‘Who belled the cat?’

In December 2015, the two main temples of Bardhaman (West Bengal) banned the practice of animal sacrifice. By ordering its replacement with a symbolic sacrifice of fruits and vegetables, they put an end to hundreds of years of a practice sanctioned by religious scriptures. This chapter analyses the social dynamics at stake behind this move: the national campaign of animal welfare activists against animal sacrifice, the local mobilisation of rationalist groups, and the local action of the district magistrate. It shows how in a region where, for social, economic and religious reasons, a legal ban is still thought to be impossible, opponents to animal sacrifice have locally developed subtle ways of intervention in order to reform Hinduism from the inside

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Medicine · South Asian Studies and Conflicts