Dwijendra Narayan Jha

Dwijendra Narayan Jha (1 July 1940 4 February 2021) was an Indian Marxist historian who studied and wrote on ancient and medieval India. He was a professor of history at Delhi University and a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research. His books include Ancient India: In Historical Outline, The Myth of the Holy Cow (2001), and Early India: A Concise History (2004). Through his works he argued against the communal distortions of history and challenged popular beliefs about the sanctity of the cow and tradition of eating beef in India.

Education Jha completed his Senior Secondary Schooling at the Board of Secondary Certification, West Bengal with a First Division. He then completed his Intermediate Examination of Arts with First Division followed by Bachelor of Arts (honours) in History at University of Calcutta and then his MA in History at Patna University where he was a student of Professor R.S. Sharma, who was among the first modern Indian historians to study history through socio-economic analysis.

Career Jha was a professor at the history department of the Delhi University specializing in ancient and medieval history. He was critical of the view that "tolerance is the very essence of 'Hinduism qua Hinduism'''", and had claimed what he termed as Brahmanical intolerance since early India. He was credited with identifying inconsistencies in Indian history and his efforts to bring a contemporary relevance to ancient history. He was a member of visiting faculty at the Institute of Oriental Culture in the University of Tokyo.

In 1991, he wrote a paper, with other historians R.S. Sharma, Suraj Bhan, and Athar Ali, making a case that there was no evidence to prove that the Babri Masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya, was built over a temple at the same site. The findings were documented in Ramjanmabhoomi-Baburi Masjid: A Historians’ Report to the Nation (1991) which he co-wrote. The mosque was demolished a year later by right wing activists. He quoted religious and non-religious texts from ancient periods to dispel the prevailing belief that cow was holy and its meat not a part of historical Indian consumption. He then argued that the sacred status afforded to cows was a much more recent development. He argued that the notion of a gilded age before the Mughal Empire was a creation of historians during the Indian freedom movement and provided an ideological support to participants of the movement, but, served no purpose after. In an article in the Indian Express, Jha responded that Shourie was distorting what he had said, and that Shourie's allegations of plagiarism are baseless. Jha also criticized Shourie's book Eminent Historians, saying that it contains "slander" and "has nothing to do with history."

His last published book, Drink of Immortality (2020) studied alcohol distillation and consumption in ancient India. He argued that there were more than 50 varieties of alcohol that were available and consumed by men and women of ancient India. He further quoted religious texts including the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata as well as the Vedas mentioning of alcohol consumption.

Works The Myth of the Holy Cow

In his book The Myth of the Holy Cow, he alleged that cow formed part of the diet in ancient India. Cattle, including cows, were neither inviolable nor as revered in ancient times as they were later. Quoting from the Vedas and the Upanishads, he alleged that cattle were offered in sacrifice to various deities and that hardly any prayer was complete without animal sacrifice. He pointed out that during Rama's exile, Sita asked her husband for meat. And Ram obliged by getting her deer meat.

Jha has received death threats over his book The Myth of the Holy Cow in which he outlined the practice of eating beef in ancient India as documented in Vedic and Post-Vedic texts. Since Hindus consider the cow holy and deny the claims of beef consumption during Vedic period, the Hindu activist groups created controversy over his book.

Jha discussed the events surrounding the publication in the introduction of the book The Myth of the Holy Cow.

"Shortly afterwards, I began to get threats from unidentified callers asking me not to go ahead with the publication. Undeterred by all this Matrix Books, a new enterprising publishing house based in Delhi, mustered enough courage to publish the book promptly in the first week of August 2001. But some right-wing politicians and groups of religious fanatics, without reading a single page, termed it ‘blasphemous’, demanded my arrest and succeeded in obtaining a court order restraining the circulation of the book, and a self-appointed custodian of ‘Hinduism’ even sentenced me to death. The book was therefore published abroad by Verso (London)."

Personal life Jha had two brothers and one sister. Jha died on 4 February 2021 in Delhi, at age 80 (often misreported as 81); he suffered a paralytic attack a few years earlier and had lost much of his hearing. 2018, Against The Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History, 2020, Drink of Immortality: Essays on Distillation and Alcohol Use in Ancient India,

As editor: 1988, Feudal Social Formation in Early India, 1996, Society and Ideology in India: Essays in Honour of Professor R.S. Sharma (Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, 1996). 2000, The Feudal Order: State, Society, and Ideology in Early Medieval India'', ; a collection of critical essays by 20 specialists on medieval Indian society, politics, ideology and religion.