of nature in the many different ways of their daily life, defining their folklore, folk songs, history, politics, philosophy, spirituality, culture, medicines, class, society and traditions that we have inherited and preserved in this land despite the interruptions of time.
Small wonder, then, an entire civilisation, the world’s oldest, has come to be defined by the Gau or Cow -- its grazing (movement) imprinted with the letter ‘ch’ (च); its feet for cha~ran (also pada), its path for cha~raha (or char/cachar, usually by the river bank), its speech (and therefore philosophy and sciences) for char~vak, its politics for cha~na~akya, its cunning for cha~tur, its intoxication for cha~ras, its remedies for char-ak, its languid graceful poetry for chatus~pada (four feet), its teacher, and therefore, the wayfarer, for a~char~ya, its skin (as also the flayers of its skin) for cha~mar, its crematorial service provider for cha~andal, all of which made for a long entourage of cha~ra~van or karvan or caravan of human civilsation.
Even go~dhuli, the dust raised by its hooves at the twilight hour, has painted the soul-enriching imagination of Indic culture since the dawn of time, giving unimaginable strength and resilience to a people in the power of compassion:
Cut to Arabia:
Bak , cognate with Sanskrit Vak, means speech or extension in ancient Arabic.
Ra in ancient Arabic translates to mercy, where Ra in both ancient Sanskrit and Egyptian is also the name of Sun, in the mercy and compassion of which all creatures thrive and prosper on earth.
Bakra or Bakr, therefore, in ancient Arabic, is the speech of compassion.
Abu in ancient Arabic is father.
Abu Bakr, otherwise Abdullah or the slave of god, which also means Bhagwandas in India, was named Abu Bakr (father of mercy) after his submission to the one god and his one messenger.
Serving as the closest companion of Muhammad since his hijrat to Yathrib, Abu Bakr, as, perhaps, the most compassionate face of his time, rose to be the successor of The Prophet and the first Caliph of Islam.
Nowhere, in the rich history of his faith, has Abu Bakr been mentioned to have slaughtered anyone in the many confrontations between the believers and those sticking to their age-old traditions of the desert, even as he stayed close to the prophet throughout his messianic lifetime.
It is a different matter, however, that over a span of the next one thousand years since they lived, the believers have steadfastly held that Abu Bakr was so named because he was in love with the grunt of the camel, and not quite its father, nor even the apt ‘father of compassion,’ never mind the cow, the goat or the sheep, or the camel, with which word Bakr has been variously identified with in the context of the celebration of the sacrificial lamb, as in Eid-al-Adha, more popularly known as Bakr Eid. So what if all beasts of burden, whether cow or camel or ass, sing the age-old song of mercy and compassion at the threshold of the slaughter house?
Yet, Bakr Eid must necessarily mean celebration of compassion. For god, the one almighty, showed compassion to our Biblical hero Abraham, after first demanding of him the sacrifice of his son, and then, replacing that worthy and precious offering with a lamb. For, to begin with, god’s demand for sacrifice from Abraham was also a test for his chosen one to sacrifice ‘man’s compassion’ in his service, which the celebration of Bakr Eid is all about.
Compassion, is also the leitmotif of the first Surah that the Qur'an rests on:
In the name of God, Lord of the Universe,
The Merciful, the Compassionate,
Sovereign of the Day of Judgement!
You alone we worship, and to You alone
We turn for help,
Guide us to the straight path,
The path of those whom you have favoured,
Not of those who have provoked Your ire,
Nor of those who have lost their way.
It is another matter that later compilers and translators of the holy book have rendered the second Surah as al Bakarah or The Cow, possibly to differentiate it from the first Caliph, Abu Bakr and his love for either compassion or the camel’s grunt.
Yet, The Cow wasn’t possibly what the prophet might have had in mind when he first preached to his flock, its massive length entirely out of rhythm with the short verses or chants in the camel’s footsteps that Muhammad is known to have spontaneously recited in bursts of anger or euphoria.
And so, whether Bakr or Bakra or Bakarah, the word must necessarily translate to the speech of mercy in remembrance of the mercy of the one and only, our Father.
Scholars of Islamic traditions can’t quite date when exactly al Bakarah was recited by The prophet and in what form and rhythm, though they peg two verses in it to his direct divine utterance.
No matter how different the fact from fiction, Surah al Bakarah of the Qur’an was certainly not the first of the prophet’s transmission to his flock. That pedestal is reserved for a short and simple voice of Gabriel that Muhammad heard in the Cave of Heera. And it read:
He told me, ‘Read!’ I asked, ‘What shall I read?’’
By the time of the third encounter between the one messenger and the other, that message metamorphosed into a beautiful verse:
‘READ! In the name of your lord who created,
Who created humans from clot.
Read! And your lord is the most munificent, who taught by the pen.’
Sadly, the believers, at least the overwhelming number of those who converted, did not know how to read.
And it took them at least a generation to put the first draft of the prophet’s chants into pen and paper during the Caliphate of Uthman (the fourth in succession from Muhmmad, and the third Khalifa: 644-656 CE).
And through 1,300 years, Uthman’s Codex, that we call the Qur’an, has largely remained incomprehensible to Muhammad’s flock.
This is reason why much of the prophet’s life and message was re-erected on a parallel platform of hearsay, we call the Hadith, compiled over the next 400 years based on who said what to whom about whom who happened to know someone who happened to be a companion of the companion of the messenger.
Yet, much of what Muhammad actually said, without doubt, was lost in translation and transcription before al Bakr, al Bakra, al Bakarah, became The Cow.
And the House of Compassion gave way to the Slaughter House!
Because poetry speaks in twin and twisted tongues -- one for the class and the other for the Friday mass.
For those who know, the educated and informed seer, and there aren’t too many of them, The Cow reveals what it must: Unrestrained compassion.
For those who don’t know, the unlettered, uneducated, faithful ‘bhakt’, it is only that: Sacrifice. It doesn’t matter what’s placed on the altar of the Ego of Man: the camel, the goat, the lamb or
The Cow - each a beast of burden that must be served as feast for that one and only god!
Which is why The Cow, our Holy Cow, the Mother of Compassion has been and is sacrificed at will and ill-will for a thousand years here in India, where the cow’s ancestor, the Aurock was the first native, before she migrated in domesticated bondage to China, the Middle East, Africa, and finally Europe, becoming the Feast of Humans of all ages and age-groups.
And so, apologists for the beef party insist that The Cow is nothing more than a meal, to be stolen, lifted and slaughtered at the altar ...
‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!’
Ameen!
PS: Sundari, my neighbourhood cow, comes with a RFID tag on its ear to prevent her theft and painful journey to the slaughter house by cattle rustlers.
For those who insist that India is the world’s biggest exporter of beef, it needs reminding that cow slaughter is banned in 20 of the 28 states, the exceptions being Kerala, Goa, Bengal and the north eastern states. Export of cow, oxen and calf meat is explicitly prohibited and only boneless meat of water buffaloes is allowed. It is time to respect the law of the land.
Disclaimer: The author of this essay has feasted on a variety of meats across continents, including reindeer in Finland, wild boar in Estonia, frog in France, pork in Germany, England and China, alligator in New Orleans and beef steak in Texas, horsemeat in Uzbekistan, springbok and ostrich in South Africa and octopus, hare and kangaroo in Australia.
He has also dined on the most expensive Wagyu beef delicacy served in India at New Delhi’s Leela Palace.
All at his own expense.
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