Over 90% of the world eats meat. The strictly vegetarian minority of India happens to be the only community that has historically dehumanised humans through untouchability. That is not a coincidence. That is the point.
The reversal shows up inside a single deity. In the Vishnu Purana, 1,500 years ago, Vishnu becomes the hermit Mayamoha, the deluder, and persuades the Asuras to abandon Vedic animal sacrifice. Once they do, they lose Shiva’s protection and lose the war against the Devas. In the Gita Govinda, Vishnu becomes the Buddha to save animals from that same sacrifice. The god has switched sides completely.
The Vedic word for guest is goghna, literally cattle-killer: a guest was honoured enough that a bovine was slaughtered for him. Ask a modern Brahmin priest whether the Vedas permit consumption of meat and the answer comes back categorical: never. Creative Nirukta etymology now reads goghna as treating a guest the way one treats a cow, with affection and non-violence, and reduces Vedic animal sacrifice to metaphor.
The textual record does not support the rescue. The Shatapatha and Aitareya Brahmanas link the honouring of teachers and kings to cattle slaughter. The Taittiriya Brahmana names which animals go to which gods, Vishnu receiving the dwarf or stunted cattle. This is not incidental meat eating. It is butchery with a liturgical address, recorded in texts over 2,500 years old.
The dharmasutras that followed, some 2,000 years old, do not prohibit meat either. The Vasishtha Dharmasutra condemns refusing ritually prescribed meat in severe terms. Even the Manusmriti, notorious for its restrictions, spends pages on which animals may be sacrificed, when meat may be eaten, and to whom it should be offered. Fish, deer, and boar run throughout its chapters on ritual and diet.
So, where did the equation of purity with plant food come from? Follow the funding. Vedic yagna was once financed by meat-eating Kshatriya warriors and cattle-herding landlords. It was later financed by merchants, former patrons of Buddhist and Jain monks, who were the first to equate vegetarian food with compassion and non-violence.
The Mahabharata stages the fight directly. A butcher tells a monk that his violence is not violence but a livelihood, part of the order of things. A grocer insists that eating animals is cruel regardless of livelihood. Ashoka sided with the grocer, and moved against fisherfolk and butchers for practising their traditional trades, even as his own empire rested on the mass killing of humans. A warlord’s violence was acceptable. A butcher’s was not.
Jain literature pushed the argument further and equated meat eating with cannibalism, since relatives could be reborn as animals, so eating an animal risked eating a relative. Merchant communities built origin myths around gods who granted fortune on condition of a vegetarian diet – a superstition that was later dressed up as rational conviction. When Jains were violently persecuted in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka a thousand years ago, many converted to Hinduism but kept their diet. Brahmins competing for merchant patronage adopted it too.
Colonial reform sealed the story. The Arya Samaj and its contemporaries recast the Vedas as a rational, morally pure scripture, scrubbed of anything that sat badly next to Buddhist and Jain claims to ahimsa or colonial mockery of Hindu ritual. The Hindi press, built on Marwari mercantile money, mass-printed the cleaned-up version in the vernacular, and translation choices did the rest, quietly editing the meat out.
What survives today is caste, dressed as a Vaishnava diet. Children are denied eggs in the name of building a more compassionate world. Ahimsa has become a synonym for purity, and the discourse follows a fixed script: the ghee-drinking elite is compassionate, the meat-eating labourer is cruel. Ram and Krishna are now served the food of the Baniya, never the food of Kshatriyas, Shudras, or Chandalas. The Bhagavad Gita is marketed as the source of Hindu vegetarianism.
We are told Sanatani food is Jain food, that Hinduism was originally vegetarian, and that meat entered with Muslims and the British. Bollywood renders Mahakali and Narasimha as strict vegetarians and treats contact with meat as contamination; a fear of mixing utensils that is really the old fear of the sweeper’s shadow, taught now in the vegetarian canteens of schools owned by old merchant communities (vaishya varna).
Food has been weaponised in service of caste, and Vishnu has been drafted as its preacher.
